Ep. 899: Jim Heffelfinger, The Deer Preacher

Summary

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The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 899: Jim Heffelfinger, The Deer Preacher

Date: July 6, 2026
Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Jim Heffelfinger

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Episode Overview

In this fact-packed episode, host Steven Rinella sits down with wildlife biologist and "deer preacher" Jim Heffelfinger for a deep-dive into some of the most debated topics in contemporary wildlife management and hunting culture. Blending humor, expertise, and candid discussion, the conversation covers the infamous Rompola Buck mystery, the realities of lead exposure from wild game, the public (mis)understanding of predators and disease control, the mythos of trophic cascades in Yellowstone, javelina recognition, and the status of mule and black-tailed deer populations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Rompola Buck Mystery (03:41 - 13:41)

• Background:
  The "Rompola Buck," killed by Mitch Rompola in Michigan, would have been the new world record typical whitetail but was withdrawn from official records, fueling decades of speculation.
• Expert Analysis:
  • Heffelfinger discusses the rarity of massive, symmetrical bucks in supposedly “unlikely” locations, noting while improbable, it's not impossible (“I've seen cases in Sonora and the desert Southwest where you get a drought... then out of nowhere, there's this giant desert mule deer.” – 06:00).
  • Potential reasons for skepticism include the immediate media exposure followed by decades of silence, and physical oddities (antler pedicle orientation and skull anomalies—“Those pedicles really seem to come out, like on the side of the head, kind of odd to me.” – 09:06).
  • Speculation around potential skull plate manipulation, but no conclusive evidence either way.
• Memorable Quote:
  “There isn't any evidence that it's a legitimate buck, and there's no evidence that it's not a legitimate buck. So we're all speculating.” (10:04, Heffelfinger)

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2. Lead in Wild Game: Risks to Humans and Raptors (14:07 - 34:37)

• Summary of Issue:
  Is consuming wild game shot with lead ammunition a notable health risk for people? What’s the impact on wildlife, particularly raptors?
• Raptors vs. Humans:
  • Raptors: Lead toxicity is highly impactful, especially for species like condors and bald eagles (16:54 – “At the individual level, lead can be really, really toxic to raptors.”).
  • Human Risk: Large population studies (e.g. North Dakota, Inuit/First Nations studies) show no significant increase in blood lead levels among hunters versus national averages, unless eating lead-shot game daily (23:03–28:35).
  • Key distinction is between metallic lead (which largely passes through the human digestive tract) and organic lead compounds (e.g., primer residue, which is far more readily absorbed).
• Notable Moments:
  • Heffelfinger shares a personal anecdote on elevated lead from competitive shooting, which dropped substantially once he increased hand-washing (30:34 – 30:48).
  • “My lead levels are higher than [avid waterfowl eaters] from my pistol shooting... then I started religiously washing my hands... and it came right down.” (30:35, Heffelfinger)
  • The politics of lead bans often cite human health for raptors’ sake, but the general medical advice does not mention wild game as a source of problematic lead exposure.

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3. Do Predators Control CWD? (CWD & Predators) (34:40 – 55:54)

• Common Public Perception:
  Predator advocates claim more predators will reduce Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer populations.
• Scientific Nuance:
  • Mountain lions and wolves do preferentially take CWD-infected animals, but modeling and long-term studies show minimal practical impact on CWD prevalence at a population level.
  • Increased predator densities sufficient to materially curb CWD would result in unsustainably low deer/elk populations (“...but the deer and elk populations were cut in half." – 42:08).
  • Control of CWD by predators is only seen in theoretical models under very specific—but not biologically realistic—circumstances.
• Quote:
  “There isn’t any evidence yet that shows at a population level that changing the management or limiting the harvest of coyotes and wolves and mountain lions is going to change the CWD trajectory.” (46:28, Heffelfinger)

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4. Trophic Cascades & Wolf Reintroduction in Yellowstone (56:00 – 72:23)

• Myth-busting the Story:
  The widely-circulated story holds that wolf reintroduction sparked a miraculous ecosystem-wide transformation through “trophic cascades,” improving vegetation, river health, and species diversity.
• Heffelfinger’s Take:
  • Early studies supporting the narrative were methodologically weak (non-random aspen sampling, confounding factors ignored, etc.).
  • Numerous robust follow-up studies found little evidence that wolf presence alone explains ecosystem recovery. Rather, complex, multi-factor causes (grizzly and lion predation increases, fire, drought, hunting policy) were much more influential.
  • Actual beaver reintroductions—not wolves—made key riparian changes.
  • The persistence of the original myth despite decades of contrary evidence speaks to the allure of tidy narratives and media repetition rather than scientific rigor.
• Quotes:
  “The biologists brought the beavers back, not the wolves. Beavers probably should get more credit than wolves for trophy cascades in Yellowstone… but beavers don’t have the big public relations campaign that wolves do.” (65:30, Heffelfinger)
  “The truth is really in the middle. They're not going to be destructive and they're not saints. … 'Wolves are neither saints nor sinners except to people who make them.'” (69:10, quoting L. David Mech, renowned wolf biologist)

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5. Javelina in North American Record Books (75:11 – 83:14)

• The Case for Inclusion:
  Javelina (“noble little desert creature”) have historically not been admitted to record books like Boone and Crockett or Pope and Young, despite being a significant big game species, particularly in the Southwest.
• Recent Change:
  Through a concerted effort (with Heffelfinger’s support), javelina are now recognized in these record books, with hundreds of records forming a baseline for minimum entries. Respect for the javelina as a bona fide big game animal is finally mainstream.
• Quote:
  "They're cool animals. They're really popular in the Southwest... This is a significant big game animal.” (77:46, Heffelfinger)

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6. Remaining Stable: Javelina, Mule Deer & Black-tailed Deer Populations (83:22 – 95:22)

• Javelina Status:
  Populations are generally stable and drought-resistant, lacking the boom-and-bust of other ungulates (83:24–84:04).
• Mule Deer:
  • Conditions vary across the West, but “more than half of the mule deer populations are stable or increasing right now,” despite cyclical declines tied to drought, harsh winters, and historical habitat change.
  • The “glory days” of mule deer in the 1950s–60s aren't the benchmark—they were the result of non-repeatable historical circumstances (logging, predator control, and differing harvesting restrictions).
  • Emphasis on nuanced, region-by-region management.
• Black-tailed Deer:
  • More difficult to survey; highly susceptible to severe winter losses but generally bounce back when conditions improve.
  • Ongoing challenges relate to long-term habitat changes, especially secondary-growth “stem exclusion” forests after logging.

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7. International Perspectives and Conservation Culture (97:00 – 108:24)

• New Zealand & Hawaii:
  • Contrary to North America, New Zealand actively eradicates introduced wildlife (deer, possums) to protect native flora and lacks the conservation/hunting culture seen elsewhere.
  • Hawaii presents a cultural collision where introduced species (pigs, deer) have become integral to the ancestral way-of-life of native Hawaiians, creating friction with outside-driven eradication campaigns.
• Notable Cross-Cultural Moment:
  “He didn’t need outsiders coming and telling him what animals belonged on the island.” (104:53, Rinella recalling a conversation with a native Hawaiian)

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8. Closing Perspective: Science, Media, and Public Perception

• Heffelfinger’s Role:
  Emphasizes the value of communicating complex, nuanced scientific findings to the broader public—cutting through misinformation and myth, and empowering hunters and non-hunters alike with reliable, unbiased facts.
• Quote:
  “I'm driven by the desire to provide reliable, unbiased information and let people just learn from that.” (109:46, Heffelfinger)

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Notable Quotes & Time Stamps

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|---------|-------| | 07:03 | Heffelfinger | “I've seen cases... where you get a drought condition... and then out of nowhere, there's this giant desert mule deer.” | | 10:04 | Heffelfinger | “There isn't any evidence that it's a legitimate buck, and there's no evidence that it's not a legitimate buck.” | | 23:03 | Heffelfinger | “...primers have a different kind of lead that's highly absorbable... That lead compound can be absorbed through the skin, it can be absorbed through your lung tissue by breathing.” | | 30:35 | Heffelfinger | “My lead levels are higher than that from my pistol shooting... then I started religiously washing my hands... and it came right down.” | | 46:28 | Heffelfinger | “There isn’t any evidence yet that shows at a population level... limiting the harvest of coyotes, wolves, and mountain lions is going to change the CWD trajectory.” | | 65:30 | Heffelfinger | "Beavers probably should get more credit than wolves for trophic cascades in Yellowstone... but beavers don’t have the big public relations campaign that wolves do." | | 69:10 | Heffelfinger (quoting L. David Mech) | “Wolves are neither saints nor sinners except to people who make them.” | | 77:46 | Heffelfinger | "This is a significant big game animal... They're cool animals." | | 109:46 | Heffelfinger | “I'm driven by the desire to provide reliable, unbiased information and let people just learn from that.” |

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Important Segment Timestamps

• The Rompola Buck: 03:41 – 13:41
• Lead in Wild Game & Human Health: 14:07 – 34:37
• CWD & Predators: 34:40 – 55:54
• Trophic Cascades & Yellowstone: 56:00 – 72:23
• Javelina in Record Books: 75:11 – 83:14
• Deer Population Status: 83:22 – 98:24
• International Conservation Perspectives: 97:00 – 108:24

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Tone

• Engaging, data-driven, and often irreverent—skeptical of tidy narratives, highly respectful of science, and committed to “calling it straight” even when it disrupts popular opinion.

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In Short

This episode tackles some of the biggest myths, controversies, and cultural flashpoints in the world of wildlife management, with Jim Heffelfinger providing clarity, context, and cool-headed perspective on every topic. Hunters, conservationists, and nature lovers alike will leave with deeper insights—and plenty to ponder—about what’s really happening in the wild.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[C]

You can't predict anything.

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Presented by First Light creating proven versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear.

[D]

For every hunt, First Light, go farther, stay longer.

[B]

This is going to embarrass you, Jim, but I'm, you know how I'm going to introduce this?

[C]

I can't imagine I'm going to say.

[B]

Joined today by the smartest man in the woods. By the smartest man in the woods, Jim Heffelfinger.

[C]

You're lying. Right off the bat, you're lying.

[B]

How about this? Joined today by the most well informed man in the woods. Okay, Jim Heffelfinger, thank you for coming in.

[C]

It's great to be here.

[B]

Yeah. If listeners of the show know that rarely does an episode go by when someone doesn't say he was telling me or Heffelfinger wrote in to explain or Heffelfinger is mad about Blank because he, like I said, he's the, he's the smartest, most well informed man in the woods. And when we're talking about stuff, he likes to tell us where we, where we hit and where we miss. And Jim comes on, you've been on I don't know how many times. This is maybe your third.

[C]

Fourth time. Fifth. Fifth time for the regular podcast. Yeah.

[B]

And what we do is we work up a bunch of things that we're going to talk about and we agree that, and we agree on what we're going to cover and we're going to cover a bunch of those today. We're going to talk about, we're going to talk about Jim's thoughts and current research on a thing that we've brought up in the past is like if you eat wild gamey, is the lead gonna get you? Is the lead gonna kill you? We're gonna talk about this thing that pops up now and then that if that, that the argument that by having more predators on the landscape we would see a decline in chronic wasting disease. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about a thing you might see pop up in the news now and then. Trophic cascades, particularly in wolves, came back to Yellowstone National Park. People came up with all these sort of fantastical ideas about the trophic cascades that occurred in the park thanks to wolves. We're going to talk about Havalina getting their due. We're going to talk about some ungulate stuff. But the first thing we're going to talk about is the Rompola buck. Now first I want to clarify a thing. I, and I grew up near where I grew up south of Mitch. But, but my father had, my father had met him, had known him, had handled some of the deer he had killed in the past. He used to measure bucks for like commemorative bucks in Michigan. And somehow I had in my head, I, I for years have said Rampala, but that's a, that's a lure.

[C]

Rapala.

[B]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah. Cast and get cast Rapalas. Ron Pola, we're working on a project. Jordan Sillers, who you might know from Blood Trails, is working on a podcast about. We're doing a series along awaited series that I've been talking about for a million years on the Ron Polo buck. And for those of you that just tune in for the first time, I'll try to keep it brief. But officially, officially the biggest buck ever killed by the hands of man was killed by, in Canada by a guy named Milo Hansen. But shortly after that buck was killed, a buck that would have beat Milo Hansen's buck to become the all time world record typical whitetail was arrowed by a guy named Mitch Rompola and then withdrawn from consideration. So we're doing a mystery series on is the buck real or not? Which side are you on?

[D]

Right.

[B]

And so I've been, we've been wanting to interview, we've been wanting to interview Heffelfinger about this buck because you have, you spent a lot of time on antlers and antler growth and deer and everything. And one of the questions I want to ask you about, and this will be included in the series, but just to kick it around is one of the things that people point out is that where this buck got killed in northern Lower Peninsula, Michigan is a place that does not make big bucks. They don't have, they don't make Boone and Crockett, like God does not make Boone and Crockett bucks in the Grand Traverse Bay area. Of Michigan. What do you make of something like that?

[C]

Yeah, I've, I've heard that. And I'm not an expert on, on the whole. Mitch from Paula Buckeye. I remember when it came out around the Midwest, I grew up in Wisconsin, so it's right next door. And, and, and remember all the chatter about that. Never paid much attention to it. Came back to it more recently and helped Jordan out with the, with that series. And just from a basic standpoint of can a monster buck like that come out of nowhere? And, and I, I think it can. You know, it's a matter of, it's a matter of likelihood always when you're, when you're thinking about that sort of thing. But I've seen cases in Sonora and the desert Southwest where you get, you get a drought condition where all of the antlers are a little stunted that year from nutritional restrictions. And then out of nowhere, there's this giant desert mule deer. And you just wonder, how did he do that? And antlers are secondary sex characteristics. They, they only get the extra nutrition after the body gets what it needs. And then it can throw off some, some extra nutrition to antler growth. And so when they're nutritionally stressed, they don't throw that out. And sometimes you'll get a buck that, who knows why, but found some good nutrition or has some kind of genetics that is able to better deal with kind of the environment. And you can get a monster out of nowhere. That, that's not a reason to discount it when you're talking about this case.

[B]

Another thing we're looking into in this series, and it was, it's an observation that another whitetail freak had made. And I can't remember the number. But, but this, this whitetail enthusiast was saying that one problem with the Ron Polo buck, it's too perfect. And I can't remember the number, but let's just say. I don't remember. Let's just say at 190 inches, let's say 190 inch whitetail. He's like, once a deer gets that big, go find me an example of a perfectly symmetrical buck that's that big, that doesn't have kickers.

[C]

They're there. I mean, examples are there. I looked at the, because it was Michigan. I looked at the Michigan state records, and the number two and the number seven buck in the Michigan state records is actually, this was not Michigan State records. It was a Boone and Crockett records, but only from Michigan.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

The Boone and Crockett records from Michigan. Number two in Michigan number seven in Michigan are in the 180, 190 Boone and Crockett range, and one has 1 inch and 5, 8 deductions, and the other one has 2 inch and change deductions. So you can get these bucks in that range that are almost perfectly symmetrical. So again, it's not a reason to discount the buck just because it's symmetrical. Got it.

[B]

So what's your gut on the whole thing?

[C]

I, for a while thought he probably just wants his privacy. He doesn't want the fame. But having the world record shot with an arrow, that's a tough thing to overcome. That he would tell everybody about it is show people in the back of his truck, talk to some media, and then within a day or two, shut up for three decades. There's something. Something strange. And one thing, I don't know if you want any spoiler alerts, but one thing I talked to Jordan about was the way the. The bases, the pedicles, they come out at an unusually wide angle.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

So you can have wide bucks where the antlers come straight out. You see those in South Texas all the time. But those pedicles really seem to come out, like on the side of the head, kind of odd to me. And one of them, actually in the photo, and there's not many photos, one of them actually looks a little. Like a little different orientation the other one. And I wondered aloud to Jordan whether in past years, something could have happened to that skull and cracked it a little and healed it and made those pedicles orient a little more. Now, if it's. If he had done something with the skull and cracked it, those antler tines wouldn't be straight up. They would be out because he bent it out. But they're not. They're straight up in that buck. But if something happened to that skull in the past that widened those pedicles out, cracked it, and re healed, which. There's cases of that. And then subsequent antlers, the tines would grow straight up no matter what the orientation.

[B]

Let me interrupt. Reeve, will you pull up and put on this screen up here, shot of the round polo buck?

[C]

So I've just wondered, and this is all speculation because we don't know. There isn't any evidence that it's a legitimate buck, and there's no evidence that it's not a legitimate buck. So we're all speculating. It's just all speculation. So as long as we're speculating, those pedicles, if that skull was damaged somehow and the pedicles were wider and then subsequent antler development made those tines go straight up. It would account for that. I mean, it's a theory, but it would account for kind of the unusually wide pedicles coming out of that skull. And I find it strange that he talked to the media for a day. He showed people the buck. It was apparently solid antlers. Other people saw it in the back.

[B]

There's. Guys, there's. Yeah, there's. There's a lot to this. There's a lot to the. The solidness of the. Are you able to do that or. No.

[C]

Go on. So. So then I wonder, why was he talking to the media and talking to everyone and then got home and skinned the buck and shut up for three days? There it is. Now, when I look at the deer's left pedicle, right. When you're looking at it, but the deer's left side, it looks like that base is coming out a little lower to me. It could be. The angle of the camera could be anything. But it comes out kind of in the back of the eye, like the eyes lined up with it. Where on the other side. The eyes below the pedicle. By looking at that. That asymmetry in that and wondering if something didn't happen to the skull. There's even kind of a divot in the middle of that skull. Wonder if something didn't happen. And then it regrew normal antlers, but would account for that wide width. It's funny that he showed everybody. He talked to the local media and then got home and skinned it and shut up for three decades. Why was that? And then when they went back to

[B]

measure it, I mean, you're familiar with all the, like, wild theories.

[C]

Yep. Yeah.

[B]

One of the wild theories being.

[C]

And.

[B]

And I've sat on both sides of this thing, and I. And. And I don't want to do too much. Like, we're. We're really. We're doing a lot on this. Okay. But one of the wild theories is people have looked at the ears.

[C]

The. The.

[B]

The difference between. The way the ears lay, the difference between the positioning of the eyes. You can see it all here. We got it pulled up. Coloration issues. Right. And a theory. A theory is that he skinned that head back and put that rack on. He had made that rack, and he installed that rack on that buck.

[C]

Yeah. I don't. I don't think he could have fabricated. He doesn't. There's no evidence he has any experience in doing any of that sort of thing. And. And he. He's shot a lot of Big bucks. So it wasn't unusual that he would shoot a big buck. So I'm leaning more towards that it possibly being a legal harvest, but maybe not eligible. And he knew that and so he would rather just be quiet and, and, and have it be a mischief.

[B]

Not eligible because the skull plate was cracked.

[C]

Possibly. That's a, that's a theory. But he came home and then, you know, he was somewhat of a taxidermist. And when they came to measure the buck, he had it almost fully mounted on a shoulder mount. Yeah, he had the cape on it. He had the. If you look at the pictures of them actually measuring it that day, the skull plate's covered by fur. And he left. Apparently he left the back open. There's no photo of the back that I've seen. He left the back open so that they could inspect the skull plate. But from the photo that I look at, the whole skull plate's covered. They could only, I would guess, see the back of the skull plate. So how would they be able to evaluate if something was funny with that, that middle suture where the bones come together? That would be covered. From what I see in the photos, it would be covered.

[B]

Yeah. Well, stay tuned folks. This, it's gonna be good, man. I'm excited about it. I'm excited about that.

[C]

Theories is all I'm doing.

[B]

No, that's great. It's great. Keep, keep them coming. And then again, we've done, we've done people like, we, we've called out looking for people that have any kind of information and of course that, that offer always stands. Let's jump to the next thing. No, ma'. Am. Is that our hunters are going to die from lead poisoning.

[C]

I don't, I don't think they have been lead poisoning. I mean, you don't ever hear in the medical profession about one of the dangers of lead exposure is eating game meat shot with lead ammunition. The medical profession doesn't seem to know about this. Apparently all of the bird, all of the bird enthusiasts are all concerned about hunter's health and, and what they're feeding their children.

[B]

Yeah, Let me, let me set this up a little bit. You probably remember when this happened, it was some years ago, scattered around on the Internet started be all these photos where they were doing like X rays of, of deer carcasses that had been shot by rifles. Okay. And you look at these carcasses and you see that, that, that those bullet fragments really scatter and travel around.

[C]

They do.

[B]

And so you'd see, you know, let's say It's a X ray of a deer's rib cage scapula and you can see the, the area where the bullet hit. But then you see all these little bright spots and they're metallic fragments that were, I guess they could get in the vascular system and move a little bit. They kind of explode outward and move a little bit. And it, and, and that among other things really got people talking about the impacts of lead consumption. Because as you know there's all this stuff about child development and like you hear about like whatever kids eating lead paint, lead pipes leaching water into, into lead. And California is very staunch position on, you know, all the lead warnings. You can't buy anything that doesn't come with some lead warning. For California, you buy a lead headed jig and it's got a warning about how the lead headed jig is going to kill you. So there's definitely like an alarm, a sense of alarm about consumption of lead. But it carried over into this idea that, that there's all this lead contamination out there and game meat. And you even now will see instances where a state might say we're no longer accepting venison donations because of the risk of lead. It's well documented that. Well, maybe you'll counter this. But it's well documented that raptors, the most commonly excited example being California condors, can get lead poisoning from eating gamey killed by lead bullets. That seems to be scientifically accepted.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

And so it, it jumped to, well, it must be bad for us too, right?

[C]

Yep. Yeah.

[B]

Let's let me ask you like a series of questions.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

What's your take on your personal take the scientific understanding of like raptors. Okay. Yep. Do raptors, is it accepted in your mind, is it accepted that raptors die from lead exposure from eating hunter killed deer carcasses?

[C]

Yep. At the individual level lead can be really, really toxic to raptors. They have a different, and birds in general, they have a different digestive system. And so raptors are very susceptible. They can get even a small fragment of lead when they're feeding on an animal that was a carcass left in the field or an animal that was wounded, a quail that was hit with, with lead shot. Okay. And then wasn't retrieved. If they get a little bit of lead in them, it can make them sick and it certainly can kill them. So at the individual level it's very dangerous. The problem is when you scale this up and say is this really a conservation issue? That should force hunters to switch to a non lead ammunition and and you look at the data that we have available, there is a population level effect of accidental secondary lead ingestion by raptors from, from ammunition. But what I encourage people to look at is not just the fact that there's a population level effect, but what is the magnitude of that effect, Is it a serious issue from the population level? And when you look at research that's been done, there are seven northeastern states. They looked at eagles ingestion, they did some modeling and they determined that the having using lead ammunition on the landscape dampened the bald eagle population growth rate by 4 to 6%. So bald eagles all over the country are just rocketing up. They're doing really well. Record numbers, trajectories going up. Their models showed that that trajectory upward would be dampened 4 to 6% if we use lead ammunition in those seven northeastern states. So I encourage people to think is that a serious conservation concern? That everybody in those seven northeastern states should switch the kind of ammo they use so that bald Eagles can increase 4 to 6% faster than they already are. Golden eagles, it was less than 1% effect. Another research and another completely different project in the west look and found that golden eagle population growth rate was dampened by 0.8%. So less than 1% effect on golden eagle population growth rate. And so when you look in Europe, they did studies on 22 different raptor species. If you average the effect on 22 different raptor species in Europe, which had just announced a ban in Europe on lead ammunition.

[B]

Oh, is that right?

[C]

Just yesterday I saw that like an EU ban. I don't think it's, I don't know. That's what I asked. I actually asked is this EU or what? And I don't know, I didn't get the answer. But in 22 different raptor species in Europe, the average effect on the population was, was that it increased using lead ammunition on the landscape for big game hunting, increased mortality rates by a half a percent using lead. So if you, if you banned all lead in Europe, the mortality rates would be a half a percent lower for 22 raptor species. So to me I'm wondering where, where is this giant conservation concern that everybody would need to change ammo? So that's a long, it's a long answer to the individual question, but I think it's important is lethal to individuals. It's the number one thing that's inhibiting condor recovery, condor endangered species. So every mortality counts and they're very susceptible to lead poisoning. So it's a serious issue within Condor Range, Arizona has a voluntary program where hunters can voluntarily switch to non lead ammunition or take their gut piles out of the field completely so they're not leaving anything for the condors. And that has been adopted by 88 to 91% of the hunters in Arizona. So it's very successful voluntary program compared to other states like California that just have a top down draconian ban on lead ammo.

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[D]

It's about no compromise gear built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements, First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters for hunters with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses, just gear you can count on. Head to first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com

[B]

so but I hear that is that explain to me the idea that like lead going through a condor's digestive tract is different than lead going through a human being's digestive tract.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Is it something to do with the ph?

[C]

They it it's, it's pH with the acidic digestive tract. And it's also the they don't have just a stomach like like we do. They have Other organs that the, the lead pellets and the meat that they eat sit in there a long time to dissolve in that, that acidic environment. And it's the length of time that that metallic lead sits in there. So I hope we talk about different kinds of lead. That's an important part.

[B]

Okay, so what is. Are you aware of cases? And I feel like I've read these, but I can't remember what happened, where they'd go in and look at people that have been consuming game meat their whole life and then go try to see like, well, how much this person, how much lead is in this person's system.

[C]

Yes, there's been several studies like that. And it started in North Dakota in 2007. A dermatologist who happened to be on the board of directors of a major, major raptor organization, he went into a food bank in North Dakota, grabbed 93 packages, X rayed them, and about half of those had lead fragments in there. So he sounded the alarm. And people have questioned the motives being on the board of directors for a raptor organization, but he sounded the alarm. And so the Department of Health in North Dakota tested blood samples for North Dakota people all over the state. They had 736 samples, I think. And they found that those that said they hunted had twice the lead level as those that didn't. And that spread like wildfire. Everybody picked that up and said, hunters are poisoning themselves. They have twice the lead level. What wasn't reported was that level of hunters, twice the lead level was about the national average of lead for everybody at that time. It was 1.27 micrograms per deciliter. And the national average was 1.25 at the time. And so it was twice the level of non hunters. But it was still below any level that any medical science has shown lead problems in, in humans. And in fact, the reality was that those that didn't hunt, because it's probably sparsely populated North Dakota, the ones that didn't hunt had below average lead levels. Yeah, because the hunters had about the national average lead levels. There's been that study. I think one of the most important studies on human effects of eating game meat with lead comes from a First nations up in Ontario where they looked at people during the waterfowl season. These communities were eating a lot of ducks killed with lead shot. So they tested lead levels before the waterfall season. They tested them after the waterfall season. They found that, that people, that people that hunted ducks had a higher blood lead level at the end of the duck season because they're eating a lot of ducks. And so they're getting lead pretty frequently in their diet. But what they found out in that study was that those that were sitting at the supper table eating the same meals and. But didn't go out on the hunt had normal. They did not have an increase in blood lead levels. So it was something about actually being on the hunt that seemed to increase the lead level, not eating the meals because other people are eating the same meals at the same table.

[B]

What does that mean?

[C]

That the, the primers in. In shot shells and then pistol rounds and rifle rounds, the primers. And here's where we're getting the different kinds of lead. The primers have a different kind of lead that's highly absorbable. It's an organic lead compound in the primers of cartridges. And that that lead compound can be absorbed through the skin. It can be absorbed through your lung tissue by breathing. By breathing it. That these organic lead compounds that are used in strengthening plastics, clutch shoes and brake shoes and all kinds of different products, waterproofing products. They use these organic lead compounds because it improves the product in some. But that organic lead compound is different than the metallic, the inorganic metallic lead. And so those compounds can be absorbed through the skin. If you get them in your digestive tract, you eat something with it on there that goes right into your bloodstream. Metallic lead, like what might be in a quail, a number eight pellet, or a little fragment of bullet that ends up in your burger, that's metallic lead that goes through the human digestive system 24 to 48 hours and passes through so quickly it doesn't have time to dissolve. It's not sitting in there and dissolving. And so that metallic lead, occasionally, hunters don't get lead in their system very often, but very occasionally, lead coming through the system and then leaving the system is not going to elevate blood lead levels like an organic compound lead compound. And so handling shotgun shells, breathing the gun smoke that has some aerosolized primer residue, picking up your shot shells. I shoot pistols competitively. And I'm concerned about when I pick up all my pistol brass to reload it, I'm careful not to touch my face because I know that that has primer lead, primer residue. But I'll hold lead bullets reloading all day long. That metallic lead is not going to come through my skin. But that primer residue with organic lead compounds can. So you have these people talk about lead is obviously a toxin. They're talking about these organic lead compounds that were in Leaded paint, organic lead compounds that were in leaded gasoline. All of that stuff that causes these human health issues was a different form of lead. You don't have doctors talking about eating game meat shot with lead ammunition as being a problem. Because if you look on the websites for, like, the cdc, the fda, the epa, the American Academy of Pediatricians, you look on their websites, they have page after page of things that you should be careful of so you don't increase your lead exposure. What kind of ways you can increase your lead exposure. None of those websites say anything about eating game meat shot with lead ammunition. It's just not an issue in the medical profession, with one exception. The CDC added one sentence a couple years ago that said, if you're breastfeeding, you may want to limit your eating of game meat shot with lead ammunition. So why is it that the entire medical profession is not warning people about this, but there's a lot of bird groups that are warning people about it because it's their ulterior motive just to try to save bird mortalities. But I think we should talk about bird mortalities and not try to use this red herring as a hammer to try to get laws changed. And I've seen in Maryland, New Jersey, the full court press to ban lead ammunition statewide in some of these states is this human health aspect, which is not really an issue.

[B]

Yeah, they're thinking about one thing and talking about a different thing.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They know that human health and children and lead poisoning will resonate with people, and they're getting laws passed with misinformation like that.

[B]

Yeah, man. It wouldn't be hard to find dudes that just shoot all the time but never eat game meat. It'd be interesting to look at their lead.

[C]

Yeah. Well, use me for an example. If you look at a bar chart of different studies have been done with people that eat a lot of game meat with lead and. And the more they like. There was an Inuit community that ate sea ducks shot with lead. It was a different study than the other one. And they asked people how often they eat sea ducks, so how often they might be exposed to lead shot. And it wasn't until you got to the people who ate seaducks daily or almost daily that their lead levels were up to a point where a doctor. 10 micrograms per deciliter, where a doctor normally says, where are you getting this lead exposure from? So you had to eat sea ducks almost daily for that? My lead levels are higher than that from my pistol shooting, from breathing that smoke that has some of the primer aerosolized in it from handling shells. Mine was at 18 at one point and it's been at 12 micrograms per deciliter. CDC used to use 10 for the safe level. They don't do that anymore. But mine was at 1812. And then I started religiously washing my hands after a pistol match and washing my hands really good after I reloaded and handle all that. And it came right down to five and six.

[B]

Oh, you kidding me?

[C]

That's where my lead exposure was obviously coming from. And throughout all that high lead blood levels when I was at 18. Our family has been using nothing but copper bullets since 2009. So I had these high blood lead levels. I've been using nothing but copper ammo at that time for 15 years. Yeah, so it's not the lead fragments and we gave meat all the time, but it's shot with copper, copper bullets. And then I'm over here reloading, getting my lead exposure. So when they survey hunters versus non hunters, those hunters are, they're making fishing sinkers, they're reloading, they're shooting, they're doing a lot of other things that are exposing them to the real dangerous sources of lead. And the game meat eating is probably not registering that at all. There's some very rare exceptions. If you eat, if you eat game meat every day and you shoot lead and you're, you've got burger. Burgers is more of an issue. Burgers can have 20, around 20, 25% of the packages might have one lead fragment in it, according to some studies. And whole cuts like steaks and roasts, it's only 2 or 3% have even one lead fragment. So burger is more of an issue if you're eating burger like daily. If you think you might be getting lead fragments more days than not. And there, there was one guy in New Zealand that was eating meat shot with lead every day and he had super high lead levels. So there's, there's extreme cases of individuals like that that you see. Another strange case is everybody has an appendix unless they've had it taken out. And that's like a blind sack in the digestive system. And if you're a quail hunter and you've, you're eating a lot of birds, dove and quail. Number eight shot. There's been cases where a couple number eight pellets have dropped into that blind appendix and then been trapped in there. They may stay in there for years. And then if it's in there for years, then it's Going to start absorbing some of that metallic lead Just because of the length of exposure gunshot victims have been shown, too, especially for some reason. If it's near a joint, Maybe it's a lymphatic system or something. A gunshot victim where they leave a lead bullet in can have dangerously high blood levels in future years. So if it's metallic lead passing through your system in a day or two is not an issue. If it's metallic lead that stays in your system a long time, it can be.

[B]

Man, when we were kids, we. We had the stuff to pour our own split shot. You know, we would go down to the gun range, sift the berms out, get the shot out, melt it, separate the garbage from the lead, pour the lead into the molds, making sinkers. No respirators or nothing. Just doing it right in the garage. And then you spend all day with those sinkers packed in your lip like a jaw. I always kind of wanted to get my lead test, but I've never gotten to test.

[C]

Yeah, Yeah. I always encourage competitive shooters. A lot of them aren't aware of it to get it tested. Because if you're not being careful, like I started to washing my hands, it can be an issue. But. But the whole issue of eating game meat, when you look at packages like commercially ground venison burger has a higher level. People that grind it themselves, they keep all those bloody scraps out of their burger pile. They're more careful about what they're putting in the burger pile personally. And though the number of fragments in personally ground venison is a lot lower.

[B]

Is that right?

[C]

If you do the math on how many meals of venison a family has, a family of four has. And what percentage of those packages might have one fragment that only one person at the table gets. And you do the math on it. It's like someone might get a fragment once a month. I did the math for Arizona using some data that we had, and maybe once a month you get an occasional fragment that passes through your system. So if you look at the reality and the science that's there, it's not an issue. But politicians are not looking at any of that. They're not interested in that. Someone tells them that hunters are poisoning their kids and they feel like they got to do something.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

Get into trouble with. With laws that don't make sense.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

CWD and predators.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

This is another example of people. In my mind, this is another example of people thinking one thing and talking about another. Okay. So you will have I'm going to color this, I'm going to color this heavily personal opinion. Okay. And you can walk it back if you, if you choose predator advocates, of which I sort of count myself as one. But I like, I, I like, I like living on a predator environment. I like having the animals, all the native wildlife present. I get excited when I see mountain lions. I get excited when I see wolves. I get a kick out of seeing coyotes, bobcats. I'm not like an anti predator guy.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

But I also am a predator management advocate and I trap. We hunt predators, we use fur products. Okay. So I have a nuanced relationship with predators, but I noticed that people that have a view that. No, that are absolutist, that like predators should not be managed, predators should not be killed, predators shouldn't be hunted. They probably never think for a minute about CWD oftentimes because most of them are not educated on wildlife issues. They don't follow wildlife issues. They're like, they're like predator saviors first and foremost. And they divorce their love for predators from any conversation about wildlife management, about issues of biodiversity. They are pro predator. And that's seems like that group, that group of people is all of a sudden now interested in chronic wasting disease. Why? Because they're now saying, oh, you know how I always felt that no one should hurt a predator? Well, check this out. This is why if there was more predators on the landscape, they'd take care of chronic wasting disease and we wouldn't have any chronic wasting disease. Because everybody who's seen never cry wolf knows that they always pick the sick animal and eat it. Therefore, we shouldn't have any predator management, any predator control. Because I all of a sudden care a ton about CWD and I would like these predators to eliminate cwd.

[C]

Right, right. So that's, that's that. So that's exactly what happened. People are laser focused on their favorite toothy animal and they're always hungry for and always promoting any notion of little information that might indicate that, that these things are renovating whole ecosystems, they're changing the course of rivers, they're managing cwd, they're curbing climate change, they're just generally saving the planet. I mean, if they, if they can latch onto a piece of information that supports that kind of idea, they run with it. And there's, and there's a ton of reporters in big cities that have no exposure to wildlife that, that don't really understand hunting culture, don't really understand wildlife management at all. And they're, and they're very eager to grab those kind of stories and say, yeah, predators are great. The predators are just going to manage the ecosystem.

[B]

And it's an urban journalist wet dream, dude.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

To see that pop up, you know,

[C]

and that's what happens. It like spreads like wildfire. Well, what, what happened was a number of years ago, quite a few years ago, people doing research found out that mountain lions were killing a disproportionate number of CWD positive mule deer. More so disproportionate from healthy meals.

[B]

Sure. Yeah.

[C]

And so that.

[B]

Which I have zero problem believing, like, of course. Exactly. Makes sense.

[C]

Yeah. Especially in the later stages of cwd. Animals just are unaware. Even in the earlier stages, there's probably cues that predators pick up on that we don't even notice. But animals a little less thrifty, a little less able to get away. Like the mountain lions hiding in the bushes and charges a group of mule deer, if you've got the CWD animal might be a little slower in detecting that flash of fur coming out of the brush. And so there's a lot of reasons why they can be disproportionately.

[B]

If he's 10% less observant.

[C]

Yeah. And it's going to come out. And so people found that these urban writers and, and carnivore cheerleaders grabbed onto this and just, they ran with it. And so you heard this everywhere. And that was just the first little bit of information. And then later on, but in that.

[B]

Within that. And I don't have the time to do this, but someone that studies the media, it would have been interesting to go look and say, how interested has this person been in cwd?

[C]

Yeah. Or a number.

[B]

Are they historically interested in CWD or are they just interested today? Because they just saw this.

[C]

Yep, that. And so that bit of information, like, started spreading like wildfire. And everybody started thinking about, hey. And they're just making bold statements about not only like mountain lions are going to control CWD and mule deer, but carnivores are going to control CWD in all the whole, the whole deer family. And so that chugged along and then people started. People started doing some research on that to look into it a little further because that was a number of years ago and there was some modeling that was done. And if you build a population model and you say, okay, we're going to keep everything consistent except we're going to have mountain lions kill CWD positive mule deer at a higher rate, well, guess what happens? They're going to control CWD it's just a mathematical certainty if you just build a simple model. There are some people that build a, built a real complex model and took a lot of things into consideration. They, they ran a whole bunch of different modeling scenarios. Some of the scenarios they varied whether whether predators killed CWD positive animals at a higher rate or at a one to one rate with healthy animals. Other things they varied in the model is like as CWD progressed in an individual deer or elk does as soon as it gets infected with cwd, do predators start preying right away at the beginning of the phase of infection or, or does it ramp up and they prey a lot more higher predation when the animal gets sicker and sicker and they could model that into the model and they did that. They varied that and they varied the overall level of, of predation on the animals. And they ran these, they ran thousands and thousands of these scenarios. And it wasn't to see if the carnivores were, were controlling cwd, but it was to look at under what conditions would they possibly control cwd. And the paper, the research.

[B]

Can I, can I just want to explain a thing real quick. That's why I make sure people are getting, when you're, when you're talking about this is, is. Imagine that. Okay. Imagine you have a whitetail deer and he's, he's. It's a terrible winter and he's starving to death and he's depleted. But he gets killed by a coyote, but he's probably doomed anyway. What do you call that? Right? Yeah. Is that winter kill?

[C]

Right.

[B]

Or is that predation?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Do you follow me? So, so I get the point you're making. Is, is as they get like, as an infected animal gets near death, does it wind up being that almost like that? Almost that the predation event would almost be a symptom.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Like a symptom of the disease being, being predated.

[C]

Yep. There's, there's, they call it proximate and alternate causes of mortality. Some of the more recent research is actually assigning probabilities to the different causes of mortality. Okay. Like that was. And, and through modeling that was like 75% mountain lion predation, 25 CWD. They're actually starting to do things like that. But, but that's true. When you get to the later stages, the animal is probably going to die in the next six months from CWD anyway because they only last two years once they get infected. And so an animal takes it out. That's somewhat compensatory between those two Mortality sources. But, but they, they did a model that varied all these different things. Some of the model outputs and the, in the research paper will say predators can control cwd. That would be the results. But then you read the paper itself and those scenarios where predators did control CWD and kept it at a low level. The, the deer and elk populations were cut in half. And so that might not be an ideal situation for people that like robust deer and elk populations. You know, maybe that's not a great thing to have that situation. They had other modeling scenarios where predators actually eradicated or almost eradicated the CWD in that population. But the deer and elk population, they were gone in 30 years. They were gone like nowhere. Deer and elk. So they controlled CBD because there's no deer and elk left in the model run.

[B]

This is in.

[C]

When you run a model, when you run a model. Right, right. So, so, and so models are valuable. You know, they say all models are wrong. Some are valuable. And they say that because models are valuable because you can look at different relationships of different scenarios. And the, the first result they got from that modeling was in that predators could control CWD in a population, but under certain conditions. But those conditions weren't operating in Yellowstone National Park. And what that was Washington, predators in the model that showed that if predators preyed on prime age animals primarily and primarily on infected prime age animals, they could control cwd. But predators aren't in Yellowstone. Wolves and mountain lions are preying on young and they're preying on old individuals. They're preying on the wrong classes of animals to actually control cwd. So they, in their, in their report, in their, in their paper, they will say predators could control cwd. But people will quote that, People will cite that and say, see, they can. But you read the paper and they say but they're killing the wrong classes of animals to do it. And so you have to, that's nuance that you have to all take into account. But people don't. They'll grab what nugget they want and they'll cite it. And you have to go to that paper, which most people don't do, and read the entire paper. Like they can eradicate cwd, but that means there's no deer and elk left. So is that valuable?

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Hunting demands preparation, persistence and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear first light.

[B]

This isn't about hype.

[D]

It's about no compromise gear. Built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool keeping me Comfortable through the cold and the hot or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements, First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters for hunters with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses, just gear you can count on. Head to first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E dot com.

[B]

Do you feel. Whatever the models reveal, I mean do you feel that it's helped? Like would you argue, like let's say you were a man, you were a state agency manager and you were tasked with. Or you're like the CWD czar for an animal for, for a state agency. You're the CWD guy and like a lever you can pull is how many coyotes around the landscape and you're looking at all the things you have available to you. Would you go and be like one of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to turn up that, that I'm going to turn up the coyote dial, I'm going to turn up the lion dial as part of my management strategy.

[C]

Yeah. No, because there isn't any evidence that shows that making those, pulling those levers will improve cwd. I'm interested in population level effects, not whether mountain lions kill disproportionately kill positive animals. I'm looking at big picture having carnivores on the landscape. Does that make a difference from having maybe also robust healthy population, the carnivores, but, but sustainably hunted small percentage of the population or compared to having no carnivores? There isn't any evidence yet that shows at a population level that that changing the management or limiting the harvest of, of coyotes and wolves and mountain lions is going to change the CWD trajectory.

[B]

Yeah. Where do you sit on CWD these days? It's such a constantly evolving thing. My own opinions, my own fears morph and mature and you know, all the time where are you at? Like just in a very general way, where you at?

[C]

I know I'm not solidly on one side or the other. What I think about is, is, and we've talked about it before, I think 40, 50 years of people in the Rocky Mountain states eating CWD positive venison. And they've done a lot of studies to see if there's an increase in Khrushchev Yakov disease or any other variant that might be related to that in nothing. They've done intensive research. Nothing. No evidence that it's crossed over into humans at all. But when I talk to My wildlife, my disease expert friends, they say, you know, mad cow disease created a variant that went into humans in England. And so, yes, we have this decades and decades of proof that it doesn't cross into humans, but it would only take once. And so that's why CDC and most of the disease experts will recommend not eating animals you know are CWD positive. And so I'm not on one side or the other. It gives me great comfort to know that we've tested this and it's not crossing a human barrier. Yeah, with a lot of testing.

[B]

I know I've always known. I ate a boatload of it without knowing it, and now I ate it not knowing it, but I found out after the fact. So now I've. Now I've 100. No, I've eaten infected meat.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But I didn't lose any sleep. And in fact, a buddy of mine was there, too. I think I told. I don't know if I told you this. I'm at my buddy's house, I'm with a buddy of mine. I take a buddy of mine to another buddy's house. This is a doctor lawyer couple, okay? And I got a buddy of mine. We go there, and the lawyer of the couple says to his doctor wife, not to me, but to his doctor wife says, heads up, I haven't gotten the results back on this deer. Like, he discloses to her. She doesn't do anything. She just eats. So we're all eating it, eat a pile of it. While later he calls me. He's like, man, I just calling you to tell you that I got the results back and it was, you know, it was infected. And so I was like, I'm gonna call my buddy now and tell my buddy. But I kind of forgot. Not kind of. I forgot, forgot. One day, months go by, and this dude calls me and, no, it's text me. And I don't know why it's even on his mind, but he says, have you knowingly eaten CWD positive meat? And I said, I forgot to tell you. We both have.

[C]

Not only that, I have. Not only have I.

[B]

And I expected my phone to ring. No call. So I was like, okay. He's not alarmed. He's not alarmed by it either.

[C]

Yeah, I think it has. I mean, it's an individual choice, obviously, but it might have a lot to do with how much venison you have in a freezer. And I go to Texas and I'll kill three or four deer just as a shopping trip to fill the freezer full of venison. It's a little harder to get a deer in Arizona. And there has been some CWD positive cases near where we harvest those, and we haven't been getting them tested. Maybe that tells you something. I haven't been getting them tested at all. Now it's different too. I think one thing that worries me is when you look at kuru, which is another form of this kind of disease, TSC disease, like scrapie and sheep. CWD in deer. Cruz Hilt Jakobs in humans, there's another human form called kuru that was found in some tribes in Papua New Guinea. Papua New guinea, they're eating the brains of their elders as a cultural thing. And they were getting these infectious prions because they were eating brains. They were infecting themselves with this cannibalism action. And so some of the anthropologists then figured that out, and a disease expert, they got them to stop doing that, and then kuru went away. But if you read the scientific papers, there were kuru cases that were like 30 and 40 years after the person ate their meal of kuru. That, that worries me a little bit.

[B]

So.

[C]

So it's your choice whether you want to feed your kids. I mean, I'm not too worried about it, but if I had kids around the table, that's a, that's a different, different equation.

[B]

Too late for mine, man. They're brought up on deer meat. Last night we ate quite a pile of it. Okay, never mind the health, human health, population level, then we're gonna move on. Population level impacts on deer.

[C]

Yeah, definitely documented all over now. Let's see it. Not in question. Hasn't been in question for a while.

[B]

Big buck impacts, you think? Yeah.

[C]

One thing that was interesting is one of the studies in, in Table Mesa, Colorado, which I should talk about more. But one of the results they said in there, they had, they had about 43% of the Deerhead CWD. And they were studying them a couple times through a couple decades. And after probably 20 years of fairly high prevalence rates, like 25 to 40%, they couldn't. In all of the 64 deer I think they captured, not one of them was over five years old. They couldn't find a buck over five years old. And I thought they didn't even talk about that much. But that's a symptom of what happens when an animal doesn't live more than two years after they've been infected. And they're getting infected early. You're not going to have an older age structure. Saskatchewan's got some game management units that are 70% positive for CW. And when you reach that level and you've got animals dying after two years, you, you, you have to affect the population. There's no way. You couldn't.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it gave me a lot

[C]

of

[B]

hope, if that's the right word, this idea that. Yeah. That you're going to have that animals get infected. They're always going to die within a couple years. The precinct, you won't have old bucks, you're not going to have six year old bucks, seven year old bucks. But earlier we mentioned the Hanson buck.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

Four years old.

[C]

Yeah, that was Saskatchewan. But four years old. Right.

[B]

Biggest buck ever killed was four.

[C]

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Another thing about the, another study that was done in Colorado, the Table Mesa study area, done by a number of people in 2005, they went in there and they studied prevalence rates of cwd, what percent had cwd. They looked at predation rates on the deer population. They looked at causes of mortality, how the deer were dying and studied it a couple years. And they said throughout this period CWD was going up and up and there was a heavy predation on mule deer, mountain lions on mule deer. Not only heavy predation, but almost four CWD positive deer were preyed upon for every one healthy deer by mountain lions. So there's a differential predation on CWD sick animals, a heavy predation overall. And throughout all CWD levels kept going up and up and up. And so they concluded in 2008 when they published, they concluded even with a heavy predation by mountain lions, there's still the mountain lions are not able to control CWD. But then 13 years later, some of those same people came back into the same population, collected the same kind of information and they found that after 13 more years now mountain lions were killing four and a half infected deer for every one healthy deer. So still high predation, differential predation on CWD positive animals. And the CWD, the percent that had CWD went from, from 28% to from 38% from to 42. So CWD still increased with that heavy predation for 13 more years. But their conclusion in that paper was we think among other things, predators might be assisting in controlling cwd. And so people can cite that paper, but the reason they thought maybe it

[B]

would have been even worse.

[C]

That's exactly it. So that was like a speculation with,

[B]

with lions killing four and a half sick deer to every healthy deer, CWD still years. But they hold out that well, maybe it would be even worse it would

[C]

have been, that was their speculation, even worse. So I think, you know, an alternate, an alternate conclusion would be. Even in that condition, they still weren't able to manage cwd. It still went up. Now the people doing that research, some of them are friends of mine, they're good, they're solid researchers. That was just their conclusion. And you know, we don't all agree sometimes when we look at the same data and I'm not willing to take that speculative step and say, yeah, they were probably controlling CWD because it probably would have been higher. It's too many probabilities.

[B]

Yeah. Let's move on to another one. Another, another subject if you follow Wildlife, wildlife news, wildlife politics, conservation news. You know that, the trophic cascade thing. Okay, so wolves have returned to two release sites. You got Yellowstone National Park, Frank Church, 97, 96, somewhere in there. And then a while later, out comes like that. They have transformed riparian ecosystems. And now like the rivers are returned, the beavers are back, there's willows everywhere. You know, it was a. Unbeknownst to us, it was a sick landscape that is now healthy. All thanks to a hand. This handful of wolves that are, that are running around, people are doing ted. It's the perfect like TED talk thing. It's very inspiring. And then over time you see pieces of research coming out that sort of have this, well, maybe it's not that tidy. Maybe that's not quite, quite right. The last one of these I read was the authors the trophic cascade theory relied on some work done by some willow, some people doing research on willows. And even the people that did the research that is cited in the trophic cascade thing part started saying, you kind of got our numbers wrong.

[C]

I'll correct that a little bit.

[B]

Please. That's what you're here for.

[C]

Yep. So first of all, trophic cascades, if people don't understand that basically a trophic level is like the grass is one trophic level, the grass eaters, the herbivores are another trophic level and then the predators are another trophic level. And the idea is you can take the predators away or you can add predators. And if you add predators, there's less grass eaters and so there's more grass. So it causes this cascading effect through these trophic levels. That's what trophic cascade is. And so, and so we, so we brought wolves back In Yellowstone in 95, 96, 97 wolves were released. I think a total of 41 wolves were released and then just a couple, just about. So 97 in 98 already there was a couple of researchers from the Pacific Northwest that were in there measuring the tallest aspens. In retrospect, there's been a lot of scientific paper showing that their methodology was, was biased. Not, they weren't trying to be biased, but it just was not randomly distributed sampling. It wasn't very good sampling. But regardless they measured the tallest aspen in a bunch of these aspen stands. And this is just. They started in 98. So it was a year after the third wave of release of wolves came in and they published in 2001 and they said in that publication 2001 aspens are recovering in the riparian areas and we're probably seeing the beginning of wolves triggering a trophic cascade. So they didn't have any data on that. They just measured some polys aspens, which wasn't a very good method of measuring aspens anyway. And they made this comment and once again the media picked it up and it was a wonderful story. Wolves were coming back, brought wolves back to Yellowstone and now the streamside vegetation, the aspens were recovering and doing great. And that spread like wildfire for a number of years. And then the first paper I saw with Mat Kaufman, remember you had Matt Kaufman on the podcast with Monteith. Matt Kau went and did some research in the 2000s. He published in 2010 with some people and they said, and they did a very good scientifically robust measuring of aspen throughout the park in a more robust way than the original.

[B]

Can I wedge in here just to make the connection? The idea was that elk ungulates were over. Like we're over grazing. And so now that there's more predation on the landscape, more animal predation on the landscape, it was giving, it was giving a break to the vegetation regime from elk grazing. Therefore the, it's coming back and recovering.

[C]

I need to clarify something. I should have started with that. There's two different kinds of trophic cascades that people have talked about in Yellowstone. One is the beh, one is the density mediated trophy cascade. And that just means there's fewer elk. So there's more vegetation. That's just. Yep, a real simple kind of relationship. And so people will say, look, we brought wolves back, there's fewer elk. We had 19,000 elk in Yellowstone two years before the wolves came. They started declining before the wolves were released. Actually for two years we had 19,000 elk two years before that.

[B]

Wolves hunt back in them days, man.

[C]

And that dropped to a low of 4,000. So 19,000 to 4,000, you're definitely going to have more vegetation growing in Yellowstone. So that's the density mediated. That just means there's fewer elk, so there's more vegetation. But the problem is people want to give wolves all the credit for that. But at the same time, we had a little handful of wolves at that time. But we have. Grizzly bear populations increased to the extent that their predation on elk calves was three times what it was prior to that earlier, it increased three times. Mountain lion population doubled in Yellowstone. Fires burned 36% of Yellowstone in 1988. That had huge effect on the ecology of that. We had one of the worst droughts during that time. Shortly after wolves were released. We had one of the most severe winters at that time. And then we were hunting cow elk off the park in Montana to help try to manage the Yellowstone population. And we, we kept cow elk tags too long and too high. And so hunters contributed to that population decline because all this stuff was happening at once. And the people managing the elk tags didn't, didn't really at the time didn't know that all this stuff was going to affect the population.

[B]

So you're bursting the bubble of everyone that just wants to blame wolves, right?

[C]

And so you hear, I mean, wolves are precipitating this, this tropical cascade. So that's the first one I think we, we can, we can dismiss that wolves did not cause that decline of 19,000 to 3,000. All those factors did. So we can't give wolves credit for trophy cascades because of density reductions in elk. So then they very quickly switched to the behaviorally mediated trophic cascade, which means that elk like to hang out along the streams and wolves were hunting along the streams and they were scaring the elk out away from the streams. And so that streamside vegetation could respond because the elk were scaring them out of there. They call that the landscape of fear. But that first study that kind of talked about that, which was, was actually part of the 2001 study, first study that talked about that, didn't mention the fact other researchers have later, that, you know, if you're comparing aspen that grow along the stream and aspen that grow in the drier uplands, the aspen along the stream are going to grow a lot more than the uplands. And that wasn't ever mentioned in the original discussion of that. But other people like Kaufman came, came by later in 2010. Not only did he measure the aspen in a more randomly and more scientifically robust way throughout the park but he took the last 10 years of locations of where a wolf killed an elk and took all those spots. And he mapped the landscape of fear. He mapped for the first time because people talking about the landscape of fear were using other metrics that weren't very direct. But Kaufman map kill locations and then related that to close to stream, not close to stream, other effects, and actually had a map of very risky places for wolves to be and not risky ways, places for wolves for elk to be. For elk to be.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Because of wolf predation. And when they did the analysis of high risk areas and low risk areas for elk to be preyed on by wolves, they found no difference in aspen regeneration in riskier areas versus areas that weren't risky. And so he published that paper in 2010, that was the first one I saw that said, hold the boat, you know, aspen. The title was aspens are not recovering in Yellowstone, because they weren't. And at the time there was a 60% reduction in the Yellowstone elk population and still there was no evidence of aspens recovering. And so that really, that was the first one I saw, and I think it is.

[B]

Yeah, but that wasn't the trophic cast. The trophic cascade heyday came after that.

[C]

Yes. And the trophy cascade heyday, where everybody was talking about it, they were all talking about this behaviorally mediated. They were all talking about wolves are just redistributing elk away from some of these areas and then those streamside vegetations recovering. And then another researcher, Thomas Hobbs, came in and he focused on willows, not aspen. And he measured willows and where they grew and where the wolves were. And his conclusion was wolves. Aspen are recovering, but wolves have nothing to do with the willow recovery. The interesting thing is, you HEAR there's the YouTube video that's got 44 million views now about how wolves are restoring the Yellowstone ecosystem and changing the course of rivers. Changing the hydrology and bringing the beavers back was one of the things that was peak trophic. Yes, but the biologists brought the beavers back, not the wolves. Biologists released beavers in seven drainages in the Galveston National Forest, right on the edge of Yellowstone, about 130 beavers. And those beavers then dammed up the tributaries, changed the hydrology, made habitat for willows to now return. So beavers probably should get more credit than wolves for trophy cascades and in Yellowstone because of their changes in hydrology. But beavers don't have the big public relations campaign that wolves do.

[D]

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[B]

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[D]

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[B]

Another funny thing that I made the same point earlier and this is about public perception, this is a comment about public perception about media and not a comment about wildlife. But the people that were so happy. It's cynical to point this out, but the people that were suddenly so happy about willow regeneration. If you studied the media, I would ask you, can you go find me situations in the past where they were expressing their concern about willow regeneration and can you show me where that they were aware of this?

[C]

Or beavers, you know, they weren't concerned about beavers not being on the landscape.

[B]

Yeah. So it's like it's, it drives. They're here, they're going through life. They're not aware that there's an aspen issue. They're not aware that there's a willow issue. They don't care that there's an aspen issue. They don't care that there's a willow issue. They've never heard the word riparian, but sudden they hear that wolves have made it better. Therefore, I now believe that it was

[C]

a problem, but it was, it was

[B]

the discovery day for them.

[C]

Yep. Yep. And it's interesting that the first two people that published that paper in 2001, they've been on a campaign to convince everyone that wolves have been the drivers or the triggers of a major trophic cascade. Just, they've published a paper almost every year in the last 25 years talking about wolves initiating a trophic cascade. And they're unrelenting. Even with all of this mounting body of scientific evidence that shows that that's really not true, that, that this story is not like that at all.

[B]

Because it doesn't suffice. It somehow doesn't suffice just to be like, they're cool to have around.

[C]

Right.

[B]

It's cool to see them. They're cool to have around. They're like, I need something more.

[C]

We have to justify them on the landscape and we don't need to justify large predators on the landscape. They were. They were part of the native fauna. We. We recovered almost all of the native. Other animals, and we've got a couple more, and they happen to be carnivores to finish up.

[B]

Yeah, I think it's like the best word I can think of it. I don't mean to give it like a religious aspect, but the best word I can think of it is. I think of it like it's a sin. I think it's immoral or whatever. To. To eliminate. To intentionally eliminate native wildlife, I think of as like a sin against God and man. You know, I mean, it's like. I don't think it's right.

[C]

Yeah, that's what Theodore.

[B]

I think it's like it's human. It's. It's hubris, you know, to be like, oh, there's this thing that's lived here. It's always lived here. But I'm deciding that I.

[C]

That it.

[B]

That it needs to go away. I'm just like, we can't be making that decision. Yeah.

[C]

David Meech. L. David Meech is the leading wolf guy, really, in the world. He's been researching wolves for more than six decades. Researching wolves for more than six decades. And he came and taught, gave a talk at the University of Arizona one time. I picked him up at the airport. We were at breakfast and he. He said something to me and he said it later in his talk. He said that the people that think returning this is the. Like the largest wolf advocate. Well, maybe not a wolf advocate. Largest wolf scientist in the world. He says people think that returning wolves to Yellowstone created this situation where it brought back the birds and the bees and the butterflies. He said that's more religion than it is science. But he was quick to add that those people that say that bringing wolves back is going to decimate all of our big game herds in the state. He said that's more religion than it is science. The truth is really in. In the middle, they're not going to be destructive and they're not saints. And he wrote another paper that said that. That. And you've probably heard. Heard this before, but that wolves are neither saints nor sinners except two people who make them. So, yeah, people want to make them out to be saints and sinners, and they're not.

[B]

Yeah, they. Within that they have an impact. They have an impact.

[C]

They sure. And certainly locally they can have an impact and we can manage that. We should be able to manage that impact. But the two that have been publishing Trophic Cascade papers almost every year. I think they have 25 papers I read since that 2001. They just published one last year. And in the abstract it says that wolves triggered the strongest trophic cascade in the world. This is just last year. They're still saying this. And that was followed by a rebuttal this year by some Yellowstone researchers. People are making their living researching the Yellowstone ecosystem. And it was a rebuttal. And the title of the rebuttal was Flawed Analysis Invalidates the Idea of a Strong Trophic cascade in Yellowstone.

[B]

That's a heavy hitting title.

[C]

That's like, that's as clear as you can possibly make it. And I think you in an email once said, let's talk about this latest. There's some kind of news article that said that the trophy cascade stuff doesn't have scientific support. But this has been happening since Kaufman wrote that paper in 2010. I mean, this is 16 years people have been saying things aren't happening. Like the media is telling you it's happening and they're using good, solid science and. But nobody wants to hear that story. I mean, the original story is so beautiful. I know it's not true, and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy and so there's just no getting rid of that. I constantly see on social media how wolves have changed the ecosystem in Yellowstone. And then once in a while someone publishes a paper that says, you know, a lot of that's not true, that the science just doesn't support that. And I've been seeing that for 15 years, but nobody. People are still telling the original story. There's no getting out in front of that. It's too late. It's like a freight train that left.

[B]

As a writer who, like. As a writer that deals in history and wildlife issues and other things, I will sometimes hear a thing. I'll hear a thing and I'll get really excited because it's going to be great for the thing I'm writing.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

And I'm like, that is great. But then when I look into it and I learned that it's not true, I feel a disappointment.

[C]

I do. Yeah. I've been there before, too. Like, this is really going to support what I'm writing.

[B]

And then I'm like, damn it.

[D]

Really?

[C]

That's a lie.

[B]

Or that's like, you know, this thing that everyone knows now I know is not true.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And I'm disappointed.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. Because I wanted the truth to be other than it was. I will say to wildlife researchers, which I have many friends that do that, that they're in that line of work and they'll be talking about something they're doing and I'll say, what do you hope happens?

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

Like, I can't do that. What do you mean, what do I hope happens? Except. But I'm like. Because you're a human being.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

There's gotta be like, let's just be honest. There's gotta be some thing. I'm not saying you'd bend the truth. Right. You're a person of integrity. But in, in your head, there's gotta be. I hope that this something happens. That would be like of note. Right. Because you're, you're only human. And so the question I would ask is, if you look at the people that started from year one, Trophy Cascades. Trophy Cascades, would they have had it in them, would they have had it in them to publish a piece that said, turns out there isn't one?

[C]

A lot of scientists do that. And that's just a matter of being a good scientist. Because you're right, every single scientist has bias, has things that they would love if the results were this, because that would be great, especially if it's going to make big news. I mean, that's how people get tenure and that's how they get promotions in the university setting, is to make a lot of big splashes in the news. And that's what drives a lot of people in academia, unfortunately. But everybody has a bias. But a good scientist curbs that and packs it away and just lets the results speak for themselves. And in scientific papers, a lot of times you'll see here's our study area, here's our methods, here's our results. And then when you get to the last discussion section, there's some leeway to discuss what you think the results mean. So the results are the results, but the discussion section, there's a lot of leeway for researchers to weave their personal biases in and interpret the results for you how they see it. That's what you have to be careful of. And that's where people peel quotes out of the discussion section that are just speculation and attribute it to that peer reviewed scientific paper. But it's not something they researched. It's not something in the results, not something they found, it's something they think, which is not really science.

[B]

Let's jump to javelinas. This is something that some people might be like, why does this matter? But it matters.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

It matters to me. Everyone knows, like you have Boone and Crockett record books. Okay, how, how Was it an oversight? How was it that you couldn't shoot like, you couldn't get a record book? Javelina.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I found this out the hard way many years ago. I got a big javelina, okay? I shot a big javelina. And people were pointing out like, damn, that's a huge javelina. That's a huge javelina. And I go and look. And I had no idea. I had no idea. I'd never entered anything before. But I go and look. I'm like, what?

[C]

It's not in here.

[B]

But then I found, like, Safari Club had it. And it was like. And it hit the whatever. The minimums for Safari Club. But I was like, how could. How could this noble little. This noble little desert creature not be in the Boone and Crocker record books?

[C]

Good question. Arizona has had Arizona record books since 1971. It's had javelin in there. But I thought the same thing probably 20 years ago. And I'm good friends with Buck Buckner, who is the. The vice president for North American records for Buna Crockett at the time. And. And I asked him, why is javelina not in there? And he just said, you know, I don't know this. No one's kind of made a run for it. No one's made a. A proposal for it. And I started a file, and I had a file. Haveleen Abuna Crockett, early in my career. And I'm going to do. This is going to be my project. I'm going to get. I'm going to get him in. Bunny Crockett and then had a family and got busy. And the file folder went farther and farther back into my file.

[B]

What was it? Okay, what was it? What were your folder?

[C]

Some of the Arizona. Like the Arizona records that. We've got a big data set of Arizona records like that help inform what the minimum might be. And then. And then copies of what the Boone Crockett needs in order to establish a new category and those sorts of things. So I'm just starting to have a file and think about that. And then I. And then I just. It just got away from me. I never got back to it. And then Nicole Tapman from New Mexico called me just a couple years ago, and she said, would you write a letter of support from your agency? That was one thing that was required to get them a new category. Because she said, I'd like to see if we can get Boone Crockett to accept Pavilion. And she's on the records committee. And I'm on the records committee now, too. And I said, write a letter. I said, I will clear my calendar next week. Let's do this. Let's. And so we got two people from Texas, two people from Mexico, Nicole's from New Mexico and me from Arizona. And we put together a proposal that talked about how these populations are scientifically managed by these state agencies. They have a long history of records in some states how popular they were. We've got 58,000 javelina hunters every year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas harvesting 33,000 javelina. This is a significant big game animal. I mean, some. Some people in Bunda Crockett initially said, is that even a big game animal? Yeah, it's a big game animal. It's got hooves. What other hooved big game animal do you mount with its mouth open, his big ferocious roar? I mean, they're cool. They're cool animals. And they're really popular in the Southwest, are really popular for non residents to come down. So we put together this really robust proposal.

[B]

You can call them in. I mean, I could name stuff. I could name reasons all day long why it's a big man.

[C]

They're cool. And they're. They're not invasive like feral hogs. They have two young a year, once a year. Not like feral hogs, where they have a litter of 10 twice a year, or they'll have a litter of eight and only 10 survive. That's a joke among the feral hog people. So we went to the proposal, we went to a records book committee meeting, and we said, here's.

[B]

But, you know, we were talking about

[C]

biases earlier Mumbais for javelina.

[B]

Well, yeah, but did you have. Because you got a couple hogs that you thought should be in there?

[C]

No, actually, no, that you didn't have a total.

[B]

You wanted to enlist.

[C]

30 years of hunting javelina. And all the skulls I've measured that I cleaned, I don't have any that make the book, so I don't have that. I got a booker.

[B]

I need to go dig that sucker out.

[C]

Yeah, you should. And actually, this year, entering in the Buna Crockett is free. There's been a benefactor that will cover all entry fees for all species until the end of December. So if you've got a head laying around that you haven't got into the books, this is the year to do it, because it's free for you.

[B]

So you're not in there?

[C]

No.

[B]

So you're just doing this out of the goodness of your heart?

[C]

I just love javelina. And I think, especially in Mexico, our Mexican colleagues Have I really have more at stake of giving the javelina a little more respect?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

As a big game animal, I think that's a big thing. Sometimes they're not given that kind of respect.

[B]

No. I even hear, man, like, people I like, you know, people. People that I count as friends, man. I'll hear people really denigrate them and.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And like, you know, talk about, oh, you know, whatever, we shot a couple and left them land or something. I hate that kind of stuff, man.

[C]

Yep. So we went to the records committee and we said, this is before we did that proposal. And we said, we. We argued our case why haveling ought to be part. And some people are like, then we got to add alligators. And then we got to add. But there's reasons why some of these other species aren't ready to make the book. And so we said, what's the logic there? Like, there's some other animals that aren't in the book that are still harvested. That was what they were thinking. Like, what about.

[B]

You were setting up that. You were setting up a. You were setting up a set of parameters that other things would be. That would. Other things would reach.

[C]

Nope, just javelina. Just focus on javelina. But some people in Boonet Crockett said, well, if we do javelina, then we're going to get pressured to do all these other animals. It's going to cascade, but it's not.

[B]

There's.

[C]

There's not any other animals for inclusion.

[B]

Be a trophy Cascade. Did you get that joke?

[C]

That is a good one. That was a good one. So we asked the records committee. We're not asking you to decide now, but let us come back with a proposal. We came back with a proposal. They were pretty impressed. The proposal was pretty extensive and covered everything. And they had some board meetings. They talked about it. They agreed to include it, but they didn't have the minimum entry yet. But we have over. We have hundreds of javelina skulls that have been measured in the state record books and sci to use as a baseline for what should the minimum. And so we use those records. Roy Grace from Pope and Young club did a whole bunch of legwork on analyzing those data. And then Boone Crockett club then made the decision what the minimum would be and the minimum for Boone and Crockett. And then Pope and Young followed suit right after that because there's a close relationship between the two clubs. So Pope and Young accepted them, which is great because they're perfect for archery. And so Pope and Young then decided. They approved them, decided On a minimum. Pope and young minimum is 13 and 14, 16. And then Bunda Crockett minimum is 14 and 5 16.

[B]

And it's length and width.

[C]

It's simply just like bears and lions. It's length and width.

[B]

No kind of toss measurements or anything.

[C]

No. They want to make it simple on measures. Already know how to do that measurement. They have the equipment.

[B]

What's minimum again?

[C]

Minimum for Boone to Crockett. Yeah. You'll have to remember that and go back and measure it.

[B]

Oh, I'm going to measure it tonight so they can hold.

[C]

Crockett is 14 and 5 16. 5 16.

[B]

I wish my wife was more handy

[C]

at that kind of.

[B]

I mean she just would if I called her right now and told her go measure.

[C]

Go measure that.

[B]

Yeah. But it's not going to go over great.

[C]

What's called the boss square that they use I think for musk ox or I think. But it's a square. It's a steel square. Because the back of the javelina skull has a Y. So you can't. It's not measured in the. The bottom of that Y is measured absolute total length. So you have to have something square across the back and square across the front. And then the width is just the zygomatic arches here.

[B]

All right.

[C]

Yeah. So I'm pretty excited that, that, that now gets the respect that. That it's always deserved.

[B]

That's great. I was going to ask you about status black tailed deer, mule deer. Let me ask you about status of javelinas.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You don't really hear about this ever.

[C]

No.

[B]

Is it just like our havoline is just sort of always there at the same. You never hear about that. It's a great year. It's a bad year. Ups and downs. Are they just sort of like just.

[C]

They are very stable overall and, and part of it is they're. They're so adapted to the arid desert. They're eating a lot of prickly pear which not like forbs are coming and going and wet your. And dry.

[B]

I see.

[C]

Prickly pear is always there. They eat a lot of root tubers. Yeah. So some of those plants are more abundant with rainfall, but they're still there.

[B]

They're pretty drought resistant little critters.

[C]

Very, very drought resistant. Just kind of chug along. They do a pretty good job of chugging along and not having these violent swings up and down.

[B]

Yeah, got it. So with that, let's talk about black tail deer and mule deer. Is there reason to be. Let's. Let's start with meal Deer. Is there any reason to be not pessimistic about the future of mule deer?

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. I'm. I'm not pessimistic at all.

[B]

Really?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Tell me more. I feel like it's like always bad.

[C]

I hope you feel better by the time you leave. Then it is always bad news. And some of the bad news comes from just a desire to advocate for meal deer, which I'm 100 on board with. There's a lot of stresses affecting mule deer in the west, but mule deer. I chair a mule deer working group, which is for the last 20 years I've been the chairman of this group that's sponsored by the Western association of Fish and wildlife agencies. It's 24 Western wildlife agencies in western North America provinces and states. And we have one mule deer or black tailed deer expert from each of those 24 jurisdictions. And that's the mule deer working group committee. So it's the West's leading mule deer experts. And every year we put together for the 11th year, now, this year, status of mule deer and black tailed deer in North America. And you can't just write one paragraph about how mule deer and black tailed deer are doing because they're doing differently all over and for different reasons. And so we take a page or two for each jurisdiction. So you can read about Saskatchewan, you can read about Arizona, you can read about Montana, written by the mule deer expert in that, in that state. And then we do some summary stuff at the beginning of that and that gives you a snapshot of how deer populations are doing. And more than half of the mule deer populations are stable or increasing right now. Some of the Rocky Mountain states had a bad winter of 2023 and then they're recovering from that. Southwestern states, New Mexico, Arizona are suffering from multi year drought. But we had to decline in the 1990s. We had several declines in mule deer through time and the latest one was in 1990 and that's when the mule deer working group was established.

[B]

You mean decline?

[C]

Holistic decline, Westwide decline.

[B]

Okay. Yeah.

[C]

And that's happened a couple times. And, and when you, when you look at it in retrospect, it when it happened in the 90s, we were like, what's happening in mule deer? Something is affecting mule deer everywhere. That's what it seemed like because it seemed to be declining everywhere. When you look back now at the history, it's obvious that when you have really wet years in the desert southwest, that means a lot of rain, a lot of forbs in the winter, really nutritious and deer do really well, Reproduction rates go up. But that same wet winter in the Rocky Mountains might be heavy snowpack and a harsh winter in the Rocky Mountains. So the same kind of wet year can make deer population, the Rocky Mountain states decline and increase in the Southwest.

[B]

That's interesting that that same weather pattern

[C]

can do something different.

[B]

Good one place and bad another place.

[C]

So you have these different things happening in different regions of their range all the time. And then periodically, every couple decades, they synchronize. Just by chance, really, they synchronize where you, you might have a harsh winter and you've also have a drought in the southwest and deer population decline. And so looking back, it looks like just once in a while, all those regional differences synchronize. And everybody says, oh my God, there's a, there's a deer decline in the west. And that happened in the 90s and, and then populations recovered from that decline. And probably no state or province would say, not many of them would say they have all the mule deer they want, they're all below population objective. But there's no westwide mule deer decline like you see some people talking about right now, like it's going down. Arizona after the 1990s declined because of drought, had 15 years of steady growth, population growth up. And it's just the last six years or so drought that has cause that to hook down.

[B]

What, what made, what made the mule deer glory days?

[C]

Yeah, good question. That was a, whether you call that.

[B]

That was like the late 60s, late 70s, whatever, sometime a long time ago. Was the meal dear glory days.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Was that that everything aligned and lifted instead of everything aligned and declined.

[C]

There was a lot of other things going on at the time. You know, our, our deer population, like everything else 1800s or early 1920s declined just because overexploitation and no management. Then from the 20s to 60s, West Wide Deer population generally increased. And during that period we had now restrictions on harvest. Not killing does in some places or limiting the killing of does, limiting the harvest. We had 1080 predator poison and predator control everywhere, dropping poison baits everywhere, reduce the predation pressure. We had some wet years in there, all that. And then there was a lot of logging going on. So we're removing the overstory. Shrubs are coming up, forbs are growing great for mule deer though, all of that stuff combined was happening from the 20s or 30s and then into the 50s and early 60s. So 50s and 60s was like the heyday of mule deer. We had a lot of mule deer, but that was the Result of conditions and activities that we will never repeat. We can't go back and do that. We're not going to do that wholesale logging, we're not going to drop 10, 80 baits, one every square mile across the west. We're not going to do those things. So looking at mule deer populations in the 50s and 60s is not the benchmark to compare today's mule deer. That was an unusual bubble because of all those things happening. And then in the 70s we had a mule deer decline coming off of that, that bubble. And we even had, there was a symposium In Utah in 1976 that was about Mueller decline in the West. And it was a whole symposium concerned about this decline in the 70s. Then we got rainfall generally in the 80s was, was a pretty lush year. And deer populations throughout the west increased in the 80s. And then if you remember late 80s, 1988 is when Yellowstone burned. There was barges running around in the Mississippi river because it was so low. We had really, really bad drought throughout a lot of the west that precipitated this late Hades 1990s decline that initiated the mule deer working group at that time. And so we've gone through these swings for different reasons and we've recovered a lot from that 1990s decline. And now more than half of the jurisdictions are stable or increasing. Some of them are certainly declining. All of them below objective, but all

[B]

of them below objective.

[C]

I'd say all of them. I don't know if you'd find many mule deer biologists that say we don't want any more mule deer. We've got enough, you know, the habitat's full, you know, we're still, we still need to build deer herds almost everywhere. Even though I think Colorado, half of the units I read from, from that biologist are at population objectives. So there's, there's places where they are. But, but we're, we're not in dire straits. There's no westwide mule deer decline right now. We're, we're chugging along in weather conditions, whether it's drought or harsh winters is causing these annual fluctuations against a backdrop of long term habitat change. You know, the west looks a little bit different now than it did in 1950 as far as urban development, urban sprawl, communities, roads, all that stuff. We're not going back to the 1950s. So we should not be saying, well, deer populations are such and such lower than the 1950s. It's not fair, it's not fair to do that. But I'm, as long as we keep working on Preserving migration corridors, improving habitat on large scales, I think the future of meal deer is bright. We're going to keep chugging along with good meal deer herds if we keep paying attention and doing everything we can.

[B]

If every area is below objective, what do you think? If someone says, before I say this, I'll recognize you're arguing for a nuanced approach where you have 24 different regions and every region has its own story and various factors. But let's say I come to you and say generally, should it be that we're not killing female mule deer anymore, we shouldn't be killing dough meal deer.

[C]

See, that's on a unit by unit basis. There's some areas like, like if half of the units in Colorado are at population objective, then that's the case where you, you need to maintain that population at that, in that population objective range. So I would not, I would not outlaw doe hunting throughout the West. In Arizona, when populations got really low, then, then doe hunts were removed. And so it, and you see in units, even in within a single state, certain units will have doe harvest and other units won't. And that's the biologist doing what they do and managing those populations based on where they are in relation to objectives and where they need to be.

[B]

Got it.

[C]

So I wouldn't broad brush and say we shouldn't be killing females. It depends on the area.

[B]

What about black tail deer?

[C]

Black tailed deer are harder to survey. They're doing, they're doing pellet counts historically. They, yeah, they do. They're looking for deer shakes.

[B]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[C]

And they'll use dogs, they'll use sniffing dogs to find pellets and they'll record all that they collect. In Alaska, they've done a lot of pellet collecting where they, they do genetics and they look at how many individual minimum number of individual deer they have per square mile based on genetic fingerprints.

[B]

Got it.

[C]

So they're hard to, they're hard to, to monitor. They're very susceptible, especially southeast Alaska, very susceptible to heavy snow winters. You get those islands, Prince of Wales, all those islands, you get a heavy, heavy snow winter and you can lose 50, 60% of the black population. But then in the years after that, they come roaring back. Once it, once the population down, there's a lot of food for the remaining animals. Those populations bounce right back. So they, they, they dip and they grow based on, mostly on weather conditions. But then again, I said weather conditions in the forefront in the background is long term habitat changes. And one of the things in Sitka, blacktail Range is the, the logging that was done in the past that is now all grown up into second growth, really thick. Not very easily marketed for anything commercially. So we've got, it's called stem exclusion or stand exclusion, where the sunlight's not reaching the ground to make forbs and shrubs that the deer eat.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

It's just blocking out the light. So you have all this secondary growth that needs to be cut. But other than maybe cutting it and making wood pellets, you know, is a possibility. Someone needs to commercialize something to get in there and open up some of that. But it doesn't mean that, that the old, old growth forests in southeast Alaska need to be logged. The old growth forest is really important for the same big old trees. They, they stop the snowfall. And in heavy snowfall events, the deer have, that have to have that mature old growth forest to go in and move around and feed a little bit until the snow melts enough that they can go back out into the clear cuts and some of the places with more food. So the old growth forest is really important. And then that stem exclusion is keeping that habitat from having more food than it could have if it was, if it was managed better. So that stuff's going on in the background of these annual blacktail fluctuations.

[B]

You know those clear cuts, they're, they're so good for 10 years or whatever in that country. They're so good for deer for 10 years and then they're so terrible for deer.

[C]

Yeah. When they grow for 30 or 40

[B]

or 40, when there's a new one, you're like, ah, it's cool now, but man, then it's just gonna suck.

[C]

Yeah. And even if they leave, if they go in and leave a lot of slash and horizontal logs, it becomes an issue of deer not being able to move around as well either in some of those clear cuts. Yeah.

[B]

It's just total obstacle course.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So, chairmanship of the Western association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies Mule Deer working Group.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

How long you been doing that?

[C]

28 years. I was one of the original, I'm the only remaining original member. That was approved by the Western Directors in 1997. Our first meeting was in 98 in Jackson, Wyoming. About eight years later, the chairman retired and passed the torch to me. So I've been chairman for 20 years. And if you go on to see what we've been up to for 20 years or 28 years, we've got a website, mule deerworkinggroup.com it's just all one word. Mule Deer Working Group. And you see A lot of publications on there. And what we put together is like we established, we established seven ecoregions in North America that were related to mule deer management and mule deer ecology. And we produce habitat guidelines for each one of those seven eco regions. So a practitioner on the ground, a BLM biologist in the Southwest deserts can pull out the Southwest deserts habitat guidelines and read about what deer need to thrive in the Southwest desert or the coastal rainforest. We've done that. We produce other documents about disease concerns, translocating wildlife. We produce the North American Mule Deer Conservation Plan, which, which guided conservation in a very general way throughout the West. And with that plan we wrote an MoU and we had the chief of the Forest Service, the director of the BLM and about seven agency heads signed this MOU saying that their documents, their forest management plans, their BLM resource management plans would incorporate these things and be consistent with the North American Mule Deer conservation plan. So if anybody, any local biologist said we're not going to do that, we said, well, your director says that you're going to do things that are consistent with what mule deer need and blacktail deer need. And we're revamping that now. But we've got a guidance document on if you're monitoring mule deer populations. Here's some of the metrics you should monitor and here's some advantages and disadvantages of monitoring them different ways, kind of for biologists. We did something on movements and migration, barriers to a movement. And that website has all of these documents as a PDF. And a lot of the mule deer working group members then contributed to our latest mule deer book. That big one that you have, the big black one that you have, where there's 82 chapters and each 82 co authors, 23 chapters. And each chapter is written by the national expert for that particular topic with a team of writers. It's all the latest mule deer and black tailed deer information. And the mule deer working group had that. Us and a lot of our friends that are working on mule deer work on that book.

[B]

Yeah, if you want to be the guy in your circle that knows the most about mule deer blacktails, you should get that book and memorize it. It's got to beat everybody.

[C]

It's comprehensive for sure.

[B]

You. So this is a funny one you recently went into to New Zealand to speak about cervid conservation. But there, I mean, I feel like they spend more energy trying to, to get rid of wildlife.

[C]

They absolutely do.

[B]

They spend more energy trying to get rid of wild, not wildlife, but more energy trying to get Rid of hooved?

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Animals. Yep. There's no, no one talks in New Zealand about con, like conservation.

[C]

I know, it's like gloves off, as it should be.

[B]

Yeah, like the helicopter gun them, you know, I mean it's like they did. They're not, they're not, they're not trying to make robust populations for hunters to be able to go out and do this meeting.

[C]

It happens every four years somewhere around the world. So it's been in China, been in Peru, in the Czech Republic. I helped organize the one in 2018 in Estes Park, Colorado. We had it in the US and this year it rotated. It was in Croatia four years ago in New Zealand this time. And I don't get. I got to go to the Colorado one because I helped organize it and it was in a neighboring state. My department's not going to send me to China and to Peru. And so I didn't think I was going to be able to go to the New Zealand one. And they asked me, it's called the International Deer Biology Congress. And they asked me to be a keynote speaker with the expenses paid. So I was able to finally get to an international version of that. And I went there and I talked about how we manage deer and elk, all cervids in North America, amid the mosaic of BLM land, forest land, private land, National Park Service land. And you have biologists for all those different agencies and around that, and then you have funding, all the these different funding sources for conservation. And among this mess that we have in North America, we somehow have this beautiful well functioning system that works really, really well. So that was my keynote address in New Zealand at that talk. But it was interesting because that conference sponsored by the New Zealanders, that conference, the title, the theme of that conference was you dear here. And it was about New Zealand didn't have any deer. It was all of our deer that were in New Zealand. It just said our deer, your deer here. And so there was talks about trying to ratty. They're poisoning brushtail possums, they're poisoning whitetails in some areas with poison to try to control them. Yeah, it's like when you go there, you don't need a hunting license on public land.

[B]

It's poisoning whitetails.

[C]

They're poisoning. Which makes me feel kind of strange, but they're talking about endangered plants and trying to save what native ecosystem they had. They had three. There's reports between one and three mammals that were native to New Zealand and they were bats.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And there was one bat that Was there. And there was another. I think the other ones were fossils of bat species. So they had no mammals, basically no predators at all. And they had nine different species of moa, these nine foot, the largest one with nine foot flightless birds running around the island. Polynesians got there, I think 800 years ago. And it only took them about 100 years ago, 100 years to wipe out all of the, the moas on the island. And the only thing big you imagine you're on an island and you've got nine foot chickens running around. I mean they, they used them, they ate.

[B]

They had to have been egg harvest too, man.

[C]

Yeah. Oh, I bet. Yeah.

[B]

Because that's like tough to do.

[C]

So there was. There's eight or nine different species of cervids that were brought to New Zealand from different places in the world and they still have most of them. There's. I was surprised to hear at the meeting they brought Moose. 100 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt was involved in some of the translocations. They brought moose. And I was surprised to hear some people talking about maybe there being a couple moose still there.

[B]

I've heard that there's rumors of that.

[C]

It seems kind of like their Bigfoot, their version of Bigfoot is what it seems like. There's never any proof roof, but there's, there's reports.

[B]

Well, like it's got to be. And I, I hunted there, you know. And the sense I got from the, the guys in that community is the same one I get when I'm hanging out with Hawaiians is they've built the whole culture and lifestyle around big game hunting.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

And so a lot of the people, it's, it's funny because you get this idea here that, you know, you get this idea here that, that you know, like, like whatever, the tree huggers want to save the deer, you know, or something. But in New Zealand, it's like the tree huggers want them. The tree huggers want the deer dead. Dude.

[C]

We have a, we have a representative on the meal deer working group from Hawaii. And that's because in 1961 they brought some Colombian blacktail from Oregon and put them on Kauai, the island of Kauai. And they're still there and they're hunted. And the locals that like to deer hunt like them. So they're not eradicating them, but like the. We had a meeting in Hawaii once and I asked the Hawaiian representative for the meal deer working group. I said, do you finally get to go to a meeting? Because we're here in Hawaii. And he said, no, I've gotten an endangered plant meeting I got to be at. He says, honestly, we're not looking to conserve and increase our deer. He said, There's 50 different species in their diet, and almost all of them are endangered plant species. So we don't want more. We don't want more of them. It's an interesting different perspective.

[B]

One of the conversations that sticks to me most wasn't New Zealand, but it was in Hawaii. But it was around the same issue is I was talking to a native Hawaiian. Okay. Like an ancestral Hawaiian or like an ethnic. I don't know what you call it. Like a Hawaiian. Not a guy that lives in Hawaii, but a. But a native Hawaiian. And, you know, historically, the idea is that when. When the Polynesians. When the Polynesians arrived in Hawaii Sometime around 1100 years ago, they brought. They brought this menagerie of things with them, including pigs. Right. The pigs have been there a long time. And he was sharing with me. He goes, how can I be native? I'm native. But the pigs that my people brought in the same canoe, they gotta go, but I'm native.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And his take was. He didn't want. His take was he didn't need outsiders, you know, he didn't need howlies coming and telling him what animals belonged on the island.

[C]

Yeah. That's such an important part of their culture. It's not just like an animal, whether it needs to be there or not. It's part of the culture. It's part of them.

[B]

It was just so offensive to him.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

This conversation that like, oh, no, no, you're native. Mad respect. But your pigs. Nah.

[C]

Yeah. Gotta go.

[B]

Get them out of here. Yep. Did you hunt New Zealand? It's my last question.

[C]

I have. Yeah. I have a friend, Pete Caldwell, I met a few years prior to that, and he said he knew about the New Zealand deer meeting. He said, if you get to that meeting, he said, let's go out and do something fun. And so the meeting was over, and my son Levi and I, and. And Pete took us out along with another guy, Pa. Ellen from Sweden, big Swedish guy. We went out and. And we did a little blitzkrieg about two days of. Of hunting, staying out there, staying in one of the old hunting shacks that was more than 100 years old, probably. And we shot red deer. We shot tar. We shot brushtail possum shot. I got a European hare, European rabbit, which excites jackrabbit. Jim, be able to get some European. European Hairs almost got a feral house cat. But I couldn't, couldn't get in my sights fast enough. Pete was with me and he's like, he's like, come here, come here, come here. Get in position, get in position. And I'm like, what, what, what is it? What's over there? It's a cat.

[B]

Hurry up.

[C]

He was like really excited about getting the cat.

[B]

Imagine they want those gone.

[C]

It slunk away, slunk away before I could. That would have been an interesting grip and grin. Sunshot of wallaby. Wallabies are hated. I mean they're cute. They're cute. My wife says you're not shooting wallabies. Yeah. And I didn't, but Levi didn't.

[B]

Yeah, but they're on the extermination list.

[C]

Oh yeah. Big time, Big time. The browse line, when we were up in those mountains, the browse line was just tremendous. Like everything gone from, from three and a half feet down, just like dirt, everything eaten with tars up there. And the wallabies. Pete didn't even want us shooting at a wallaby because he was afraid we'd miss. He wanted to make sure that that thing hit the ground. It was in a new area that it was a really nice area and they're just starting to pioneer into that area and so like every pioneer needs to go. He was adamant about it. Yeah.

[B]

What? I had fun there, man, hunting there. But the reason I couldn't get into it for like, I couldn't get into like to consider going back or anything. Is that the non native aspect of it. Yeah, that it's not, it's, it's not like a heritage thing.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

It's like a giant, they came in on a boat. There's not like a human hunting heritage there. It was just, it was, it was hunting without, hunting without cultural history, hunting without conservation, wildlife history. And it just like I had fun but there was just something gone. And another thing that really struck me is the, the, the, the, the no predators on the landscape.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

It, there was something about it now and I don't want to hack like, like, you know, I mean this isn't meant to disparage dudes in New Zealand. Just an observation from a guy far away that doesn't matter. But I just, there's certain things that were missing that I didn't know meant so much to me.

[C]

Yeah. And sheep raising is such a huge part of New Zealand culture, sheep raising. So you can imagine how interested they are bringing a complement of predators over to control.

[B]

Whenever I'm in Hawaii. I always think, like, some parts of Hawaii, the dry side, like Kona, you know, I'm always like, dude, if you turned a rattlesnake out here, he'd love it. Not that I would do that, but I would. You know, you think about, like, there's certain predators who just love New Zealand.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

But it's not gonna happen. Well, Jim Heffelfinger, thanks for joining, man.

[C]

I enjoyed it. Always enjoy coming back.

[B]

Appreciate all your work on behalf of American wildlife. And then also just the effort you take as a, as a. As a scientist, the effort you take to come and talk to just Joe Blow outdoor people, Joe Blow hunters and anglers and, and try to help them ask the right questions, understand what they're reading.

[C]

I think that's.

[B]

See through the noise and follow wildlife and be like a concerned. Be a concerned resource user.

[C]

Yeah. I've written a lot of magazine articles, and I, I enjoy. And I think I've honed the skill of taking complex scientific stuff and just explaining it so that, that anybody can understand it, and I think that's valuable. So I'm driven by the desire to provide reliable, unbiased information and let people just learn from that.

[D]

Nope.

[B]

Well, until next time. Thank you.

[C]

Yeah. Thanks.

[A]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[B]

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