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Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cow’s Week in Review with Ryan cow Calian. Here’s cal. You’ve heard of space lasers, but what do you know about space mirrors? Texas listener Maureene Frank wrote in to tell me about what she says is a major threat to the dark, starry skies we love to look at while we’re out in the field. An outfit called reflectl Orbital is selling a solution to one of the major flaws in the green energy ecosystem. Because the sun only shines during the day, solar panels only generate energy about ten hours of that time. If my calculations are correct, that’s fourteen hours every day when no electricity is flowing, and some of those hours are during peak energy usage. To solve this problem, reflectl Orbital has invented a giant mirror that, when launched into space, along with other giant mirrors, reflect sunlight back down to Earth. This would theoretically allow solar panels to generate energy twenty four hours a day, and could also be used to grow crops more quickly or provide space age street lights for cities might sound great, but marine is concerned how a bunch of space mirrors flying around will deteriorate the natural light of the stars and moon. She sent me an email from an astronomer from the Donald Observatory who says these mirrors would be three to four times as bright as the full moon and directly illuminate a swath of ground about five kilometers across. However, thousands of these satellites would be needed to generate useful amounts of solar power, and scattered light would cause skyglow visible for hundreds of kilometers. The impact on wildlife is tough to predict, but you can imagine how it might throw off the neutral rhythms they’ve established over millions of years. And I don’t know about you, but this isn’t the kind of thing I want to see in the sky when I’m out in the wilderness. There are enough blinking, flashing lights up there without giant mirrors getting between my eyes and the milky way. This week we’ve got public land hunt, fish announcements, listener mail aka the mail Bag, wooly rhinos, and a daring winter rescue. But first, I’m gonna tell you about my week. In my week, well game, a couple of house cleaning items. There’s still some concert tickets available for the fourth ever Concert for Conservation at pheasant Fest this year. The only jam sash that’s gonna support habitat and Habitat is the name of the game for healthy animal populations, good opportunities in the field. This year, my good buddy Dave Simonett Trampled by Turtles and Dead Man Winter, alongside oll Evan Felker of Turnpike Troubadours, will be on stage. You know, you get to go support habitat from the I would say, like the number one habitat organization Pheasants and quail forever by listening to some sweet tunes by some awesome conservation minded musicians. Throw in a concert for conservation in the old Google machine and check that one out. I’ll be attending pheasant Fest alongside a bunch of other great folks. Hope to see you there. I just got to say this. There’s been like a palpable depression and guilt and I’ve just been like ignoring social media as much as possible, and I’m a daily and a dollar short on saying this stuff out loud on this podcast or on other platforms. I’m way behind the curve in publicly acknowledging the scenes that have been and continue to come out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Twin Cities. In my opinion, there’s a ham fill. Did leadership lists effort to do a really hard job deport undocumented and or dangerous immigrants? Short version is I’m just disheartened and disturbed. I feel incredibly let down. I’m the product of eighties and nineties and early two thousand cinema Rocky Rudy, the Goonies, Red Dawn, Independence Day America is number one, and more often than not, we are the champions of the underdog and the little guy. Most of all, we’re right. We as Americans are the just ones, the good guys. I’ve been around the illegal immigration conversation for a really long time, not because I live in a border state, which I do, Montana’s are northern border state, but because I’ve hunted and visited Texas and Mexico a lot. Ever ever, have I heard even the most hard line proponents of exportations make the statement and by the way, be sure to treat people like crap and scrape any dignity or humanity off of them on the way out the door. Never heard that. I have no fix for this system, how this should be done or could be done. I’ll acknowledge this attempt to pull needles out of the haystack of citizens is a tough job. I’m sure it’s scary at times too. I’m a critic without a functional answer, but a nagging question, is this really the bar of acceptability we are setting for ourselves? This is really where our expectations are as Americans? Seems pretty low to me. I have a hard time accepting that the great country in the world can’t do a hard job a whole lot better. I’ll tell you what I do know. As folks like myself and others on all sides of the political spectrum crawl out and acknowledge, Hey, this isn’t going well. Be it for reasons of guilt of the US Constitution or social injustices, or deaths of US citizens, or dips in political polling and or domestic and global market instability, whatever the reason is, we’ll need someplace quiet to go and decompress after this. And hell, maybe some of us relate to this game because we were in the tree stand or the duck blind or running the trap line, because that’s what we like to do, and that’s how we can ignore and avoid social media. Lakes, rivers, streams, forests, deserts provide distance from the noise of humanity. Places that provide the space for activities that promote independence, promote exercising our brains and abilities by catching and killing and cooking food instead of pondering our collective path as Americans. That’s the type of sanctuary wilderness provides the Capitol w That’s the type of sanctuary. Little pockets of just trail lists and roadless Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land provide that ability to breathe, to recenter, to remember what matters, to de escalate our thoughts. I mean, I’m removed from a lot of this, and I’ve been tense, been walking around feeling like I could punch somebody. It’s not healthy, it’s not good. And as we talk about all the time on this here podcast, the demands on these quiet places where a clean air and clean water come from are growing. They’re getting greater and greater. Those demands are not going away. So I have to ask another question, what will our ability be to mentally de escalate and decompress in the future. If we don’t protect our quiet spots. And of course one of those quiet spots right is right there in Minnesota, the Boundary waters Canoe area, right there in the Rainy River Watershed downstream of this proposed open pit copper sulfide mind, a mind that, as we’ve talked about, is just kind of on hold right now. It’s not going anywhere. The ore is not going anywhere. The potential to mine, i should say, is not going anywhere. We don’t need it right now. There’s operations next door that are ongoing, providing jobs with a much longer timeline, multi generational potential, providing those good long term jobs. And again, man, I know many many people in the extractive industries that spend their off time and harder dough being conservationists, supporting public lands, waters and wildlife. They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s just do we need this mine in this spot right now? And the answer is emphatically know. And if we don’t protect this one and speak up for this one, which is a true national treasure, then what about the wilderness in your state? Will it matter to everybody else when the crosshairs fall on it? What about your quiet spots? This spot in northern Minnesota is a backyard issue for you too, and you got to recognize it. So if you want to weigh in, give your US senators off US a call and let them know what you feel. Capital switchboard number is two O two two two four three one two one. There’s a lot of things out there that we can’t control. We can still win this one, but it takes you picking up the phone. Call your senator two O two two two fourth three to one to two to one. Just remind them that that twenty year moratorium on mining that is the current state of affairs is the pragmatic middle ground. It’s not a permanent mineral withdrawal. It’s just a pause. We’re kicking the can down the road, and there may come a time when we really need those minerals and there could be a mining company with a heck of a lot better track record for the environment than this Chilean firm and Tafagasta. Moving on to the fishing desk. A couple weeks ago, the Department of the Interior announced that hunting and fishing would be allowed on all US Fish and Wildlife Service Refuges BLM land and Bureau of Reclamation properties, as well as parts of the National Park System where hunting is currently permitted unless managers specifically close particular areas. The shorthand is that these lands are quote unquote open unless closed. As an aside, most people think that all national parks are closed to hunting, but in fact, according to the National Park Service, quote, approximately fifty one million acres are open to hunting, forty three million acres in Alaska, eight million in the contiguous States, and forty seven million acres are open to trapping forty three million acres in Alaska, four million in the contiguous States, which is over sixty percent of the total National Park Service managed lands unquote. So if you ever find yourself at the Amistad National Recreation Area in Texas, or the Whiskeytown National Wreck Area in California, or the seventy three other open National Park Service units around the country, do yourself favor, check the REGs, and get out there. Okay. Back to the recent Interior Hunting and Fishing order. A lot of conservation organizations and outdoor media outlets cover the announcement and praise the fact that the initiative clarified a nationwide mandate to support each site’s policies. Still, this announcement did not add any acres to public land holdings add significant hunting fishing rights to any existing public lands. It is, in my opinion, a good statement, though it is a symbolic support for hunting and angling use on public land. The administration heard loud and clear last year that hunters and anglers won’t stand for public land sell off. We need to stay vigilant and uncompromising about that. With reassessments of National Wildlife refuges underway and Joint Resolution one point forty speeding toward destroying the Boundary Water’s wilderness, this announcement reaffirming our existing hunting and fishing rights is good, but it should not distract us from the big threats at hand. Jumping over to the good news desk, the Nottingham Ranch in the big state of Colorado, twenty thousand acre parcel near Beaver Creek is being put into conservation easements after going on the market in twenty seventeen for one hundred million dollars. That’s a deep couch cushion. Even better news is that at the time the proper Prey went up for sale, the owner, Susan Nottingham told the Denver Post quote, conservation easements are bad words in my book. I’m not fond of them because they give government a toe hold to private property, and private property rights are such a blessing and such a wonderful gift, and to give them away it just makes me sick. So what changed between twenty seventeen and today? First, the organization handling the easement is the Colorado Cattleman’s Agricultural Land Trust, which works specifically with ranching properties. Nottingham told the Colorado’s Son they are old time ranchers who know what they are doing and know what ranching is. They are easier to work with than a land trust that is interested only in conservation. Cow’s not condos is fined by me. A lot of organizations pulled together to get this one done, including Great Outdoors Colorado, the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land, Colorado open Lands, and the Conservation Fund. This piece of ground is precious in itself, but the property also holds senior water rights for one hundred and sixty three cubic feet per second it flows from the Colorado River. The fact that this won’t ever become a golf course makes it a good thing for me. Cattle ranches need open space, and tall grass makes fat cattle. It’s also great habitat for our pollinators, upland birds and big antler decrutters as well. Moving on to a very special edition of the mail Bag, a listener we’re gonna call Mark called in recently to tell me about a hunt from September when he says a local rancher harassed him and his hunting party.
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Speaker 2: I have been Casper, Wyoming. I drew a tag for an elk area which is northeast of Casper.
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Speaker 1: The plot they hunt is about thirty eight thousand acres of state and blm lands, surrounded by private ranches. It’s a three mile hike one way in the early season, but seven or eight miles later in the year. I’m guessing there’s a lock gate in there somewhere. On this particular hunt, Mark and three of his friends were chasing bull elk at their bows.
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Speaker 2: Good size el curred, probably about three hundred to four hundred dish you adding them all up. On the last day. We were in it, as they say, beagling, chasing, and fighting all before dawn and into the early morning.
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Speaker 1: They were excited to start hunting, but as soon as the sun came up, they saw a plane in the sky.
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Speaker 2: Soon afterward, four wheelers joined the plane and pushing the elk out of the area. Two of our group were in the elk, one pinned down surrounded as the plane may pass over to pass on the elk. After nearly four hours of trying, the elk were gone and we packed up and left, making calls the game and fish when we had signal.
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Speaker 1: Mark and his friends were upset that their last day of hunting was ruined, but their troubles weren’t over yet.
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Speaker 2: While we were leaving, we were shadowed by one of the four wheelers, who eventually came and confronted us for recording and taking pictures, asking why we were acting so scared. Soon after anothers joined, shadowing us for not confronting us.
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Speaker 1: The plane and four wheelers continued to follow them, and eventually they were approached by someone who said he was one of the ranch owners.
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Speaker 2: We were accused of attempted poaching for hunting out of season. His exact words where elk season is over out here.
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Speaker 1: But elk season wasn’t over in this unit, and according to Mark, it didn’t end until December.
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Speaker 2: And finally he also threatened us with getting us charged with trespassing. Given we were standing in the middle of Wyoming state land and surrounded by blm that was quite the statement.
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Speaker 1: The ranch owner said he and his crew were out there trying to herd cattle.
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Speaker 2: He had said he would have felt bad if we were hunting gear antelope, but the elk, we’re in the way of him moving his cows.
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Speaker 1: As they were leaving, Mark says that one of the drivers of a four wheeler recognized someone in their group. This resulted in a county commissioner calling people in their hunting party to try to get their names in contact info for everyone else who was there that day. Mark says they weren’t the only group of hunters in this area who experienced similar behavior.
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Speaker 2: Since this happened over the course of the rest of hunting season, there are multip incidents of those who are in a hunting party and others out in this area. One incident involved hunters from Wisconsin who were lucky winners of my bumping elk from one rise to another, and they killed two bulls and the small herd that I was stalking. Soon after they shot their elk, there were two planes in the air and a truck on the ground Within ten to fifteen minutes. The elk were being pushed back towards private off the public, and a hunter’s being harassed for having shot the elk. In general. Conversation with them later they had been dealing with run ins with UTV spore wheelers and confrontations from ranchers the entire week they’d been out there, asking is it always like this out here?
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Speaker 1: According to Mark, it is.
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Speaker 2: I would say at thirty to forty days in it includes archery season, and ninety percent of those days I saw a plane in the air at some point. If you walk towards that plane, that’s where the elk are going to be, like, without a doubt, and most of the time it’s making low passes if they’re on public to push them, and it’s just, yeah, it’s a frustrating thing because if you don’t get there when the plane’s not there, you’re probably not going to be able to get an elk.
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Speaker 1: Mark says that all of these incidents have been reported to BLM and Wyoming Game and Fish, but as far as he knows, nothing has been done for me.
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Speaker 2: The stroller brit to Camel’s back. This hunting season was. It was towards the end of the hunting season, probably beginning of December. I saw a herd that was moving through a drainage to a watering hole, and they’d done it a couple of times, and previous times I’d been out there, I was on the wrong side of public land to be able to get to him. This time, I made sure that I was going to be on the right side of the public land, and they were moving through the drainage down to the watering hole. But I was exactly where I wanted to be, one hundred yards from where they were going to be, had good cover, just kind of hanging out. About an hour before dark, the herd really started to move and they were going to walk right past me. As that happened, they had to cross the two track, and as they were coming up to that two track, outfitter truck showed up and stopped them moving to the herd that people got out of the truck and pushed them back the other direction. Not long after that, a hunter showed up that clearly had paid the outfitter, or at least was with the outfitter, and shot a bull that one kind of like was the nail in the coffin for me when it came to whether I was going to write you or not. The unfairness and ridiculousness of it all just kind of is not okay.
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Speaker 1: It’s tough to know how common this kind of behavior is, but Mark is concerned it might happen even more frequently in the years ahead. That’s because the Wyoming state legislature is considering a bill that would allow landowners to sell their hunting tags.
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Speaker 2: This kind of caused an alarm to go off my head because landowners are already allowed to outfit their land, and that causes enough issue and the brazenness and arrogance and just basically disregard for everything that they operate with already. I can only imagine it’s only going to get worse when they can sell tags.
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Speaker 1: That’s a heck of a story. As you’ve heard me say before on this podcast, there are two sides to every story. Ranchers run cattle on BLM land, so it’s not totally unreasonable that a ranch operation might be rounding up cows at the same time the hunter is putting a stock on an elk Eli Fournier wrote an article on this insidant over at the meaeater dot com, and he reached out to the ranch owner in question. He reiterated the fact that he was just trying to wrangle his cattle, which, if true, makes this more of an unfortunate coincidence than hunter harassment. The key phrase there is, if true, the way Mark describes it, the ranch hands intentionally interfered with their hunt and then confronted them as they were trying to leave. That seems unnecessarily aggressive, and to me at least indicates that there was more going on here than an innocent roundup. Whatever happened in this particular incident, two things are still true. Landowners and outfitters do sometimes act like they own the elk on neighboring tracks of public land. They do sometimes interfere with legal hunters, and if game and fish agencies appreciate all the dollars public land hunters contribute to conservation, they should do everything they can to stop that behavior. It’s also true that if states like Wyoming allow landowners to sell tags, those ranchers and outfitters will be further incentivized you act like those elk which are public wildlife belong to them because they become a commodity. Now, this is a nasty story. I don’t want folks thinking that, however, you land on this side, that the outfitters or ranchers, if they are in the wrong, represent the entire community. We all know that there’s bad eggs in the bunch, and you know you just throw them out and eat the rest of them. Big thanks to Mark for taking the time to call in. I hope you got to bowl that season there, buddy. For further details on this encounter, head on over the Meat Eater website and check out Eli’s article. If you’re aware of this situation and want to shed some more light on the incident, give me a call. Four oh six two two oho six four four one. Moving on to the wolf desk, you’ve likely heard that wolves can eat up to twenty pounds of meat a day, and throughout history, law of different animals have been on the business end of that fact. Archaeologists digging in Siberia recently uncovered an ancient wolf that had been preserved in the permafrost, and inside the stomach of that refrigerated canine was a full meal of wooly rhinoceros. The find was dated to fourteen and a half thousand years ago, and because wooly rhino went extinct right around fourteen thousand years ago, this is the youngest specimen of the species ever discovered. The wooly rhino was an extremely cool critter, five feet high, twelve feet long, and a weighed up to six thousand pounds, about the same size as the white rhino that exists today, but their long layered fur let them survive in the same frigid conditions as the modern muskos, and their horns were much longer than those of contemporary rhinos. The longest wooly rhino horn ever discovered was almost five and a half feet long. You can’t help but wonder whether this frozen wolf’s last meal was wooly rhino, because another wooly rhino dispatched it with that horn, but disappointingly, the wolf likely scavenged the ride pan ocarcas. Thankfully, wolves don’t chew their food a whole lot before they eat it, and this chunk of wooly rhino was relatively intact, with large pieces of flesh and hair for scientists to sample by taking partial strands of DNA from several locations. They were able to recreate the entire sequence. That complete genome told the scientists that there was no inbreeding in the rhinos genes, even though its extinction was only a few centuries away. In contrast, wooly mammoth remains have showed serious genetic decline in advance of that species extinction. The number of mammoths dwindled over a longer period of time, and eventually there were so few that inbreeding itself was a cause of their demise. For rhinos, on the other hand, the end came more suddenly, likely from changes in climate and vegetation over several decades. And if you were worried that people hunted the wooly rhino to extinction, breathe a sigh of relief. Humans and rhinos overlap for thousands of years, and there isn’t much evidence to suggest that we hunted them much at all. It looks like we just left them to the wolves. And pound Hall is a lot for a freezer, especially back when you didn’t have one. Now, for those of you in the Eastern States, a little bit in the Midwest there, and you know, in the Southeast, basically anywhere other than Montana, where we want snow. Perk up your little wind nipped ears. Because the recent winter storms punished half the country, killing at least twenty two people, canceling tens of thousands of flights, and knocking out power for almost a million people, that wasn’t enough to keep the nation’s hunters out of the field, which created a few sticky situations. Down in Louisiana. Two boaters got stuck in a frozen stream in the Wombrock section of the Russell Sage WMA in the northern central part of the state, requiring a rescue from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Nearby, in the Upper Wachidah National Wildlife Refuge, three young hunters got their trucks stuck in frozen mud and the LDWF pulled them out as well. And yet another incident, this time in Bossier Parish near Shreveport. Two duck hunters came trapped in ice along the Red River and the Department pulled them out and got them back to shore, where they were checked for hypothermia. This should be a reminder next time a wildlife official is checking your license or you’re cooler. Remember, the same person might be getting you out of a pickle before too long, so be polite. Up in Wisconsin, the weather was apparently not cold enough because a seventy two year old man broke through the ice of Lake Superior on Saturday while driving a side by side. The US Coast Guard nearby Bayfield Dispatch an ice skiff crew and assisted by the National Park Service, they had him out of there in a hurry and into the hands of waiting EMTs. Big thank you to all the emergency personnel out there who go to work while the rest of us batting down the hatches and just try to keep all our fingers and toes. Glad to know you’re out there. Oh, last, but not least, thank you to everybody who attended the Big Baha Minnesota ice Breaker event. Heard you got an excellent talk from Hal Herring, all sorts of tips and tactics for being out there on the ice, maybe a couple of cocktails and great food. I miss that one. Thank you so much for coming out and checking it out. That’s all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to write in as CA C A L. That’s ascal at the meat eater dot com let me know what’s going on in your neck of the woods. Know we appreciate it. Thanks again, We’ll talk to you next week.
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