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Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Col’s Week in Review with Ryan col Klai. Here’s cal we hear it, cals we can review. Know that it’s easier to pay attention to the segments about assaults on public land and federal spending bills when there’s an outlaw squirrel story in between. If you laugh at this comic relief, new research is showing that you are part of a grand tradition. Hominids have been laughing at each other for a very very long time. English anthropologists recently compared the vocalizations of all the great apes, orangutans, gorillas, Bonobo’s chimpanzees, and humans and found that when we’re tickled, all of us have a repeating encyclical vocal pattern known as isochronous expression. To translate for the layman, we all go ha ha ha ha ha, short staccato exhalations in sequence. The researchers conclude that if all those species have the same vocal plasticity to enable laughter, our last common ancestor must have had it too. We began to diverge from that common ancestor about fifteen million years ago, so we know that we were yucking it up that far back, and likely further that means we’re not likely to stop joking around anytime soon. As for the quality of the humor on this show, as you know, I recently became a dad, and so things are not likely to improve. And what’s the only thing worse than a dad joke? Not just a granddad joke or a great granddad joke, but a six hundred thousandth great granddad joke. There’s math involved there, but you get what I mean. This week we’ve got fireflying, illegal stewardships, Sunday hunting, and beach fishing. But first I’m going to tell you about my week. And my week has been packed with puppy training, diaper swapping, and digging in deep on what the heck is happening here on the verge of our shared Independence Day. I’m writing this on the third Tomorrow will be the fourth, and I’m thinking hard on how we are still working on providing equitable access to public land from public land via corner crossing, and how a state like Colorado or Illinois, which are flush with well documented navigable rivers and streams, are still places where freedom loving American can’t legally float or wide most of those well documented navigable rivers and streams. How is it we are working our butts off to have wilderness and roadless areas where Americans will have the opportunity to pursue deer, elk, moose, all the iconic American megafauna in perpetuity, so long as we all stand up right now and demand it. And how if we don’t, we just won’t because it is the opinion of some that those unbelievable American assets have matured and should be disposed of. Forget this our benefit. It’s like those cult leaders who say, hey, last night I had a dream, and material wealth as well as physical pleasure are just holding you all back. So I’m gonna do you all a favor and take on the burden of your cash and your spouses. I know, I know you are right to be grateful. Now, if that sounds negative, I do believe this is the time to be optimistic and nationalistic, to recognize that all this awesome embarrassment of riches, our public lands, waters and wildlife are here simply and not by accident or mistake, but because those that came before us recognized that the wild parts of America would only increase in value, would only continue to shape and provide for our country if we were willing to self regulate and demand a system of regulation that set lands aside and manage them in such a way the land of many uses renewable and responsible use. Pack it in, pack it out. Know before you go. Not everything everywhere, all at once. Is our system of public land and public resource management perfect well in comparison to a lot of countries and caliphates and kingdoms. Yes, but keeping things purely domestic. No. Things can be improved and advanced and made to function better. But we have to demand that too, And I promise you getting rid of all of our regulations is not the answer. One thing I noticed and I certainly empathize with, is the thought that if we were to deregulate the landscape, roll things back to that time, not all that long ago, of the copper barns and the timber barons and the get it. While the getting’s good, there’s a thought that it’s going to be my woodsmanship against yours. I just got to beat the other dude or family to the spot. And the fishing and hunting and wood cutting and mushroom picking is going to be great. Well, I get it, but that’s just not how it’s going to work. If there’s profit to you made, it’s going to be all of us putting our get up and go and good woodsmanship against each other, plus mega corporations looking to own an entire supply chain from beginning to end. The barons of this day and age have more money and power concentrated than in the turn of the century. And I’m just saying us little folks better learn to stick together or we’re just fighting over the scraps. We’ve done it before, Let’s do it again. Join a local rod and gun club, join a national conservation group, or three, be informed and participate. Make showing up and calling in and writing in just what you do, not a special occasion gosh I had no idea is not going to cut it. Memberships at backcountry Hunters and Anglers make nice midyear gifts. Just FYI, sign up, get informed, participate, spread the word jumping over to the fireflying desk. If you do a YouTube search for the words two thousand and two California Air tanker crash, you will find footage of a Lockheed C one thirty a soaring through the air, dropping fire retardant on a blaze before both wings fold up like a taco and detached from the plane. The fuselage then rolls over and disappears behind a ridge, where the plane went on to crash and kill all three crew members aboard. The plane was in the middle of a mission fighting the Cannon fire near Walker, California, which burned almost twenty three thousand acres in six weeks. This was one of two crashes that year of firefighting aircraft owned by the same company and contracted by the US Forest Service. The second was a consolidated PB four wide Dash two privateer who’s left wingspar collapsed, causing it to slam into the ground near Estes Park, Colorado and kill both of the people on board. This all might seem like ancient history, but two disasters so close together prompted the Forest Service to implement an aircraft inspection process that was finalized in twenty ten and continues to this day. It’s been extremely effective. Once the inspection were put into place, fatalities dropped from three point seven per year down to just one point seven per year. So it might surprise you that the owners of several firefighting aircraft companies started calling for the end of these inspections in recent years. They argue that they could fly more emissions for less money, while consequently making more money if the time consuming processes were discontinued. Instead of having Forest Service personnel doing the checks, the companies could just do it themselves. I’m flagging this one for you in the spirit of deregulation because we recently just lost a couple of firefighters, wildland firefighters, the ground kids, and they’re not the ones making the big bucks. They’re making big bucks for you know, working people wages. There’s always something pretty much everybody grown up here in Montana aspired to do because man, the fire is hot, but so’s the cash. Now, this particular story’s got a lot of ties to elected officials and it can get pretty sticky. But it’s in here as a reference to those by gone days of reduced oversight, regulation increased profits. But you got to ask yourself who’s behind the stick in this one. It’s not going to be a shareholder. Now, we’re in the middle of a historic drought cross country. If you look at it, being in snow here in the last couple of days in Montana, which is going to make the fishing last for the summer. I’d wager at this point. But there’s an increased fire activity across the country. There’s a lot of uncertainty in our federal fire fighting due to staff reallocations, we’ll call them. Is this the time to deregulate or is this just a good example of the path we’re going down? Moving on to the illegal stewardship desk over the UK, an environmental lawyer named Paul Powellsland and a bunch of other volunteers recently organized a clean up of a river in rural Essex, north of London. They pulled out two hundred bags of trash. Sorry we’re talking about England, so I should say two hundred bags of rubbish, as well as fallen tree branches and silt. The group is part of an organization dedicated to cleaning up the river Rotting, which over the past few decades has faced significant pollution. However, instead of cheering on the volunteers, England’s Environmental agency sent Powellsland a letter threatening legal action against him for carrying out the work without a permit. The letter says that the cleanup could pose a flood risk, and that any significant intervention in the river needs to be done according to the Environmental Regulations of twenty sixteen. Powellsland is clearly no dummy when it comes to pr because in the many articles about the fracas he said quote, after decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime on the rotting, the Environment Agency has finally decided to act. But it’s not action against Tame’s water for dumping billions of leaders of sewage in the rotting, or the waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tons of rubbish on its banks, but against the volunteers restoring a river without a permit. He’s certainly right about the other groups messing up the river. The English equivalent of the Mafia has dumped a huge amount of trash along the country’s rivers and Tame’s water. The privatized suit utility serving the area dumps almost two hundred thousand gallons of raw sewage into the river every year. Powsland has registered official complaints about the dumping for years, but maybe getting a ridiculous ticket and having the whole world take notice will get more results. As much as I admire this guys Moxie. I will add that it’s important for volunteers to do things by the books. A good piece of legislation champion by Trout Unlimited, as well as a broader coalition including back huntry, hunters, and anglers, for example, produced the Good Samaritan Act in this country, which allows for volunteer orgs to step in and remediate disasters without burdensome liability or expensive bonds for a mess they didn’t create, but are willing to wade into. Creating big messes with horrible downstream effects is attradition in this country from poor performers in the industry. The good Smaritan Act was focused on hard rock minds that had been abandoned and were not remediated, causing nasty, toxic downstream flow. Good Smeartan Act was a win for sure, just not as big of a win as maybe reviewing the eighteen seventy two mining law. Jumping over to Sunday hunting down in Delaware, Governor John Carney has signed HB two seven eight, which repeals all restrictions on Sunday hunting in the state. Although the first state allowed hunting for many species on the Lord’s Day, This new law now permits all hunting for all game animals and game birds during established seasons. The bills passed with only one nay vote in the state House and unanimously in the Senate. Great news for all of you trying to squeeze in more time in the field up in Massachusetts. Now is the time for you all to call your state senators to pass sunday hunting. Earlier this spring, Governor Mora Healy announced her support for ending the ban, but anti hunting lawmakers stripped out the reforms from a recent budget bill. The provisions have now been added back to a different environmental bond bill, S three zero six y four. This bill would not only open up sunday hunting, it would also allow the use of crossbows for all hunters and reduce archery setbacks to significantly increase the amount of land where people can hunt, especially in the denser eastern part of the state. These kinds of reforms are essential if we’re going to bring people into hunting and create conservationists in the process. Going after game has to be accessible, or else our political power is going to continue to decline. So Bay Staters call your state senators and ask they vote yes on S three zero sixty four, the same measure passed in the Assembly, So there could be cause for celebrations soon, but let’s not leave things up to chance. Moving on to the fish desk, biologists in Colorado are a celebrating progress and recovering native Colorado River cutthroat trout and knocking back invasive brookies. The news comes to us from a Colorado Parks and Wildlife press release from earlier this spring that highlighted population sampling results in Bobtail and Steelman Creeks, two remote waterways in the western portion of the state, and according to officials, the difference maker there is Trojan trout. No, these brookies aren’t endemic to the ancient city of Troy, but they are inspired by the Trojan horse of Greek mythology. Specifically, Trojan trout are genetically modified brook trout that have two Y chromosomes instead of one X and one Y chromosome. Once released into the wild, the yy brook trout produce only male offspring when they spawn with wildfish. This is supposed to slowly skew the sex ratio in the wild population, until eventually the invasive species is wiped out. The spring’s news is particularly notable as Bobtail and Steelman Creeks are the site of the first attempts to use trojan fish to aid in native species restoration in Colorado. Idaho has been doing this. I believe it was developed out of Poketello, which is what Idaho University idahom. The trojan trout have been in the stream system since twenty twenty four, and the results are already paying off. According to the most recent tally, there were over thirteen hundred cutthroats in the two creeks, well above the one hundred and twenty three cutthroat count in twenty eleven. The findings are a good sign for the novel tactic and are prompting local aquatic researchers to consider using genetically modified trojan fish to fight other invasives, such as the carp moving on its jaws season and In response, on June twenty five, the California Fish and Game Commission issued an emergency action that many shore and peer based anglers in the Golden State are unhappy about. The Commission banned the use of hooks greater than one and a half inches and wire or metallic lines and leaders when fishing from or within one thousand yards of shore. The emergency regulations extend all the way from Pigeon Point on the Central Coast south to the US Mexico border. You’re probably asking why they did this. Well, the Commission’s reasoning is that this year’s El Nino will push warmer than usual water up the California coast and a bunch of juvenile great white sharks into the area too. In case you didn’t already know, recreational anglers are not allowed to target white sharks, which are a protected marine species, but they occasionally catch them incidentally, often when trying for other shark species. These are safeguards in place to mitigate this, but apparently California officials don’t think they’re sufficient. They say that the emergency action will both cut down on the take of white sharks and also improve public safety. Apparently, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife would like to quote reduce potential interactions between hooked sharks and swimmers. We’re really worried that someone catches a large shark and is fighting it with this heavy metal leader, that the shark could wrap itself around a person. Interesting. It’s not clear that this has ever actually happened to a swimmer, but CDFW pointed out an unfortunate twenty fourteen incident in which a long distance swimmer was bitten by a great white that had been hooked by a shore angler that said, the vast, vast majority of shark bites didn’t involve anglers at all, and the regulations will likely seriously impact the ability for local fishermen to target open species such as Maco’s leopard, thresher sharks, and more. Now public beaches, like other public the glands need to be managed for multiple uses, and this requires finding balance between recreational users like swimmers and anglers and land based shark fishing has caused some controversy in this area in recent years, but a widespread band that doesn’t appear to be based on legitimate science or data isn’t the way to do that. Regardless, the emergency action is valid for one hundred and eighty days and can be extended by the Fish and Game Commission twice have thoughts on this one. Let’s hear them at askcl at the meeater dot com. Hunters and anglers provide a ton of personal information to fishing games agencies in order to hunt fish. We expect that information to be confidential, and for the most part, it is. But on Thursday, June eighteen, Texas Parks and Wildlife announced that a licensed system vendor had been the victim of a data breach. As a result, more than three million Texas Hunting and Fishing licensed customers have had personal information such as their addresses, driver’s license numbers, and more leaked to bad actors. Thankfully, the agency says that social security numbers and credit card details were not obtained by the hackers, nor were customers under eighteen involved or any specific group targeted. Still, it isn’t a good situation, and TPW officials say they were working to implement new safeguards and security monitoring for their license sales system. Additionally, affected customers are eligible for a year of free credit monitoring. Moving on to a quick update on a story we talked about a couple weeks ago the June one episode. To be exact, I told you guys about the hullabaloo over the Montana Landboards overhaul of its land swap process. To put it simply, the group shook up the regulations in a very expedited manner, as well as the process for exchanging state managed public lands for private lands. Some local conservation groups supported the change, while others worried that the new system lacks transparency and accountability, as did its implementation. Now, the Montana Wildlife Federation, Montana Sportsman’s Alliance, and Public Land Water Access Association have filed a lawsuit challenging the process used to adopt the new policy. Those groups are arguing that the Land Board didn’t provide adequate public notice, public participation, or compliance with state laws. Quote. If the five member Land Board is going to rewrite the rules governing state land exchanges and give itself greater authority over those decisions, Montanas deserve to know exactly what is changing and have a legitimate opportunity to weigh in. They got either, said Montana Wildlife Federation board president Mike Mershan. This process needs a do over, one that includes adequate notice, transparency and meaningful public participation. Will keep you posted on the progress of the lawsuit. One interesting fact here, too, is this expedited process notes that if public access is not available to the parcel, it becomes a prime candidate for land exchange, which may have many benefits in some cases it certainly will. However, the state, as we’ve mentioned many times, has increased the rhetoric around corner crossing, the act of walking from public land to public land. The state is telling everybody and their dog that corner crossing is illegal and always has been, despite not having a law on the books to which they are involved in a lawsuit to determine that. So, at minimum, I think the landboard should really probably walk before it runs with this. They don’t want to be in a position where they’re exchanging legally accessible land under the guise of inaccessibility and illegality. That’s all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to write into ask c Al that’s Ascal at the meat eater dot com. Let me know what’s going on in your neck of the woods. No, we appreciate it. Thanks again, talk to you next week.
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