Ep. 823: Restoring Alaska’s Wild Buffalo

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware. Listening past, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. Ladies and gentlemen. Joined today by Tom Seaton from Alaska Department Fishing Game, Montana Native and Tom runs you tell me the title of the program you run.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Wood Bison Project Biologists partner of Fishing Game.

00:00:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, sorry, Wood Bison Project Biologist yep, okay, kind of lay some context, Yeah, to tell the story you’re gonna tell you. Tom’s gonna tell the story of what I consider to be the most exciting thing. It’s big. You’re gonna be under a lot of pressure what I considered to be the most exciting thing in bison recovery in the whole country. There’s really nothing like what you guys are doing. In order to set up the story of what you guys, I’m gonna tell I’m gonna talk a little bit about what’s going on around the country if that’s cool with you. Just lay the context as people know, and we talked about this’s a ton on the show. Uh. For some reason, the American bison or buffalo are the only animal in the United States of America. They’re the only wild native animal mammal in the United States of America that is not treated generally, not treated like a wild animal. I guess some examples. There’s the one I always bring up, so everybody knows. Everybody around the country knows or has some familiarity with the fact that in Yelstow National Park, there’s a buffalo herd in Yelso National Park and they’ve been in the park continuously since the beginning of time. Now, there was points in the history and the only ones left in the park were fenced in and they were feeding them hay bales. But they’ve been there right. However, when those animals, if those animals walk north out of Yelstow National Park and come into the state of Montana, they stop being wildlife when they leave the park and they become they walk into an environment where they’re under the authority of the Montana Department of Livestock. In the last twenty years, there has been some efforts to be more lenient with the animals. There’s some these little things they call tolerance zones around the area of Gardner, Montana, where the bison can leave the park and mingle around without getting rounded up or hazed back in. But it would not be allowable. It is not allowable for a little band of those animals to decide to leave the park and just go wandering their way down the Yellowstone or wandering their way into the National Forest and set up shop, say in the Gallatin Range, or set up shop in the Absorcas. They would be under the jurisdiction of the Department of Livestock, who would have the authority to shoot them, down, load them up, send them off to slaughter. They’re just not welcome as a wild animal. We have all around the country a lot of habitat where we could be putting buffalo on the ground and building up populations that are big enough to support hunting, and we just choose not to do it. With a lot of species that are imperiled or endangered or absent on the landscape, sometimes it winds up being that The reason we can’t recover them is because it would be really hard, or be really expensive, or there’d be like intense social risk, right like putting grizzly bears back in Golden Gate Park in California is going to come with inherent risk to individuals. So you don’t go and do it with Buffalo. We could fix a lot of the problem we created when we wipe them all out. We could fix a lot of the problem by doing nothing, because we have these little populations all around the country that could be allowed to grow and expand. The example I gave the Montana, and again this is all setting up for Alaska. The example I gave the Montana is here you have y Also National Park. It’s administered by the Park Service. The Park Service is very friendly toward the animals. Since two thousand, they’ve had this idea that the park and support around three thousand buffalo. Three to five thousand, I think is what they have. Recently, the park, National Forests, and tribal entities all agreed on a new management plan and they’re like, hey, we’re going to double it. We’re gonna say that the park can hold six thousand, trusting that some of these animals are going to migrate out of the park. So the state of Montana turns around and sues them, saying no, no, no, no, no, you got to drop it back to three thousand because we don’t want the risk of these wild animals leaving the park. Elk can leave the park, Bighorn sheep can leave the park, grizzly bears can leave the park, Mountain lions can leave the park, black bears can leave the park, moose can leave the park. Everybody can leave the park, but not him. If he leaves the park, we’re gonna shoot him, okay, or round him up. Then you got this other example, like we’ll jump down to Arizona for a minute. So Arizona has had buffalo, a couple buffalo, a buffalo herd going back to nineteen oh six. Okay, there’s this dude named Buffalo Jones. He was a reformed hide hunter. Toward the end of the animals engagement in the country, when they were wiping them all out, this dude went out and caught some wild ones. He literally went out and roped up some buffalo calves, and he bought some from other guys and got this little herd worked up in nineteen oh six, this herd makes us way into Arizona and they set up this game area where these animals live in confinement. Later they move some to another game area. Eventually they shoot those ones off and bring them in from Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. And so like these genetically peer ones. And then at one point in time, a group of this herd breaks off and they go down and they set up shop in Grand Canyon National Park. So here you have the inverse of what’s happening in Montana and Arizona. The Grand Canyon National Park is tended to be antagonistic to the animals. They’re saying, oh, they’re not from here. There’s these problems. They’re damaging habitat, they’re restricting, they’re causing trouble with other wildlife, so we don’t want so many of them in the park. And when they leave the park and go on the national forest, they’re welcomed. So it’s like an inverse relationship to what happens in Montana. But for the animals that boils down the same thing where again and again and again in the lower forty eight their movements are restricted. We have in in the country in North America. So between US and Canada, there are about five hundred thousand buffalo in existence. Ninety four percent Somewhere around ninety four ninety five percent of all the animals in existence are privately owned. They could be privately owned by a tribe okay, or they could be privately owned by you know, an agricultural producer. Every most people have heard of Ted Turner. Ted Turner owns a ton of privately owned animals. They’re out on the landscape, but they’re owned. They raise them for meat, they raise them for leather, they raise them for production. They’re treated like livestock. So what does that leave. It leaves about somewhere four to five percent of the buffalo that exist in North of Erica are in some way arguably free ranging or wild right. You have a small number in the Henry Mountains of Utah.

00:08:13
Speaker 2: You have a small.

00:08:15
Speaker 1: Number in the Book Cliffs area of eastern Utah. Some of those have been moving over into Colorado. Colorado just did an interesting thing and they’ve made a new rule that was just passed, and they said, if a buffalo walks into Colorado, naturally, we are going to treat it like wildlife. They did what Montana has not done right. Montana has buffalo walking into the state on their own fore legs naturally, but we don’t welcome them as wildlife. But Colorado, in a brilliant move, has come in and they’ve gotten out ahead of it. And they said, when an animal walks into the state, naturally, that animal’s wildlife. If you own in Colorado, they’re still yours their livestock. If they walk in as wild animals on their own four legs, their wildlife. The reason they did that is because some of these book cliffs ones in Utah are crossing into Colorado. So Colorado has a future where they’re going to have to potentially have a wildheard. On the north rim of the Grand Canyon, you have what I would call it wild herd there. As I mentioned, what makes them wild is they can move from one jurisdiction to the other. That’s like a definition of wild right. They can move from the park onto the Kaibab National Forest into a state game area, and when they’re doing that, they remain wild animals. So that’s like a wild heerd. They can move across jurisdictions and remain wildlife. But these are just little isolated things. The reason we had I’m having Tom seton here is because he is in charge of a program that I’ve been watching for over twenty years of finding some ways to bring wild, free roaming bison into Alaska and put them onto suitable habitat and allow them to live as wildlife. Okay, So, as I handed over to Tom, the first question I’m going to ask him, and this is when I was joking with him that we might have different understandings of the history, but he’s gonna educate it on us, and it’s gonna be the first thing you think, the listener thinks when you think of bison in Alaska. Huh, I didn’t know they had bison in Alaska. So Tom, you can talk a little bit about your program. But for the first question, how do we call how is Alaska buffalo country? How is Alaska like? Did Alaska have bison? And if so? When?

00:10:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems a little bit odd to a lot of the public. But if we just take today, we’ve got about a thousand wild bison in Alaska. And when I say wild, I mean you know, unfenced, unrestricted in any way, subject to natural selection, exposed to all forms of predation, that they originally had in North America and and and you know, exposed to a lot of difficult weather. Of course, Alaska’s got some difficult weather as far as bison range goes, and so they’re valuable animals far as conservation goes. But it’s like, say, a thousand is about what we have in the wild. And I think a lot of estimates say that there’s probably about ten thousand wild bison in North America, like truly wild, not not fenced in any way. And so Alaska has around ten percent of the world’s wild bison, really, which is shocking. I didn’t really understand that until he got into it myself. But the reality is is that there’s not a lot of habitat left for wild bison to be wild anymore. You know, most places that were good bison habitat historically for the last say ten thousand years, are now agricultural. You know, bis and eat things that are right at the ground level, and that’s the same place we like to grow crops, you know. And and so it’s it’s it’s difficult to try to restore bison anywhere anywhere but Alaska. Now, like you said, there’s just not a lot of habitat left or places to go with them.

00:12:22
Speaker 1: Go ahead, Yeah, I don’t agree, Okay, I understand what you’re saying. Yeah, but there are a lot of places I think so, I think, but it’s like a it’s a different definition than what you’re thinking. Yeah, and I don’t want to get into it. But man, like the area of Missouri breaks areas in the Gallant and Range, areas in the Madison Range areas and absorb it is just the name a few areas around here. It could definitely have some man, yes, they just it would require more social tolerance, yeah, than what you’re speaking about.

00:12:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think there’s always been a conflict between agriculture and bison, and I’m not sure. I’ve done some thinking about that, and I just don’t totally understand what it is. I mean, there’s the obvious part that a bison can graze on crops and damage crops or break fences and things like that. And you know in Montana with the arguments is to bring disease to cattle. Of course, the disease that they’re bringing was originally from cattle and got into bison.

00:13:16
Speaker 1: That’s one of the great ironies of the whole thing, Yeah, is it. Yeah, there’s a Eurasian disease called brucellosis and cattle. It can cause a cow, it can cause a haffer to a border calf. This disease came in on cattle, was transmitted to elk, was transmitted to bison. Then they got rid of it. For the most part, they’ve gotten rid of it in cattle and stockmen are worried that bison will give the cows back their own disease. Elk carried the disease, and no one’s worried about elk giving them back their own disease. And no one can point to a case in modern times one a cow has gotten it from a buffalo. But it’s kind of I viewed as kind of a red herring. It’s not really what they’re talking about. They talk about it, but it’s not what they’re talking about. Well, it’s almost grazing competition.

00:14:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that perceived conflict with agriculture is why bison are the last great animal to be restored. I think, you know, we nearly wiped out antelope and both pieces of deer, and you know, buffalo and most other you know, cats and bears and everything and elk.

00:14:27
Speaker 1: We eliminated elk from nu metically.

00:14:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, but now we’ve brought them all back, right. We took all this effort to get all these animals back on the landscape, but bison haven’t really come back yet, and we don’t really want a lot of folks don’t really want them to come back because there’s really not a lot of space for them. That’s what’s perceived, and.

00:14:41
Speaker 1: That is the perception. Correct. Yeah, I’d agree with that.

00:14:44
Speaker 2: I think in Alaska it’s a little different. The Alaska Partment Fishing Game really wants to restore wildwood bison as a wild animal performing their wild things in a niche that’s unoccupied at this time for a large lowland grazer.

00:14:59
Speaker 1: Can you do too? Can you two things layout and I haven’t gotten into it. Can you lay out when you say wood bison? Can can you contextualize that against what we what most people are familiar with the planes bison? And then also, can you talk about historically, prior to any kind of introductions or reintroductions, what evidence do we have that they were present in Alaska?

00:15:26
Speaker 2: Sure, I don’t know how far you want to go back, but the history really starts about ten thousand years ago the end of the place of scene in the beginning of the Holy scene, which is, you know, the era that we’re in now, and bison were kind of there’s a bunch of species of longhorned bison, you know, larger bison that occurred, you know, like they’re just generally called step bison in the places scene about ten thousand years ago, when a lot of megafaon in North America went away, bison persisted, but they became short horned bison revolved into short horned bison, and it’s the two persistent subspecies left of those short horned bison are as bison and everywhere from northern Mexico through lower forty eight, you know, eastern Oregon to Pennsylvania, all the way up to central Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia. But then north of that was the wood bison, and they occurred in the boreal forest all the way up to the mouth of Kenzie River, which is uh. You know, it goes into the Arctic Ocean there and all the way west to the Yukon cus Cum Delta and western interior Alaska and UH. And they kind of stopped at the at the bottom edge of the Boreal forest. And so if you look at a map you can see that, you know, the Great Plains kind of ended and became forest, uh, somewhere in central Canada, and it was wood bison in the Boreal forest and plains bison south in the plains.

00:16:47
Speaker 1: And those soccers look a little different. Like if you weren’t used to looking at buffalo at all, I else you say, I’m gonna stay bisonse you’d like the word bison. If you weren’t used to looking at bison at all, and you were driving down the highway a sixty miles an hour, you might just look and be like, oh, some bison. But once you look at them a fair bit, you’d look, even at that speed, you’d think something’s different about those. If you were looking at wood bison, you’d recognize something’s different. They got like some physical differences.

00:17:19
Speaker 2: With thirty seconds of training that they’re abundantly different at one hundred yards distance, you know which. To me, that’s that’s pretty grand for subspecies. Most subspecies you got to kind of have them in hand, and you’re not really sure what the difference is between the two of them. But planes, BiCon and wood bison are quite a bit different. You know, the plane spison have a much more forward hump. It’s a taller hump and more forward. The way their hair lays on the bodies a little bit different. A plane spison has that really big, thick cape and it goes into thin hair after that, with a real strong demarcation between the front shaggy hair and the and the thin hair in the back. Wood bison just kind of has curly hair along its whole body and it is a little bit bigger, you know, a little bit longer and thicker in the front, and it isn’t the back, but it’s it’s it’s fairly uniform. Then. You know, a plane spison has really curly hair around its head, and especially the adult males that get this big kind of afro and and and there’s for lack of a better okay, yeah, and it’s just thick and maybe it’s you know, six eight inches thick, and sometimes it even covers their horns and everything.

00:18:21
Speaker 1: Well.

00:18:21
Speaker 2: A wood bison, a classic wood bison, doesn’t have that. A wood bison has like a a bill that sticks out that’s just like straight, perfectly straight hair that that kind of looks like the bill of a baseball cap and uh, and these hairs all lay flat and straight, and then and they can get the curly hair on the sides that that can cover the horns a little bit too. But then planes bison have a really big beard and really big shaps and all these grand secondary sex characteristics that wood bison don’t have. Wood bison have really diminished cape and uh beard and and shaps and all that. The other thing that I find really interesting is that planes bison roar during the rut, but wood bison are fairly oh really, And it’s been hypothesized that wood bison occurred in much smaller groups since they occurred in the boreal forest. They live in these tiny patches of habitat which are mostly wetlands, and so they never really needed these strong secondary sex characteristics to compete with other males and work out which females they could breed, as opposed to the planes’ bison that lived in these groups of you know, a thousand, ten thousand, whatever, you know, when they would come into rut and these massive groups where they had to roar and have secondary sex characteristics that really stood out amongst everybody else, so they could breed, right, So that’s hypothesized why that might be. But the whole big hump and the big head and a little bit bigger body size is hypothesized to be a reflection of the demands of the environment in the north. So deeper snow, colder weather, that sort of thing, and deeper. Well, the reason why snow is important is bison sweep snow with their face. That’s how they get to the vegetation in wintertime. And to do deeper snow you need, you know, more bone structure and muscle structure and tends to be able to sweep that big head. And that’s why it’s not the the humpus. Further forward and.

00:20:04
Speaker 1: Tell her how far back you got to go in Alaska, Like, let’s get rid of the modern times, because from a period I think it was around the nineteen twenties I wrote. I wrote about this extensively when I wrote a book that I published seventeen years ago called American Buffalo in Search of a Lost Icon. I wrote a story, the story about how some buffalo were brought from Montana and released up in Alaska, and that these planes bison from Montana wound up this little shipment of Planes bison from Montana formed the nucleus of what would become four little scattered herds of Plaine bison around Planes bison around Alaska. And at that time in the twenties when they brought them up there there were none in the state. But if you went back one hundred years, two hundred years, at some point you would have found in Alaska there were there were there were wood bison in Alaska that were wiped out, perhaps by natural causes, perhaps by man. What is your what is? What is sort of the academic consensus about when they were there and what happened to them?

00:21:19
Speaker 2: Well, it’s believed that they were in interior Alaska for most of the last ten thousand years. And there’s there’s a paper that we published in two thousand and one and it’s on our website and you can read it. It’s called wood Bison in the Late Holst Scene in Alaska and Adjacent Canada, Paleontological, archaeological and historical Records, written by Bob Stevenson and several other folks. He was published in two thousand and one and it goes takes a deep dive into collecting a whole bunch of specimens radio carbon dating them and they look at like accumulation of specimens through different periods that and not ten thousand years and the most recent radio carbon dating is about one hundred and seventy years before present. And then they went into oral history. They asked a lot of local Native elders about what they knew about bison in the area, and they were amazed to uncover a pretty rich oral history about woodbison, especially in Yukon flats. Give me some examples, so in this paper, I’ll read you a couple real short ones. Here a couple that really grabbed my attention, and that’s here’s one. Virginia Titis recalls that her father, Robert Albert, described to her how he and his adopted father, Pretty Albert, encountered a bison near Tananau Village, probably in the winter of nineteen eighteen. This occurred when they were on their trap line and when her father, who was born in nineteen oh four, was only fourteen years old. Her father remembered being scared when they encountered a large animal in the brush. His father shot the animal with a lever action rifle, the first cartridge rifle they had obtained. The animal was a large bison. After butchering the animal, they stored the meat and an underground cellar insulated with grass. The hide was given to their chief, which he used in their quote unquote talking house as a place to sit. The carcass provided food for their dogs for a long time. Missus Titus said that this was the last known occurrence of bison in the Tananaw area, and so that was a huh. That was, you know, nineteen eighteen roughly is what that’s expected to be. And if you get this paper, there’s twenty or thirty maybe more, just oral accounts that are a lot like that. But there’s a second one that I really enjoy, and I’ll read it. With regard to their disappearance. To the disappearance of woodwison, Missus Mary Sam said that quote unquote, maybe they ate it up, suggesting that hunting might have contributed to the disappearance of bison in a Black River area. She also described how on one occasion, her grandparents pointed to another young girl, saying, quote, when this young girl grows up and her children grow up, then the bison will come back, quote unquote. And the cool thing is if you kind of lay it out in a timeline.

00:23:58
Speaker 1: It’s about now, Oh the prophecy, the prophecy exactly. Yeah, that historical stuff matters, right because nowadays, well, let me talk about what used to happen, because I referred in the nineteen twenties. There was a long period an American kind of wildlife conservation when the idea was generally with state game agencies and others. The idea was generally the more animals, the merrier, and people would look around the country and they would find areas that they thought were game poor, right, they would see areas they thought should have more animals than they do. So let’s say someone goes and looks in New Mexico and it’s like, there’s just not that many animals in New Mexico. It’s desert country. The desert doesn’t support things. Well, let’s try some other animals, and you would be able to just seemingly at random, move creatures around the world to see what would take. So to give you a few examples, like sambar deer were brought into Florida, seek a deer from Japan and areas of Asia were brought in in turn. Loose in Maryland, ibex were brought in in turn loose in New Mexico or from Asia. Or x were brought in from Africa and turned loose in New Mexico. Aw Dad cut loose down in West Texas and other areas. Nilghai brought in from the Indian subcontinent and turn loose in Texas. I hogs brought in, wild hogs from Siberia brought in and turn loose all over the place. Ring neck pheasants brought in from Asia, turn loose in North America. I could go on like this for an hour. Bison planes bison brought from Montana and turned loose into Alaska. In those days, the nineteen twenties up into the nineteen fifties, you could just do this stuff. They didn’t have environmental impact statements. It’s like if you had the money and the will, you would probably work it out and you would cut animals loose. Right, That is not hip anymore. So with this project that you’re working on to bring wood bison into Alaska, you need to have the sort of authority of history, right. You need to be able to say this is a reintroduction, this is not us really nearly moving animals around, right, Can you explain that that process a little bit of how you sort of get the political go ahead to do a project like this.

00:26:48
Speaker 2: Right, So, the Alaska Department Fishing Game has a policy to not release animals into places that they weren’t previously there. And of course, like you say, history is not quite like that. You know, there’s there’s deer on Kodiak, black black tail deer weren’t native to Kodiak. They’re there and they’re super successful. And you know moose in the in the in the Copper River delta weren’t there and humans did that too.

00:27:12
Speaker 1: And elkinto Elkin do a fog neck and Raspberry Island and yeah, all that.

00:27:17
Speaker 2: And and of course even here locally, I’ll just do a little side thing real quick. Right here in Bozman, there’s brook trout, rainbow trout, brown trout, you know, pheasants, you know chuckers, hungarian partners. I mean, that just list goes on the things that you’re really familiar with that you don’t realize that they were from somewhere else anyway. Uh It there were problems that were created when you look at things that were released in Australia and Hawaii and stuff. Whethy is there’s uh, you know, isolated groups of animals that that got you know, didn’t do well with with incoming new animals, and so there’s problems that they were created. So people are scared of recreating a problem. Well, in in our situation in Alaska, there is a lot of a record of wood bison being there and so what we’re really trying to do is restore were these animals and we believe that hunting played a significant part and their demise, and so humans may have caused their disappearance, so we want to kind of correct that, but it is a challenge. Would bison are listed as threatened under the Danish Species Act, and so we can’t just grab a bunch of animals and start releasing, and we have to go through all the process of the Danish Species Act, which includes the neep A documentation, which for us in this particular situation is environmental reviews and environmental assessments, and we have a non essential experimental population rule for interior Alaska so that we can hunt them. That’s pretty unique as far as those kind of rules go, but it is complicated to make it happen.

00:28:42
Speaker 1: So once you guys got the idea, once the State of Alaska. I understand this happened before you’re in your current role, at some point in time, like very much in our lifetimes. The State of Alaska started moving ahead with a plan to reintroduce these animals. People might be thinking, where are you going to go get them from? Can you explain the source herd? Like if you want to find a sort of disease free, somewhat genetically pure wood bison to begin turning them loose in Alaska, how do you get them?

00:29:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s excuse me. There’s a park in Canada called Alkyla National Park. It’s east to Edmonton, and they’ve got planes bison and wood bison that are separated from each other with a highway, and so there’s just no mixing between the two subspecies. And they maintain those herds specifically for conservation purposes where they kill test and live test for diseases every other year, and they produce animals that can be provided for release to create new herds of planes bison and wood byson and some of those if they don’t have a need, like if no agency comes along or or Native American group comes along and says I want these bison for conservation. They just sell them into you know, private ownership, like you talked about, there’s a lot in private ownership. But for the wood bison that they have, we’re one of their highest priorities right now. And we have agreement with them to get their bison every other year. Their surplus had them outs to about forty bison every even year, so twenty two, twenty four, twenty six like that, and and we’ve been getting them for a while.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: Now do you guys get them for free?

00:30:27
Speaker 2: No, we have to pay. It’s close. We pay for all the effort to collect them from the wild. I think they have seventy five square miles in their park and maybe a third of that is wood bison habitat, and so they’re collecting out of let’s say twenty square miles or something like that. So it’s not that easy. But they lure them in through supplemental feeding in the end of winter, and then they capture as many as they can. They have to run them through shoots, and they have this handling facility and they get all these people there to do that process. And so we kind of pay for that process, and then we pay for the disease testing, all the veterinary services that are needed for all the new disease testing. You know, they do to the disease testing, but then as the State of Alaska, we do it again just to be redundant and you know, do due diligence to make sure that we don’t bring anything from there that that might be bad for native wildlife in Alaska. So that’s main thing we pay for is just the handling and the keeping and then the trucking.

00:31:20
Speaker 1: You know, in Canada has they kind of have their own versions of what you guys are trying to create because they had like wood Wood Buffalo or Wood Bison National Park. They have a couple of populations that even had the support limited hunting.

00:31:32
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah. One of the greatest populations in my view is the one in Yukon Territory between white Horse and the border, and that’s around two thousand wild wood bison and it’s still growing at something like fifteen percent a year, really well something like that. Yeah, and they harvest two hundred and eighty bis in a year the last few years out of that herd, and it was only put out in nineteen eighty eight, so it’s not very old.

00:31:53
Speaker 1: This was doing good.

00:31:54
Speaker 2: Oh, unbelievable.

00:31:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve heard from like like that there’s some schools and stuff that will take the students out to do field harvest on those animals.

00:32:01
Speaker 2: And yeah, right, because bison. You know, I I think if you lived in North America at sometime in the last you know, one thousand years up until just two hundred years ago, you would have thought of North America as a bison continent. You know, we think of it now maybe it’s an elk continent or deer continent or something, but it would have just been predominantly bison then. But people have lost that connection with bison, and so sometimes it takes you know, training to help people understand how to deal with such a big animal.

00:32:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. When what year was it that Alaska started to have a confinement area where they were keeping wood bison in anticipation of trying to find good habitat to bring them and put them on. It’s been going on for.

00:32:43
Speaker 2: A long time, it has. In two thousand and eight, we have imported fifty three wood bison from from Elk Island National Park. A farmer imported some in two thousand two ish illegally because they were needed as endangered under the ESA at that time, and he went and got something in Canada anyway and brought them in without the permits, and then those were confiscated by the Fishing Wildlife Service, and we ended up with those and their progeny in two thousand and six or so, and then because there was really nothing else that the federal government could do with them, and then we combine those with the ones we imported from Elk Island in two thousand and eight, and then we’ve received more in two thousand and two, two thousand and four, and we’ll get some next spring too.

00:33:31
Speaker 1: So what was the most you ever had in one little.

00:33:32
Speaker 2: Spot in the captivity? We had about one hundred and forty five in captivity in twenty fourteen at the Alaska Wilife Conservation Center south of Anchorage.

00:33:43
Speaker 1: No. I saw those ones there one time.

00:33:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they’re still about thirty five or so there right now, and they’ve got there’s got a really good operation going on there, and those cows are really productive and they produce eight to ten releasable animals every year, and so every other year is when we tell to release, and so we could we can get you know, fifteen to twenty or so bison out of that hurt every year and take it out. And then we have something that at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Large General Research Station too, and that’s a smaller group, it’s like a dozen. But we are importing the ones from Elkla National Park to UAF these days and just holding them there temporarily and then taking them back out to the wild.

00:34:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, what’s that process like to go find them? When I was looking into this subject back in early two thousands, it was kind of undecided where Alaska might try to do a reintroduction. I would hear things like the I hesitate to even say where. I remember initially hearing talk about Yukon Flats, But Yukon Flats hasn’t happened yet. Can you can you explain the process of identifying a place to do it, and then the sort of political and social process us of ever getting the okay to go take this large herbivore fifteen hundred pounds sixteen hundred pound animals and turn them loose into place where they have been absent for over a century. Like, you can’t just spring that on people.

00:35:16
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, No, it’s complicated. The first thing we did is after we acquired all this information about the paper I discussed with radio carbon dating, the oral history, the habitat that’s available in modern times compared to historic times, and all that. We took that to the public in a feasibility assessment in nineteen ninety four and asked for public input. And the input from the public at large that came in verbal and written feedback was overwhelmingly positive. And that really set the course for Alaska Apartment of Fishing Game to pursue would Bison Restoration Estate, because the question in that feasibility assessment was do you want to do this or not? You know, this is something we should pursue, and then we were essentially directed by the public to pursue it. So at that time a wood Bison Project biologist was created, and that there’s been a position like that for the last you know, thirty some years.

00:36:10
Speaker 1: And that was Bob Stevens in that time. I met with him in Fairbanks, I believe year ago.

00:36:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And so there’s been other folks on that program too over time. You know, sometimes it’s as many as three people. But you asked, how do we identify places? So what we want if we’re going to try to restore a species a place that’s large enough to have a minimum viable population, And through modeling of genetic work with bison, it’s decided that a minimum viable population is more than four hundred. You’ll maintain most of your genetic diversity over one hundred years if you have a population of over four hundred. It’s even better if you can get a population over one thousand. So what we were seeking was a habitat patch that was big enough to hold four hundred to a thousand bison or more or something like that. And so it had to have certain characteristics too of not really deep snow and not really firm snow. It had to be soft snow that wasn’t too deep, but also the wintertime food. So you know, bison our generalists grazers, so they can get by with durn near anything in the summertime, but they really need grasses and especially wetlands sedges in the wintertime. And so the three largest areas that had those qualities that we came up with and we wrote an environmental assessment about it, and in twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen were the Enoko Flats, which is kind of west central Interior Alaska, Minto Flats, which is just about fifty miles west of Fairbanks, and then the Yukon Flats, which is about one hundred miles north of Fairbanks. Well, the Yukon Flats was the original place, and that’s where Bob Stevenson was an area biologist. That’s where all the oral history comes from, and that’s probably the largest and best piece of habitat on all of interior Alaska.

00:37:50
Speaker 1: That’s kind of that’s a stunning area. Yeah, you got like the Brooks Range to the north, you got the White Mountains of the south, all these big famous rivers flowing out of thee coming in there. Oh yeah, tons of mosquito.

00:38:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a difficult place to stand in the middle of June.

00:38:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, the flats. Eventually, you guys settled on the Innoco Flats.

00:38:15
Speaker 2: That was an interesting thing, since would bison have a listing under the ESA Oil and gas and mining industry was worried about the influence of that listing on development, and there were no oil and gas prospects at the time, and the Inoko and so a lot of the industry leaders were like, well, we understand, you have a non essential experimental population rule that protects us and we understand that they’re only listed has threatened right now, but just to be safe, let’s go with the Inoko.

00:38:46
Speaker 1: And because what they’re worried about is that they’re worried that you’re gonna you’re gonna re establish this population. There’s gonna be some protection of the population. They’re gonna want to industrialize the landscape, and then they’re gonna have to hear from people about how there’s an endangered species living there. So the argument would be, well, don’t put them there. Then we won’t have to worry about them being.

00:39:07
Speaker 2: There because it could potentially stop oil and gas development.

00:39:10
Speaker 1: Well why, I’m just like, I don’t want to drag you into like a quagmire here, but like, why would anybody ask them anyways?

00:39:19
Speaker 2: Oh, that’s a good question. Well, Alaska, their economy is based on oil and gas and mining. Really, that’s what Alaska’s commedy is based on. And and so all the political leaders and big business leaders care about the fact that we need to be able to extract resources to make Alaska survive. And so that’s why I think it mattered. And they have influence, you know, in the legislature and the governor and everything else, you know, and it’s important, right, and that’s why we spent so we spent five years negotiating with the Official Life Service to make a non essential experimental population rule that gives full deference to development and talks about bison, you know, can live and play. This is where there’s development and and the reality is, you know, most of that country’s boreal forest, and so any sort of development breaks down that boil forest into you know, places where sunlight gets to the ground, whether it’s fires or roads or or drilling pads or whatever. That turns that into better habitat for bison than forest really, and so there’s it’s it’s a hard argument to say that that development would hurt bison anyway. It’s just that the the Endangered Species Act has been used as a club in the past to herd industry, and the industry leaders know.

00:40:31
Speaker 1: That I want to just touch on this for a minute, this experimental status, because this is something that you see come up again and again and wild They’re recovery efforts would be that oftentimes, let’s take let’s take the recent move to bring wolves into Colorado. Okay, here your you’re you have proportions of Colorado that have no wolves. They were historically there that gone for a long time, and someone proposes, hey, we’re gonna bring wolves into the state. Well, right away, there’s a negotiation that’s gonna happen where you’re taking you have a landscape that doesn’t have an endangered species or a threatened species, and all of a sudden, you’re putting a threatened species on the ground right and you know that it’s going to cause conflict with livestock growers, for instance, So they’re like, oh, man, the minute you bring them in, they’re gonna start killing my cows. And there’s nothing I can do. I can’t shoot them, and the state can’t help me out because they’re they’re an endangered species. So you’re just creating a headache for me. So this deal that will often get broken in these situations is people will say, we’re going to bring them in and turn them loose, but we’re not gonna treat them the same way we might treat an imperiled historic population. We’re gonna give managers greater latitude to deal with this new pos population that we’re creating. Then we would give managers to deal with a historic population that’s imperiled, and it just greases the wheels a little bit. Right. You might come in and say, sure, we’re going to turn you know, we’re going to reintroduce bears into this area and there will only be a few. But if a bear is killing your chickens, go ahead and shoot it. You’re not gonna get prosecuted, whereas in other areas you might under different circumstances. So this is kind of like a way to. It’s a way to, it’s a compromise that can be made when reintroducing animals.

00:42:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, well there’s a monumental irony there, Like when I think the ESA was really designed for when when populations are in a decline, to stop that from happening and try to keep animals from going away. They didn’t really plan for, I don’t think as well for when you’re trying to restore an animal on the landscape and the in Danger Species Act, this stuff has probably been the biggest detriment to wood bison restoration in Alaska because every time we’d want to do something, the bureaucracy and political nature of the Endangered Species Act being involved just makes it extremely difficult. You know, and so it would have been a lot easier to There’s been several times when political you know, higher ups above me have said, let’s just do this with planes bison. This is way too hard. Planes bison aren’t listed. And then we have to, you know, from the biology perspective, we have to say, look, you know, our policy is not to release animals here that weren’t originally here. You know, let’s try to stick with wood bison. And it’s a real challenge to get it on the ESSA.

00:43:30
Speaker 1: I don’t want to stick you with having his viewpoint. But so this is I just want people to clear this is me talking, not Tom talking. But you’re here. Especially lately, you hear a lot of people talk about the Endangered Species Act being cumbersome or aspects of it to be revisited. Oftentimes you’ll see that and you’ll think it’s people trying to dismantle protections for imperiled wildlife. A lot of times it’s like kind of like good guys will say that sometimes too, Like people that are pro wildlife will say that for the things we’re talking about, where it just when they drafted the legislation, they couldn’t anticipate all outcomes, and you don’t have a crystal ball, so you can create situations that later you’re like, I wish we’d have thought of that. And that’s the thing that they hadn’t contemplated, is they hadn’t contemplated what about ways in which it would make it harder to restore wildlife. And it happens with other pieces of legislation, like famously like the wild Horse and Burrough Protection Act. When they enacted that, they’re like, there’s these wild horses out in the desert. People are killing them all off. We should try to save them, and they they create this piece of legislation that winds up being its own worst enemy, and then you’re.

00:44:47
Speaker 2: Just stuck with it.

00:44:48
Speaker 1: You’re stuck with it because it takes a super majority to change it, right, and so then generations thereafter have to live with a cumbersome ESA or have to live with the wild Horse and Burrough protect At, which is wind up. You could almost at this point call it like the Wildlife Habitat Destruction Act is what the Wildhorse Burrow Protection Act became.

00:45:10
Speaker 2: And I think if you live with it, yeah, if you deal with an amal like wood bison, that everybody kind of wants on the landscape anyway. It’s just an impediment to have the essay there because you know, people want this grand resource to be able to use there. It’s different than if it was a tiny fern that only grew in wet spots along creeks or something, and we really had to focus on trying to make sure there was habitat for this fern. It’s not like that. You know, people want bison on the landscape.

00:45:36
Speaker 1: So we got a little off subject. But explain the area that we’re talking about, Like, explain the Anoko, what the flats the wetland. Well, I shouldn’t say the wetland, but like basically it’s it’s a river coming in from the south, I believe, and flown into the Yukon. Yeah, and that’s kind of where this site is, right.

00:45:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, the the Anoko kind of comes out of the northeast and the Yukon happens to be flowing to the south there, and they kind of come together to make about forty miles apart, they make this valley, and then they kind of come together at the bottom of it. So this valley’s maybe eighty miles north and south and forty miles east to west and sometimes only twenty miles east to us, and it floods on a regular enough basis that it keeps that habitat in grass and sedge. It inhibits tree growth there because it’s so wet, and that’s just perfect wood bison habitat. And since it floods too, a lot of the productivity or the nutrient value of those plants is really high along with their productivity, and so bison really like it and it’s worked out great as a good piece of habitat. The problem that we’ve had is in that particular place is it’s snow, and we worried about that somewhat in the past before we release bison there. That occasionally has as deep snows and ice layers and snows, but the reality is that winters have been very wet and warm in the last decade or to fifteen years in Alaska, and that’s been really hard on all wildlife There’s you know, we’ve had an eighty percent loss and a lot of sheep populations. We’ve lost about half our caribou in most places of an interior Alaska, and then we’ve lost it depends on what you’re looking at a boy. As far as moose goes, it’s something like thirty to forty percent of moose have gone away in a lot of places in Interi, Alaska, and it’s mostly attributed to these really difficult winters we’ve been having where they’re just so wet and warm that it makes snow that it’s hard, it’s deep, so it’s hard to get through for a lot of ungulates, and it encapsulates the forage where the animals can’t get to it, especially sheep where they rely on the mountain sides to be blown off so the snow blow off and so they can get to the grass and things they eat. Bison are similar, but they live in the lowlands where they get through the snow without a problem if it’s soft. But if there’s a rain on snow event that makes an ice layer in the snow, it’s much harder for them to get through that vegetation or through the snow to the vegetation. And so one of the things I often have a difficult time with is all the history and the legal process and the political process and the funding has all come together and culminated in to now for releasing wood bison. But the weather is just really difficult because it’s hard for all angulates right now, and we’re trying to restore a species of ungula in the midst.

00:48:25
Speaker 1: Of this is this winter shape, and it would be more the same, No, it’s the opposite, which is great.

00:48:30
Speaker 2: Like last winter, the winner of twenty four to twenty five, we had two ice storms even in Fairbanks. It was crazy, you know, trees falling down everywhere and forage getting you know, covered over with ice. But this winter has been like an old school winter, the winters I remember from my twenties and thirties where it’s really cold. We’ve had long, long spells of thirty below forty below the snow falls, but it’s just super dry. It’s like the way it used to be, you know. So the snow can two feet deep, but you could just smack your hand right through the whole layer of snow, you know, it’s just so easy to get through. And so bison and moose are I think, are probably doing real well this one so far. You know, I haven’t had any mortalities from snow conditions, and in the bison herd that we just released in mental flats.

00:49:17
Speaker 1: So talk about how you guys got them in how you guys brought animals in for on the Innoko Valley.

00:49:24
Speaker 2: Okay, so in the Enoko this is well. First of all, I mentioned that that local people were really supportive when we were trying to pick between Yukon flats, mental flats, and Oco flats. Uh, the Inoko people were always, hey, bring them here. You know, if you got political or otherwise conflicts in that country, bring them to us. And so that was one of the major decisions, not just the the lack of conflict oil and gas industry, but also the support from local people made us go there.

00:49:51
Speaker 1: So now now that is that when you say that, is that with with Native Alaskan and who who is there? Like, what group is there?

00:49:58
Speaker 2: So there’s four villages around the Yoko landscape where the bison are, and that’s the villages of Grayling and vic Shagalak and Holy Cross. They call it the gash area, you know, just the abbreviation of those four places. And so those are communities that are they’re mostly Native, but there’s other you know, people, non natives in those villages too, and they’ve been involved in the process of deciding whether bison could should go there. Or not through through the whole time. Now, when we’ve went through all the political process and all the public planning process that we did, you know, we finally got down to okay, we’re going to take bison there in the spring of twenty fifteen, and so we had to get bison. This place is more than three hundred miles from the closest road, you know, the road system. You know, there’s a couple of little roads to airports and stuff like that from villages, but it’s really remote and it’s way down the Yukon River from any road too. So what we did was we had these animals in the Alaska Whilife Conservation Center, and like I said, at that time, we had about one hundred and forty five there. I took one hundred and third of them and took them to the Ynoko. But it was it was kind of a complicated process. The state only had enough money at that time to release a smaller subset than this one hundred and forty five we had in captivity, and so I kind of had to do a piece mail bit by bit, and I was able to get donations from Safari Club and Bass Pro and then match that or really with match that with Pittman Robertson funds and come up with enough money to fly bison. First truck them far out that they did, which was great. Yeah, yeah, and uh, first truck bison from the Alaska Islet Conservation Center to Anchorage Airport, put them on Linden cargo plane see one thirties and fly them to Shaga Luck which had a good runway with bison habitat nearby and a place a little road we could take bison. We could pull them in these containers to a little pen that we could build along the Enoko River. And so we took a hundred total of fifty cows and fifty younger animals there in the spring of twenty fifteen, that was like late March twenty fifteen, and we released them on April second, twenty fifteen, and that was I think there was seven loads herkloads went back and forth with feed equipment, bison, all kinds of stuff. But in the previous winter we’d built this like six acre pen that was kind of divided into pieces that we held them in. That was about three and a half miles out of the town of shag Look. Anyway, we released those animals, and then in May and June of that following summer, we released a load of bulls by bar, two loads of bulls by barge, as I realized that I had enough money to do that through donations.

00:52:43
Speaker 1: So you brought the females in by a plane? Did you not bring the bulls in by playing because they’re too kind of wild?

00:52:48
Speaker 2: Well, they’re big, and then you know, if you fly stuff, it’s you know, the more weight, the more difficult it is. So I brought fifty cows and then fifty young animals. Those fifty young animals were about half and half male and female. So there was plenty of bulls there to breed.

00:53:03
Speaker 1: Like they would have gotten old enough bread anyways.

00:53:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I had all these adult bulls in captivity that that I wanted them to be out there too, And so the barge. Yeah, I put the barge process out to bid, which would have been a seven hundred and fifty miles that would I think it’s yeah, somewhere around seven hundred and some miles from the barge station at Nynana where the Parks Highway hits the Tannel River. They would get barged down the tanne down the Yukon to the mouth of the Enoko and then back up the Enoko to where these cows were. I put that out to bid and one of the bidders.

00:53:37
Speaker 1: Seven hundred river miles.

00:53:38
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, that’s crazy.

00:53:40
Speaker 1: Well, that gives you a sense of the remoteness of that stuff. Seven hundred river miles. Yeah.

00:53:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it took like four four plus days. So we had to truck them about one hundred miles actually like two hundred some miles two hundred and fifty miles or so by by a semi truck and then get them on the barge and then go down the river. And that whole process was four and a half to five and a half days. But the cool thing is there was a guy named Charlie that owned inland barge at the time, and he drastically discounted his rate to barge those bison seven or d fifty miles because he really wanted to see this project, to see you really Yeah, he was super cool guy’s great man.

00:54:13
Speaker 1: And.

00:54:15
Speaker 2: He helped us git those animals down there. And so what they would do is they’d come down by barge and it would take them all those days. I’d be down there with the cows, and I would fly to find out where the cows were and figure out where we could land the barge closest to the cows. And with the cows and young animals, we did what’s called a soft release, where you hold them to kind of get him to calm down before you release them, so you don’t get animals just like scattering everywhere from fear of the stress of transportation. So we held those animals about ten days and then they kind of they stayed there pretty good. Well. Then I would figure out where they were at when the bulls were coming, and then I would just hard release the bulls, which means you just show up and open the gates onto the bank. But we needed a place where we could you know, land the barge and all that. Anyway, it all worked out pretty good, and about sixty percent of the bulls got into those cows in the first twenty four hours. The other thirty percent of the bulls would just kind of wander around and eventually connected with the cows.

00:55:05
Speaker 1: But you think they smell them and find them.

00:55:08
Speaker 2: Man, I don’t know. I think it’s smell. I suspect there may even be some sort of low low frequency sound that they do, you know, like elephants do that low frequency sound that communicative long distances. And I can hear bison making low frequency grunts and stuff. But you know, my ear, you know, nobody’s ear. Human ear can’t go that low. So I don’t know if anybody’s testing that with bison, but it’s fascinating.

00:55:31
Speaker 1: So I just went right to it.

00:55:32
Speaker 2: That’s crazy. So you hear you have you know, these animals have been in captivity most of their life. You got these bulls that have never been allowed to be with the cows other than when they were first young animals. You kept them separate in captivity. You fed them. Hey, they’re just in a pen, you know, a thirty forty eight re pen their entire life. You take them to this place that’s a thousand miles away in total wilderness and just dump them out on the river bank and they just navigate to a cowgroup that’s a you know, a mile away or something over the course of a night or something. And it’s just it’s mind blowing. That other also, when we released these cows and young animals, a lot of the young animal we made feeding stations because I had all this grand ideas that I thought, well, if I make feeding stations on these native sedge habitats, they’ll kind of transition from captive feeds to wild feeds and stuff. And they kind of kept their calves there a little bit. And by calves, I mean like eleven month old. But the cow started doing this the exploratory forays, and they’d go on a foray until you know, they’d walk five ten miles until they got out of bison habitat and they would walk back in to where to that original spot that I released them, and then they would take another exploratory forewhere in a different direction, and they would come back. And they did that over and over again until they went all the way around the you know, all directions and every it depended on how much bison habitat there were there was available that they would walk through. So to the south bison habitat goes for sixty miles and they would walk that whole sixty miles and they’d get to the end of it where they hit canopy forest, and they would turn back and go all way back. Oh really, yeah, it was really cool. And so here you have these animals that haven’t been wild during their lifetimes that can just navigate a landscape so well, and and and they would, they would they do all that well, then in the winter they would go to these places that were really good habitat winter habitat and summer habitat. And if you look at it.

00:57:21
Speaker 1: It’s exactly they they they were just like serving the whole lampscape.

00:57:27
Speaker 2: Okay, what do we have here, and we’re going to cover fifteen hundred square miles in the course of this summer and figure out what’s out there, and then we’re going to use it. And they found places, for example, that have a lower snow load than anywhere else. Now I didn’t even know that this this low snow existed in this little snow shadow behind the Russian mountains, which is about sixty miles to the south. And now they all winter down there. They go down to this place that’s maybe ten miles across that you know, the storms come in off the Yk Delta. They go over the Russian mountains and there’s just this little spot where, you know, not little ten miles across that has low snow shadow yep, and they go there, you know, for winter. That’s where they winter now, and that they found that sixty miles away from their release site. And so there understanding of navigation and habitat is so much greater than us. You know, it’s pretty cool, you.

00:58:15
Speaker 1: Know when you mentioned doing the cold release, and you hear this in wildlife work a fair bit where you take animals to a spot where you’re going to release them. It could be any number of kind of creatures you do this with, and like you said, you bring them into an enclosure and feed them there and just let them calm down. And then one day you leave the door open, right and they might even leave and come back, but just try to get them settle in. There’s a great story from Alaska when they brought those ones up in the twenties. They went to this area delta junction, and eventually they got a bunch of them there and they wanted to just try to move them around. So at one point they take i think it was thirteen of them, add a delta junction and bring them up the Slana towards Slann of Mine in a truck and they just opened the door of the truck and show them all out of the truck. Well, they split for so long that people thought they were dead. I mean people will there’d be rumors of them. People applying over would see them or something. And they didn’t settle in for a hundred miles. And that’s the ones that wound up being in.

00:59:22
Speaker 2: That copper herd.

00:59:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, the copper herd, so like the Nodina, Doddina Chattisleena, and they’re migrating between a glacier and all the way down to the Copper River. But they went one hundred miles before they found a spot they liked, you know. And that’s like a cold that’s a hot release right there.

00:59:38
Speaker 2: Man.

00:59:39
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they just split. You know.

00:59:41
Speaker 2: I know a daughter of a homesteader name’s Sharon, and she used to live on the Danelli Highway and they would see him years after that release in Slanta and she’d say, well, there was you know, when I was a kid, the bison walked through here, and then three years later they walked through there. And yeah, I think one of the issues with that is that we didn’t understand their habitat needs as much then. And if you look at the habitat around slam And it’s kind of Tussic thunder, which is not it’s not quite like Alpine tussic tunder it, but it’s it’s it’s tussics, and it’s uh not what bisons select for habitat. They’ll eat some some tustics in the spring, you know, especially the top end that turns green first. I mean, that’s what a tussic really is, is just a micro climate that allows you know, thowd parts at the top while the bottoms frozen. Anyway, it seemed like they didn’t like that habitat and that hard release might have been not enough to keep them there too.

01:00:30
Speaker 1: So some of the ones you guys cut loose, you were telling me, they went on some tracks. Man. Yeah, if you talk about a few of the outliers, yeah, like what they did, why they did it, you know, but mostly I guess you don’t know the why, but the what is incredible.

01:00:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. I want to make it clear first off that that ninety eight and a half percent of them stayed right where we had a habitat assessment and right where we wanted them to stay. And so these really are outliers. They’re they’re they’re very unique individuals.

01:00:59
Speaker 1: So that’s a that’s a solid point ninety eight point five percent stayed put. Of course, let’s talk about the one point yeah, right, So the one point five percent was three animals and that was.

01:01:14
Speaker 2: Uh. We had two cows that went on really long exploratory forays and a bull and I’ll explain them all right now. So we had a ten month old cow that just disappeared right after release, within maybe less than a month of when we released animals in the spring of twenty fifteen, not wearing a collar. Well, she had a collar on, but then at that time, we made them out of like spandex, like you’d wrap your ankle with, you know, the spanex wrap with a little canister collar, and it was a VHF. So I had to fly and actually get within like ten miles of it to hear it. And then since it was made out of spanex with this growing animal, so that it would just rip off early and when I was radio tracking, that one just disappeared. And so sometimes they go off the air and things, and so within a month or so after release, I couldn’t hear her, and I thought she was just you know, her collar fell off and fell in the mud somewhere or something like that. So I didn’t know. Well, a biologist in Galina spotted her that winter in a in a habitat about I think one hundred and fifty miles north of where we released him, and she’s by herself still, and we went and called caught her then and put a caller spelled.

01:02:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:02:23
Speaker 2: He was a biologist doing aerial surveys and and spotted her.

01:02:27
Speaker 1: And you were able to go find it.

01:02:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well he he yeah, his name’s Brad. He lives in Gallina as a great biologist, and he uh he kind of kept track of her, you know, and uh so we went and searched for uh and found her in the winter when things were froze up and uh. And you know, bison, they’re not that hard to see that they’re they’re dark, and they stay in open areas, and so you can you can tendly generally pick him out. Anyway, we put a caller on and we’ve tracked her ever since. And she stayed up there, uh, which was in like if anybody knows that that the area it’s like the Pilot Mountain habitat, you know, the marshy area, the big open marsh areas, and so she like that. But then she moved down in the Cayu Flats east of Caltag. After that she started kind of migrating back and forth between those two kind of really nice wood bison habitats, always by herself, always by herself. And she’s stayed now she’s she’s east of Caltag now in the Kayu Sto. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so she’s old.

01:03:22
Speaker 1: What is she?

01:03:23
Speaker 2: What would she be this year? She’d be twenty or twelve, you know, coming.

01:03:25
Speaker 1: There’s never like just lived the rest of her life on old spinster.

01:03:28
Speaker 2: I guess so. And we’ve had some that The reason why we don’t add more bison there is that it has really deep snows there, and uh, I think without the demands of gestation and lactation, she’s been able to survive even in these horrible winters where the snow will be you know, forty inches deep with ice layers and all kinds of stuff. And she just should just be standing out there and doing her thing. And yeah, anyway, kind of depressing it is. Yeah, but here’s here’s the very interesting thing is that I often wondered, well, why was it her? Did she go do that? I tried to take all the animals from captivity, you know, the full social structure that we had in captivity that because bison’s social structure is a very powerful thing, and it’s generally matriarchal lead. And then they and these big groups of bison include all the young animals from calves up to about three years old. Once they’re three year olds, the bulls kick off and go do their own thing, but the cows tend to stay with the older cows for their whole life. So and I think if you look at bison and the way that they’re a generalist grazer and they can occupy all kinds of different niche like I mentioned, from northern Mexico to Pennsylvania to Oregon to the Arctic Ocean. I think they can do so much diversity because of their ability to learn how to adapt to a particular site, and they are very their adaptation is very plastic. Since they’re generalists, they can occupy all these places and just learn what the best thing to eat is there. And I think part of that is the education from the adults, you know, like hey, you know, eat this and not that, and go here and not there and that sort of thing. Anyway, that’s the preface to the concept of why I think she went away the cow that gave birth to that calf that did that. She was still back in captivity. She’s one of the cows they didn’t take out because she was so n me that I didn’t want her to hurt herself in transport, So I left her back in captivity because I thought she just might throw a fit and you know, hurt herself and.

01:05:26
Speaker 1: Her calf didn’t have that bond to the herd.

01:05:29
Speaker 2: And split looking for mom. I don’t know that this is totally you know, a guess.

01:05:33
Speaker 1: But if you can somehow measure her contentment, like is she content or not content where.

01:05:43
Speaker 2: She’s at now, I don’t know. I don’t know much. I think I think she knows. I think she knows how to get back, you know, yeah, maybe not.

01:05:52
Speaker 1: Well, if you look at the work of the Monteeth Shop, Kevin Monteeth, those things have incredible abilities, Yeah, to retrace journeys. Yeah, like when they go somewhere, they can, I mean from his stuff, his collaring projects, not with bison, but with Mule de Or and Elk. When they go somewhere, they can damn sure walk back on their same tracks, like they know where they’re going.

01:06:18
Speaker 2: And maybe she was kind of in shock. When she left because she just got transported and I don’t really know, but onto the other things because it ties into that one a bowl. Then in twenty sixteen, so a year after release left and went north to the Cayu Flats where this cow that had already gone up there. Let’s say she’s cow number one and he’s bull number one. She was going back and forth between the Kyo Flats and the Pilot Mountain area. This bull went up to the Cayu Flats and so at one point we had both this cow disperser and a bull disperser in the Kyu Flats and a lot of local people were like, oh, we’re not gonna make a herd, you know, this is really gonna work out. And then he stayed there.

01:06:57
Speaker 1: And then how close did they get to each other?

01:06:59
Speaker 2: Maybe fifteen mile apart or something like that, so not quite close enough I guess to smell each other or whatever it’s like it was. And then uh, rut happens. Right, So this bull that did this dispersal, you know, he just takes off on heads north and rut and she starts heading west. No, no, she’s she was north of him at the time, and they crossed trails like they were like four days different or five days different or something like that. But they didn’t you know, like turn around, try to find each other whatever. And the bull went. Now onto the story of the bull. He crossed the Yukon, got into the kayakuk went all swam. You know, they’re good swimmers. They they’re they’re very dense and they don’t have hollow hair, so they swim really low. Like when a bison swims. The only thing sticking out is like its nostrils, its eyes, and its horns and maybe a little bit of its hump and uh so that you don’t see much and they can be drowned easily with waves. But yeah, he crossed the Yukon. In fact, there are those cowgroups and those exploratory forays I talked about. In that first summer, we had some that were crossing the Yukon with calves and everything down in that lower Yukon it’s a mile or more wide, and then going back, Yep, they were just you know, they go over there for a week and then they crossed back to the Yukon for a week and yeah, just crazy stuff. Anyway, this bull went north. He went up to Kayakuk, hit the upper Kobuk, went into the Brooks Range and got up in the high Brooks Range between the Kobuk and the no Attack and and Rutt was over by then. He got up in there in like October or something, and I don’t know what happened to him, but he died somewhere in there in late winter. And if he had a GPS color and she’d kind of see his movement, say, he looked to me like he got up in this high mountain valley and then couldn’t get out of it. And I think what had happened. He must have been injured or something, because when we finally dug him out of like nine feet of snow, he you know, he died in there, and the way he was trying to make forays out of this valley, he just couldn’t make it out. And I don’t think it’s because it was too much snow at the time. I think that, you know, he got buried in snow afterward. But anyway, and then the other the third one that I know of big dispersal, was a cow that left left the initial range, went south around Anniak and Kowskeg, and then came back to the main herd, and then she left again a few months later and went down by Russian Mission, which is so Annie and Kowskak are on the lower Cuscquim. Then she went down Russian Mission, which is the lower Yukon. And when I say those villages, I mean like right out the village, I mean that’s the closest landmark. Yeah. She spent much of a winter down in the mountains or the hills around Russian Mission, and then she worked her way down and end up on the lower Cuscquim. And she was like, we called her like a diplomat because everywhere she went, you know, everybody was, you know, writing us letters and called man, the wood bison’s here.

01:09:48
Speaker 1: People.

01:09:49
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, they were super excited about it. In fact, you know, we got a light, nice long letter from the village of Eke where they said, you know, hey, how can we get more wood bison down here? I really like this, you know, we want to start a population here too, and all that. And but it went past Eke and went to down by Quinnahawk.

01:10:09
Speaker 1: How far from the release.

01:10:11
Speaker 2: Uh, it’s probably it’s probably something like one hundred and fifty miles down there.

01:10:15
Speaker 1: Too.

01:10:15
Speaker 2: I might have to measure it to be more accurate, but that’s roughly about right. And she got into that lower Cusquin, which is just phenomenal habitat their sedge as far as I can see, and it’s good thick stuff. And I had a friend from Bethel, the biologist there, radio tracker and took a picture from the air, and she was just fat.

01:10:32
Speaker 1: You know.

01:10:33
Speaker 2: She was really having a good time down there, I think, and all alone, all alone, And.

01:10:37
Speaker 1: Why can’t you sling a mail over there go get her and sling her back?

01:10:41
Speaker 2: Or with all this good publicity that she was doing down there, I thought that was going to happen. But she got to near a village of Quinnahawk and a guy shot her. Essentially he was he did, yeah, he was. He was long ways away. He had a thirty thirty that had gotten for Christmas or something like that, and he shot it at her like nine times and finally got her wounded enough that he came up and finished her off.

01:11:03
Speaker 1: And then what do you think it was?

01:11:04
Speaker 2: Well, first he thought it was a bear, and then that’s what he said. And then when he got it close and side it had horns, he thought it was a muskox and and uh, then he saw it had a collar, so he shot the collar, so we couldn’t use any of that information, and then shot the collar. Yeah right, and then then he got it back to the village. So he did take some of it back to the village, and then the elders were like, you ding dong, you shot the wood bison, you know. And then he felt kind of bad about that, and then we talked to him about it, and he had to give a he didn’t have anything. He couldn’t like find him or put him in jail or whatever, and and so he had to give a public apology on the radio, which he did, and uh he had to uh get all the meat to the elders building and in Bethel, and you know it was all fit out there and stuff like that. So but it was it was pretty much a tragedy. It would have been kind of neat to have because I.

01:11:55
Speaker 1: Let you hear that public apology. Yeah, it lengthy.

01:11:59
Speaker 2: I don’t know, I don’t know it was on the radio there. Yeah, I didn’t have an opportunity radio yet. Yeah. Huh.

01:12:07
Speaker 1: So there is kind of a long tradition in America of seeing something you’re not quite sure what it is and shooting it. Yeah, yeah, that’s a that’s like a common response with people.

01:12:19
Speaker 2: I’ve had several old timers call me and say, hey, you can’t do this because people local people are just gonna shoot them all. And I found that not to be true. I think a lot of most local people are pretty darn excited about it, and they want it to happen, and they want to be uh, you know, conservation conservationists for these animals, you know, they want it to work. But there’s a.

01:12:41
Speaker 1: Defense of that one. Bro though the muskos is plausible. Maybe. I mean, if he wasn’t aware that you guys were doing the reintroduction, what the hell is you gonna think it is at a distance?

01:12:55
Speaker 2: I don’t know, big brown object.

01:12:57
Speaker 1: I went time in the fog. We went after what we went after a grizzly beard had turned out to be a muskox and a fog shoot. But I mean it was enough to make us cross the river heavy fog, but it was enough to paddle across the river. And they were like, no, shoot, that’s the muskogs.

01:13:13
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, anyway, that’s all took off.

01:13:20
Speaker 1: Man, you gotta go save that one. I’m not gonna be able to sleep at night. I didn’t realize it was still live. Man.

01:13:26
Speaker 2: I don’t know. Yeah, I mean a lot of folks say that too. We should a lot of folks argue that we should supplementally feed when conditions get tough too, there spend times. I don’t think that, but I think.

01:13:37
Speaker 1: Because that would that wouldn’t go along with the objective.

01:13:41
Speaker 2: Right to have wild populations doing wild things.

01:13:43
Speaker 1: Yeap, it wouldn’t. It’d be like an it’d be like, this is just me talking. In my view, if you start feeding them, yeah, what are you doing right? It’s not it’s not anything. Well but here here’s gone.

01:13:59
Speaker 2: Well one of them we’re trying to go do anything with her is that she is outside of the areas listed in the environmental Assessment that we can do stuff. That’s another thing where it comes down to the essay the Danger Species Act making things difficult is we have to go with what is written like ten years ago in that in that document. We can’t just like go I would like to go the path of least resistance. There’s a lot of villages that say bring them here, but we’re like, I’m sorry, we can’t because the essay says.

01:14:22
Speaker 1: I want to set the record straight on something. If I was in your shoes, I would do the same thing you’re doing. I’m just saying, like, as a guy sitting here feeling all sad about that one and anthropomorphizing its experience, that makes me say, like, go get it. But of course in your position, you can’t go take your money and be like, oh, you spend thousands of dollars to do what? Right? Like, I totally understand an issue, But here’s here’s when you look at the numbers. And I’m rooting for you on this, I’m rooting for you on it. But when you look at the numbers, man, you guys have put more animals on the ground in Noco in Thenoco Valley, You’ve putt more animals on the ground than are currently alive. It’s right, So what like what does that say to you? I mean, you dressed that this series of bad winners right right?

01:15:15
Speaker 2: Yeah?

01:15:17
Speaker 1: Where are you at? Like, like, where are you at right now? Mentally about this whole thing? Knowing that you turned out what one.

01:15:25
Speaker 2: We’d released one hundred and thirty right off the battle, you.

01:15:28
Speaker 1: Put one hundred and thirty on the ground but you don’t have one hundred and thirty alive right now, so correct. You would expect with the reintroduction, and they’re exploiting new habitat, they’re not competing with other animals, there’s all this room to grow. You’d expect that to just be like boom boom boom, like population growth, population growth, population growth, population growth, and that you’d be seeing it like skyrocket.

01:15:54
Speaker 2: Yep, right, that would be the hope.

01:15:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it didn’t know, So what’s your like, what’s your what you take?

01:16:01
Speaker 2: There’s been several years of growth like that, even up to twenty five percent growth in a year. The problem is we’ve had these catastrophic bad winners with ice, you know, rain on snow events and ice laders in the snow. Like I mentioned, it makes it hard for them to get to their forage and you can lose a lot more bison to mortality and winter. Then you can replace that by calves because you know, there’s only so many adult calves that are of breeding age. So the population can only grow you know, twenty percent or twenty five percent in a year based on reproduction, but it can lose eighty percent or one hundred percent in a year. You know, in the spring of twenty eighteen we lost thirty percent. Spring of twenty twenty we lost twenty percent. These are rough numbers. But in the spring of twenty three we lost was it twenty three, Yeah, spring of twenty three we lost fifty percent of the population. And the two previous years were really great survival. So twenty one and twenty two, like all of the calves and all the yearlingks survive in the population was just cranking and and then we had What happened was it snowed in mid October about two feet deep and then it melted down to about eight inches of just concrete and just you know, locked in their forage, and then that they had to go through seven months of winter with that, with most of their forage, so you know, locked in the ice.

01:17:20
Speaker 1: He had a bunch get drowned, right.

01:17:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, right after we released them in the spring of twenty fifteen, we had about nine that we knew of go through the ice. You know, there’s always going to be bison going through the ice. That’s that’s a common cause of death in Canada, you know, where they have a lot more bison than we do, and it’s you know, I mean humans still fall through the ice, but they’re.

01:17:45
Speaker 1: Well they’re real. I’ve written about this. I mean, they got an incredible capacity to drown. Yeah, you wouldn’t think of it.

01:17:52
Speaker 2: Well, they’re so they’re so low in the water that they can’t get out. So once they get in a hole in the ice, it’s done. And I’ve had them go through holes by beer houses where they’re just they’re just there’s under there, you know, and you can’t even radio track. I’m tell the spring when when the ice melts and I can hear the collar and the carcassol, you know, float up to the surface and stuff. But like a moose, when a moose falls to the ice, you can see a whole bunch of struggle where it tried to get out for a long time and stuff, because it’s you know, somewhat buoyant. But a bison is so danse Advan. Yeah, they’re just under the ice.

01:18:24
Speaker 1: So what do you think, like, what do you think there? What do you think is gonna happen? And let me set this up to as you answered that, because here’s the deal, though, you got like these other you got these other four populations trying to think so Copper River farewell burned Chittina, right has some is that it for? For plane? Yeah? So three other groups.

01:18:45
Speaker 2: And deltah, yeah, Delta.

01:18:47
Speaker 1: I knew there’s four since nineteen twenties. So for a century there have been planes. There have been these populations of planes bison, which for all intentsive purposes, could be just as well adapted as anything else to live there. So for a century you’ve got these populations of buffalo that weren’t even put on scientifically selected habitats. They were turned out that have that have survived for a century now in Delta Junction. Sure they hang out in those oat fields and there’s agriculture around, but the other three groups are just living off the land and they got their ups and downs, but like they made it, and if you didn’t mess with them, it’s safe to assume in one hundred years they’d still be there. Right, So that makes me think that like there’s a really good chance that these things could take off. I don’t know how, Like I don’t know, just see like other animals are doing in other places, why not there? But what’s come to be your opinion about the survivability of that herd? And could it ever turn into like thousands of animals.

01:19:58
Speaker 2: Well, the way I look at that heard as I look at individual years and what to try to understand their potential. So they’ve only been there ten years, and like I mentioned, there’s years where the snow was fairly normal, you know, it was fairly soft. They could get through it. That the population gained twenty eight to twenty five percent. If you can maintain that over the long term, they’ll be in the thousands in a short time, you know, a couple decades. The problem is this, this weather regime that we’re in right now is much different than the history that we had before we released them. You know, if you look at the weather records before we released them compared to just the last ten years. And I’ve got a good slide on this in a lot of presentations I give that you can find on you know, YouTube or whatever, that in the last ten or fifteen years it’s been so wet and so warm in Alaska that we get these you know, rain on snow events and isolators and things, and a bunch of that has happened just during this time that the Unoco bison have been out. Even with all that, they still have grown in seven of the ten years that they’ve out there. It’s but the problem is that you know, a catastrophic winter can can kill a lot more than what they can reproduce.

01:21:07
Speaker 1: In a year.

01:21:07
Speaker 2: So right now, I’d say they’re persistent. But the reality is is every one of these populations is an experiment, right you know, we if we we could sit on our hands and just say, well, let’s not do this because it’s too scary and they might die, but we can also just say let’s let’s give it a shot. You know, there’s good habitat here that you know, the snow they might be able to have, the snow they might not, and then you give it a go. And so that’s kind of where we’re at now, I think, is trying to just run these experiments and see if it’s a reasonable thing. That’s why I mentioned it’s so it’s such a difficult time, you know, and all like all the money and the legal process and the politics all came together to do it now. But we’re in the middle of this thing where ungulates and Alaska are just getting pounded by these warm, wet winters, and I’m trying to do it right in the middle of.

01:21:48
Speaker 1: That let’s jump to the next one. So that wasn’t the only release site, correct, some time went by and you move down to release site number two.

01:21:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there’s the three lease sites listed in the environmental assessment, and that’s the Anoco Flats, the Mental Flats, and the Yukon Flats. And we were directed from the Commissioner, which is the highest level person in fishing game, a couple of years ago to pursue the Mental Flats one. And so we went through the public planning process and wrote a management plan and we took bison out to the wild in Mental Flat State Game Refuge in the fall of twenty twenty four and then we held them in one hundred acre release pen that we built out there all winter long and then released them about May thirteenth of twenty twenty five. That was about sixty animals. Since then, we’ve we had three calves and lost two bisons, so we’re at you know, sixty one animals now and yeah, that he seems to be doing pretty well and it’s pretty exciting now that habitat there doesn’t have as much historically of the heavy snows that are wet with with icing, you know, rain on snow events, but it does happen out there. You know, there wasn’t a rain on snow event to my understanding until about fifteen years ago in interior Alaska, like around Fairbanks area. But now it’s more much more common, and like I mentioned, last winter, it happened twice and you know Fairbanks area. So some of it’s just going to be luck. And the weird thing is if it’s colder, like like the historic winters the winter, the snow is soft, bison can get through without a problem. If it’s just a little bit warmer, you have these chinooks that melt out the snow and so then they can easily get to the forage. And when that happens, that’s happened twice in the Enoko and every time that only one melt out in the course of the winter produced about one hundred percent survival on bison that winter. And so all it takes is just a little bit warmer to when a storm comes it melts stuff out. Well, we’re not in that regularly, and we’re not in the cold part regular We’re stuck right in this middle thing where we’re snow is wet and there’s ice layers in it. And so if there really is, you know, climate change that’s making us go more warm, I’m hoping we just get off this pinnacle of of difficulty, you know, one way or another.

01:24:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’d be like if that would be that as the climate changes, if it wound up being that that was one of the winners, you know, that that it made that uh whatever, moose suffer and bison. Yeah, it’s going to take those balancing acts have occurred, right, and it would maybe it’d be some peculiar balancing act.

01:24:38
Speaker 2: And I’m not a climatologist, but a lot of folks from the University of Alaska that I’ve talked to that are have mentioned that that they think the future of interior Alaska is very conducive to to bison. But that stuff is changing so fast, you know, like a lot of the predictive models that i’d heard of before in interior Alaska was drier, uh more, drier summers, more fire occurrence, So it would kind of kind of convert more to an Aspen parkland sort of thing, like like Yukon Territory is. But it’s gotten so much wetter, just so fast, that I don’t know if that’s still true with those climate models.

01:25:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what surprises me is that I guess I don’t know. I surprise is the right word. Yeah, sure that wolves don’t hammer them, or the brown bears don’t hammer them, But then you think, like they don’t know how to deal with them, because they can. They have a defense mechanism, right, they got sharp horns, they got really powerful hoofs. And I’ve read in the past that like it’s a real learning curve for wolves to figure out how to kill one, yeah, without themselves getting killed. But I think you did say you’ve had a couple.

01:25:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s an argument out there that with these reintroduced populations, it takes wolves and all predators maybe a couple decades, twenty twenty five years, you know, that’s kind of the Canadian experience for the predators to learn how to really kill efficiently bison. But even after they do, and even in populations that persist half persisted forever, like well Buffalo National Park and Yellowstone, predation rates are low in bison compared to all deer species like you know, white tails, meinies, you know, moose, elk, that sort of thing. Much higher predation rates in deer species, and if you think about a bison, they kind of look like a you know, big slow animal, but they’re not. They’re they’re quick and agile, and they can kick with all four feet. They got the horns. They’re super strong, they’re big, they’re fast, you know, they’re fast runners, and so it’s hard to kill those things. And then they work socially together against predators. So uh, you know, when when a bear shows up, they’ll or any predator. And I’ve seen this from the air. You know, when when wolves show up that they’ll they’ll approach those predators, which is really interesting, you know, I mean go to them. Yeah, yeah, they’ll just kind of the calves will kind of work their way to the middle of the group, and the cows will just kind of like walk toward the wolves. And I’ve seen, really I’ve seen a group of bison and the anoka where there was you know, three or four wolves kind of around the edge, and and uh and they just kind of had a standoff for half hour forty minutes and then and and the cows just you know, kept you know, working their way toward the wolves, and eventually the wolves just kind of got tired of it and and worked their way you know when it did something else.

01:27:24
Speaker 1: That’s a spear fisherman move with sharks. Really, the friends of mine them just show me, don’t Yeah, they’ll go at, they’ll go to them. And it throws the sharks whole perception of what’s going on, like changes his whole groove. He’s like home and what, Yeah, you’re coming to me, and they don’t like it.

01:27:41
Speaker 2: There’s a body language, there’s a predator and prey body language. And I remember the most significant time I’ve ever done that, if you’ll allow me, a little rabbit hole is a buddy and I landed uh in the spring for bear hunting in the Brooks Range, and UH at night overnight the river came up and so we couldn’t take off in the place that we’d landed, and so we had to make a new runway fartherer up on this growbar, and there’s a bunch of rocks. So we’re throwing off all these rocks and we’re just, you know, heads down, throwing rocks and making this runway, and at one point we look up and there’s a wolf that was kind of in between us, and he’s scouting us out, and you can tell he’s in predator mode. He’s looking at us very carefully, you know, and like kind of stalking us a little bit. And we were kind of just bent over doing all this work, and he thought, man, these must be prey animals, you know. And my buddy like looks at me, and there was a gun leaning against the airplane and you could tell like as soon as my buddy like went to you like looked back at this animal in a predatory posture, that wolf that knew that immediately He’s like, oh my god, these are prey predators. They’re not praying. He was gone no in a second. And so I think about that a lot when I’m working with wildlife. If I can act like a prey animal, I can, you know, make a lot more progress being around bison than I can a predator. And you know, cowboys do that a little bit with horses too. You know, if you try to act like a predator that they’re not real happy about that.

01:29:06
Speaker 1: Buddy mine, we were talking about this this thing with shark body language and sharks and a body mind who’s had a ton of exposure to sharks. He had an interesting observation he made me one time where I was I was commenting on and I didn’t growup around sharks, so everything’s new to me with sharks. But I was commenting on, it’s weird that you can like intimidate them by going at them, and he said, they can’t afford to get hurt. Like when he gets hurt, he’s done. The minute he’s hurt, his body’s all rip him apart. They’re just careful, you know. And it’s like you think about two with a wolf or a bear or whatever, like they don’t want to get hurt, you know. And he put them in this and if you put him in a situation where sometimes you put them in a situation where they’re like, I don’t know this thing, maybe’s gonna mess me up, it just changes their conversation, you know. They don’t want to get hurt.

01:29:58
Speaker 2: Well, back to predation on vice, and I think that’s their strategy is to try to face those those predators. And I think with bears it works really well because you got you know, twenty thirty bison on one bear. It’s a little bit Wolves can kind of break that because I think wolves as a group can work against a group of bison and finally get them run and then try to pick something out of the population, and you see that in the videos from Wood Buffalo National Park. Of course, Wood Buffalo National Park is a diseased heard so that both brussels and tuberculos brings down enough animals that it’s wolves can actually have a better time killing animals there and in a lot of these non disease populations. But I think that strategy that bison have to avoid predation is probably central to the reason why humans killed them off in North America is because we have weapons that if you stand and face a human being and the human being has a rifle, you’re done. You know, you have to run and get away. And that’s what serve its. You know, deer speed have done, is they running it away and they hide and things. Bison are in the wide open and they stand and face you. And so there’s an argument out there that bison are the only really, you know, the only North American angulate that absolutely requires modern conservation to exist because of their predator avoidance strategy. It’s impossible to just let people shoot whatever they want with rifles or even bows and they’ll just all be gone.

01:31:26
Speaker 1: Well, you look at another one. Muskogs have a similar approach, and they’re very easy to wipe out.

01:31:31
Speaker 2: Yep.

01:31:31
Speaker 1: There also exists at much lower numbers, but they were very easy to wipe out, yep. I mean they’re riping those things out, the Russians, even just the Russians initiating the fur traders wiping out muskogs in the Arctic, you know, because it would be the same thing, like, yeah, they don’t boogie.

01:31:46
Speaker 2: And so far, you know, alasa’s been trying to restore muskos too since nineteen fifty. And one of the issues there is that bears have figured out, you know, grizzly bears have figured out predation of muskogs, and they can get them running and out animals. You know, the muskots go into that you know, the tight group where they put the calves in the middle and stuff. But if they can get them run, and they can, they can kill some. And I think a bison are just so much larger, you know, Bison are you know, roughly three times larger than a muskox, and it’s a little bit tougher for a bear to kind of make that happen, I think.

01:32:19
Speaker 1: So let’s talk about the last one is the last area. So you you you got the Anoko Valley Mental Flats rub one hundred ducks and fished. It’s a cool spot. I’ll tell you a funny thing of Mental Flats. We one time at Mental Flats had been duck hunting and left our ducks land, I mean just right in our camp. In the morning. We had them all gutted and they’re gone and mink had hauled them off and we were able to recover them just by hunting around. You find them stashed in the woodpile, stashed in the holes, you know. But uh so you got some there. But it seems like the real promise, man, is that that that the Yukon Flats would work out? Like what needs to fall into place to do someone at Yukon Flats And if you imagine at Yukon Flats, and you can say this about the other release sights too, like if everything went perfectly, what is the estimate of how many you could have at Yukon Flats?

01:33:22
Speaker 2: Well, the estimate from the habitat assessment in nineteen ninety five was more than two thousand. Okay, so that’s not really a number. It just means greater than great in two thousand, Yeah.

01:33:35
Speaker 1: So it could I mean, let me ask you this, could it possibly dethrone Yellowstone National Park as the high number figuring there, you know, typically around you know, three thousand and four thousand, Could it possibly I mean, would it have the potential to knock that off? It’s to knock Yellowstone off, it’s off its bison pedestal.

01:33:59
Speaker 2: Well, humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future, but I think that, Yeah, I think it has the habitat absolutely.

01:34:08
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:34:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, It’s going to depend a little bit about the appetite for harvest from human beings and Yukon flats and you know, Alaska a little bit about the social uh density. So if we have we end up a lot of bison and Yukon flats, how do people do the people like that? You know when it comes to bison interaction with infrastructure, human human infrastructure, and so uh, there’s a lot of regulating factors there. But if you just take like what could live in Ukon flats, yeah, absolutely, I think we could have way more than Yellowstone in there. But you know, the asiac herd in Yukon territories ahead of us now they’re you know, they’re passing two thousand with a growing population. And so again the Asiac herd is the is the herd between white Horse and the Alaska border and Yukon territory. They’re going past two thousand animals with a growing herd right now. That’s super productive.

01:34:59
Speaker 1: I mean they’re and they’re just in like boreal forests and like aspen stands, and.

01:35:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s so weird. Yeah, they’re just open mixed forests essentially with some kind of aspen parkland. They’ve got some old like pleisiscene step kind of habitat on some of the big hills, you know, where it’s just kind of these grassy It looks a lot like that picture on your wall there where it’s just like the grassy slopes with you know, uh, you know, spruce and things mixed in. But it’s mostly boreal forests and a lot of it’s burned and stuff. You know. But that the productivity that population always stounds me. And I’m a little bit jealous, to be honest with you.

01:35:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what would it take to be able to do a release up you like, like, what are the obstacles right now to doing a lease? A release on Yukon flats is the obstacle having the animals.

01:35:48
Speaker 2: Not really. We’ve got the two captive populations in Alaska, we’ve got in agreement with Canada get more animals. We’ve gone through the public process, the public planning process here in the last few years, at our third public planning meeting, where we get thirty different interest groups or representatives from thirty different interest groups together in one room and we sit down for three days and we go through every possible thing anybody could ever want to say about bison. We record all that, we summarize it all, and we turn it into recommendations for the Board of Game and Fishing, Game and local Landowners in what’s called a management plan. That’s where we’re at right now. That public process has happened, and now we have to write that into a management plan, which I haven’t done yet. So I’m going to be summarizing the public process here over the next month or two, and then I’ll be trying to write a management plan. Over the course of the next year, we’re going to work out some logistics on how to get bison into Ukon flats. So a whole bunch of Yukon Flats is National Wildlife Refuge, and a bunch more of it is Native corporation land, both local Native corporations and regional Native corporations. And then there’s about five hundred square miles of state land in eastern Yukon Flats, and that’s where we’re going to go, is to that state land. We don’t have any access overland to that state land, so we’re gonna fly them all in. And so I got to work out all those details. And I’ve done some proof of concept work with flying bison and smaller airplanes, like to havel in beavers. Really yeah, I flew to.

01:37:21
Speaker 1: Uh, you can stand one up in there.

01:37:23
Speaker 2: No, no, no, they’re immobilized, so we just they just you just dart them, toss them in there with a lightweight veterinarian and uh, and go for it. And so I flew to the Mento Flats that way.

01:37:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, because a beaver can haul like two thousand pounds.

01:37:36
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, and you got a six hundred pound year ling or something like that, it’s no big deal. The two cows that I hauled were twenty two months old and they were there were something like that seven hundred pounds.

01:37:45
Speaker 1: Maybe, So why not barge them in?

01:37:47
Speaker 2: Well, the state land that we’re going to go to is Uh, maybe twenty miles or more from the Yukon River, so there’s no barging. There is a little tiny corner of it. That’s many many my it was probably two three hundred miles from the closest boat landing, and you could get there by riverboat. And so maybe you could haul one at a time on this, like you know, three day treks in a riverboat or something like that. But it’d be a real challenge.

01:38:11
Speaker 1: But you got the legal go ahead to do it.

01:38:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I won’t until I write the management plan and the Border Game approves the management plan. But right now all the political support exists, and I just got to make it through that last process of getting the plan written, approved internally in Fishing Game, and then approved by the Border Game, which is a panel of people appointed by the governor that sets wildlife regulations in Alaska.

01:38:40
Speaker 1: You know, I mentioned Colorado’s recent move to sort of buy for kate bison in the state of Colorado, where they’ve said there are bison in Colorado their livestock. We’re creating a new classification and just three mind, folks, it’s a new classification saying buffalo that come in naturally into the state that walk into the state will be treated as wildlife. They pave the way for hunting, which is a brilliant move because a thing you wind up with when you do introductions or reintroductions is you wind up with you might have wildlife managers that are planning on using hunting as a control mechanism in the future, and they’ll bring in an animal, and then later down the road you’ll encounter public resistance to hunting, even though it was the intentional long people down the road will be like, wait a minute, I thought they were endangered or imperiled, and now you tell me we have a hunting season for him. So in Colorado, they’ve already laid out that they’re like, they will be a big game animal. And the bill they passed even specified what a tag will cost. They set out the fine if you kill one or capture one, it’s a ten thousand dollars fine. There’s one thousand dollars restitution to the state for the loss of its asset. There’s a resident tag price, there’s like a really hefty, like twenty seven hundred dollars non resident tag price. But they don’t even have the animals yet. But they’re laying out like, here’s what it’s going to look like, right as this becomes a thing, Here’s what it looks like. What would it look like in the future, Like, how have you guys contemplated what it would look like when one of these populations is in the many hundreds or moves into the thousands, What would it ever look like to open up hunting opportunities? Because that’s probably part of the public buy in with locals is that in some way they are setting up a future in which they have a diversified portfolio of wild game available to them. Yeah, right, so what would how have you contemplated this?

01:41:06
Speaker 2: So the primary reason for this restoration is to restore this subspecies as a component of the ecosystem that functions in this empty niche. So that’s the that’s the number one reason. But if we are successful at it, then it will be a renewable natural resource that we can harvest. And that’s what you like you mentioned, there’s a lot of people that are counting on that. That’s that’s why we get a lot of support from your average person is because they think that someday they could harvest that that animal and it’s a pretty big boon, you know, to harvest you know, eight hundred pounds of meat or something like that. You know, it’s a it’s well worth it to a citizen to have that on the landscape. The way our regulatory system works is that every few years for each area, the Border Game meets and they hear proposals from the last compartment Fishing Game, and just average citizens can just put a proposal in to change regulation in Alaska and so that there then there’s a process of locally elected citizen advisory committees, and each village and each large community they can also produce proposals and they you know, vote any proposal from anybody else up or down, and that all works its way up to the Border Game and when they get to these Boarder Game meetings, the Board of Game reviews that proposal, They hear all the public testimony from everybody else, including the department’s perspective fishing Game department, which is usually just a biological perspective, and then they make a decision right then there, this is how we’re going to do it. But there’s a lot of options, Like I’ve written in the management plan for the Mento population or lower ten and not populations, it’s the formal name where you know, there could be drawing permits, there could be registration permits that there could be all of the permits that are available to hunt any other species are as a possibility, and so we really don’t know what that hunt structure is. When we first started releasing animals in Anoko, before we were going to go to the Yenoko with the animals, the planning team there set up this. They had it all figured out. They were like, Okay, the hunt’s going to be this many drawing permits, this many locally registraed locally available.

01:43:11
Speaker 1: Registration gets them on the ground totally. Yeah.

01:43:14
Speaker 2: And they had they had you know, we’re gonna have a trespass fee on on these lands and and so people can you know, access these bison on private lands, and like, we’re gonna have a scholarship fund that a bunch of these trespass fee dollars goes into and that helps local people go to college to study, you know, by and they were just going for it, and and they I thought it was a beautiful piece of work of people trying to work together to make something happen. It was just absolutely wonderful. However, over time, when the Ynokle population didn’t perform as well and then different people you know, were elected into different these different groups that helped make that that then it changed over over over time.

01:43:52
Speaker 1: And so.

01:43:54
Speaker 2: I think one of the important things to realize is that it’s not the people from Night teen twenty eight when they release the bison and delta junction that determine how we’re going to hunt those bison today. It’s the people of today that determine how we’re going to hunt bison today, and through the Board a Game thing, and so we can record everything that people want to see happen with wood bison now before they go on the landscape. And that’s why we have this public planning process where we we write down everything everybody says, any opposition, any support, any any concerns, all that stuff, and then try to address that and these management plans so that later on, when the Board A Game does hear proposals regarding a harvestable surplus in a particular bison population, then they can look back at these recommendations that were there originally and be like, oh, yeah, well they really wanted the harvest to be you know, to include local people as much as it includes everybody else, and you know whatever, and then try to act in that way if they if they choose to. But as you know, public trust resources, there’s a lot of conflict there because and there always will be. That’s why we have a Board of Game and all this citizen advisory groups and all that is because there will always be conflict about something that we all own together, you know, because we’re a territorial social animal, and we want those resources to go to our group, not some other group, you know, whatever our group is. And so it’s a challenge.

01:45:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, you raise a really good point when you say that when it’s time, if and when it’s time to do a hunt, it’ll be the people. Then figure it out because like I said, with the original, the nineteen twenty eight ones, I mean, think about what happened since then and now statehood, the Native Claims Settlement Act, I mean, you know, I mean like you can’t anticipate.

01:45:45
Speaker 2: Totally, you know what I mean, right, And in Alaska regulations I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but prior to like nineteen eighty nine or so, we could discriminate by someone where you live, we could give more permits to people in this town than people in this town because say they were closer to the resource, or they had more subsistence you know, history there in a particular resource or something like that. Well, we lost that to a court case in the late nineteen eighties where it said, all right, the last Constitution says that all people have equal access to wildlife resources, and so we have to treat all people equally. We can’t discriminate based on where you live. That was a difficult thing. Well, then does the federal government stepped in and said, oh no, that’s not fair. Through a nilka, we are going to say that you have to provide a priority for rural people on resources and you know, on federal land. And so that created this kind of dual management system between the state and the federal government. And that’s been really complicated. Well that just happened.

01:46:42
Speaker 1: That’s gonna I mean, we’re going to talk about this on an upcoming up. So that system is in a review process right now. The current the Trump administration is reviewing the Federal Subsistence Board and so some of the decisions they’ve made recently, and so that could be again, you know, just another we don’t need to get into.

01:47:05
Speaker 2: It now, but I mean it’s like, but my point is that things do.

01:47:08
Speaker 1: They’re poking and prodden at it right now, you know, and you.

01:47:11
Speaker 2: Just added to it. I mean, I think things change. You know, thirty years ago the state could do that, then the federal government can do that. Well, who know thirty years from now, when we have a big harvestable surpus of bison in a particular area, who knows what the regulations are going to be.

01:47:21
Speaker 1: Then Hey, I don’t want to I don’t want to paint you into a corner here, but I mean, just like, no, I mean, just just for conversation’s sake, what would you put one hundred and thirty animals on the ground. Okay, you put one hundred and thirty wood bison on the in the lower n Oocle Valley If you just had to get like, what would be a number that would make sense to you in the future where if you heard from your grave or wherever you heard, hey, they’re running a bunch of the they’re giving out twenty per permits in the Anoko Valley, you’d think to yourself, well, I hope there’s at least blank animals on the ground. Ten permits they’re given out ten permits, you’d say, I hope there’s at least.

01:48:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I want to see a minimum viable population of four hundred or more for the long term. But we’ve harvested plane spice, and you mentioned all the herds, the plane spice and herds in Alaska, and it’s a lot of those bisons. Bison herds have been managed at less than two hundred for for decades and decades, and uh so we know it’s possible, and I think we could have a hunt in the Nooko now. We could have one or two drawing permits. There are no problem without any sort of issue with right now, yeah, right now. But the planning team doesn’t want that yet.

01:48:44
Speaker 1: Now the last it does, I’m all for a little hunting, you know, it does feel a little free mature.

01:48:50
Speaker 2: Well what they what the planning So the planning team includes all kinds of people, right, it’s all the local people and urban people and safari club and animal welfare groups and all that we.

01:48:58
Speaker 1: Are welfare groups in on it. They didn’t do anything.

01:49:03
Speaker 2: I think I’ll let that one go with So we’re doing it’s just part of we’re trying to get be inclusive, right, you know, get everybody in there. Maybe Animal wor for Chris is the Whilelife I don’t know, like Alaska Whilelife Alliance, and there’s another one I can’t remember the name of it right now. Anyway, we’re just gonna want to keep everybody involved so people don’t feel alienated and come back later with them.

01:49:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, I understand.

01:49:28
Speaker 2: Anyway, where was I going with this?

01:49:31
Speaker 1: Oh?

01:49:32
Speaker 2: So this group that’s the planning team, the site specific planning team for the Unoko Uh. They first started out and said, well, we don’t want to start any harvest until we have a harvestable surplus of twenty animals. Are going to run part of that into drawing permits and part of that into locally issued registration permits so that local people will have the ability to harvest in the presence of drawing permits. Well, when the population wasn’t that productive. Then now they lowered that to they’re like, well, when there’s a harvest of will surplus of ten and so at the last meeting, I was like, well, do you guys there’s enough to have a harvest of a few? Do you guys want a harvest few and they were like, Nope, we want to start this in a way that there’s local harvest and drawing permits. And of course drawing permits do service local people too, but they just have a small chance of getting a permit. And we have no way because of that court case and the last constitution. We have no way of just giving permits of local people. We have a way of you can issue local registration permits where you’re more likely to get it if you’re local. The problem is the planning team can predict this and they can say what they want, but ultimately it’ll come down to a border game action. And nobody’s done a proposal to start a hunt in the enoko. If somebody would would propose that there should be hunting the enoko, then that would kind of force the issue and we’d have to go through that process. Uh.

01:51:04
Speaker 1: With the when you talk about the permit thing and the local hunt and all that, they also have a mechanism to stay as a mechanism too, where you have to destroy the trophy value of the animal.

01:51:17
Speaker 2: That’s that is in some places, yeah, on some species.

01:51:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, Win said, here’s the deal. Though you can’t take the horns, you cut the horns in half. You would lose a lot of outside You wouldn’t lose my interest, but you lose the outside interest.

01:51:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, that happens. People do that if they think that the you know, Yeah, there’s a bunch of little tools like that to try to level the playing field between different user groups.

01:51:44
Speaker 1: But I think, man, I think that you got to wait till you got a way, till you’re on a steady upward incline. Man, I think it’s a little early right.

01:51:50
Speaker 2: Now, and I think that’s going to depend on the weather, which is something we can’t predict, right.

01:51:55
Speaker 1: But I think it’s like I don’t care what I think, but I’ll tell you anyway. I think that having that I think that having that hunter buying is really important, and it’s a it’s a thing that frustrates me down here in the Northern Rockies and well in the entire in the West. The thing that frustrates me is it’s just an area where you don’t see, we don’t see widespread hunter buy in on buffalo restoration. I think people can’t picture it meaning this whole brucellosis thing. If someone, if a politician in Montana said, hey, man, we’re really worried about brucellosis. We’re gonna start killing every elk that walks out of that park. It’s a political suicide. It’s political suicide. Hunters have a fit, you know, hunters that have a fit. They’re like, if anyone elk walks out of the park, we’re shooting it or hauling it away. Yeah, dude, they would. They would be apoplectic. Hunters would be. And as much as I invite people to be like now, no, no, listen, like restoring these animals is a long term hunting play. Like restoring these animals, I’m always like, picture man, picture that we have public herds on public land and you draw tags and hunt them like we do for moose and everything else. And I think it’s too far fetched, Like you just don’t see hunters in on it some but not all. It’s too far fetched to picture. But I view in order to get more more of the animals on the landscape, I think that it’s gonna be really important for hunters to like advocate for that, knowing that it might not even be for their benefit, but it might be for their kids benefit. And that happens all the time because you look at like you go to like, look at people in bighorn all the people that do work on bighorn sheep. Okay, all the people that support Wild Sheep Foundation. There’s a lot of people that support wild sheep we’re called and conservation that are never going to hunt big horns. They’re never gonna hunt big horns. I’ve never hunted a big horn. I’m all for big horn recovery, right, So it’s not just that people do it. Like the people that were involved and bringing elk back into Kentucky, there were people that were heavily involved in bringing elk back into Kentucky that knew they were never going to hunt elk, but they did it as hunters, right. They did it as they were their heart as a hunter, motivating them to get involved even though they themselves weren’t going to benefit from it. So I think that like I wish more hunters were involved in, like in building up public publicly owned herds, using public land as a long term play of being not just that you’re doing the right thing by the wildlife, but motivated as a long term play of restoring this really important game species onto the American landscape. It’s like the forgotten game animal. Yeah, and you go back and look like the tribes that lived here historically, that was their pick man. They were slumming it when they deer meat, they were slumming it when they pronghorn. Yeah, that’s what they wanted. And I just think we need to get back there.

01:55:21
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that that is the main motivation for most people, is the concept that someday they might get something.

01:55:27
Speaker 1: But we have to be But I don’t think it’s a bad motivation.

01:55:30
Speaker 2: No, no it’s not. But we have to be as biologists. We have to be brutally honest with them and say, this is an experiment. We’re going to try to make a renewable resource. We’re going to try to fill this empty niche in the ecosystem and improve nutrient cycling at all trophic levels, from insects up to human beings. But it may fail.

01:55:49
Speaker 1: You know.

01:55:49
Speaker 2: The unocle population, as you pointed out, is you know, is not climbing at this moment. Maybe these other populations that we try, maybe maybe they won’t work out either. But if we look at history and we look at bison, what bison can do, it might be a massive success.

01:56:04
Speaker 1: You know. And earlier I made like I made a comment about I think before we started recording, I made a comment to you without explaining myself, where I said, use an oral tradition or archaeology or paleontology to prove that bison were in the modern period present in Alaska, right, so that you have the political cover of saying it’s it’s a reintroduction or recovery effort, which relies on you saying they were here and they were wiped out by people or people were influential in wiping them out. That gives you the political cover right to go ahead and bring the animals back in. And I said, I don’t really even care if it’s true or not. What I meant by that is at European Contact, we had forty million of them, Somewhere around forty million. You hear twenty eight million, you hear sixty million a bunch. There was a bunch, and not all areas are suitable. So in bringing the animal back me personally, I’m not so concerned about having it match up exactly to where they were historically. I mentioned that group that’s living on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. They’re spending a bunch of time in Grand Canyon, National Park. And in this whole conversation about whether the animals belong there is this thing, well, how many were there historically? And they’re like, oh, it was marginal habitat at best, it was fringe habitat at best. I’m like, I don’t care. It’s suitable. It’s a suitable location for them now. They can be there now. Maybe maybe there were more of them one hundred miles away, Like, I don’t care. The public wants them there, the habitat supports them being there. It’s okay for them to be there. Let them be there because there’s places like they’re not going to be in downtown Dodge City, but Dodge City had a lot. It ain’t gonna have a lot now. So it’s like where its suitable put them on there, right, yeah, because there’s a lot of places to be covered up. And so if it winds up being that, you can go into valleys in Alaska and it’s not and they’re not coming at the cost. They’re not pushing moose into extinction and they’re not pushing caribou into extinction, and local people want them there. I’m like, go for it, because we have a lot of ground to recover.

01:58:33
Speaker 2: I completely agree, yeap, that the problem is right now is the constraints of the endangered species that actn make it difficult to just do those paths of least resistance where we find places that people want them and the habitat’s good and we can just put them there. We just can’t go willy nearly like that. We have to stick to that.

01:58:51
Speaker 1: And it’s a lot easier for me to be a dude sitting here like telling you all about everything that should happen, Like, yeah, you’re the huge that there’s a huge difference between me and you. I mean, I can say all these like grandiose ideas, but then you got to live the reality and like, thank god, I’m not putting animals on the ground you are. So I appreciate the obstacles. Yeah, you know, I appreciate the obstacles, but I I just like that’s all like a long wind away of saying that. I’m like, I really am elated, Like I’m the work from my personal perspective, the work you guys doing is beautiful. I think it’s like a really cool testament to the state aspects of the political atmosphere, the social atmosphere, the state game agency like to kind of have the audacity to like try to do this. You know, I think it’s great, man, I think it’s great. And until someone can come and point out some overwhelming harm that none of us have anticipated, I think it’s like full steam ahead, man, I think it should. Like I wish you guys the best of luck.

01:59:54
Speaker 2: Thanks. Yeah about the harm saying, there are no studies that I know of where bison show that they’ve harmed other species. But there are many many studies that I know we’re buy some help other species, you know, like I said, everywhere from all trophic levels, from insects right on up to you know, human beings, and so it’s a yeah, I think they bring a lot of benefit to most systems.

02:00:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to point out folks, like there is one last thing I’ll make on the same point is if you go back to European time of European contact, they think that there were turkeys in thirty four states. We have wild turkeys in forty nine states. Now, why is that? Because it just no one people have looked, No one can go and find where they’re causing harm. They’re not driving species to extinction, they’re not displacing native wildlife right, It’s like they’re just not causing problems. That’s why we don’t have turkey eradication effort. People welcome and being on the landscape, and I think there’s gonna become more and more places. This is where not only do people welcome out in the landscape, there’s gonna be come more and more places where people like, hey, man, why can’t we have some right, like, let’s get some back. And they’re big, they’re dangerous, I don’t know, tough shit.

02:01:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s like I hope it can be that way with bison, and I think it can be. I mean, yeah, there’s such a valuable resource. I think it’s worth trying. Oh now, I tell you what too.

02:01:23
Speaker 1: I used to when I first got a hide off one, we’d try to sleep under it. It’s got pretty cold for you to sleep under that thing. Man. It’s all there is a useful animal.

02:01:32
Speaker 2: Man.

02:01:33
Speaker 1: But I sure I appreciate you coming in and talking about your work. Glad to be here, thank you, and this is home for you originally. Yeah, yeah, I was born and raised in Montana. I left when I was eighteen, But did you go right to Alaska?

02:01:44
Speaker 2: Went right to Alaska? Go to school UF Fairbanks.

02:01:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you’re married. Yeah, I’ll long. You been married.

02:01:52
Speaker 2: Twenty six years this summer. But I was with her for three years more than that, so almost thirty years.

02:01:58
Speaker 1: So if your wife is driving at sixty miles an hour and she looks out the window, can she say wood bison or planes bison?

02:02:06
Speaker 2: I don’t think she could. No, I’m not totally, but I.

02:02:12
Speaker 1: Understand it’s stressful. Well, dude, thanks so much for coming on, and thanks to your agency for letting you come on.

02:02:21
Speaker 2: Welcome.

02:02:21
Speaker 1: I know sometimes there’s reluctant to cut people loose some big, long conversations about policy. I don’t think. I don’t think you cause any trouble for anybody.

02:02:28
Speaker 2: Hope we’ll find out when I get back.

02:02:30
Speaker 1: Thanks man, I appreciate it all right, everybody else? Tom Seaton from Alaska Department of Fishing Game tell me the title again.

02:02:37
Speaker 2: Uh, Wood Bison Project Biologists for Apartment of Fishing.

02:02:40
Speaker 1: Game, Wood Bison Project Project Biologists. And if people want to check out some of you guys work, what’s the best place to go? Look?

02:02:47
Speaker 2: Well, I’ve got a website if you just google, you know Alaska wood Bison Restoration and Alaska Apartment of Fishing Game. Uh, there’s all kinds of documents on there. The website’s a little bit old right now. We’ve got a new draft that will should come out in the next few months. But yeah, there’s all kinds of information if they want to dig into it.

02:03:03
Speaker 1: And if you’re looking for where you click to apply for a tag. It’s too early, but you can apply for the planes bison hunts, right, you know you can apply for those. Be allowed to keep waiting to get your wood bison permit, So stay tuned. Thanks again, Tom,