Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your fave. It's so like, say subscribe and rade it.
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Today listening watching lim always keep its watching.
And now your host's Cliff Berrickman and James Bobo Fay, Hey, Bobs, excuse me, it's like he's here. Actually Bobo is not here. That's Robo Bobo. Hey, Robo Bobo. For you, it's like he's really here. Yeah, okay, but for real now hey, everybody that's Cliff and Bobo is not here today. But Matt pru It is, Hey, Matt, how you doing.
I'm good. How are you doing?
Oh I'm hanging in there, Amanda super busy as usual.
Yeah.
So Bobo is tied up unfortunately right now, so he's not going to make it tonight. He had something to do with like some sort of like pigeon calling contests or whatever, some underground pigeon calling contests. I can't really talk about it. Bobo couldn't talk about it, and he didn't hear it from me. So anyway, Yeah, something weird is going on. So he's not going to be here tonight. That's all right, that's right, we got it covered. This isn't the first time, it won't be the last one,
for sure. It's like he's here. It's just like he's here. But anyway, we do have somebody here. We have the lovely and talented Shelley Covington, Montana, who's a super citizen scientist, nerd into gathering all kinds of evidence. She's a trained tracker, a trained naturalist, super fired enough about doing anything outdoors at all and gathering information on it. So we're super excited about that. Now. I don't know if Bobo would mind if I do this interview by myself whatever, Cliff
can have it. Thanks Robo, Bobo. I appreciate it. And with that, let's bring in Shelley. So, Shelley, how are you doing today?
I'm doing great? How are you doing?
Doing all right? As usual, as all my listeners are, all of our listeners know, I'm always spread too thin. But such as life, Such as life. So I saw you a couple of weeks ago in Ohio. How do you think the gig win?
You know what? It was great.
I was very impressed by the audience and everybody there were so nice, and it was just an opportunity for me to get on the other side of the country and you know, fresh fresh ideas, I guess for people. I had a lot of great feedback. People were very very receptive about my techniques and you know what, I like to share and hopefully, you know, some of those
guys and ladies will come well. Actually I did have a few tell me that they were they were highly influenced by ideas of nature journaling and getting into the tracking field and to better educate themselves on how to read you know, disturbances and things like that that can help us.
You know, maybe figure out a little bit of what isn't bigfoot?
Right, Yeah, that that seems to be the challenge for a lot of people because if they're going bigfooting and anything happens, they find anything, they see anything, it is a big foot. And the number one thing you should do is kind of eliminate that possibility, or eliminate every other possibility I suppose before you come to the bigfoot conclusion exactly.
I mean, that's you know that right there says it all.
I mean, it's bigfoot last, you know, and in my world, and I feel that I'm just too old and I just don't have enough time to play around with, you know, one hundred different possibilities. How about we just get rid of the most probable and then narrow it down.
To a few possibilities.
So these things that I love, as far as wildlife tracking and DNA collection and thermal work and all of that kind of stuff is really kind of you know, in my in my mind, it's it's tools for my tool build because I feel like we can always.
Have better tools.
You know, Whacking on trees and doing calls and stuff is fun. But unless you see that that entity doing those things, we still we still really can't assume that it is one thing or another. And so I'm just really interested and passionate about that citizen science stuff. It's just way fun and it gets you connected to everything, you know.
So yeah, we can all use we can all use better tools, as you said, because I've been called a tool lots of times, which means I should be doing better, I think, well.
I've been called worse. I don't know that I've been called a tool. But it's okay, you know, it's okay.
We are who we.
Are, and and I think you're a great tool.
You're a great tool. You're a good bad asset asset, that's right. That's better than ass hat. I'm usually only half of that, right, right.
But there are things like so one of the things I'll always remember you telling me, or say you weren't even telling me. I think you were giving a speech at a conference or presentation, and I remember you saying to put your game cameras near the people's stuff, you know, the human stuff, and like not out in the middle of the woods, per se, because it doesn't.
Belong there and things will know it doesn't.
And I always resonated with that, you know, I felt like that's really a great that's just a great tool for me, you know, is to think along those lines of And that's one of the things that I wanted to talk about today as we get into whatever you all want want to talk about, but was why aren't we getting better pictures, you know, with game cams and thermals?
And I'm kind of dabbling in some things that I've been thinking about for years and years and years that have bothered me, or I've questioned why why do they do this?
What is you know? From signings?
Before we get to that, it just occurred to me that we're just hanging out because you and I know each other. We've known each other for years, you know, but there's probably some listeners who don't know you. And I very often forget if I don't know all of our listeners have heard me say this lots of times. I forget anybody else's listening, but for the sake of the people who actually are listening, because I just remember
that some people are actually listening to this. Can you give a nutshell version, like a brief paragraph, tell us a little bit about like who you were, and then I want to know about how you've grown since last time you were on the podcast.
Yeah.
So my name is Shelly Covington, Montana and I'm from Texas.
I'm not from Montana. I get that a lot.
But and I've been married for almost forty years to my wonderful husband, Don Covington. He is wonderful, yes, yes, And he had an encounter in the eighties here in Texas, and I've known him all my life since I was fourteen, and I kept hearing this crazy story how he got ran out of the woods by something. He really wouldn't speculate too much about it.
But finally I.
Figured out what he was talking about and asked him if it was bigfoot, and he said, well, I just didn't want to think it was crazy. So that just kind of launched me into this world of what the heck is this because I knew he was telling me the truth. And you know, by that time, this was like two thousand and ten ish, I think, and by that time I was our children already grown and gone, you know, to college and.
Out of the house, and I had my background.
You know, I consider myself, while laft enthusiast, I don't like to call myself a researcher. I don't know that I've earned that, but I am very in tune with the outdoors. I consider that more of a place I love and feel comfortable. And then, you know, the big city, even though I lived near one. I was a cosmetics vendor for years and a flooris before that, so I
kind of did my big footstuff in the summers. My job allowed me to where I take off for the whole summer and I go to the Pacific Northwest year after year, and eventually it just got to where I just quit doing the cosmic thing. It just was too much.
It wasn't my passion anymore. So I really focused on what could help me do what was because what I was saying before there, I just felt there were no real tools for people like us that, you know, other than maybe some game cameras and hitting the tree and recorders and such.
But I felt like it just needed.
To be more, especially for me, because I wanted to find answers. And so my dad is a retired law enforcement officer, and I knew you would be expecting, you know, factual things for me.
Why am I doing this in the first place.
So I really just delved into wildlife DNA keds and what was out there and what was available because everybody was talking about DNA and collecting DNA, and I noticed that people were doing a kind.
Of a crazy job at it, like picking it up with their hands and such, and so I delved into that.
And that's been kind of the hill I've been preaching on, I guess since around twenty thirteen or fourteen, and.
Today the kids are able to collect.
Any kind of DNA really and I'm still learning and it's really pushed me into just being more educated. But in the sense of this also led me down the path of getting certified as a wildlife trucker, and.
I'm a level two. That doesn't mean much. That means I'm mediocre.
I'm no expert, but my mind and my eyes can see detail that I was walking past every day in the woods, and to help me just sweep out what the most possible is and focus on things that are different or even new. Let's say I'm a known species doing a known behavior behavior in a different region.
And then nature journaling I got.
Really into that and how that is a form of data collection where I sit down and I draw tracks so that I can memorize facts of tracks. That way, I can tell you if you know, or tell myself, Okay, this is what I see, and this is why this is not a dog man track or or a wolf track or.
Any of those things.
But also nature journally, let's say, uh, you're really into tree structures, which you know, I don't know, but a nature journal los And what that does is it starts to get your mind to notice detail, to ask better questions, Like you know, there's three questions you should ask.
Yourself when you're journaling in nature.
Because those are those are things that will start to move you outside of what you already know, which is I wonder I notice and it reminds me of and so I do these these tree structure journaling things, you know, and maybe let's say in ten years we discover that sasquatch is proven. You know, it's proven, and they have no data. Well what if they do make tree structures or if they don't, there's your data, you know, no
matter what. If you're making, you know, journaling things like this that you believe, let's say it's it's it's sasquatch beds or nets or whatever.
If you're finding those.
In journaling them and asking those three questions, and just continue pushing yourself to ask better questions, it's gonna be data, whether it is sasquatch or not.
It's data of something. I mean.
We have a friend, Kim Morale, his wife Miriam, she's a retired firefight and she is she nature journals almost full time. She's written a book about it. But she natured journals fire and wildlife fires and what causes them, what the effects are, how they work. It is amazing and no one's ever done that. So these basic tools, getting back to the basic citizens science arts, which is you know I believe tracking was the very first science
and art. I think we probably were scavengers before we were hunter gatherers, and we had to follow animals the scavenge.
Off of them. And how did we do that?
We tracked them and we learned the morphology, and we learned how they moved, and we learned the behaviors. And when your mind starts opening up to those things, you see a whole new world. And I can never learn enough. And where I was when I first started, when I first did your podcast and today is just that I'll continue to go out educate myself. I continue to go and be certified over and over and learn more things in different regions.
When you stay certified over and over, do you mean re certified or certifying in a higher degrees in that same skill or what do you mean by that both?
I mean so in the certifications, there's level one, two, three, and four, and then there's professional and there's specialists, and then there's what we call trailing certifications. Now, trailing is when you actually follow tracks and sign and you only pass when you find the animal that's made those tracks inside.
So at the end here he is.
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You know. And something about the nature journaling that I'd like to put in here, and I'm sure I mentioned it last time you were on, is that you know science as a as a very very broad field, shall we say, is fairly new. Two hundred years ago there weren't scientists. They were called naturalists. I think we often forget because we have iPhones and computers and we think we're pretty fancy, but we're not at all. You know, two hundred years ago we didn't know germs existed. One
hundred and fifty years we didn't know germs existed. We are in our infancy of scientific understanding. But before that, the baby steps of getting to the point where humans could be considered scientists, that was all. They were naturalists at the time, and can you image where we would be without Like Charles Darwin's journals, he was basically nature journaling essentially is what he is people. And I think that's a stumbling block for people in the Bigfoot community
who want to be more scientific. They think that it's all XL sheets and numbers and stuff, and sure that exists, but the nature journaling side is truly the root of all that, and that is extraordinarily useful and valid data. I think of Tom Shae for example. Tom Shay has several piles of two to three feet tall of spiral notebooks and when he goes out he writes the day, the temperature of the weather, if you find something or not. It's set very very basic stuff, a treasure trove of information,
and anybody can do this. People say, what's the most important piece of gear I can get, thinking that it's a thermal No, it's a spiral notebook or something that's rights.
And think about it this way.
All the pictographs we see throughout the desert that was nature journaling.
So you're exactly right. And the nature journaling and.
The tracking it can be as elementary as you want. Anybody can do it. You know that the master trackers that the group I'm working, I work with or I'm certified by, is called CyberTracker dot org and the cyber is kind of misleading because this was all created by gentlemen who realized that the tracking art master tracking art was dying and we needed it for conservation all over
the world. So he went to Africa and learned from the last of the last, who still don't actually read and write, but track.
Because that's how they live every day.
We don't live like that, right, And so he was trying to help with the sense of them being able to collect data because they knew the landscape, they knew the region, they knew everything that was going on in their countries, and to help with poaching, you know, to stop poaching and conservation.
So they gave them these little units.
That were they call them cyber units, that had just little icons on them so they could press in the data. So it is for anybody, you know, five year old up to one hundred and five year olds. Everybody and anybody can do this and it is essential. Like you said, I mean the most some of the most important discoveries to this day are done by people like us who are not sitting behind a cubicle or you know, in a in a university who those are great and very
needed individuals. But we're not held by bounds of how to ouput it, rules and grants. You know, we're free and the government needs this.
You know, imprisoned by what is going to make somebody else money and that somebody else is paying them to do the research. That's one of the neatest things about it. In fact, that's one of the things that initially drew me into the bigfoot field. Is that back in the day, you know, when I was twenty two years old or twenty three years old, however, it was when I started taking this seriously, I was an amateur and still am
an amateur astronomer. I've got a pretty nice scope and everything else, you know, I love, and the vast majority of new comets and asteroids are discovered by amateurs. And because the professionals will telescope time is expensive and grant money is hard to get and all that sort of stuff, And the sasquash field is exactly the same, exactly the same.
There's way more amateurs like us, like me out there and you doing this sort of thing than there are primatologists who take it seriously and can spend time in the field. It's up to us because they can't do it. It's not some weird conspiracy where they're ignoring and they're trying to hide this and they're misleading you and they're lying to you, like some of the crazies are saying
out there. But it is just a matter of facts, like those people are busy and we're the ones with spare time, and so we can go do it, which is all the more reason for us to up our game. Yeah.
Absolutely, And this is what my I feel like. If it fail her to, you know, pass.
Tomorrow, what would my legacy be?
And I would hope it would be that I helped influence the younger generation or anybody to look at what we do as the scientific side in the citizens science field or whatever you want to call it. I've heard that's even an offensive term, but I don't care to. Where we are just benefiting the possibility people getting out and making discoveries of their own, and that's what I want.
I want.
You know, nothing is more exciting for me than an individual that comes up and says, hey, Shelly, I got my eye naturalists masters. I'm a master naturalist now because of you expressing how fun and.
Important this is. Because I love nature.
You know, most of these people that do what we do, they love nature, right, They're always out in the woods, you know. They tell us they're boosts on the ground all the time. And it's like, okay, well you can make that benefit you in the long run to where you're gathering more information.
You may even get a job. I don't know, you might want to be a bark ranger. Who knows.
But I love that idea of us getting away from our computers and the II and our cell phones and all of that and getting back to wilderness therapy. That's what it is for me anyway. And it just adds to the bigger picture. I mean, there's gonna be other discoveries besides sasquatch with people like us, and that's exciting too.
Yeah, they just won't be as important.
Right well, yeah, you know, the great North American Sasquatch is our national treasure.
In my eyes, I'm one behind that.
So how about a book? Have you thought about a book? Like a just real simple you.
Know, yeah, And there may be some other things coming soon with like field guide kind of things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff like that, because you know it's one thing to say, yeah, everybody go nature journal it's fun and cool and easy. But when you go buy a spiral notebook, like when you sit down at the pen in the woods, like I think a lot of people might run into some resistance within themselves, like what do I do here? And it might be good to have an example like that out.
There, right, Yeah, exactly.
And that's that's you know, some of the things I wanted to talk about today. At the end of the podcast, I'm going to be giving out some reference material and some uh like Facebook pages like animals Don't Cover their Tracks is a fantastic Facebook page. It's all it's filled with doctor Melm's even there and there I think it's filled with a certified cyber tracker specialists from all over the world. I'm telling you, these people are so smart. I'm I talk a lot, but I don't talk in there.
I listen and I naturally dot org see.
Cybertreker dot org and people I encourage people to go and find in their areas, like in the if my next certification I want to take in the Pacific Northwest, and you can go to CyberTracker dot org and find classes. If there's somebody giving classes or certifications and you don't have to. You can take a certification and not know a thing and but will give you a very, very
in depth taste of what this is all about. It's a two day process and they'll tell well, the people I took my certification from the head biologist of the Texas for Endangered Species, he's the guy that gives me my test. They were just like, well, you're going to fail, so just be prepared.
And I'm like, no, I'm not.
No, no, no, no, no, you know, I'm going to study. I don't want to fail. I mean, it's a little expensive. It for two days, it's like three four hundred dollars, but it's intent and it is a plethora of knowledge. If you went to YouTube and just type in nature journaling, there's a plethora of nature journaling tutorials to get people started on that. Like I said, sit down, nature journal whatever it is, even if it's a flower or bird, or just to get you to start seeing detail, detailed detail.
One of the things I always ask witnesses to do is draw, which is essentially a type of nature journaling, and it doesn't take literacy. You don't have to worry about your grammar or punctuation. You don't have to worry about spelling in any of this nature journaling stuff at all. The point is to get your thoughts on paper. But I find that when I ask somebody to draw, that are automatically resistant to it. Oh, I'm not an artist.
It's not going to look like blah blah blah. But that doesn't matter, and I don't think that's the point of nature journaling either, and correct me if I'm wrong, But it seems to me that whenever I have somebody
draw something that they have observed, new details emerge. And I think it's such a good exercise for anybody to do draw a picture of what you think you see, because you're going to learn something about what you're observing just by making that connection between your visual stimulus and the kinetic motion of moving the pin around on the paper. It engages multiple modalities of learning, and going back in my elementary school teaching days, modalities are how you learn.
I am a very visual learner. I learned by looking at things and listening to things, what probably explains my musicality. You know, but quote unquote bad kids in class. There always the kinesetic ones that have to move around, and they're only the quote unquote bad kids in class because they can't sit still and the teacher doesn't recognize that that's how they learn. But by engaging multiple modalities, you
you engulf just so much more information. And that's exactly what this nature journaling sort of thing does for someone. Whether you're drawing or writing or stick figures, it doesn't matter. I can't sing your praises high enough for bringing that to the attention of well.
Yeah, and nature journaling is for that individual. It's not for if you want it to be for the world, sure, but it's not. It's for you first and foremost and what you're observing and for your memories and down the road. You know, I look at all of my you know, I write things down and books. I have tons of notebooks, and I also take notes on my iPhone and I take you know, I take notes everywhere in a nature journal and I've got years of stuff and I go back.
I even do voice journaling, like I'll just.
Talk into my notes and record myself and what I observed and how I feel about it. And there's nothing more interesting than to find something you wrote or drew or thought and recorded ten years ago and you revisit that it brings you back. And like you said, you know, I and Down talk about this a lot. We call it old timer's. It's like Alzheimer's, but you don't really
have Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's. You have Oldheimer's because you're forgetful. And it's wonderful when I go back and I read or listen and it brings me back to that place and it brings up memories I forgot before.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo will be right back after these messages.
It helped.
I think it really helps, like you said, our cognitive resources if we're not using them.
This truly like nature journaling. It makes me ask.
So if I'm journaling a tree structure, because that's what people are interested in, and a lot of times will ask and what do you think of these tree structures? And I'll say, well, who told you they do that? And they're like, what do you mean that's a known behavior? And I'm like, I don't know of any recorded data or encounters or experiences where someone saw them build a
tree structure. Maybe there is, but I don't know, But so what I look into is when I'm nature journaling those tree structures, I start to ask myself, up.
Okay, what does it remind me of?
Well, it reminds me of a boy scout TV, right, So what kind of wood is that?
Is that the same all the same wood? Or is that is that pine? Is that? Oh?
Or is it a multitude of different kinds of wood? Is that type of tree growing all around here?
So? If this is pine, how close am I to the nearest stream?
When was the last flood? Okay, when's the last flood? So all right, we've got pine, we got oh, we've got cedar. How long does it take for these different types of woods to rot in certain environments? So what I'm doing is just starting to train my mind to just look for something different and ask questions of myself that maybe I didn't ask before. And that right there
is going to get you on your phone. People will go home and they'll start to google those things if they don't know that answer right then, and then it just leads you down a queerly cool rabbit hole.
You know.
That's how I learned about lollipines and how incredibly important they are to the ecosystem. And that lolly pines are what, you know, what they make turpentine out of, and they only grow from Texas to basically Mississippi and just a little bit of Florida. But the lollipine needs fire to germinate. So that led me down that path. And so then it's like, Okay, what what areas need lollipine? Or what
what species need lolllypine? You know, it just gets you going, and then your life becomes overwhelmed with new ideas, new maybe hobbies that you become interested in. You know, maybe you want to learn more about the indigenous you know, flora and fauna in your area. So what do what have in my area? You know that that's what I do. I mean, I'm just so ecstatic right now. I've bland in Oklahoma and I have sassafras trees and hickory trees
and maple trees and you know, persimmon trees. And now I'm I'm trying to collect native persimetry sepling so I can plant more. So I believe those you know, persimon trees. They everything in the woods eats a persimon. So I'm thinking, okay, how could I make my area more you know, animal friendly and the fact to bring in more wildlife, which might bring in more bigfoots possibility. So just for nature journaling, that's what how it affects me.
Well, you know, one last thought on nature journaling before we move on to other topics here is and I find for myself when I'm walking around in the woods, I don't really want to sit down and take fifteen minutes out of my time there to write some stuff and do some stuff. And I know that's probably a bad habit or whatever. But one of the one of the tools that I've been utilizing lately is I happen to have an iPhone instead of an Android or whatever.
But I'm sure there's equivalent apps or whatever out there. My iPhone came with an app called Journal, and it does I think GPS stuff and you can just talk into it and it transcribes it and you can export things into like word files and various other formats. So that's kind of a new fangled way of doing these nature journals. It might be something that is more up some of the people's alleys. You know, you can't really draw in it or anything like that, but you can
attach photographs to those same journal entries. So there's there's a modern equivalent of doing this in case someone doesn't want to take the time. Like when I'm out in the field, I got to cover as much ground as I possibly can, you know that sort of thing. That's how I feel about when I'm doing those sort of things until I find something. But I keep track of a lot of negative data that way, Like I don't have to say the date, it's already there. But today
I'm walking the mud road. I walked up and down. I didn't see anything at all, But there's some bear tracks over here, you know, on the puddle road today, and there's nothing in the puddle today. Maybe I'm gonna go try so and so you know that kind of thing. So that helps me a lot.
Well, that's exactly right. And a lot of times it's same as you. I don't want to sit down, and you know, I don't always carry a big notebook or my journaling book with me, depending on how much time I want to spend out there. But what I'll do now that I have ideas of what I'm interested in as far as questions, I'll go and take pictures.
I'll take a plethora of pictures.
And then or even video and then go back and start to journal it, maybe revisit again later and journal more of that same thing. So yes, definitely. But just getting your mind's eye to start seeing things differently than you did five years ago, or let's say, or whatever is the biggest focus for me.
So yeah, but.
I didn't know about that journal thing because I just got a new iPhone the other day, so I have to look for it.
That will be a great asset.
You get the scan a Verse app yet, I.
Will definitely get that because that will help with all the tracks. Because I even taught one of my track classes that I attended, I'll go to like trips in the tracking world where we'll go to you know, certain areas like the desert, and we'll be there for four days and just learn, you know. And I taught them about, hey man, I'm going to cast these tracks because I don't know that it's this or this. Everybody's indifferent right now.
And they were just really impressed because we're like, oh my gosh, the bottom of the track reads so much better out here. And I'm like, yeah, so that will be great. I'll have to share that with my group. They will love that.
Yeah, my protocol now because I'm out there tracking a lot, so next time you're in Oregon, let me know, I'll bring out to the spot or whatever. But my protocol now, like what is if I find a maybe or something like that, or maybe a definite you know, I take I always say, take a minimum five photographs of each
track with a scale item. With a scale item, of course, I talk from directly above it, from the left and right about forty five degrees in the front and back about forty five degrees maybe a foot or two out depending. You know, I'm not super regimented about any of this, but so I take minimum five photographs, try to take a video if I possibly can, and I also am now scanning it, and if I think that anything is going to come of it, I will also cast it.
And it is a good thing up just like literally yesterday. Maybe we can probably talk talk about this maybe on another episode or maybe the members sing. But yesterday I found a very odd looking track that I couldn't make sense out of. But it didn't make sense to be anything else except for maybe a human or a sasquatch. Because I had a nice big Alex, a big toe had a nice broad keel, but the rest of it
was missing. It was very weirdly shaped. And so I did my my thing, you know, And and the cast itself, the cast, it makes a lot more sense than the photographs did. It looks it makes a lot more sense in what I saw with my own eyes. The cast, you can see like, oh, that is a big toe and there are at least three other smaller toes next to it, and it was a it was a beautiful heel.
And yes, the fact there's dramatoglyphics on it, it's it's an extraordinary cast that I almost just passed on by if I wasn't so stubborn and determined about this sort of stuff about wasting plaster on a regular basis, pouring it into holes that don't make any sense. But yeah, yeah, so I think it's a great habit.
Let me ask you this, do you do you carry your headlamp with you during the day?
Yeah? So, yeah, because I never because you never know when you're going to be stuck out there after dark.
Right, So here's a fantastic trip, So the best in tracking. And I want to get into depth about some gates and about misconceptions of bipedal trackways and what to look for. So when you're tracking, always have a lamp hanging around your neck during the day because the best time to find tracks, like we're talking like, you know, the minuscule whisper of a track right like, you wouldn't see it unless it's early in the morning or late in the evening because of a cast of a shadow from the side.
When you're looking at tracks, take your take your headlamp off, turn it on whiteline, put it at the you know, at basically ground level, and go around that track and you will see a whole new world. It will just jump in your face like, oh my gosh, look, there's all the tolls, there's.
All this, there's all that.
That is one of the best tools ever is just a simple flashlight. You can even use your phones flashlight or your headlamp. That when I go and take a certification or if I'm on any tracking event, always got a headlamp around my neck and that way I could really focus on is digit number one, a digit number two?
You know, even links how, and you.
Will start to see pembricks of claw marks from other animals that you never saw before.
You'll start to see insect tracks that you've never noticed.
So one of those tools that is just phenomenal is a white piece of paper, a headlamp and a stick, and those things can show you a bunch of things you never would have seen without them.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo will be right back after these messages. Let's talk about gate. What do you want to say about bipedal gates?
Okay, so when i'm on it, let's say I'm on a test, a certification, and you know as well as anybody, when we're out in the woods, we will see maybe one good track of an individual and then a bunch of sloppy mess or you may not see any at all, and that is more often than not, and a lot of times animals, particularly very There's a lot of variations in gates.
Well, first of all, the define gate, right.
Okay, yes, let me define gate.
Gate is really the definition of gate is how the body moves or how the legs move. In let's say a walking gate. There is a walking gate, there is a trotting gate, there is a running gate.
And then those are broken down into.
Body scissoring, like if the body of a canid is full extended. We're only one foot's touching the ground like they're running. They're in a full run. That is a full scissoring body gate. And to know those, there are a few things. You'll see their tracks in clumps like broken Like you'll see four tracks four tracks, four tracks, that is like a lope or a run. They're moving at a fast speed, and you'll see bigger distances between
one group of tracks and the other group of tracks. Now, if you're in a walking or a trotting gate, let's say, well specifically, let's look at deer, kyote and feelids, because there are big culprits. So if you see a very straight line of tracks, let's say coyote canid tracks where they're just one right after the other like in.
A tie line, that's a trot.
And what's happening is they're moving to where only two feet are hitting the ground at a time. So they are also moving fast enough. And this is with humans as well. The faster we go, the tighter the width of the trail is meaning the trail width meaning from hip to hip, the width of a When you see a deer trail, it's kind of thin, and long. That is the width of the trail the gate, the width
of the gate. So as animals and humans move, our gate becomes very narrow, meaning like when you and I'm run, our tracks are one ride in front of the other. When we walk, our tracks are hips apart. So when deer are in snow, they will move at a slower gate. All animals do, and a lot of times they will step into their own tracks. They'll do it indirect register or direct register, and that's to save energy, but it's
just to help move through the snow easy, easier. And so what happens is a lot of times deer especially because they're not trying to be quiet. They're prey, they're not predators, whereas a kyote, you know, put your mind's eye into the idea of watching a coyote trot through the woods.
It's like he's tippy toeing, you know, it's like to to.
If that's what a trot were to sound like, that was what it would sound like. It is like, well, only two feet are hitting the ground at a time, whereas deer do the same thing, but they're not quiet because they're trying to warn others or they're moving away at night. So a bipedal sounding gait can really be a quadrupedal gate, which is a deer that is doing a direct register in the woods because there are boom.
Does that make sense?
Well, yeah, I think you also hit on something very important as well as far as bipedle gates go. Everybody, this whole tightrope walking thing with the sasquatch gate is overblown. There is always straddle, which is the side by side you know distance. I guess you know there is, but and and people say, well, as a tightrope walk, look at look at the distance in between the footprints, the
step length. In other words, it has to be a sasquatch. No, it doesn't have to be a sasquatch because a human wearing stompers or otherwise or something you know, trying to replicate a sasquatch trackway will probably run to increase the step length in between the footprints and there when they when human runs functionally, it narrows the straddle. So you're going to get a more tight rope walking. I saw
what the London tracks. I've seen it with a lot of different trackways that are misidentified or hoaxes.
And that's everything that's that's all of us that run animals included people that it starts to narrow into that straight line, like you're saying, and that's exactly true.
Yeah, yeah, it's just and I see. Oh and then of course snow prints is another whole bag of soup that you got to get into there, because you know, animals hopping through the snow are going to be in a straight line, and you can't hold up the tightrope walking thing as evidence of it being a sasquatch print in my opinion, right.
Well, deer the biggest culprit, Dearrin Elk, you know, the ungulants, they are the biggest culprit because they are doing a indirect registered trot through snow most of the time. Now, now there is a difference, like you've got black tail deer up there. We have white tail here in my area, but we also have mule deer. Now there's a different Sometimes deer and black tail deer will do what is called a promking, where they bounce you know, all fours,
whereas here white tail deer do not. They can do that, but it is so rare that they do not prompt. So, but what I see all the time is the snow tracks where it is an ungulant it's a deer or an elk or moose where they're doing an indirect, indirect register trot and.
It looks like a bipedal walk, you know.
And because the faster they move, now maybe you're only seeing two tracks. They're straddling that line. Let's say they're straddling a line. A slower trot will be a straddle, whereas a full on trot. If it's a full on direct register where the where the track goes directly into the other track, they're moving faster and that's that's going
to be a very straight line. If they're moving in a little bit slower trot where it's an indirect where you see like you know, like bear tracks, when the bear steps on the other bear track, it's front fall. That is a little bit slower for a deer, but that is their most common way of movement. People I don't think people understand like so like mountain lions, mountain lions most common way of movement is walking and it's
an overstep walk. So when you see their tracks, their back seat step in front of the front track, it lays down. Every animal has very specific gates on the way they move because of the morphology of the body. And like you said, there's so many times when I see these snow tracks and it looks like a bipedal walk when it really is just deer.
And but yeah, I don't even say.
It, oh ya, you gotta you gotta see it, you know, because it's I think the most respectful thing you can do is pop somebody's balloon.
Sometimes, well it's true, But this is what This is why I encourage so many people, and I have a lot of reading information that they can go to and learn on their own. But when people send me a picture and I was telling that this earlier of a track, I will always say, Okay, tell this is what I'm going to tell you. I see in this track. I see symmetry, I see let's h let's say I see pinprick, mail mark seven sixteenths of an inch out, or maybe I see all these different things.
What do you see?
And I want you to take your phone that you've showed me this picture on, and I want you to go to edits and I want you to play with the contrast and the and bring out all the shadows. And then I want you to tell me what you see. And then they start seeing things and I'm like, now I want you to turn it upside down, and then they start seeing more things because a lot of times
trackways aren't just one animal, they're many. I had a gentleman to do this exact thing where he was trying to show me this track and gravel and I'm like, sir, I didn't see it, but I'm going to tell you what to do. Come back and tell me what you see. It turned out to be a horse and a deer and a coyote track all.
Mixed in one.
And so what happens in that moment for them is I didn't tell them what it was. They figured it out on their own, and I just gave them the tools. So then they get on that path that we want them on of Oh, let me see if I can figure this out. It's not always going to be, you know, I'm that hunter dude. Yeah yeah, yeah, okay, whatever, you know, educate yourself more.
So that's where instead of saying, hey.
That's a wolf, because I say it's a wolf, I'm gonna say, hey, these are the things I see, and these are the things I don't see what do you see.
Yeah, yeah, that's a lot more constructive than this yelling the word balderdash and moving on right right.
But people get so offended, and especially I'm sorry.
I've never been a feminist in the sense of oh I'm suppressed or you know.
I've always been.
Treated very equally by the people I'm surrounded by. That I love my family, my friends, my husband.
Until I got into the bigfoot world.
Oh my gosh, it's crazy that, you know, being a woman, I'm not smart enough sometimes for them, But I'm interested in them learning for their own so that they can figure this out and then we don't have all these crazy videos and pictures online of.
This is what this is, and that's what things like.
There's some field guides that are so great, like Animal Tracks and Scat of California. It's a Pacific Northwest book. It's written by the same guy I took my certification with. It's a great little field guide that people can get. There's the Facebook page animals don't cover their tracks.
That is so great. People.
You learn so much in there, and they're very, very very adamant about how you post.
And you can't just post something and say this is what this is.
You have to tell them why and using that same type of information that I'm talking about today. There is Mammals Tracks and signed by Mark Elbrock. It is the Bible of the tracking world. There's a volume one and volume two. I mean we're talking about all the way down to which Okay, what al puked up this alpellet? Because what you're going to do is you're going to open it up and find the specific rodent skulls in there and tell us what rodent that is, and we'll tell you and then you can figure.
Out what out that is.
Everybody's idea every good time.
Well it is of mine. I can assure you.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo. Will be right back after these messages because we're coming around for like the final approach, so to speak, at the end of the hour. Here, I know you wanted to talk about some DNA ideas real fast, So why don't we get that in before we have to close down shop here?
Okay?
Perfect, So you know that I have this DNA kitt in the last you know, this last conference, I just like beef them up. I mean I really wanted I'm always looking for improvements. And one of the things you know that I've been, you know, talking to a Darby orth Cut and Haskell Hard, you know, the guys that are really like moving into DNA testing and writing peer previews and such, and has Heart's working in or testing and working in water, you know, DNA collection and things
like that. And so I thought to myself, Okay, so what can I do for these kids?
Now?
What has school's doing I think is really in large proportions. I'm not sure. I got to talk to him a lot, but I was thinking. So what I did is I went online and I looked at water collection e DNA water collection in wildlife for fish. And it wasn't really about rivers and streams for me, is because bigfits don't live there.
In my opinion, I don't know. But if we were to collect water, where would we get it? That might show something? How would we collect it?
So I put together a little minikit of collecting water DNA or DNA from water through a process of how they do it with fish. But you know, there's many fish. But I don't know if it's gonna work. But this is my thought process. So when we're out looking for tracks and let's say which people have done. We see a trackway in the snow, and we're for sure that
that's sasquatch. Why could we not collect the snow from the track, because we know that dogs could smell it if they were trained to, you know, track sasquatch or bear or whatever. Those tracks hold DNA of some sort. We collect that snow, melt down that water, plenty of it, and then we put it through my DNA collection filters. That is one of my new thought processes. And the other is when you're seeing trackways of sasquatches on the beach or let's say near a river and it's not
water in it. Now we've got to pull the water out to cast it. Why not pull the water out and see if we can collect possible DNA that's been trapped in that small amount of water sitting in that track and send that in through those filters that I provided, or you can. You know, people want to do it, however they want to do it, But that's what I'm looking at.
What do you think?
I think it's interesting because I've had long conversations with Darby because of the presence of some snowprints up in my neck of the woods about how snowprints are probably one of the more promising avenues that we can retrieve e DNA because unlike the woods, I mean, the woods is full of DNA, of everything that lives there. That's what DNA is all about. But the thing is on snow.
If you have a nice sasquatch snow track, the only thing that really came in contact with that snow is sasquatch foot especially it's fresh enough, so I think that would probably be amongst the higher probabilities. Because the cards are so stacked against us finding unknown DNA strands, it is extraordinarily difficult, next to impossible at this point until there's a target species. If we have the target of this is what sasquatch DNA looks like, then you can
look for that. But otherwise you're looking around in the sky looking for a bird you don't recognize when it's invisible, you know. Yeah, And as far as the footprint in the standing water in the footprint, I think that holds promise. The question is, I guess how do you collect it? I guess you'd have to sterilize some sort of syringe
or something like that. But is that going to be enough because the conversations I've had with Darby about snow tracks, as he says, is probably going to take close to a gallon of water to get an amount of genetic material necessary to analyze appropriately. So I don't know about I would have to I'd have to talk to people first, hatter than me. You know about that the standing water thing in prints.
Well, this is the thing.
You have that equipment because I gave you a kid, and it has a sixty mil syringe, sterile syringe that you so when I researched the fish, you know, you know, the water for the fish DNA out of a running river. They extract three times a full syringe of sixty mil and then run it through that filter and then you go back. You pull water, You keep pulling water. I would assume if you, I mean, I don't know. We got to try it, that's all you know. For me, I'm going to try it if I ever come across it.
I may even tried on just some random thing and see like bear and see if it comes back bear. But anyway, you want to do that. You want to extract as much water as you can till the filter won't take any more of the DNA or whatever it's it's I would if it was dirty water, I would do a little bit of a of a filter like a coffee filter first, but anyway, then I put in there a preservative of ethanol, so you shoot that preservative inside the filter and then you leave that syringe on.
It comes in another sterile syringe and then a cap that's provided for you, and then you can send that in and it's good. You know, it's not gonna deteriorate or anything. But I'm super curious. I'm gonna try. And that's what I provided my new kids with is for people to try.
You know.
I mean, like I said, I don't know much about much about after all that and how that's tested or done. But I feel like this is the best we could do, and maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But if I were gonna find e DNA as far as water, you know, holding any kind of odd DNA or unknown DNA, I would think it would be in the snow tracks for sure, it'd be clean, but possibly in the tracks of a print.
You know.
But that's just where my mind leads to me. For me, it's just about better tools. Where can cause you know, even and I knew, well, I don't know if this is going to work or not. Nobody does really, But in the sense, will it lead to someone thinking of a better idea?
That's what my goal is.
So you obviously have a lot of information in your head, you're very enthusiastic about what you're doing. What about people who are out there and want to contact you, maybe with questions or ideas or collaboration or anything like that. Where can people get a hold of you?
I am super easy, peasy when that could just my Facebook page, you know, Shelley Kevington, hyphen Montana, just message me. But I also want to encourage people to go and look at There is a new YouTube channel called Study Sasquatch and it's run by our friends Bartkatino, Kirk Brandyberg and then Nathaniel Grons and they're really focusing strongly on
thermal imaging. And what I love about it it teaches you One thing you need to know about using thermal is that thermal will help you learn how animals move. So if you're looking at a coyote or an image at one thousand yards, by the way that animal moves, you should be able to differentiate whether it's a cougar or a coyote.
By the movement. That's what Gates also teach you.
I mean, I could go into ten hour talk about Gates, but we don't have that kind of time.
So if they have questions, they can go to your Facebook and talk to you there. Are you going to be doing any live appearances for the rest of the summer. I know you're going to be in the woods a lot, but are you going to do in any other appearances? Because I saw you last week in Ohio Bigfoot Conference? What else? Anything else?
Yeah?
Well, the next one I have scheduled so far is the Texas Bigfoot Conference in October.
And I'll be there.
And then I just bought a start link, so I'm hoping to maybe start doing some like streaming in the woods. I don't know, we'll see. But as far as any of any live stuff, not really this summer. I'm hoping just to be in the woods. I'm hoping to get back to the Pacific Northwest maybe for a short is it. I'd like to come see you. I'd like to come. I'd like to go visit a lot of stuff.
But yeah, well, very good. Shelley, thank you so much for coming on Bigfoot and Beyond. I'm sorry Bobo couldn't be here today, but you know, he has a much more complicated life and schedule than I do, even though I'm extraordinarily busy. It's Bobo. He has a lot of things going on. But anyway, I want to thank you for your time. And I don't know everybody. I guess keep it squatchy is what we say here. Thanks for
listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond. If you liked what you heard, please rate and review us on iTunes, subscribe to Bigfoot and Beyond wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Bigfoot and Beyond podcast. You can find us on Twitter at Bigfoot and Beyond that's an N in the middle, and tweet us your thoughts and questions with the hashtag Bigfoot and Beyond