Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It's time now for our community connection right here on K one though one you trust, it's only really three and a half days away.
We're talking about wild Brew. How are you doing, Daniel.
Doing all right? Happy to be here?
Well, I'm happy to be anywhere, but I'm really going to be happy to be down in Tulsa here on the twenty fourth, because that's wild Brew.
Absolutely, that's right.
This Saturday, the twenty fourth, we're having the greatest party ever hashed. It's back in Tulsa at the Cock Convention Center, and uh, we're inviting everybody to come out.
This is going to be a big deal.
Now, do I understand?
We have just a little bit, just a few tickets left, but wed Schuld like to have it sold out because kind of keep the streak going.
Yep.
Absolutely, Yeah, you want to get those tickets beforehand, if it all possible, go ahead and get yourself onto wildbrew dot org and get those tickets. We have some patron tickets. If you want to get there early, you can get an early start to the party. And that party, by the way, is exactly what we're talking about. Is live music. It's going to be all the local breweries from the area. We've got an over thirty breweries signed up, forty salon restaurants,
wine and spirits, which is new. We didn't have as many of those in the past. This is going to be a new tasting experience for this crowd.
Well, this is going to be great.
And of course the money raised goes right back to the sutn Avian Research Center and all the great work that you've been doing for years, and we'd like to see that happen for years to come.
Yep, absolutely, you're right.
That money that we're raising for for just coming out and having this good time with us, you're gonna get to experience a lot, but you're also going to be helping to fund wildlife conservation in our state, that science and education being done right here in Green Hunter.
Well, very good. Now, it started off with eagles. That's the big story that really put the research.
Center on the map. Tell us a little bit about that. It was a couple of decades.
Yeah, absolutely, so this so happens that this is our fortieth anniversary at the Sutton Center.
We got our start forty years ago.
People may not remember, but eagles were not a common site. They didn't nest in Oklahoma at all. It wasn't something that people could go out and see. And people said, you know what, I liked this part of our environment. This is our national symbol. We should have that here in Oklahoma again. And so they invited us to come start this project. And what do you know. Now we've got eagles on all our major waterways and then they're
spreading even further. It just goes to show when people care about a project, we can make a change, we can make a difference.
And right now we're preserving a variety of different to avian life.
That's right.
We've got two more endangered species. We're hoping to do the same thing we did with our eagles. We got the eagles off of the endangered species list, so now we've got two other species. They said, hey, you know what you did so good with eagles, why don't you do the same thing for these prairie chickens. We've got the Atwater's prairie chickens and a species of quail, the mass bob white quail. And that's just our endangered species work.
We're also doing environmental work in other aspects. Helping farmers better utilize their land so that it's not impacting low flying grouse, helping to keep track of the species, even the common birds. Every bird matters, the common birds need to stay common. So we're doing an atlas essentially, a breeding bird at list for birds that come and nest here in Oklahoma, and then a wintering bird at list for those that stay over the winter.
My goodness sake, that's a lot of cataloging.
It is a lot of cataloging.
Yeah.
Absolutely, it takes a lot of work.
It's a lot of man hours, and that's why we need your support to help keep these projects running.
Now, you have some pretty darn good interns, but it seems like you have more people who want to be there than you can actually handle. But it's great to have that kind of interest.
Yeah. Absolutely.
In addition to our seniors, biologists and professionals, we're also training new people that want to be interested in this field. So we've got interns coming from places like our local Bartlesville High School. We get interns that come out and start to learn the field, get hands on experience, as well as college graduates that come in and help with some of the projects during the busiest parts of the year.
Now, daniel A Long with everything that you do at the research facility, you're also the education guy, which means they throw you out at high schools, grade schools, middle schools, and you put on a lot of demons straight. You're kind of like the showbiz aspect of the research center.
Absolutely, if you go to our website for better or worse, my face tends to pop up a lot. So yeah, I've got a handful of education birds that will come out with me to different events, and so when you come out to while Brew, you'll get to meet a lot of those education birds. I all have Artemis, our
red tailed hawk, right on my glove. And so if you come out, get there early and be ready and your best, because I'm going to take a picture with you a artmist You're gonna have a selfie to take home with a red tail hawk.
Wow. And you know, and Artemis is used to all this.
Yep, she's done really well.
I've been working with her for a couple of years now, and so she's been on the news a couple of.
Times in the last few weeks.
And all the time we're going out to schools and expo centers and nature events centers, conservation districts, you name it. If they'll have us, we want to be out there and talking about the importance of our natural environment.
I think I remember having you out there, Dewey at the Washington County Fairgrounds. If you had this thing about wingspan. You know, so if you were a bird, what would your wings span be? And the kids they get a kick.
Out of that.
Oh yeah, The Wingspan exhibit is great and it's another way for us to have a way to connect to.
Our natural environment.
A lot of people don't realize those little geese that you see running around.
Are pretty big.
Oh yeah, you get going, and then comparing it to something like our hawks and our owls and our eagles. It's an amazing, impressive site and we're gonna have all those features in addition to a lot of our other education birds out for you to view and talk to experts.
They're at the wild Brew event.
Well, very good.
Now at the Wild Brew once again, you bring your appetite, bring your thirst because there's gonna be lots to sample.
What did the tickets start out at? You remember?
So I want you to go to the website because we've got a few different varieties.
Oh yeah, you for gotta get there five for.
Your general admission, but if you really want to get there an hour early, you can get a patron ticket. You can also get group discounts, so if you've got a work group you want to go with, or if you can talk your boss into sponsoring you. There's a few sponsorships left as well.
Know, now this has grown since its beginning. This started out as a cute little thing and now it's kind of become a behemoth.
Yep, that's right.
So we've been doing wildlife conservation in Oklahoma for forty years. It was only twenty six years ago that we started with the wild Brewer event, and at that point in time, we were like, hey, if we can get a few breweries together, we can have this craft brewing event and help showcase some really cool brewis while also supporting wildlife education.
Now we're the oldest running craft brewery event in the state.
How you like that?
That's amazing.
Hey, drink a beer, save a bird.
Drink of beer, Save a bird. Absolutely.
Now we're you located here in Green God Grey.
Yeah, so we're right off a circle mountain. We're just south of Bartlesville, but we've got a couple of different sites, so we've got two projects working here in Bartlesville as well as sites that are all over the state.
Yeah, because you guys are all over because this is what you do.
Absolutely yep.
My goodness sakes, this is incredible. And the story of the AVI and the research center, all forty years of it. You can find a lot of it on the website. You really can't. And you can find out just about all the different aspects of the different things that you've been working on. And it seems like a lot of very tedious, eyeball straining labor, but it's got to be done because if it isn't, things get lost. Yep, and we mean life forms.
You're absolutely right.
Birds are one of the most sensitive creatures in our environment. Everybody knows about the story of the canary in the coal mine where people took these canaris because they would be the first ones that again, it got impacted by low oxygen quality in the air. And we see some of the birds that have thrived in Oklahoma for thousands
of years are suddenly disappearing. And it's because of things that are changing in our environment that are changing in our state, and we're seeing new birds that were never here before starting to show up. In fact, at the Sutton Center, she won't be a wibbery this year, but I'm training up a new bird, a new resident. Yeah, we've got a crested kara kara. If you've never heard of this bird, it's an amazingly beautiful bird. A bird used to be called the Mexican eagle.
They were a South.
Texas at the most northern range. You would think about them in Mexico, South America, and now they're living in the southern part.
Of our state.
As speak of these things.
They're a little bit smaller than our hawk. Nine hundred grams is what I waited at yesterday, which is still pretty good. Still pretty good sized bird. Yep, bigger than your average chicken.
But more fun to look at than too. Maybe. Yeah, there we go. So there you go.
But boy, I tell you what, you can learn a lot and you can have a lot of fun by simply going to wild Brew dot or. That is where you get your tickets, and that's where you get your information about the big wild Brew that's coming up on Saturday down in Tulsa.
Where's it going to be in Tall.
So this is the Cox Convention Center. Absolutely, So that convention Center. We've got a huge space running out. We're gonna fill it with all kinds of booths. In addition to the beer, the one, the spirits, there's gonna be some non alcoholic offerings as well, So if you're not into that, you can still come out and join us. We love to have you all the food offerings and all of the experts from our field. You're also going to get to talk to the people that are doing
the work on the ground. So people from our Mass Bob White team will be there to talk about their work. People that are working with a Prairie Chicken will be out there to talk about their work.
And getting to see the people.
That are actually doing the work on the ground is an experience to learn something new in addition to having a good time.
All Right, hey Daniel, thanks for being with us today. Absolutely thanks for having us all right, folks, and we will see you at Wild Brew