Welcome to the podcast, Tom C, biologist with the Alaska Department of Fishing Game, the Wood Bison Project. Thanks for being on here. Yeah, you're welcome. So I guess we'll just start right off with the Wood Bison Project. So what exactly is a wood bison? How does that contrast to a plains bison? And where are you located and what is the project about? Well, I'm located in Fairbanks, Alaska, but wood bison are the subspecies of North American bison that evolved in the boreal forest.
So everything from the central Canadian provinces up to the Bering Sea and out to the YK Delta, that's the bison that evolved there. And for the last 10,000 years during the Holocene period, there's been bison throughout most of that area. And that was the wood bison. Everything to the south of that kind of line in the plains is, of course, plains, bison subspecies.
And there's some argument of what bison occurred way over in the forests of Pennsylvania and the Appalachians and what bison occurred in kind of the Rocky Mountains. There's some argument that some of those were wood bison also, but there's, to my knowledge, no DNA that can support that kind of argument. But essentially, wood bison is the northern version and plains bison is the southern version. Wood bison are about 15% bigger than plains bison at different life stages.
So that makes wood bison the largest still surviving land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. adult bulls can be can weigh more than 2,000 pounds and. They're, they're a highly social animal. The, you know, if you've been around bison, plains bison at all, you know, that in the rut, the plains bison bulls can roar and make a lot of noise, but wood bison bulls are sometimes called the silent bison because they really don't make any noise at all.
And that's thought that in the forest environments, they didn't need vocalizations to travel a long ways because they were in small groups. And, you know, what makes bison habitat in the boreal forest, it's kind of a weird thing to talk about, you know, bison in the forest, and it's not really the forest itself. What it is, is the openings in the forest. So what makes openings in the boreal forest is typically wetlands, and then a little bit of alpine and a little bit of burns.
And so that wood bison have kind of evolved in the wetlands of the northern boreal forest, and that's kind of their niche.
So as far as the project goes is it maintaining the surviving bison from that era or has there been introduction in in new areas what's the project yeah so there's a paper that's listed on the website last partner fishing game wood bison restoration website that it talks about the history of of wood bison in the holocene epic and it goes through carbon dating of of all the bones and and horns and stuff that we get our hands on in the 1990s the paper was published in 2001 and,
And so there's a lot more information since then. And then it also goes through the oral history. Bob Stevenson was a moose biologist in the early 1990s, and he was looking at moose habitat and the moose sign on the Porcupine River and the Yukon River and Yukon Flats about that time. And he started running into a lot of bison bones and bison habitat, and it made him real curious.
And so then he started asking questions in Fort Yukon and Chalkitsik and Beaver and stuff and he was amazed to find a rich oral history about bice there and a lot of the folks there you can read about the oral history in that in that paper that i just talked about anyway the a lot of those the really old folks there had stories of a time before moose when bison is what what the people there depended on and they even had the stories of the last ones that were killed about 1918.
There was low numbers in the previous 100 years or so, but there was a point earlier when there was high numbers of them. And that's guessed at being 200 to 500 years ago. And so that's kind of the gist. I think the last place they were in Alaska was the Yukon River drainage from roughly the mouth of the Tanana up. And then there's also some oral history in the upper Tanana and it's not documented anywhere.
We had a, we had a meeting up there about wood bison and some people were talking about water buffalo there. And there's an oral history there about bison that are in the wetlands, which is really a wood bison sort of niche thing from a couple of really old brothers that, that are now in their late eighties. I think They talk about that.
And then there's just across the border in Yukon Territory, there's quite a bit of oral history and bones and, you know, even things that come out of snow patches on the hills and stuff, you know, bison parts. And atlatls and things like that are the type of things that they use to kill bison in that part of the country. So that's, that's some of the history, but if you read that paper, it's, there's a lot of really interesting history.
Yeah. It's interesting. You say there's a lot of oral history and there is, but like comparatively, when you think about Alaska and you think about now that whether it be the, the, the indigenous, or you think about like a Frank Glazer and what he was experiencing, you don't hear a lot of mention of, of bison. So super interesting that it is there. I hadn't really heard of it.
I grew up on Prince of Wales Island and my idea of, of buffalo or bison was, you know, the plains down there on the prairie in the, in the lower 48. So it's super interesting and it's nice. The more you dive in, the more that there is a presence there. It's just a matter of like knowing where to look because you can find anything you want about moose and caribou and whatnot in Alaska, but bison's a super interesting history. That's a really good point that it really wasn't known much.
The oral history of bison in Alaska wasn't known much before Bob Stevenson started asking questions of really old people in the Yukon Flats. And at one point, what he told me is he asked them, you know, why haven't you talked about this before? And some of the responses were things like, well, nobody ever asked.
And so it's, you know, and there's, if you think about Alaska natives and Alaska native languages in Alaska, how they went through this transition from Alaska native languages to English, where a lot of that oral history was lost, you know, I mean, when the next generation takes up a new language, a lot of that doesn't, doesn't translate and just the different practices of people where, you know, used to kind of huddle down in the wintertime and just tell a lot of stories and stuff.
And that doesn't really happen. And once we got television and telephones and travel to cities and, you know, all that sort of thing. And so oral history is, it's kind of the really old stuff is kind of hard to come by. So we were really, really lucky to get that. And like I said, if you're reading that paper, you can get, there's like 20 or 30 different perspectives from people that knew about oral history of bison there.
As far as hunting goes, I know one of the big things people talk about in the lower 48 is finding areas that there were buffalo jumps where they would somehow figure out a way to get the herd moving and then take them over these cliffs before they had a chance to stop. Or maybe the first ones were able to stop, but were eventually pushed over.
And so you'd find these archaeological sites where there was massive amounts of bones and then there were arrowheads and knife marks and whatnot before they were finished off. So it was more of a individual. Spearing. I forgot the name of the, you just mentioned that the other weapon. So it was like smaller, small, yeah. Smaller scale killing of the, of the animals appear and not, not a whole lot of, uh, group kills. The first answer to that is I don't know.
I'm not really an expert and I wasn't there, but Reverend David Salmon, who is, you know, it's long since deceased now, but he was, his, some of his oral accounts were recorded in that Holstein paper. He has spoke of the types of arrowheads that were used and the types of atlatl heads and, and the stuff that I remember him speaking of, and I don't know if that's in the Holstein paper or not, I don't think it is, that was atlatls and bows that were used to kill bison.
But, you know, yeah, I'm not, I'm not an expert on, on ancient technologies for killing, for killing bison in interior Alaska, but there are some guys that probably are. Well, it'd be so much more difficult to try to find evidence of it. If you're in the planet, if you're outside of Laramie, Wyoming, that's looking very similar now to the way it did back then, of course, minus the, the actual presence of, of bison.
So those sort of relics can, can last. Whereas up here, the earth just takes it back. The moss, the lichen, the forest, all that stuff just takes it. So it's got to be incredibly difficult to try to find answers because the relics are eaten. No, you're, you're exactly right. Everything is, you know, extremely vegetated in interior Alaska, except for things like gravel bars and dirt banks and stuff where the river's cutting away at it.
And a lot of that, it happens really slowly. And so if you get to a cut bank, you're looking at a, you know, a spectrum of things that happened in the last 20 or 50,000 years or something. And just that top little bit is where more recent stuff has come from. But even with that, I mean, there's, I think the most recent wood bison bones that have been dated are, I think it's 130 years at the time of that study ago. And so, you know, and then there's a lot that are in the hundreds of years. Yeah.
So when it comes to Plains bison, they were introduced. How did, do we know how we got a hold of them to bring them up here and how had that all go down? Yeah. So in 1928, it was, we weren't a, Alaska wasn't a state yet. You know, the federal government, it was a territory. They got a bunch of bison. I think it was in the twenties, how many bison there were.
That they brought up and released at Delta Junction. And right about that time, so most of the bison extirpation in North America happened in, or the big grand finale was in the 1880s. And that's when we went from, you know, millions to almost zero. Well, then some ranchers and other folks kind of gathered up the last remaining bison.
And the first reason that people came up with to kind of catch the last remaining bison and keep them was to try to crossbreed them with cattle to make something that was another form of livestock that was going to be strong enough to withstand the winters in a lot of North America. Well, that didn't turn out to work very well because bison and cattle, they can crossbreed and you can have some offspring, but they're not viable.
Or for the most part, they're not viable anyway, but they did succeed in spreading cattle diseases to bison at that time. And they succeeded in getting some cattle genetics into bison herds. But if you can imagine that happening in the 1880s, then the 1890s, and then early 1900s, what was happening is they were propagating those last remaining bison.
So we went from almost no bison in north america in the end of the 1880s to by the 1920s we had several captive or somewhat captive bison populations that were in the thousands and the different bison ranges like the american bison range in low east montana where where the delta junction bison came from come from they were looking for things to do with them and in alaska they had some habitat and they thought well we can try bison there and it might provide some food
for you know local people and so that's kind of how that started, And there's some differences as far as how the plains and wood bison act. Would you be able to tell them apart if you were to just stand one next to the other? So there's a complex answer to that question. They are much easier to tell apart than subspecies of almost all other species that I'm familiar with. For example, from 100 yards away, you can tell if something is a plains bison
or a wood bison. Now they regularly, or they can easily interbreed too. And so you can have all kinds of mixes, but the shape of the hump and the shape of the beard and the chaps and the penis sheaths and all that is all different. And you can tell that from, from a hundred yards away. Even the horns are on the cows are different shape. And then the vocalizations are much different, like I mentioned.
So they're, they're very much different. However, one of the things that bison are really good at is being very plastic in their ability to adapt to different conditions. And so that's why bison existed from northern Mexico to Pennsylvania to Oregon to the Bering Sea to the YK Delta in the last 10,000 years is because they can adapt to darn near anything. And so if you take a plains bison and you put it at Delta Junction, it adapts to Alaska conditions and does great.
You can even take wood bison and take them to Montana and they adapt to Montana and they do really good. And so they're a bison's ability to adapt is way greater than the differences between subspecies. And so they operate about the same. You know, if you bring plains bison to Alaska, their ecological niche is about the same as wood bison would have been. Or if you put wood bison out and same goes for, you know, going the other direction. What about bulls and cows telling them apart?
There is a great amount of sexual dimorphism so bulls are are really big they like i mentioned the the adult bull wood bison can get to be over 2 000 pounds adult cow wood bison is somewhere around 1300 1400 pounds 14 will be a really big one the cows stop growing at around four or five years old as far as their you know they kind of reach maximum size about then and then bulls keep on growing to about eight or, or 10 that, so they, their, their sizes are fairly parallel to about four years old.
It's just that the bulls keep growing. So it's, it's a long, it's many years to get to the, to the really big size. Mm-hmm. They start, oh, sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say that, you know, they start out awful small and they, they got a heck of a growth rate in the first couple of years, but go ahead. How many calves will a cow have like in a year or, and then also in her lifetime? So they only have one at a time, a lot like caribou.
And it's not, they can have twins, but it's like one in a thousand or one in several thousand, something like that. It's really rare. And it's not known, it's not common for a cow bison to keep those twins. They often abandon one if they do have them, even in that low rate. And then how often they have a calf is, of course, associated with what their body condition is like and what their age is like.
But once they get to be about four years old, all the way up to 20 or older than 20 even, they should have a calf about two out of three years in the wild. And of course, the better the habitat, the more that's going to lean toward three out of three years. And the worse the habitat, the more it's going to lean toward one out of three years. But the general average is about two out of three years. You'd expect an adult cow bison to have a calf.
So given that they've been there for almost 100 years now, the introduced ones, the habitat's got to be fine, but it's a slow kind of grind reproduction. There's not going to be a massive proliferation to the point where there's going to be like a ton of hunting opportunities for these things. It's kind of is what it is at this point. Well, no, I think you're misinterpreting that. Okay. That you've missed is, is survival. Survival on bison is ridiculously high.
So if you take Delta Junction, we harvest somewhere between 15 and 20% of that population every year and have for most of the last 80 years. We have never seen a moose population where we've done that. Once you get up around five to 7% in a moose population, you're pushing them down. You're, you're making the population decline. And the reason for the differences, both of them have about the same amount of reproduction.
Like say you have a hundred moose or a hundred bison, they'll roughly produce 20 to 30 calves. But with bison, they just survive so much better. And the difference in survival comes from predation. Bison are really good at not being killed by wolves and bears.
Moose and caribou and sheep and deer and all these other things that we're used to in Alaska, they are easily killed by predators and so often when you when you get that 20 20 or 30 percent growth in the spring from from calving or lambing or fawning or whatever species it is.
Most of that is killed by predators you know by like for example in low density moose populations in interior alaska you know you get that big pulse in the spring maybe 30 percent growth and then And something like 90% of that is killed by predators by the end of the year. Yeah. So they just don't survive. Well, in bison, they, they survive and it's, it's, it's, sometimes close to 100%. I remember what one of the Delta Junction bison biologists used to say, you know, that was managing that herd.
He would just go count calves in the spring, and he would be able to set that as his number of permits for hunters to take in the fall, because almost all those calves would be recruited into the population. Which just recruitment of a young moose or a caribou is actually rare. I mean, your chances of making to adulthood is super rare on a moose or a caribou.
So defense mechanism, also maybe not a lot of, you know, some animals have to be taught to key in on certain things like the calving time or just that you can kill the calves. And we see it some down here with black bears eating a black tail deer. They just kind of seem to know when they're going to drop and it's just, they just punish them in those first couple of weeks. And then after that, they kind of leave them alone for the most part, because it might not be worth it to chase them.
But yeah, that does make a lot of sense. There might be more difficult in an angry mommy. Well, yeah, bison, they look a little bit awkward, but they run fast. They run far. They jump high. They kick with all four feet. They got horns. They work as a group and they're really savvy when it comes to predators.
And I think that's one of the reasons why, well, it's, it's kind of the inverse reason, but it's one of the reasons why they're so susceptible to firearms because they're just not scared of predators they know how to deal with predators they know how to defend themselves against predators so if you walk up with a rifle they think you know that you're a bear i mean or a wolf or whatever don't i don't imagine to think
of what they think but you know what i mean they treat you like the other predator but you've got a rifle and they are no match for a rifle i mean so when rifles came on the scene in north america it essentially wiped out bison and and and i there's even some thought that But some of the early die-offs of bison, like in the late 1700s on through the 1800s, had, especially in the north, where bison were really small numbers,
you know, scattered out through little wetlands all through the boreal forest. Whenever rifles showed up, that was just the end of every little buffalo herd that was around, you know, muskets that the Russians brought and things like that. So, yeah, it's still true today. They're just no match for a rifle. As opposed to like deer or moose or caribou, you know, they run away, they hide and all that. And bison just stand there because they know you can't get on.
So what are some of the management challenges? Because obviously, like you said, you don't have the market hunters of the 1800s. You don't have the railroad coming through. You don't have a patchwork of private land and everything else and the encroachment of land development. There's a lot of land for them and you have management hunting. So what are some of the management challenges that go into Bison? Well, at Delta Junction, there is some conflicts with agriculture.
There are farmers there that grow crops like hay or barley and things like that. And there's some conflicts there. Most of that has been mitigated in the last couple of decades through fencing. But there's still a couple of farmers that fence their stuff with not very modern type fencing that when the snow gets deep or drifted, the bison can get over it and stuff like that. And they get into hay and stuff. So that's a conflict.
Of course, not very little amount of Alaska land is designated for agriculture. So that's not much of an issue across most of the state. But if you take the farewell herd and Chitna and copper herds and stuff like that, there's not a lot of difficulty managing them. One of the things that is a challenge for bison in Alaska is snow. So bison eat their forage right off at ground level. So they're eating meadow
plants, whether it's grass or sedge or forbs or whatever. It's mostly stuff that's right at the ground level. Well, if it snows, they got to get through that snow to get to it, which is fine. Their whole big hump and head and everything is designed to sweep snow from side to side and then get a bite of forage. So they end up making these big pits in the snow, and that's where they eat for a while.
As opposed to moose who kind of walk around, and they eat the stuff that's poking up through the snow, and they hardly ever dig in the snow. So if it gets to be ice layers or other difficult snow conditions, that can really inhibit a bison's ability to forage. And so that can be a problem, is that they can have catastrophic weather events that lead to mortality, which is what we've seen in some of the years in the Inoco herd out there in lower Yukon.
There's been some, I was doing a little bit of reading, and there are times when there were massive amounts of buffalo that would wash down rivers. Because they were trying to do a river crossing on the Platte River somewhere or the Missouri River down south, and they'd be washed away, swept away, stuck in the mud. And so it was kind of this idea that water and bison might not mix. Do we see the same sort of issues here?
Yeah. Is water a big predator for them? Well- It can be the leading cause of death of wild bison in Canada is water, whether it's drowning of one sort or another, whether they fell through the ice or they swam across the lake or whatever. And they've had mortality events where hundreds died at the time. And what happens, so a bison is a good swimmer, but it doesn't have hollow hair like a moose or a caribou. It's got hair more like you or I do. That's really interesting kind of hair.
But anyway, they are big, dense animals and they swim really low in the water. So when a bison is swimming through the water, all you see is its nostrils and its eyes and sometimes its horns and that's it. Literally everything else is underwater. And so that makes them highly susceptible to waves. So like if they're out swimming and somebody comes by in a boat, you can just swap them with the wake from the boat.
And since they're not very buoyant, that's challenging. And that's what that was thought wise. A lot of them died in that lake is in Canada when a bunch of them died in the hundreds, is that they were going across there and the waves built up and it killed them. But what I've noticed in the Inoco, they've got the Inoco River down there and the Yukon River are kind of side by side.
And I saw cow groups, which, you know, a standard group bison is the cows and all the young animals up to three years old.
And I saw them crossing back and forth over the Yukon even several times but then in the Inoko they cross the Inoko almost every day and I hardly ever lose them to drowning down there and they're in the water almost daily but in the very beginning in the very first year that I released them in 2015 I lost nine to falling through the ice that spring in the first like three weeks after I released them and i think they're they were just naive and it was a special conditions that spring
too it kind of melted out really gently so that the the ice stayed in place and kind of rotted which is kind of an abnormal melt out but then they the places that they were crossing sloughs and things like that they just eventually started falling through and again they were they were naive so there's some shagalook folks tell a story of a couple years later when they watched a bull go out on the ice in October to cross the Inoco.
And he walked out there really slowly and got about a third of the way across and then stopped and turned around and went back. And so there's some ideas that they're learning. Yeah. So as far as hunting them goes, it's a difficult tag to draw. A friend of mine drew and hunted in the farewell burn area and flew out and had skins on the skis and did that whole thing.
And I said it was a pretty wild hunt super cold they had an arctic oven whatnot but as far as hunting them goes, are there unique challenges to things things that people might need to know, that would differ this hunt from other Alaska hunts good question, Yeah, it depends on which one you go to, obviously. So at Delta Junction, it's highly accessible.
You know, you can kind of drive around and talk to farmers and ask, you know, where the bison are and just kind of go, you know, spot them out of your pickup trucks and stuff like that. But in a place like Farewell or Copper, you're dealing with some pretty remote country and some challenging conditions. But they are highly visible and they like to live in the open areas. So, you know, you can spot them and get on them.
And the interesting stuff for me is that the Asiac herd, which is just across the border in the Yukon Territory, kind of by Hanes Junction between us and Whitehorse, that's about 2,000 animals and they harvest 280 out of that population every year, which is better performance than any moose or caribou population that we have in Alaska.
But they're finding that those animals, they harvest so many out of that population that those animals are really hard to hunt and the the success is is pretty poor especially with snow machines because when the bison here snow machine come and they just go into the trees but they people have learned that if they snowshoe or ski and they do they do a lot better because they kind of can get around that that whole deal of them learning to avoid snow machines and what how much
meat are you getting off one well of course it depends a lot on the sex and age of the animal but their conversion ratio is something like two-thirds. So if you get a 2,000-pound bull, you got something like 1,500 pounds of meat. So that's an awful lot. Yeah, it sure is. Goodness sakes. I mean, that's harkis weight, sorry. Okay. And then taste or anything like that?
People always talk about ruddy caribou and ruddy black-tailed deer, but do you know anything about taste, or is it comparable to anything, or better time to get them? I, in Fred Myers or Costco, you know, sells Bison Burger, and, you know, it's commercially available, so you can get an idea of what it tastes like. It's a lot like beef, other than it's not very fatty, but I've never, people have given me several packages from different hunts they've gone on. I've never shot one in the wild.
I've had to shoot some in captivity, but, they, and we've donated the meat on all the ones that we shot in captivity. So I didn't eat any of that, but the bison that I have, eh, just tastes like beef without, uh, without the fat essentially, but I've never tasted gamey bison. I've never heard anybody speak of gamey bison. Is it a little bit weird? I know my wife and I are thinking about getting chickens
and getting meat chickens. And so like you're raising the thing, so you're connected to it on a different level. So killing the chicken might be a little bit different. So because you work with bison and you appreciate them and you understand them and you study them, does it make the thought of eating them or hunting them a little bit different or is it just fine? Man, you're really getting into philosophy. I know. That just popped into my head because my wife was talking about the chickens.
I was like, man, is that like eating our pets or no, this is food. It's totally different. Well, if you're going to push me into it, I'll get into it. I grew up in a hunting, fishing and trapping family. And we also had agricultural animals that we harvested like chickens and an occasional pig and an occasional bottle calf and stuff like that of, you know, cattle. And so I was used to killing things that we raised. So I had no problem with that.
I was used to killing wild animals that, that for food. And that was all our main food. We didn't, we didn't really buy any, any meat all growing up. And that's through most of my adulthood too. And the eating of wild things is really, to me and my family, was really kind of a religious-type experience or a ceremonial-type experience where we really respected that meat and what we were getting from that animal.
And to be totally honest with you, working as a wildlife biologist kind of ruins some of that because when you work with an animal that you killed and you skin it or you prepare for meat and stuff like that, there are certain ways that you do it. You know, you try really hard to make sure the meat stays clean and that the
hide is taken care of properly. And you spend a lot of time thinking about the flavor and the aesthetics and all these things, especially with the individual components of these animals.
When you get to into wildlife biology, you do all these necropsies where there's gut contents all over everything because you're, you're digging through the room and, and you're, you know, you're going for, you know, trying to find parasites in them and you're, you know, it's just, it's, it's way different than a religious experience. The scientific experience associated with wildlife is much different than like
a religious experience. And so, yeah, it's, it's kind of ruined it a little bit for me, ruined the kind of, the glory and. Like deep appreciation for hunting. I mean, I still, that's still how I feed my family and I've got little children and stuff like that, but, but the kind of passion for climbing over, you know, three hills away just to kill the animal is, is not quite as great in me as it, as it was. And maybe that's some of just getting older too.
I've heard that hunters kind of progress that way, but yeah, it's, it's tough being a biologist and a hunter as weird as that sounds.
Yeah. well it's a different context my my brother's a doctor and so i say brother do you ever get like, weirded out or grossed out he's like this is it's it's totally different you don't look at like if you have a cut on your hand and it's your blood that's different but if it's a problem solving and this is what i'm trained to do and it's a doctor so it's it's a completely different context and it's like well it makes sense and you have to have that detachment otherwise,
you're going to be overly emotional while while things are going on so yeah but yeah super super interesting there. Where did you grow up? I was raised in Montana, around the east front, just south of Glacier Park, on some ranches just west of a little town called Shoto. And how'd you get to Alaska? Penel and Tollefson were the original bear guides on Kodiak Island. They were from Shoto. And there's a book about them called Alaska's Great Bear Men or something like
that, or maybe just Alaska's bear men. I can't remember. Anyway, they would come back to that community and show slides and tell stories and stuff like that. And they would take young men with them to be packers and all that. So there was quite a bit of Alaska influence in my community. And what I was used to as for socialization when I was a kid was to listening to men tell stories, you know, And one man would tell a story about something
he hunted or fished or trapped or whatever. And the next person would tell one that was a little bit better. And the one story that always beat at all other stories was always a story from Alaska. And so from when I was about five years old, you could ask me, what are you going to do when you grow up? I said, well, I'm going to Alaska, because there's no other alternative. That's where all the cool stories are from. And it just happened to be just this really weird little spot that I lived that
had that Alaska influence in it. So by the time I got to graduate from high school, Penelope and Tolson were dead, and that opportunity didn't exist anymore. But I had, my dad was an elk guide for a while, and he had guided some folks when I was in high school. And one of them that had been, had come from Kotzebue. And so I did a bunch of work for that guy between my junior and senior year, because he was moving to Montana at that time.
Anyway, all that work that I did for him was in exchange for a guaranteed job when I landed in Kotzebue. And, and so I went to Kotzebue, I borrowed 800 bucks after I played the all-state football game in May of 1990. And I landed in Kotzebue in June and then I stayed. Dang. Wild, the call of the wild. Yeah. Once I got to Kotzebue, I really enjoyed, you know, that, all that Northwestern Alaska.
And I, you know, would work just long enough to get the money to go fly out and be on the Noatak or the Kobuk and stuff. And I worked in a lot of villages up and down the Selawick and Kobuk and everything. And that was really fun. But I realized I had to do something with my life. And I kind of always wanted to be a wildlife biologist. And one of the old guys that had kind of take me under his wing, he really convinced me that I needed to go to college and go do that.
So I came to Fairbanks and then I got here and gotten to college and then I got married and got a house and all that sort of stuff and just kind of settled. And now I got kids and all that. Yeah, Fairbanks is awesome. I got some friends up there. It's super cold, but at least you can see the blue skies. And that's what my buddies talk about, that it might be negative 30,
but at least you can see blue sky. And they don't know how I can handle the gray and the rain down here, and I don't know how they can handle the cold. So nowhere is perfect. Yeah. True. Anything else to add? Anything that you'd like to share about projects or any interesting stuff coming up? Well, the goal of the Alaska Wood Bison Restoration Project is to return bison to portions of their former range in interior Alaska.
And so we've got that population put out in 2015 on the lower Yukon and Inoko River system. And now we have a population in the Minto Flat State Game Refuge. It's currently in a pen, a soft release pen, where we're acclimating them to the site. We're going to release them around green up in the spring year of 2025. And we're hoping that that establishes a population. Every time we try this, and it's an experiment. And so we have high hopes for that. And the habitat looks good.
And it all should go great. And then the next place that we have in mind is the Yukon Flats. And we hope we can get to that in 2028. Or so it's hard to say uh and it depends on a lot about you know how local people feel and stuff and right now there's a lot of support from yukon flats so i think that's that'll probably work out pretty well awesome well thanks a lot it's been really interesting enjoyed having you on here, you're welcome take care thanks bye.