Ep. 037

Janni is his new name? Garrett Smith, who has a distended belly right now, and he's and he's got a chew packed and somehow they're related like that chew is gonna alleviate his distended belly. I think he was trying to tell us in some kind of subtle way. Um, Chris Gil like a fish, like a fish. Who's a turkey man? Now you just heard your first turkey gowl? I did? Is that true? I think it is? Yeah. I can't remember hearing one before that, I mean, you know,

other than digitally. Yeah. And then Dr Carl Malcolm Carl tell us about the Wisconsin supersow Man, the Wisconsin Supersou, the wiscon This is the most this is it? Yeah? Tell us about the Wisconsin supersou all right, so a little backstory, lay it all out, lay it all out, all right, I mean within reason. Okay, So so my mom and my father. Yeah, so I'll began right around um.

All right, So I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin Madison, which, by the way, was the first wildlife management program anywhere in the world, founded by Aldo Leopold after he left the Forest Service. That was one of the draws for me and kind of a

Leopold junkie growing up. Um, but going to Madison, I was in kind of the southern farm belt region of Wisconsin, and as you travel north in the state of Wisconsin, you increasingly get into more and more forested landscapes, to the point where you get up into the northern part of the state, and the northern third is predominantly forested. So about halfway up you're in this interesting mix where you've got about a fifty fifty ratio of row crops

like corn and soybeans and forest. And our good friend Doug Durn and south of that line, yep, he's south of that line. He's just like solid egg. No, well, defining like the defining feature or how would you put it?

You know, So the Driftless area, the southwest part of the state where dug Durn is located is is interesting because it does have a major agricultural component, but there's certainly a lot of forest land, and part of that is because there's so much slope, which is unusual for the rest of the state until Yeah, so there's there's some untillable land, which is where you typically have forests

there in the Driftless area. And this relates to the story because what's been happening for the last few decades is that black bears throughout the Midwest are increasingly expanding their range southward. So I don't know if Doug has any stories about bears showing up in his property in the Driftless area yet, not yet, because I feel like if he did, I would have heard about it. Yeah, well, because he'll tell you about everything down to a greener showing,

you know what I mean. I imagine he would, and I predict that he will have that story before too long because certainly bears, why why are bears mark him south? Like my theory on it, and this is completely untested and probably you probably i'd recommend you do not publish the paper on this is it. It It just took him a hundred fifty years to get used to people. That's the case. So what I think it has to do with is persecution. So black bears are extremely adaptable with

their diet, and everybody knows is there. Like the classic omnivore, they'll eat anything. They can subsist on vegetation purely. They can do very well chowing down on meat and typically speaking, they're eating some combination of the two. So they can exist just about anywhere where there's where there's food for him. You know, my neighbor, uh, you'll at my last cabin. He's telling about a guy that had a bear come into his workshop and drink three gallons gear oil. That's unreal.

I wonder if you killed it. If it didn't, it probably tore some gastro intestinal situation. Was debating whether or not to go there. But I took the high road and let you take it there. So thanks for being Yeah, phenomenal omnivorse. So the point is they're they're really adaptable. They can live just about anywhere as long as they're not being shot to the point where it's not sustainable.

You know, if, like anything else, if you shoot enough of them, or you know, trap enough of them, if you eliminate enough from the from the population, they're not going to exist in a particular part of the state anymore. So. The bears, like many other species UM that are managed by state agencies as hunted species, have been on an upward trajectory since their low point when they weren't being

managed as such. So essentially, bears, like many other species, were persecuted by unregulated hunting for a long time and driven out. I mean, we're just like no rules about take and it doesn't matter what time of year, saw with cubs whatever. You could at a time shoot a bear and there was no just like everything else, right, I mean at a time, that's what it was for

all these species. But under managed under a management scenario where we're tracking populations, were making sure that the number of bears taken is sustainable. Um, they are showing that they're capable of existing well outside of what people think of as bear country, including places like southwest Wisconsin, which historically certainly had bears and now increasingly has bears showing up places like Richland County as an example. Yeah, right,

So I'm throwing it out there for you. Always feel like calling Dug up right now if he if he doesn't have a bear story about his property, he will he'll have well he will soon, I think, and he'll certainly have bear stories from other people's properties. So part of the equation here with the expanding bear population is the super Sal and bears like her. And the super Sal was an individual bear that was part of my research project and as a graduate student at the University Wisconsin.

Who but tell, tell, tell what you were doing? Okay, So I was looking at that spatial expansion. So what I was doing, I was I was specifically focused on dispersing subadults. So black bears are really interesting and that you know they're they're in the den. So they they emerge into the world um with their mother in the den and basically just latch on and nurse for the first couple of months of their lives, and then the family emerges from the den in the spring. I gotta

ask you the other question, bring it. What's the difference between precocial. They're not precocial, they are altricial. Altricial. Yeah, So they're born in a state where essentially um they're relatively underdeveloped, they're tiny, their limbs are barely formed when they're born, and they basically just navigate from the birth canal to a nipple latch on. And bears in general, including black bears, crank out some of the most calorie dense milk anywhere in the animal kingdom. It's like liquid

butter coming from those nipples. So they grow really fast, and they do after the wrong nipples. Yeah, I mean it's amazing. So as an example, you know, I have my hand on a lot of bears um during the field work. And when you go to work up a den that had a sow with cubs, the styles would be lactating. And there were a number of times where explaining working up a den. But use a checklist for you. I want you to I want to do a quickie

pre precocial altricial. Do quickie on that. And then don't just say work up a den, because no one's gonna know what the hell that means. Okay, all right, precuecial altricial. So species that are born precocial have the ability to do things like evade predation. So, for example, like pronghorn fawns, when they're born it's a matter of days before they're up on their feet and able to cruise if a

predator shows up. Alright, altricial species are born in a state where they still have a lot of development to go. So we're humans are altricial. Yeah, man, Yeah, you know, infant is not going to evade pre ation. It's got to be protected, just like a bear cup all right. Now, working up a den essentially, what I'm referring to is

going into a place where bears are hibernating. They've been located either because they've got a radio collar or someone from the public has encountered a den and contacted through some avenue researchers like myself, and we go into the den with typically a poll syringe or a jab stick, which is basically envisioned like a broom handle with a big syringe and a needle on the end. And the goal is to be able to give the bear an injection in some major muscle without putting yourself in harm's way.

So you're either trying to get an injection somewhere like in the buttock or in the shoulder. Those are the two best spots to try to get a stick, and the den's. You know, when people think of a bear den, most folks are thinking like a hole in the ground with the bears piled up in it, a cave. But

and and sometimes that is the case. But I would say, man, probably around half the time they're above ground, maybe in like a a slash pile where they've kind of carved out a little nest, or sometimes just laying on the ground in the wide open. You were saying, you found him dend up just under like some bows, over under overhanging evergreen boughs. I found him, you know, I found him dend up in places where they really have almost

no cover. They're just like laying there in the snow, getting snowed on, and the cubs will be curled up against their bellies. Um, and it doesn't look like they put any effort at all into seeking like shelter of any form, so highly variable, what these dens look like. I was gonna just ask if you have like has that always been like that, like when you read older papers,

did they have research that shows that as well? Or do you feel do you have a hypothesis on maybe why that's is it happening more now than it used to? Like the expanding bears aren't finding good spots, you know, man, or maybe they don't need to because the winner is still In some places. They don't even hibernate, right, I mean they in hibernation is a whole different subject. You know,

they're not technically true hibernators. They go into like a seasonal sort of downturn in their metabolism, but they're not a true hibernating species. Um So, I don't think it's something that has changed. I think it's part of their life history. Um So, No, I don't. I do not think that the denning without a hole in the ground is something that is new for black bears, like it's part of their life history. It has been part of their life history. They basically do what they need to

do to survive. Some bears one year will make it, then the next year not. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. One interesting pattern that was true throughout my research and was conveyed to me by other folks who have done a lot of bear handling, is that an individual bear will not use the same den location twice ever, and in some cases, and I thought

it was twice in a row but they'll alternate. I've I've never seen a bear go back to the same place, and the people with whom I have done my research have never seen a den get reused. What it makes sense. There's a guy I know in northern Wisconsin. Um, his last name is Heart maybe Bill Hart. He owns a T shirt shop. Where's Northland College something like that. There is Northland College, I can't remember the town. They have

to think called the Secret f Olson Nature Writing Award. Yeah, and I won that award and was hosted by this man Bill Hart. He took me down and showed me undercut Bank on his property where every other year there's a black bear with cubs in there, and there's a little hole he can even look in there. So maybe it's different bears. It's just a SP's different bears. Maybe it's the same bear disproving this pattern that I've served.

I'm sure he listen. I hate guys like I hate people to do what I just did, because you're trying to talk about like generally right, So generally it's bad to smoke tons of cigarettes and then someone's like agreeable, you know, so it's like, yeah, interesting side this fello by the last name of Heart. I will go on to say this, I guarantee you in the history of American black bears, a bear has reused a den. That's that's all I'm trying to say. Man, generally speaking, black

bears do not reuse den sights. And this the super Saudi asked about is a really interesting example of this because she denned in the same like hundred yard by hundred yard area, but shows different locations within this small footprint during the years that I found. You're worried about disease transmission of some sort. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's who knows. Man, Trying to get into the mind of a bear is what we're doing here, and

I think it's But I don't like. Yeah, it's an when you're talking about like why things do things, why animals do things, A lot of people say, like, for instance, the r day, my friend Heart, he's got a bear that comes back to the same he's convinced it's the same bear. Yeah, And I don't think I said, like, never has a bear done this. I'm not taking your task. I'm just I'm just asking a point. I like it. I like it. Um And then knowing thing people do and I do it all the time, is you'll say,

let me give an example. I was yesterday admiring some turkeys that we shot on our turkey hunt. It's a Miriam's turkey, and a Miriam's turkey has a lot of white on the end of their feathers. I was saying, I wonder if that has to do with heat reducing how many how much radiant surface because it's a it's an animal from the southwest, very intense sun. An Eastern

turkey has a lot of black on it. Maybe these turkeys have a lot more white on them as an adaptive advantage about radiant heat, Like maybe that's a problem getting too hot. So I think that when you look at stuff you be you'd say, like you, I can't say that that's why those turkeys evolved that what you could not pillage, But what would you call it? I'd

call it that. Okay, I can't say that's why those turkeys evolved that pellage, but I could say that could be something to do with it, or that it could have that effect in reducing radiant heat. So, but I find talking to scientists like yourself, I'll be like, oh, do they do it. Do the bears not want to go back, maybe because of mits or some kind of thing like that. I know you don't know all the way, but is that a reasonable Yes, it's a reasonable idea.

It's a reasonable idea. It will be another reasonable idea maybe to be unpredictable. You know, if they've got a den that has been there on the ground for X number of months and a certain number of animals have encountered that den and become aware of its existence, then there might be some adaptive advantage to moving locations, you know,

especially if you have those extremely altricial cubs to look after. Um. You know, basically the onus is entirely on a mother bear to make sure those cubs get to the point where they can climb a tree. And they've got a long road to ho from the time they're born before they're to that point, because they're born in the middle of the winter, right, Yeah, that's right, like February March

or something like that. Yeah, late January, yep. And then like I said, you know, when when they're born, they're they're tiny, and by the time they're coming out of the den, they've gone from being you know, like something you hold in the palm in your hand to be in something that's four or five, six, maybe seven pounds, And so the mother has she's got to bring all that all those calories, all that energy into the den with her both to maintain that pregnancy, deliver the cubs,

and then provide enough nutrition through her milk to get him to the point where when they emerge from the den, she can wolf at them and they're ready to climb, because once they leave the den, you know, she's she's not in a position to just protect them the way she can while they're they're all bawled up in a pilot, dogs, other bears, all manner of things. Yeah, definitely. So that's you covered on everything so far. No, man, I'm sharp,

I am sharp. I'm good. It is fascinating stuff. And by the way, one of the highlights of this week turkey hunting. Yea, you guys almost got killed by bear. No,

we didn't almost. We had to bear encounters this week though. Um. The first one was going out trying to locate some birds in the evening and I heard what sounded like a cub kind of bowling down the hill from us, and then a bunch of claw marks on a tree and then what had to have been the sow popping her teeth, and given how late it was in the day, I decided not to take the shotgun with me. I was just kind of strolling up the hill, and when I heard that sow pop in her teeth, I was like,

let's let's take this other direction. And then, uh, what was even a cooler sighting was um as yesterday morning man saw that the biggest bear I've seen since coming to New Mexico. And it was also the blondest bear, this great big boar, and UH had him while I was putting a decoy in the ground and heard a twig pop and looked over and he was no more than seventy yards away looking at me through the trees,

and he was just beautiful. And then we we set up a couple more times, and he came back in to check us out, and he was woofing at us from up the hill, so we all got a good look at him. Is just a beautiful animal man there, And you're getting a lot of bear vocalizations, which is usual. Yeah, that's true. You know, I was telling you I one time was hand calling to a tom to a gobbler and heard an exhale over my shoulder, like how someone would do, like they're a little bit tired from walking

up a hill. And it was a bear, I mean arms distance that that would be an exaggeration, extremely clear enough where I could like, I could hear it breathe. He's coming to kill that hand When I turned around, Man, it's scared the ship out of him. Scared. He freaked out. Yeah, he did not like that man. Yeah, and that big one yesterday when he first saw me, he went part way up a tree and decided that wasn't his best

course of defense. Came back down the tree, making so much noise, breaking big branches, claws scraping on the side of the tree, and then tore off up the mountain. And it surprised me that he came back in to check us out when we were calling again. So I don't know if the turkey he went and got pumped up. Maybe he's like, come on, dude, your whole life he's been running, Go down there. You've got that guy. But at least two and a half bills. It was an

awesome animal. Man Okay, Wisconsin, Supersouth, Okay, Wisconsin. Super south. So aside from the fact that she came back to the same general need, I needed more background. Okay, how many bear dance have you dug up? I would have to look at my notebook to give you an answer. I would say, oh, gosh, in the neighborhood of lady to fifty dans something like that that I've been or everybody. So I should give you a little more context on

the research projects. We're interested in. This expansion of black bears south in their range, so individuals moving farther and farther south. And as you know from all the other species that show up in crazy places like mountain lions showing up in New York State. You know these critters that go hundreds of miles. Typically it's these young males disperse sing that go great distances. So I was really interested in looking at the dispersal behavior of black bears.

So what I needed for that research project was to get GPS collars on yearling bears and a little bit more about the biology of the species. Got you, I got you. So born in the den, they get up to let's say five pounds, come out of the den with mom in the spring, keep growing still really dependent on mom for their defense. Spend that whole spring, summer, fall, buy mom's side, side like insight of mom or in

sound range of mom. And if something's going wrong, all that mother bear has to do is give a wolf, and the cubs know they've got to get up the nearest tree. So what a lot of people don't know is that when that second winner comes around, now you've got Mama bear and a bunch of you know, we call them year things, but they're less than a year old.

They're just about to complete their first year. They all den up together again, so you'll have a beared end that might have let's say a sow that weighs two thirty pounds, and then she's got x number of one year old cubs, some of which might weigh as much as a hundred pounds themselves, all piled up together. So it could be a huge like biomass of bear in

a heap, and they're sorting it all out. And and especially if they're underground, you know, so I mentioned I described this this polsyringe that you used to sedate the bears. And if they're underground, you know, you've got like a head lamp and you're looking in there and it's a dark hole and a dark animal and they're the way that they're piled up, it's like super spooning. It's like a tangled mass of limbs and heads and trying to figure out where one bear ends and another bear begins.

And you don't even know how many bears there are down in the hole. Like when our kids crawling with me and my wife, man, yeah, just wake up. It's hard. You can't get out. So you're like, is that is that Steve's thigh or you know, you have no idea, so it can. It was, and it is a nerve racking thing at first to intentionally go up to a den and try to sedate these animals. And you got

to sedate the cubs too. You have to sedate the cubs when they're in that second winter when well, yeah, and they're you know, hundred pounds, Yeah, and they don't know what's going on. They want to get away, and you don't want to. You don't want to fracture that family in a prematurely either, So you want to get everybody sedated and then you because you don't want one to run off. Yeah, and yeah, and that can happen. You can have individuals that you know, try to make

a getaway. So that's what I'm talking about when I say working up a den, going into sedate um and then you're getting measurements, you're taking um blood samples. You know, there are other research projects people were looking at a variety of other topics with respect of these bears, and

one of the projects they're interested in in milk. In in the bare milk, And I mentioned to you the fat content of bare milk, and we segued several different times since then, but I wanted to mention on several occasions I've had bare milk on my hands when I'm doing this in the winter, and obviously it's gone from bare body temperature out to wintertime temperature, and it's almost instantaneous that it turns into a solid and you can smear it between your fingers and it feels it feels

like butter. I mean it, it's so it's got so much fat in it that the second you take it away from that that body heat from the mother, it turns into a solid. And obviously for the cubs, that's just going straight from bare body temperature to bare body temperature inside the cup's mouth while it's ingested, but if it gets out in that winter air, it is like a solid material, so pretty fascinating stuff. So those cubs

are not a ton of weight. And the number of offspring that a single sow has in a given year is linked directly to her body condition. So a bear that goes into the den in good condition will have more cubs than a bear that goes into a den in poor condition. And one of the ways that this is controlled is that black bears have what's called delayed implantation, so they get pregnant and these little fertilized eggs just kind of float around in the womb for a little

while and then when the time is right. The body is communicating to the brain what kind of condition it's in. And there are a variety of chemical uh interactions that scientists believe drive this relationship. One of one of the keys is likely to be uh lepton, which is in circulation in a in an amount proportional to body fat. So a really fat bear, it body is telling its brain,

I'm in really good shape. It's brains telling its body we should be having more cubs than in a poor year, and more of those fertilized embryos will implant into the uterus wall and turn into cubs. You can you imagine humans had delayed implantation, the implications at half I'm imagining it. We still be My wife is still have three floating in there. They're like no, not quite yet, Like no one are there, but not quite Yeah, So it's pretty

It's it's amazing stuff, man, animal kingdom. What's the maximum? When you say that, how many does she have in reserve? Like? How many could she have? That's it's a great question, and I don't know the answer to it, but I can tell you that in the literature there are very very few instances where six cubs have been documented. Being born to a single mother in a given year seems to be about the mass six is like, you know, like the less than once in a blue moon number.

What's the national average? Two to three is really common? Two to three is really common? And imagine you know, you asked about a national average. Obviously, depending on where you are on the map, you're gonna have different food resources, and then even in a given location year to year, it's highly variable. Think about you know, in a lot of these systems acorn mast crop is a key driver.

So if you're in a place that's let's say, got a lot of white oak and it's a massed year, you should expect those Souths to have more fat and more cubs. And when it's a massed poor year and they're forced to some relatively inferior calorie, poor food source, lower body condition for your cubs makes sense. Hold there for a minute. Okay, Yehney, any questions. You're cool and everything up to this point. I'm cool. I can tell you that where there won't be a lot of cubs

come out of dentist here, and that's in Kentucky, Tennessee's straight. Yeah. I am curious about the the hundred yard square, like if that had a reason to it with the Superstown. It's a it's like how many she dined? How many times within a little chunker ground? Three times I visited that sow in this little area. What were the three dens? So two times? It was this interesting place. It was on private property. The landowner gave his permission to do the work. If I remember right, it was it was

the Pettis Farm was the name of this place. And there were some stump piles there the farmer had cleared out, you know, some egg fields and piled up a bunch of stumps. So on two of those occasions, the sow was in a stump pile, but it was not the same stump pile, two separate stump piles. And then on a third occasion occasion, she was above the ground and close to those stump piles, just laying out, just laying out with a pile of pile of yearlings. So how

in the world does that work? I don't know, man, but I can tell you, like, like, how do they not? So it's just laying there, like a dog could walk up and start eating the young. If a dog walked up and tried to start eating the young, it would not go favorably for the day, even though she's in a semi stupor state. Yes, and that's another sort of

misconception when you approach a den. And I should probably have prefaced the conversation about so called working up den's with a disclaimer like, no one if you find a bear den should be messing with it. Just leave him alone. Let them do their things. Now, when you come up to a den, it's not like the bear is laying

there in suspended animation, oblivious to your presence. The vast majority of the time when I would get to the point of trying to figure out how many bears are in the den, is it is, you know, the den above ground or below ground. By the time I found that the location and was looking at the bear, the bear was aware of my presence and looking back at me sometimes but aware. It's not like they're you know, completely sedated already and you just walk up and give

a sleeping bear a shot. They know you're there. And the speed at which they can go from being in this metabolically um slow state to just being like with it and running away, you know, it is remarkable. I mean they can they can go from idol or sub idol speed to full RPMs in a matter of minutes. It's really an amazing thing that their bodies can do. That's like me in the morning before tricky hunt. He's noticed that as long he's got some of that great

camp coffee. Before I can even think about getting up, he's got the jet boils round and everything's happening. You guys, run, You guys are in a tight ship. Chris, are you cool? And everything. Yeah, Actually I do have a question. Um, so averages two to three cubs per per litter per letter? How many cubs? Like, how many litters can a bear have in her lifetime? Is it just one? Or is it? That depends on one key variable, which is how long she lives? So they can't. They don't do it every year,

though they do. That's exactly well typically, that's right. Yeah, so bear in mind again those cubs are born. Let's say year one, the cubs are born, mama's got that responsibility for a year two, right, she's denning with them again, so she can't give birth to a new letter and care for last year's litter. So that's why there's this cycle where it's a litter and then it's rearing last year's litter and then they're gone, and then it's a litter and it's rearing that litter and then they're gone.

How old are they when he becomes sextually mature. It depends on diet, But you can have bears that are reproducing at two years of age. Yep, So they're not they're they're not doing is that many times? Well, he could have a black bear boar one time they aged at seventeen not accurate that they can get I mean they can live into their twenties. It depends, you know. The biggest thing is is uh, honestly, how how hard

hunted the population is. That's like the leading cause mortality. Ye, but you could you could you know in a in a situation where a sow has avoided predation and made it to her twenties, she might have had eight litters nine litters, so they can crank out a bunch. Now this style that I'm talking about, the super I named her that because she perfect perfect. I'm a fan of alliteration, so it kind of has a ring to it. Um. She really stood out because I mentioned that A visit

her three times. The first year I visited her, she had five cups, which was noteworthy in and of itself. She's the only bear during my research project with five cubs. Ever, that's a good question. I'd have to look at my notes again on that. But she wasn't She was not not like a monster, but she was in the neighborhood of two twenty somewhere in there, so not not like holy cows. Would have read reread my paper on this if I knew I was going to get all these questions,

but it's a it's a cool topic, for sure. So let's say she was in the neighborhood of two pounds. All right, she has five cups. That's big, but not extraordinary. It's a good, a nice, big, sell healthy cell. So she's got these five cups the first first time I've seen that, really cool deal. And so I'm looking at it from the standpoint of, all right, here are five cubs now. But next year I can come back and

I'll have five year links for my research project. Because then when their yearlings and they emerge from the den, that's when the family unit splinters, all right, breaks up, And oftentimes that coincides with the spring breeding season, so the males are starting to chase mom around. The yearlings don't want to be in the neighborhood anymore. Mom isn't caring for him anymore, and the females will typically go

a relative short distance when they disperse. Sometimes their home ranges as adults will even overlap a little bit with the home range of their mothers, and those young males can go phenomenal distances like on the order of tens to hundreds of miles they'll cover and then set up shop in a new place. So I've got five bears that I'm hoping the following winter I'll be able to put GPS colors on from my research probac slim that's

gonna happen. Yeah, she's good that they're all gonna live. Well, I shouldn't say the odds are slim, because we actually had pretty high survivorship of bears that we found as cubs and then relocated as yearlings. Most of them survived, but you know, you got your hands full with five offspring to deal with. I come back to the den the next year hoping to find five yearlings. There are five yearlings. And not only are there five yearlings, but

they're big, like they've thrived. They've done really, really well. What's big, like hundred pounds, So they've gone from five pounds to hundred pounds in a year. And the males were bigger than the females. The females, you know, seventy pounds. So there's seven hundred pounds worth of bears. A pile of bears, yes, seven hundred pound blob of black bears. A heap of black bears, six of them yes, six

bears all piled up. That's incredible. So one of my grad school colleagues, guy named Dave McFarland, who's a working for the Wisconsin d NR now as a as an ecologist. He and I were tasked with getting those bears handled and collared, and those five became subjects of my research. And then another year goes by and I go back in to this same style. She's den in that same general area, and she has five newborn cubs again, so she has successive litters of quintuplets, and that's amazing in

and of itself. Furthermore, we weighed her that first year, we waited the second year, we weighed her the third year, and over the course of birthing and weaning those ten cubs, she put on on the order of fifty pounds of weight, gaining weight, gaining weight while cranking out calories like nobody's business. So that's how she got the moniker of super cell. Yeah. So back to back litters of quinn tuplets, I mean,

ten cubs over the span of three years. And then I started getting stories to one of the one of the coolest stories was from some Wisconsin Department of transportation guys who had seen the sow with those five yearlings, and they were going and scavenging deer carcasses that the d O T guys had picked up and taken to like a dump site. Secret. Well, that was part of

her secret. The other part of it was she was living in this landscape where there's corn like corn and oak forest and she's just translating all those calories into bare biomass through her reproduction. But now did she do it again? Though? So what she did again was rear those five cubs to the point that they were yearlings and dispersed, and at that point I was done tracking that style. Did any of the ten that you watched her bring to yearling hood? Did any go south? Yes?

What percent went south? So out of those out of those ten specific cubs, I do not know the answer to that, but I can tell you that there was a statistically significant skewing of the data where the bears were moving in a southerly and easterly direction from that sort of central forest part of the state, like moving initially or winding up, winding up, winding up, So they were they were checking for territory and finding unoccupied locations. Yes,

that's certainly true. And I think one of the things driving it was not only were they finding unoccupied locations, but they were finding unoccupied locations with ad libitum, in

other words, unlimited food supply and no competition. And another really cool thing that happened because these GPS collars, you know, they've just revolutionized wildlife research because rather than going out there with like an antenna and trying to locate the radio signal, you're just getting thousands and thousands of locations.

And I had a handful of bears that made these really interesting forays into totally new areas where they'd never been before and distances of dozens, sometimes as much as forty or fifty miles, And then they'd returned to the area where they were born. And then they'd go back to that place that they had explored and set up shot there. Yeah, they come back to get their stuff. Well, you know, I think it was like get their stuff out of storage, you know, again trying to try to

get I got to go to store. You know, it's try to find a spot if whatever he'son, come back where they came from, and then go back to their spot. Do you want to see some of these data points, well I will buy me not right now, but i'd love to. I looked at one time. We'll put some if you want to share. We put somebody's up for

listeners to go check out. Because I also find this link where I looked at one time how a wolverine uses a mountain for a year, and it was just his marks of all the places he went on a mountain, which was looking at it. It seemed like very haphazard, but probably made some kind of sense to him. Yeah, you know, it's got to be a reason for it. Man. So one pioneering bear, the Wisconsin super South, moves into

a new area semi new. Yeah, I mean she was at the southern extent of what you consider like the core bear range of the state, and in the course of four years produces ten offspring weighing a hundred pounds. Some of them move souphomore. So if you see a bear your listeners show up in your neighborhood, think of Carl. Yeah they're coming, Carl. You could go, you could do your thoughts last Okay, yeah you can. Here's deal. You're

gonna have to come back on though. I'm down for that, we don't even talk about what I was gonna talking about. Let's we'll do it again, Johnny, I'll do my job here, do you. Um yeah, it's kind of general broad but I love the fact that we're doing like biology and science equals hunting, Like that's just awesome for me. And I hope we can can te you to do that and have more biologists on but on the digital radio program,

on digital radio program. But yeah, man, I feel like all hunters should be thinking, you know, with this mind frame, you know, and and looking at it that way so advantageous. I recently I gave a talk at a at a thing and um, after I get this talk, well, as I was preparing for my talk, I noticed my wife for what she was doing. She was working on a project, and she had a lot of unusual magazines around our house, and I noticed that the big thing in magazine anyone

who stands in the checkout line, I'll see this. Everything's like top you know, um, seven things to make for dinner, or like forty nine ways to blow your man's mind in bed, or like a hundred and one you know what I mean. Like lists are big. And my wife was even telling me that an odd numbered list does better than an even numbered list. People when you say top ten, people think they're being bullshitted. If you say eleven, they're like, who, like why eleven? They want to read

it more so. Anyhow, at my end of my thing, I had seven things that I think hunters should be doing, and one of those seven was why not spend more time learning about a college and biology, like from real places? Do you know what I mean? Like, especially if you can figure out how to read the abstracts of peer reviewed wildlife journals, that if nothing else, you'd be a better guy to talk to in the bar, because you'd be like, you know what, you'd be you'd be the

kind of guy who gets to go like this. You'd be saying, you know what, that's not how it works, that's not exactly what happens. You're wrong. I read it in a pure reviewed journal. Um is that if you're concluding thought gret to Cotail that it was very enjoyable to hunt and hike with Carl because of that fact, like a little tidbits, you'd point out that you knew because of your studies that otherwise you know what had gone unnoticed by someone like me. So that dude to

wealth and knowledge. He introduced me to the word music and then the opposite of music is zer. So Carl was describing a ridge top as being music, meaning it was relatively moist by Southwestern standards. Yeah, so this is one of these we didn't get talked about. Carl is uh, tell me what you I know what you do, but just give me, give me to everybody what you do.

I work as the Southwestern Regional Wildlife Ecologist for the Forest Service, so pretty much anything related to wildlife monitoring and research type stuff in the Southwest Arizona, New Mexico on the Forest Services, twenty point six million acres of land is under the purview of my position. And by those twenty point six million acres of four Service land, I mean the land that belongs to all of your listeners, to all the listeners, to everybody around this table. And

that's way the world's people. That's true, because if you're a German and you come over here, they're not like even a German can go out there. Chris Gotty concluding thoughts, Um, yeah, I learned that you shouldn't go working up a bear den without some sort of poking stick. He made a personal note. I was like making a was like, you know, excuse me minute, I gotta call my wife, tell her to remind me of something. I get home. Carl concluding thoughts,

I agree wholeheartedly that you know, I think hunters. I think hunters do innately have a desire to know more about the places and the species that they hunt. So they have the desire to know more. I think so. I think it's a it's a natural thing, a natural fascination and and um, that was what it was. It was experiences as a hunter and fisherman, just kid grown up outside that led me on this career track. And this career track feeds directly back into how I appreciate

those activities even more now than I did then. It's like a it's a a feedback loop of sorts. The more I learned, the more I like to hunt. The more I hunt, the more I want to learn, you know, And if people feel that intrigue, if that's something that resonates with folks, you should you should explore that when you're out there. You should take the time to note a question that you have and pursue additional information. And you should be trying trying to find ways as individuals

to be more than takers from these places. If there's a place from which you are taking a resource, you should feel like you have a stewardship responsibility. Yes. Um, my conclusion thought is I love it that I didn't know about this. I knew roughly this about you. Better know all the way about you did. Um, you got your start on your own hunting squirrels. You're darn right. Carl was telling me in Michigan, where Carls grew up

and I did too. Deer season openers November fift The Carl's telling me about one time he went out on a squirrel stroll on November fift that got a hollered at by a deer hunter, which I kind of love. But you turned a love of squirrel hunting into doing like very important work and our understanding and preservation of wildlife. I appreciate the kind words. But a squirrel hunter, debt bared and digger, I would counter that squirrel hunting is in and of itself important work. Yes, that that point

point well taken. There you have it, Wisconsin super sow Dr Carl Malcolm. Can people look up your work online. Is there? Do you think I go to J store and pay for it? Can they find stuff? There's some stuff on there for free, the best, find the abstract of the super sal Yeah, the best, the best. Some stuff online, you man. We'll put stuff online. We'll put some of those some of those little maps showing these

bears roaming around. Let's do that all right. Next time, Carl's gonna talk about stuff that he's been doing recently, and that stuff you did a long time ago. Sounds good, buddy,