Ep. 354: If There's Lead In The Air, There's Hope In The Heart

for every hunt first like go farther, stay longer. Hey there, I'm Janice, but tell us and I'm here to read an ad for you today because Steve is up at the fish shack having fun with all of his friends catching salmon, spear and salmon, diving for scallops, trying to catch halibt um, just general, you know, a good Southeast Alaska fun, but not I mean, I'm here in the podcast student, you know, reading this ad for you. Alright,

but listen up, very serious. You should get fired up because this is big, this ad here that I'm about to tell you. Are you're listening all right? It's the first ever organization wide meaning everything under the Meat Eater umbrella meaning the Meat Eater Store, Phelps, f HF, and First Light. It's all on sale August second through the fourth. Okay. What's cool about this is that now under the new

shopping experience that you can find on our website. You can do all your shopping in one place, put it all into one car. And the big hicker here is that you only pay for shipping one time. Um, I've done a little bit of surfing on the new media website, but phil Um says he's been down in the rabbit hole a few times? Why do you like that new website? So, I mean, I think listeners know. I'm usually not the one to be able to speak to this the stuff

that we sell on selling website. I'm a relatively new hunter. You know, I'm not too deep in the waters. But man, if you if you have not been to the website in the last few weeks since it's been updated, I maybe the last time you shop was before last year's hunting season, check it out. It's great. It's very aesthetically pleasing.

Like I'd say, if you had a choice to take a plane to New York to visit the Museum of Modern Art or go to the meat Eater dot com and check out our new store, that's a toss up. I'd say check out the store. It's way cheaper, way easier. Okay, I was gonna say, like, go shopping on Amazon versus shopping on media at the meteat store. Oh no, I don't want to compare us to Amazon, comparing us to MoMA. Okay, Okay, A couple of the items that you can find that will be for sale is going to be, uh Like,

let's let's start with a meat Eaters store. I want to mention that everything that we that is on there is curated by the team. Okay, Cal helps, Seth Morris Chester, myself, even Steve Ways in a little bit on what we should be carrying in that store. Okay, but it's all like really solid stuff. And even though I might not like use every piece that's on there, somebody in the company has said, I love that gear. I want us

to sell that. Okay. At the meter store, there's Vortex Optics, trauma kits, Booze, cutting boards, and our logo where you're gonna buy the trauma kit first and then the cutting board, but when you're at home, you're probably gonna be using the cutting board and then need your trauma kit. So

think about that. Be prepared first. Light off almost everything, including percent off the uncompagrade two point oh jacket, which is probably the piece that I use the most out of the whole first light lineup f hf percent off. The Biny Harness phelps up to fifty off select items, including off all renegade bugle tubes. So if you're not ready to go metal yet, get yourself renegade bugle tube.

It almost half off. This might entice you to buy a medal to a regular price and then get off ending gave you go to and try and boat side by side. All right, so remember you got three days August two, third, and fourth. You can buy it all in one place, pay for shipping only once four brands, one card. Get it. It's gonna be the season opener sale of all season opener sales. That's a tongue twister.

All right, thank you for listening. All right, everybody, you know we go, we go all the way to the top, go all way to the top on this show. And that's why we have the president and CEO, the lead figure of the Peregrine Fund here with us today, Chris Parrish. Uh, before we get into it, Chris Krin, I gathered you can test the idea that D and D is the primary driver of falconry. We just gotta put this thing

to bed now. I let me tell you my evidence. Okay, my evidence is this, Well, you asked me, Now you're gonna love your question. My here's my evidence. Do you not listen to the shallow crest? I do? I have a family member. Um, I'm trying to keep it distance so the person. If the person is listening, they don't know I'm talking about them, like the person that I'm gonna get to in a minute. I have a family member who had a roommate who they were way into D n D and that involved them first having like

a lot of serpents, horrible roommates. They had serpents and that was like a D and D thing, and then pretty soon they graduated the falconry because they wanted to look like a wizard. And I heard that was a pretty common path, and then UM developed my theory that the bulk of falconers outside of the Middle East, American falconers are driven are are driven down that path through D n Well, I'm so glad you asked because um, Well, to be fair, I mean, I've been with the Paragrine

Fund for twenty two years is founded by falconers. Falconry is a huge part of the way and how we do our business. But um, I had to ask her in what D and D is. So let's start there and dragons. You know what I'm talking about, right, I know about I know that the word, yeah, the phrase. But all your members aren't into that. I don't think any of them are. And falcony community is right now

a plotting Yeah, no, the falconry community. If you look at the history of falconry and you want to talk about the US is history in falconry, you have to go back to UM the conservation movement and how that's tied to falconry, because falconry of three four thousand years ago, Yeah, that's Turkey series. I ran what we call it today and it's in all the as soon as art and any art form, whether it's written or pictographs, petroglyphs, anything

like that. You see falconry, you see depictions of of husbandry of animals that are depicted as being used to catch prey. Were the Egyptians into it absolutely because they got a lot of falcons and stuff in there. Yeah, No, they're highly Do they have do they have hieroglyphics that suggests that's what they were doing with them? Well, not just that they were keeping them as part of a menagerie. Yeah,

because they're on the fist. In many of these the birds are on the fist and the quarries hanging from their gloves, much as you see. Those guys are big into D and D form of a many sided die, of many sided die. I'm not following you. That's a that's okay. I only just put that together right now because I'm not familiar. Well, I remember there was like certain dudes in high school. I don't want to name them, certain dudes of high school of which I was friends.

I was friends with that. You know, you got like your jocks, right, your stoner's head bangers, um ranch kids. Well we have farm kids. Yeah, D and D guys who crossed over with head bangers weirdly, but not stoners. Well, I'm I'm betting that Elder Leopold probably didn't know about D and D and he said falconry was the perfect sport. Come on, really really held Leopold? Yeah, well he's you know, there's a there's a dark side to Elder Leopold that

people don't realize. So taking like seventy five yard hail Mary's with his bow was with his like seventy five yard hail Mary's with a long bow at deer and like just kind of shooting over that way to see what happens and stuff. People hunted different back then. But he liked falcony. Yeah, well, I mean he said it's a perfect the perfect sport. Um fran Hammerstrom one of

his uh I think she was a PhD student. She became one of the one of the very first ladies in conservation and was awarded by the National Wildlife Federation or whatever it was before it became in WF in UH in Wisconsin for her work. And she was a falconer and had great writings about it. And I'm surprised that that given uh, you know, the your literate nature of understanding and looking at all these things that that you didn't have more of those you know, early falconers

in the US and and understood what that was. Craigheads, for example, you talked about you both an Indian prince. I'm gonna send you a book, do you know that. I think it was under the Clinton administration they considered hitting Ben Ladden at a falconry camp m but didn't because there were there were certain uh, like high level Saudi Arabian people present in that camp, and they didn't hit the falconry camp. I could be messing up a small part of this, but I don't think I'm messing

up a big part of it. Well, I tell you as much as you guys travel when you're three boys in Idaho, come to the World Center for Birds of Prey, and on that campus, we share it with the archives of Falconry, and we can tell you everything about falconry as far back as you want to go. Do you think that? And there's not a single not a single piece of evidence about, not a many side of day in the building, not a mini I have you been? Have you changed your mind? I'll never changed my mind, man,

I mean, do you think perfect? Like they don't want to admit there into D and D it's like or something like that. Like this little bit of evidence here, this little bit of Evans doesn't look well. But I need to do my counter research now, okay, check out. Am I in a strong position right now? No, never stopped you before. The good thing is here. Follow up argument can come after Chris has left. So yeah, well, there's a there's a quote I heard from someone who

once said, Um, Okay, so I'm wrong, but am I right? Uh? Oh oh, here's I want to talk about this real quick? Did you just saying, Pat durkinsent Um, there's a study Frontiers and Sustainable Food Systems. Okay, look, here's the name of the here's the name of the study, Locally Procured wild game Culinary Trends in the US, A study of

the rough grouse as entree and accompanying nutritional analysis. And this paper in the in the heading gets into how uh, people who are into wild foods or eyes extolling the virtues of wild foods, but oftentimes their claims are not well substantiated in an academic sense, meaning like what is actually in gaming is a different right, Like you might be like eating rough grouse better and eat chicken man,

you know. Um, And the u U s d A has this thing that's like massive thing of all the new like mineral composition, calories, makeup of all these foods. And these guys did the work to add the rofed grouse, so now you'll be able to find all the nutritional data of roughed grouse in this U s d A database of foods. I'm just gonna give you a high, a high level thing. So rough grouse compared to highly

consumed domestic boneless here's where it gets okay. Compared to highly consumed domestic boneless skinless chicken breast meat, rough grouse has more protein per serving, less calories, and significantly less total fat and saturated fat. The cluss draw A content

of grouse is also lower than domestic chicken. Much of the vitamin and mineral content of rust grouse of rough grouse compared to chicken were similar, with grouse having slightly higher amounts of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, saudi and rival flavan and nyasin. Chicken meat had slightly higher amounts of potassium, zinc in, vitamin A, and nichols on. But what it gets into, the main thing, is it gets into the health implications of hunting rough grouse. Of the people who

participated in the survey. This makes hunting rough grouse seems like a daunting thing, and it is depending on your approach, depending on your approach the particulars of the year, But so so the people that participated in this survey. Hunters participating the survey logged twenty five hours afield during the season. They on average took about nine trips of field for the season and has spent about three hours of field

per trip. So that's like the rough breakdown about so the average rough grouse hunter is spending twenty seven hours tis hunting rough grouse. Uh You generally each outing for rough grouse is four point five miles of walking. Now, if you ran all those stats on eating chicken, we would be a different nation. The here's the thing about the toughness of grouse hunt. Uh So in New York State, Okay, this is the New York State, and the hunters spending

average of nineteen hours hunting per bird harvested. Wo A lot of that is some damn ass growls hunt. That's why a lot of people aren't drawing the upland Game hunting checker will carry you. They have burns people out real fast, like and then when they get something, they're like all of that Like calories lost to calorie games less than a pigeon worth of meat burn away. I asked more calories than that rose. But that's like averages and you know you know what I mean, who knows

um and right? I think you could run it in different places, like you could run that for the western up of Michigan, the western upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I think you'd wind up with some highly some very different statistics. That just makes me question, though, my dedication as a hunter, because man if I went out and I got one grouse in nineteen hours on average, because I mean, what you're hunting for maybe like with dogs, like five or six maybe hours, so what that'd be

four days? One growl? No, I feel like here, yeah, oh if people remember um So me Eater camp Fire Stories close calls volume two, and I'll point out that book that that that audio project accomplish something particular for a genre because normally, when the book goes the audio, like nomoany, when you buy an audio book, you're buying

an audiobook of a book that exists in print. So when you look at the audio book best seller list, like the New York Times best seller list for audio books is typically audio books that wore books, So does the awareness of the book as a print edition, and it makes like an audio edition. But Campfire Stories debuted and stuck there as a New York Times bestseller and audio even though it wasn't even a damn book. Volume

two is out now. Uh It releases August sewo but of course you can go and preorder the thing right now. And it's uh me eater stories, narrow misses in more close calls and and again it's like an immersive audio experience better than the first one. Um we have on there. Our friend Kimmy Werner, who tells the story that involved her and a mentor of hers and she violates a pact because they had agreed to never tell the story.

That's my favorite one. There's a phenomenal story, a near death experience from our very own Clay nukelem Me and my son have a story. We also have stories from a guy who saved his friend's life by shooting at him, a guy who got into hand and hoof combat with a buck in a corn field, a guy who damn near died after shooting himself in the leg duck hunting, which is a crazy story, and his life was saved by his dog. You're in that killian I did hear that?

If you're listening, snorts you on after that rattlesnake and a sheep hunter who got h so horribly Cliff hung in California, that near very near death Cliff hung Experience. Just a really really great collection. The guy who almost died from his own error. It's hard, hard, Yeah, I gotta tell you this some hard ship to listen to check it out. But no, it's like it's just like it's a lot of it's just skin crawling, but then

you know the amount of it's like tart. It's like a quick Yeah, it's called narrow mrs More close calls. If it was just everybody died in the end one, it would be hard to get the stories right then, being all dead and everything. But the amount of blood shed in here is it is it's like it's like watching it's like watching kill Bill. Yes, some stories I don't want to spoil anything about it, but that one that you mentioned where someone had to shoot at his

friend to save him, just listen. It was hard for me to listen to that one. But just a great story, really just interesting. So that's out Mediators camp Fire Stories. What we're gonna do to get a taste for the series. Last time we released the camp Fire Stories, we put Sam Lowries the mud puddle and just like built it on the end of the show. So, in keeping with that tradition, we're gonna do the best shot of my life. That's a spear fishing one. Cam Kirkconnell about the guy, Well,

I don't want to spoil it. Yeah, just stay tuned till the end because it's it's awesome. It's got everything in it. You're gonna hear um, Yeah, we're gontack it. On the end of the show. You'll be so titilated by this little freebee that you'll run out and want

to get the whole damn things. You can have all those hours and it's it's an hours of phenomenal stories, polished and really like experiential kind of musical score, and you're you're immersed, Yeah and polished, not like some dude up there him and in Han like we we we like obsess over every minute of the content. Yeah, yeah, we do. We really did. Everyone. Our good friend Jason

Phelps over it. Phelps game calls just came out with I'll tell you this at one time or another, like I kind of pointed this out, like driving around and like friends cars and you you know how everybody has a bunch of junk in their car on the dashboard of the glove box. I have experimented with probably every every elk call, every cow call I'm not saying mastered or like even made a passable sound. I have experimented with probably every cow call on the market at some

point or another over my lifetime. I think that, uh, in my view, Phelps is easy to sucker. Is the easiest cow call I have ever used. Under this category that makes a wide variety of sounds. I probably need to get one because I have a hard time listen. I don't understand. I don't get the mechanics of it. But normally so like over the years, people come out with bite and blow calls that are like monos. They make a sound, and everyone that uses them all makes

that same sound. It becomes something of a joke, like a good call will come out. Then a couple of years later people laugh about when you make when you blow that call the alcohol goal the other direction, because you're like ship. It's one of those dudes. That one call um where you lose that problem is with diaphragm, because you have like like a tremendous vocabulary with a diaphragm.

But this one is like one of the problems. A lot of bite and blow calls to or exposed read calls is it's so hard to get like the pressures of how much pressure with your lips or teeth you're putting on it, how much air you're putting through. It's just a pain in yass. And it's coming from guy who thinks game calls are painting he has in general. Uh, holy sh it, dude, Cal's gonna Cal's gonna suck on it. Steven. It's like you don't know, you don't you don't blow

on it. You're just like and it's not even like you're sucking. You're like it's like a like an inhale. Do you like hyperventilate? It's like inhale and and like and it's hands free. It's just it's like a green rubber. It's called the easy sucker. Do you like it? Steve? Screwing this up a little bit? Okay, go ahead, Okay.

So the more complex and called the wider range and noises you're you're gonna be able to make, but the more time you need to get into it and uh and really started playing, because they're like a musical instrument, a kazoo in the hands of someone who actually has messed around with a kazoo, a bunch can make that sound appealing. People who really pay after you get um, after you get Rhonda Santis and Chris Pratt, Chris Press

and uh, you know who's the galph Meds NBC. I always want to get on the show, Rachel Madden, get us a good kazoo player. Thirty five minutes of pure kazoo easy listening. Uh, this is a dog inhale calicoll, but it's got a bite component to it, so you can actually create some different tones and pitches. Volumes. Is that included in tones and pitches? Well, I think there's you know, there's a limitation on this, which is good

as far as like your overall volume. I was messing around with this, and you can do like some some little bowl sounds too, and and some Phelps can Phelps can do, but he doesn't like to say. He doesn't like to wreck amend it for bowl like, Oh, he was way out there. I think I need to get myself one of those. I can't play time with that one. And volume, you can actually get a different insert, right like I think Phelps has a different insert, So yeah,

you can get a different like a louder call. She can switch mountain and you can take the biggest jackass on the planet there trying to segue into my kids on the end of that, you can take my children and they can make cow calls with it, Steve saying they have the experience level of jackasses or my children. Yes, that's like you're go for them. You can do a lot of playing around with the wraps, the kids, the

monotone do everything yourself. Cow calls are the ones that I certainly stay away for m and I like to pick up one new col call a year, yep, and just mess around with it and try to find something different. And everybody has like a different read, thickness of read, length of read, et cetera. That makes a different pitch

and call. So um, yeah, I need that one. And I feel like we all have that hunting buddy too that you just know you're gonna have to call for all the time, right, Like you're always going to be the guy in the back calling for him because he's just not gonna call. Like I brought that home, gave it to my wife, and it was like within just related to what you're just saying. I wouldn't say it's unrelated,

but like within or take my wife friend. But in like a two minute time frame, I'm like, you're gonna be able to call for me, Like you're legitimately going to be able to call for me. Now that's awesome. I love it, dude, I'm throwing other ship in the

garbage or in a box. Well, I do point out, since this is an inhale cow call, there's definitely room for an exhale cal call, of which Phelps makes several external read calls that are understand if you want to pick up a call, if you want to pick up a call and make a like and make very passable cow calls very quickly and not just one sound, but a variety of sounds, I would be like this and

then just waste your breath exhaling for no reason. And I would say that if I thought Phelps was the was the biggest asshole in the world, I still say the same thing, because it's like an objective reality. It's it's a good one. I like, I like a minimum of two external read calls because you can definitely jam them up with with gunk and spit and you know, dirt and all the pollen and bugs. And I can keep going on with this list um and about this this this is a fun one. That's a fun one

to add to the land yard. Cal do do do uh. I don't want to say one last land access initiative. So here's the deal, folks. We've been running the land Access Initiative for quite a while. It's a sweet program. We've had some success under our belt with the Shiloh Pond project. We're looking for the next one. We're still

in the active looking phase. We've gotten a lot of suggestions, but honestly, very few out of probably six or seven hundred submissions at this sex of like of like solid this is the place, this is what we want to do, like like a project. We've we've had ideas of projects that frankly, we just don't have time for. You're looking for a whole nonprofit organization that can focus their time on this, of which there are so many, So get off your key, star and and I've forward these on

to my friends in those positions. But we are looking for a place that is open to an easement outright purchase, something that will provide more public access to hunting and fishing. We got a lot of awesome stuff in the works. We got some cash on the fund right now. We got a lot of partners on board to make this happen. Um, we had we had an amazing donation offer. We have people that want to help so bad that they're giving away houses, little tiny ones that you can trap out. Yeah,

super super awesome. Um. So go to the conservation page at the meat Eater dot com, click on land Access and submit a. The phones are ringing off the hook over here. Okay, okay, get in lines right now, click a submit to the Land Access Initiative and we want Yeah, we want to find that that perfect thing where we can jump in and help create more access to hunting and fishing. Garrett's only about a couple of the ones

that are in there. We have, we have several very good ways to spend money, I think, Um, you know, we just just want to find like the perfect thing. But there's we have an absolutely phenomenal project here in the state of Montana and Northwest Montana that the Trust Republic Lands is working on, which would be at a system of ease months that would provide access for the myriad of land of many uses activities from firewood cutting to fishing to snowmobiling. In perpetuity, which is super cool

and attractive. There's some incredible projects that Ducks and Limited is working on in in Iowa for instance, that are it would be money well spam. So if you have something that you just want to get active on, please submit it to the mediator Land Access Initiative. I want to give the dude to plug even though we're not we haven't moved on yet. Naughty log homes k n A U g h t Y naughty log homes. They want to donate a log trapper's cabin. I can't remember

the dimensions of it. And they're I mean, they're donating a log trapper's cabin to the to the auction House of Oddities. They are one of a kind log home. That's a really cool name. They're just saying, you see, Sean, not sisters sister's organ donate the whole damn thing. That's cool. Yeah, that's big. No, it's a great offer. Uh oh, Sean,

you're ready to lay out this. Uh about talking about Delta Waterfowl, Yes, sir, yeah, uh and Cal can speak to this too, but we are First Light is partnering with Delta Waterfowl for Camo for conservation as a lot of you probably well you've probably heard on the last podcast and seeing on social media and all that that first lights Waterfowl Pattern TYFA is out and a portion of the sales from that are going to Delta Waterfowl UM, which you know, I'm stoked about because I love Delta.

I've talked about Delta a lot in these Duck Reports and they've been information with you on the Duck Reports. Yeah, yeah, there, And I mean the big reason those guys love help and so much is their duck hunters. I mean, they call themselves the duck Hunters Organization, but they really are. They are Their organization is about helping duck hunters. And there's still research organization. They have their four pillars duck

production are three, habitat, conservation and research and education. Um. But like their research and education stuff is really keyed and focused on applicable science right ways that they can actually um you know, benefit duck habitat, duck numbers, the whole bit. So it's nice to be working with them to go buy some TYFA, kick some money toward Delta.

We're just gonna make a donation to Delta two. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think every duck hunter should be with what the two big duck hunting orgs have done for

water fowlers. Every duck hunter should be a member of both anyway, So so Campbell for Conservation first Light right now, prior to TYFA, if you bought a specter, anything in the specter camouflage pattern which is is our can mover folks who like to hide in trees, a percentage of every sale goes to NDA, which used to be q d m A National Lines and now and NDA and

now it's just National Deer Lines. Uh. On the water foul side of things, any thing in the type of patterning, a percentage of that purchase goes to Delta water Fowl. So you're gonna feel real good about buying some unparalleled duck hunting camouflage and just stuff that's gonna keep you warm and dry when you need to be warm and dry. But you're gonna feel doubly good knowing that that cash

is going to go make more ducks. And one of the coolest things about Delta that they talked about all the time is it was founded with the idea of I want to replace times two or times three every duck I take off the lance gate. And so you're buying clothing that you're ideally going to go out and remove some ducts from and some geese from the waters and in airways of America. But with with that purchase, you're gonna slide some money back to putting them back

out times two or three good? Good? Okay. We got a guy rolled in from Alaska. So he said he has this say he wants people to weigh in on this. Just to give some background, I am in the military, stationed in Alaska and work for a three letter organization that I will omit from this email. Boy, that makes you really start thinking, I'm starting to think of them,

ain't I r s? Anyways, recently this spring I was successful in a brown bear hunt and have since updated my Skype pro file of course on our classified computers with a photo of me kneeling next to my bear pictures. Very tasteful, not displaying any blood, gods, etcetera. Well, on Fridays, he goes on to say, we use Skype to conduct virtual meetings weekly to highlight mission successes for each work

center in the building. I am currently the highest ranking enlisted person in my work center and am in charge of the missions we conduct, so I was speaking on my team's behalf and obviously my profile photo popped up, indicating who is speaking. No video on these skype calls. Shortly after the meeting, my three letters civilian boss came down to talk to me about mission related stuff. When

he was pulled aside by another three letter civilian. She instructed him that he needs to speak to his team about displaying profile photos with dead animals and that it is offensive to people. He spoke to me about this instructed me not to change the profile as my photo is not offensive and I am not displaying the bear in a disrespectful way. My question is if this escalates into something bigger down the road, do I stand my ground and try to push back or do I simply

just give in and change it. He goes on to say, in my opinion, I don't understand how this photo is offensive when my profile photo for the last year has been a photo of me holding a big silver salmon I caught with my fly rod. At what, at one point does a dead bear trump a dead fish? Is that the anthropomorphizing of bears and not salmon. Meanwhile, we all walk around and kyote brown suede leather boots. The military is literally walking around with dead animals on our feet.

Half the civilians sit in luxury leather chairs at their desks. I'm just trying to figure out if it's something I should stand my ground on or just be the bigger person and change my profile. Now here's my take on it. I have a take to after you. If there was a rule, if there was a pre existing rule dictating guidelines for your profile picture, and this broke a pre existing profile picture guideline rule, then you should change your rule.

But if you're being singled out for this and nothing else, I would fight back on it. Yeah, my my take is a little more broad like in scope than that. You're in the military, which is purpose is to conduct violence, yet we're like offended. I don't understand how people in the military are offended by a dead animal in profile picture. But the whole point in the middle, if you don't

get like, culturally, why that would that that's surprising to me. Culturally, it's surprising you well, and it's a little bit ironic to think about an organization that exists for like violence. I think all great points, but um, I would take it down. I would put up something very very milk toast that is mildly appealing to everyone who sees it. If it's the three letter organization we're talking about, um,

we're talking about regime changes. We're talking about the ability to impact gross national product of any country on the planet. We're talking about zero dark thirty. You're an enlisted man, change your profile picks not worth its like this bigger fish to fry. Yeah, they're they're the organization fry the fish, bigger bear, bigger bear meat to fry. Yeah, here's why I think you're wrong, cal Um. That was so matter of fact. I don't think this is an issue of

like compliance. I don't think it's like an issue of rules, like I think this is kind of semantics and like one of the things we deal with a lot on this podcast when we bring up is like different predator hunting getting closed down for no reason at all all over the place, And I feel like, uh, one of our jobs is that normalize it a little bit, right, Like, so it's not just so you know, like toxic whenever

you do see it. I feel like folding on something like this, taking down the picture or not being able to embrace something that's a huge part of your life. It detracts from the normalization of something that then we come on here and we tell people like, no, it's a thing that people do and should be respected. And there's a key in the language used here is the individuals claiming not that it violates protocol or not that

it violates picture rules, They said it is offensive. And I think that allowing people just to run around really nearly declaring yeah, like to declaring something that might offend me as being categorically offensive, are they is running rampant. I mean, like you can declare people things that the people would never even agree with, so to say, like it's offensive, Like, let's let's let's be clear. You find it offensive, but there are probably things about you it

would be deeply offensive to me. You have a picture of your third wife on your profile picture. That's offensive to me. Why why have you been married three times? I find that very offensive? Take that down. No one would ever ask that of somebody, right, Or like I see that you have a picture of yourself, um not at church on Sunday, that's deeply offensive to me. Yeah, you can make this encrypted channel. That's that's like a language thing. That's people stating as fact. So it's used

to use the eye word everybody. But that's my point. Cal is like, it is insane that the people who exist to swap out dick to waters are getting offended by a bear picture. I think we're obviously I mean your computer, cow oh, because I'm I'm well read up on this crab situation, but you weren't on the other situation. I was working on some other things from the crab come for everybody. I want to tee up the next

this next segment. If there's one thing the media loves, not TV, but there's one thing newspapers and magazines love, it is a story about someone utilizing an invasive species as a for something or another. Hit it cow, Yes, that I mean, that's that's a great There's a good couple of question marks in this story. So this distilling company in conjunction, I guess I'm not all that right up on this anyway. He's quietly quietly opening I could peer back up. So there's this green crab, this invasive

green crab. They came over in the eighteen hundreds, we think, in the ballast of boats. Never heard of this crab and the things years of being here. When you do hear about it, though, they're like, they are horrible. They're horribly destructive. On Mola's they eat clams and and muscles and stuff like that, so obviously it's dipping into some other folks pocket books there. They are prolific and they're they're an edible crab, but they're so small the yield

is really bad. So if you ever gone to a crab house and started picking crabs, eventually you might get sick of picking crabs. And that's why folks aren't eating a lot of these green crabs. Well, in this case, New Hampshire Distilling took up the problem and turned and this is where I really had. Here's here's what I don't like the language I'm worth distilling. It's not taking up the problem. Like it's not taking up the problem capitalizing. I mean it's like, okay, so I mean I thought,

it's what do you mean by that? It's not taking up the problem. It would be like if I started eating let's say I eat dandelion salads. He took up the problems dandelions. He's been eating a dandelion salad at night. But take up the problem of dandelions, or might eating a dandelion salad? I get what you mean anyway. Um, they started with the bourbon base and then they added in this green crab stock are along with like bass

seasoning and kind of classic crab stuff. And what you end up with is what they call something better than um. What the hell is the fireball? But it doesn't know now I'm not interested before. I can't even smell fireball, crab trapper green crab flavored whiskey. Wait, where does it say that that's the comparison? Fireball is nasty? Just eat a stick of like Big Red. I was just back at my hometown. I went to my hometown gas station, and the guy in front of me, which made me

feel so much like I was in my hometown. The guy in from me bought a fistful a lotto tickets and then asked for a bottle of fireball, and they asked if he wanted it chilled or room town, and he was able to walk out. He's able to walk out with a fistball lot of tickets in a cold bottle of fireball. I can go cup. I can't even stomach drinking that in the summertime either it's like maybe

in january ice fishing. But there's a there. It still is a bar called do drop you outside of West Glacier and they did off, you know, off say a liquor, so you could buy a bottle of liquor there. And this is the only place that's ever happened to me. But if you go in there and buy a bottle of liquor at the bar, they say, would you like cups and ice with that? Not? In addition to have you been on the on the kaibab right there in fre Donia you come down the hill off the Kaibab

plateau and it's the center of the universe. Judd otto, guns, m o lotto and beer. Okay, So there is a good snippet here on on the green crab. They are probably one of the most successful invasive species that we have in North America, at least in the marine world. They can eat about forty muscles a day, just one crab. Each bottle has a pound of green crabs. And that's impressive.

That is impressive, and in my immediate d I sent this to some folks in the in the culinary world because I to understand if there's what is the demand for like a good crab stock, so you know, you you don't go through the worry of picking everybody, just

turn it all into a giant bats and crabstock. If there would be like a you know, canned crab stock type of market, I imagine there is, and that seems a hell of a lot better way to go than making it into something better than I wonder what the hangovers are like, Like you got feeling crabby, broa wake up in the morning, feel like you're rolling on a boat. Yeah,

except for your walking sideways everywhere you go. We probably can't get this here in Montana if anyone at tam tam Worth Distilling wants to send us a bottle at mediator, uh A marine Bio just goes on to say, like, you know, it's unlikely that this whiskey, this whiskey bottle and enterprise is gonna have a serious impact. But she says, someone goes on to point out, I'm not reading it carefully.

Know who points out? They go on to point out, if you factor in producing fishing bait with green crabs, whiskey with green crabs, fish sauce of green crabs, and just more and more incentivize the use um. It could be good. You know, one of one of the invasives that I felt that you could most like kind of get after in a way that felt productive is shooting

lion fish. Yeah, because you go like in the Bahamas, we just ran a boat and go out and cruise for coral heads and it's just sand, sand, sand sand, and then there's coral heads. You've see him from million miles away on a sunny day and you go to a coral head and every coral head to go to the be like o lion fish or to lion fish. They're easy to get. They're like they just stand the ground, like they don't it's not in their mind to get away.

They stand the ground, and so you shoot them. And he'd be like, this coral head is free of lion fish. And then you move on to the next one and shoot those, move on the next one and shoot those. And it seemed like guy, he seems to be able to kill them all. But man, they haven't gotten that problem solved yet. The incentivize that. That's when Steve started the intro to this segment here he is correct, like we love talking about like good uses for these invasives.

And the one that they've gotten the most use out of, by and large, of something that we see as a real problem. Or it would be the Asian carp species. And so there's some school, some collegiate school programs that their culinary programs utilize you know, several thousand pounds of fish every year, UM in their their meal halls, and

they're making actual, you know, tasty stuff. But then in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, there's some actual per pound incentivized fisheries and and processing facilities for these fish where they've actually there's enough incentive government incentive that folks who commercially harvest catfish or buff flow or paddlefish do they call spoonbill out there um can switch over net sizes and start targeting specifically the Asian carp, which there are some food markets for, and

there's some fertilizer markets for and stuff like that. Uh. And it's definitely something that we we need to get ahold of, which is why you know, crabby whiskey, get some get some headlines, and it says that there is no, uh no real market around green crabs. So if something

got started, it would be the first ever. Uh, I'm gonna give you some very dated insight into the carp problem, the Asian carp problem, and differentiating it from the common European carp which fast of our waters, many of our waters. I spent some days with a guy that was a commercial netter okay, um. He was doing allow stuff that would wind out. He was catching a lot of those carpon. His primary buyer was using them for making a filter fish,

so like canned fish preparation. And they're very concerned in those waterways about not catching like the native fish. I'll add that we caught a beaver, but that's just a side note. And so they'd regulate mesh size, okay. And he had to use whatever like an eight inch mash or something like a huge mesh that way all the bass right, like large moths, bluegills, crop ease, everything can get through the mesh. But it was a big enough mesh you kept it really catch a really big carp.

And he said you could go into a stretch. The commercial guys could go into a big stretch of river with that high, that big mesh netting and really get it where you're not catching carp anymore. Like you catch them. It's it's just very the the way they use these saints very effective. Oh, after they come through, you're not catching they can work an area. Let's say you use an eight inch man, you can work an area with

an eight inch mesh. Where you're like, we're does not catching them like we did, we must be having a positive impact. But then researches will point out the bio mass of the cart doesn't change, like the poundage per mile of carpon these stretches doesn't change. It's just not comprised of big ones, right, And so they'd be like, we need to be able to use smaller mesh. We need to be able to use do a six inch mesh.

And then people be like, well, you know it could have ramifications for bass or whatever, and they use a sitien and then you kick ass with the new mesh and then you're catch slows. Meanwhile, per mile same pounded of cart, which which is why you see it's carrying capacity. Right. In this conversation around carbon specifically, you see a lot of prevention in the form of how do we get these fish to not spawn where you see like those bubble curtains and narrators and stuff that try to divert

fish from areas where they would spawn. Yeah, it's a hell of it. I visited that electrical barrier on Lake Michigan. We're trying to keep him from entering the Great Lakes. I don't know if that's still up and running or not. A guy when out when I was sawing the people on that cart problem, he was saying like, I was like, what would actually fix the thing? And he said, what would actually fix the thing? And we'd never use it or be able to use it, and you wouldn't have

public appetite for it because he goes. I could imagine there's gotta be some kind of virus or something that's particular. But who's gonna be the guy that pours out of the you know, who wants to play with the virus? Like he's like like path They're like there's They're like, if you really like there's maybe some pathogen or controlled studies say that nothing, nothing will go wrong, nothing bad app alright, Sean, we're gonna segue into raptors, uh, I

mean lead ammunition yep. And we're gonna kick it off with Shawn's duck report. Got anything else to shape. You bet you had mentioned I don't know, a month ago or something, do a duck report, arm do a duck report on lead points, the lead shot band, what led up to it, whether it was successful. So, Chris, if I get something wrong here, which I'm pretty sure I don't have anything wrong, You're gonna have to correct me because this comes from your world. Really, I was raised

at a time, o't Do you remember what year happened? Yeah, they tried several times, but when it ultimately happened was because you know, it's interesting, My first legal duck season was in six and there were people that were not duck hunting. They were they were like quitting duck hunting out of protest. Yeah, and that that some of them stuck, some of them just never came back, which is wild. Okay, So the lead shot ban um was a gradual crescendo.

Late eighteen hundreds there started being reports of lead poisoning and waterfowl late eighteen hundreds. Yeah, they had a mass kill because guys like me and Spencer with them punt guns. Yeah. Well, it was mostly like commercial market areas that were punt gunning whole lakes um Texas seventy four they really started reporting it, and then in the early nineteen hundreds it turned into mass die offs because smoking wasn't even bad for you back then. It's just surprising. I don't need

to be glue about. It's just surprising that at that time there was like the level of sophistication to take dead waterfowl and determine cause of death right and related to a related to a heavy metal and some of them weren't even making the correlation necessarily right away. They were like, there's a bunch of dead ducks here, and then they do a knee cropsy and find they just also happened to have letting their gizzards go out, and

that's that's really where it started. Um, then you get into the early nineteen hundreds and they started having like mass kills, um hundreds and hundreds of birds on a single body water repeatedly seasonally. Yeah, and yeah, it definitely kept going faster and faster and more and more. Uh am, I correctness that the issue with ducks is that ducks are as they gather grit for their gizzard, they are finding lead shot and ingesting the lead and like ingesting

the lead for grit for their gizzard. This isn't that they're all carrying around stray pellets. Well, it's no, it's not from It's definitely not from wounder wounded, hunter wound. It's it's mostly ingestion. They're like picking they see something like, oh, that makes a piece of great piece of grit from my crop. Yeah. And I mean they're getting it in both their gizzard and their stomach. It's not like just as they're picking up while they feed. They're picking it

up while they feed. And people think, oh, how are they picking up that tiny little pellet in this big lace home? But it has it doesn't get to their stomach without going through their gizzard. Well what I'm what I mean is like that they're finding the lead shot in both places. It's not just poisoning them in the gizzard, it'll pay. It's passing intact, yeah, and into the gut.

And there's a lot of comparison photos that the Fish and Wildlife Service had that shows like a normal ducks, how healthy stomach and healthy gizzard to uh a lead poison one. Um. But you know, one of the big pushbacks from hunter and I did not realize how controversial this was until I started really digging. And see this was interpreted by a lot of outdoorsman as a anti hunter, anti Second Amendment government overreach movement. Was not positioned as that.

The hunter thought that's what it was, right, um. But and you know one of their big arguments was how is a duck picking up stray pellets? You know they're tiny, a little pellet because I've never seen it, because right, right, But well that's We've had a lot of people right in and be like I have checked every stomach and every gizzet of every duck and they killed law ducstion, like and I found a pellet mm hm. So you

know it's anecdotable, but we hear that, right right, yeah. Um, but when you start breaking down like how much leads being dispersed on the environment, you know there's half pounds. So the average back then was a half pound of shot being you know, shot by a hunter per bird bagged, which comes out to four hundred pellets of number six lead. And you know that's per bird you shoot. Overall, their estimate was tons of lead shot being put into wetlands

a year by waterfowl hunters. And there was that that was in the fifties. I think, um, this is got The guy that did this big study on this was a guy named Frank Bell Rose and he was the one that really brought it into like we got to do something about this. We need a management plan about lead shot. And that was in nineteen Yeah, like one of these things you have here. In one Lake, Michigan blue bill die off, ten stomachs were examined that held

any were from forty eight lead pellets per bird. But I'm not saying that this guy was cooking the books. Boo boom. People are still hunting ducks. Yeah, but there's not like why is the why are the crops and

stomach is not full of shot? I think one thing that would be really interesting to look at here would be your your hunter distribution, right like in methods of hunting during this study time, because I do have to wonder if there's higher concentrations on certain Martia's bodies of water than than we could have, how that distribution of actual hunting activity varies from then until today. Well, Sean hit him with that little detail you got near that

little detail about a heavily hunted wetlands. Yeah, so and and that was a big part of it. You know. The argument is now a lot of that lead shot has been covered up by sediment because that So they did a bunch of sampling of major wetland areas that were like huge waterfowl hunting destinations, and they found some of those to have over a hundred thousand pellets per acre in the top three inches of the bottom sentiment, which is so man, see Sean did a good job,

because he's not that I'm looking in here, Okay. From nineteen thirty eight to nineteen fifty four, they examined thirty six thousand gizzards six point six percent. Between nineteen thirty eight nineteen fifty four, thirty six sample size of thirty six thousand gizzards six point six p ingestion right had led in them with mallards seven. So there you go,

go kill a hundred. So here's the tests for someone, now who someone who's like going to be like bullshit it, man, get a hundred ducks, especially if you hunt like a social hold, like a refew, like like you hunt a place that gets hunted, Go to a place it gets hunted. Shoot a hundred docks and see if you find seven percent to gotta steal or bismuth, pellet or gut be interesting if if it's constant through time, yeah yeah, and

so okay. So where where it kind of like really got to the point of people having to do something about it was these die offs started becoming highly visible. Right you had TV and UM one that like was right perfect at the kind of the right time in the seventies when this was getting talked about more and more, and I think it was the National Wildlife Federation had already started trying to push for a lead ban. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted a lead ban, but they couldn't

get it done. Um Lake Puckaway, Wisconsin. They end up with like over three thousand geese dead that we're winnering there. And the what ultimately what they said happened was that these geese winnered on a part of the lake that was shallow and had a lot of hunter um hunter use. And what year was this, m I can't remember exactly what year that was. It was either of the late seventies or early eighties, but it was right dear in the peak of the discussions. So the debate was heating up,

and then there's all of a a sudden on TV. You know that a bunch of volunteers collecting thousands of dead geese, three thousand dead geese in a lake that had a eighteen thousand lead pellets per acre and three inches top three inches just so wild. It's a lot of dead geese. I'm trying to picture, like, um, an acre's good sized, chunker grown. I'd think to see a density map, like if you did a one hand, if you took your two hands and did a scoop of muck, you're probably

grabbing one. And I'm sure yeah, and I'm sure it would probably be there would be something about how it lays out right, There would be areas probably with a lot of higher density just by how someone hunts the area or whatnot. Um, But you know, yeah, prevailing wind right just like I mean, just like if you're someone who knows where to look on an old pond for arrowheads, for bird points, it oftentimes has a lot to do with the prevailing wind in the area. Find your shotgun

pellets around that same spot too. So But you know, bell Rose's point was not that these mass die offs are like a population threat. It's that there's so many other factors that come in Once waterfowl start dying from lead poisoning um, for example, take some two weeks to die, they start getting weird, isolating themselves, hiding in the weeds,

making themselves more susceptible to predators. In addition to that, then you have you know, he he even pointed to like you can't even really count or no exactly how many baculi is um outbreaks, for example are because a lead poison duck dies and then you end up with a botulism outbreak because well just ultimately, if the more you know, the more you have waterfowl dyeing in random places, increased abundance of carrying, okay, overloading the system where scavengers

are cleaning it up. There's great examples about that, but different and uh So, they tried to try to ban

lead in seventy six. The Stevens Amendment blocked it, kicked that back to the States, and then that's where raptors came in and bald eagles in what happen, Well, they had sixty bald eagles from nineteen eighty to ninety five died from lead poisoning, and the National Wildlife Federation was um sued, fish and Wildlife Service for a ban on lead shot, referencing bald eagle deaths, and they actually blocked this suit because then fishing once that suit was like happening.

Fish and Wildlife Service said, okay, well band lead, so this court case doesn't happen. The National Wildlife Federation led the suit, yep, and it never it got dismissed. But I got that because bald eagles at that time, we're in e s A. They were in dangerous that same year they got kicked too, threatened I think, But yeah, they were on the essay still. And of course why do people care because the replacement was steel shot. It didn't work as good as lead shot. Yeah that's what

people said, right, but um, okay that steel shot. There's stuff now that works phenomenally well. But I think, like any you know, you had to switch to bigger pellets, right, so you you used to use sixes and leads and also using twos and fours. So you're throwing I want to say, less lead out there, less material out there.

You're throwing out less material per shot with with a smaller number of lethal things flying towards the target in their Yeah, this is it, just this is a whole another Duck report though, Um, it's talking about like the steel shot lethality table and all the work Tom Roster did going in you showing that steel is far more effective than it gets credit for, well in the heart

and wounding loss and harvest rates. Actually, while they did decline initially after the ban, the the what they posited was based on their observations is as hunters learned how to use the new tool, wounding loss actually was less with steel than it was because they're like, I can't take that hill Mary anymore. Yeah, And a big part of that is, you know, lead and steel shoot differently.

See everything about how you shoot as a shooter is different. Um, and it was not you know, like one of the things that when people talk about Pittman Robert's act, it really likes to point out that people were like really

excited about it. Hunters wanted it right when they don't maybe some don't now according to what the Clyde and Georgia so, but it's it's like part of the part of the story of Pittman Robertson and the excise tax and ammunition that it was brought by the rod and gun clubs of America like they wanted this, They willingly did this right, and um, this was not we lose sight of it now. But this was not a popular

thing now. I mean, there was definitely some waterfowl hunters there, you know, there was appetite for it with some, but not everybody, not even close. Um, some people welcomed it and didn't want I didn't want to see lead poisoning and waterfowl and and you know, bought in on the Bell Rose study and seeing how how bad lead shot could be on waterfowl numbers. But also there was a lot of people that just don't want to quit shooting Grandpa's gun with the fixed full choke and the thirty

inch barrel. Right, Oh, you know, real quick, tell me about the guy that tell us the story out, the guy you know that was jailed for shooting a red tail. Well, hold on, I think that Sean's point there is is a great one that doesn't get brought up hardly at all, is the fact that not only were you forced to use a different ammunition, there is a ton of guns in use, like heavily in use that could not shoot steel,

couldn't shoot a pellet. That that's hard too. Hard on the barrel at that time, at that time because the loads hadn't been developed. I mean, you look at what they've done in Europe in the last ten years. They are shooting steel out of parkers and parties, but they're adjusting the loads. So by adjusting the loads and decreasing the pressures, you can still you It's not that you can't shoot them. You can't shoot the loads that they had then. Well, I mean here in America is bigger

is better? Okay, two and a half loadger better? Thing is uh? I was talking to uh, a guy called the Jazz Doctor, and we're talking about I was having a problem matching a jet outboard to a flat bottom boat. You remember my whole trial Tralation and I one one day it was entertaining over the phone with the jet Doctor, the idea that perhaps there's like, is it perhaps too much engine for the boat? And he said, I've been

in this business forty years. I've never had a guy come to me and tell me he wants he needs a smaller motor. Yeah. Now you see boats with four hundred horsepower racing motors on them. Unbelievable. All right, talk about the redtail dude, real quick um or slow, I don't care. Oh, there's not much to it. I was a little bit wrong on that. It was not one red tail. It was one. It was it was one

red tail with a game warden with him, was the problem. Yeah, so he uh he was working at a pheasant hunting farm, you know, in South Dakota, like a lot of people do, and was shooting red tails while he was out guiding pheasants because you know, pheasant honors eight red tales and uh, well that's a that's a great you know what I mean though, like you'll hear stories. I would hear stories

from guys like I would hear stories. Got the generation prior to me would be like if you hunt on so and soals farm, he gets mad if you don't shoot the red tails, right, which is like a I'm

sure it's still out there. But I think that there was a time when well he used to pay bounties on him, right, there was a time when it was like you were doing the right thing for the planet by killing every raptor you saw, because chicken farmers would thank you, you know whatever, And uh yeah, so I don't I don't know exactly how many he shot, but he did get six months federal prison time plus three months probation plus or no not three months house or

plus four years probation. Big fine, Yeah we're talking about this. You could he could have killed his wife and landed in jail for last time. Yeah, I mean he did some, He did some. I mean that's serious time. Six months. What are you in here for? Shot a hawk with

a game warden? And I think what they really got him on was after he shot it, he then picked it up, moved it and buried it, Which is like even on top of all that, on top of all that loss is hunting privileges four years Okay, Well, the sad thing is for a lot of those things there there are depredation permits for instances. You know, I'm not saying that they're justifying the killing of raptors, but where it does you know, impact an individual's livelihood, there there

are ways that for that to be managed. But to say loosely quote unquote managed is you know, that's different than wanton shooting that where I grew up to the same thing. You go out there and every third telephone pole's got a red tail at it. M right, man, but that's changed in my lifetime. That's changed drastically. So yeah, okay, give me your spiel on I don't want don't deliver it like a spiel all right, he never does, he wanted. I'm trying to think where it's talking to the microphone. Okay,

all right, I can hear myself breathing. I didn't. I want to. I want to. Let let's approach it this way, all right. When people are talking about um, when people are talking about leading the environment today from hunters and shooters, Okay, there is a widespread idea that this has something to do with the California condo. Oh god, that's okay, that's the lead in. Raise your hand. I'm trying to find

an avenue. Raise your hand if you feel that if you're made aware of the issue years ago in relation to the California condor Okay, everybody, okay, even Chris Races.

I'm relatively new. No, okay, well, yes, Unfortunately, unfortunately people think that this lad issue lad lead from hunting or the otherwise shooting of animals, whether it's depredation, whatever you want, whichever category it's it's assumed that it's only a problem because of the condor, and that's that was people's avenue to introduction, absolutely, and and from a scientific perspective, because we were focused on the condor because it was a

species at such heightened level of endangerment, only twenty two birds left, and trying to figure out what was going on with them and saving them from extinction, not just for the sake of saving them, but for understanding what the hell is going on because the condor could you could argue that the condor has been on the road to extinction since well before the end of the last ice age, right, that's a that's a point I hear that with Well, you'll get into it, like with with

the mega fauna extinctions o that stuff. Yeah, and the range reduction that was observed based on the recovery of of fossilized remains and all that stuff. That's that's what we use as inference. We don't know that's what happened. We just have inference that there was a tremendous range reduction. Condor bones have been found in Florida, Upstate, New York, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, every all over the place.

But that's a ubiquitous bird. Well, it was widespread. And when you as you come to know more about the condor, and this is the key. As you come to know more about the condor, you come to know more about the fact that they can fly states away in a couple of days, They can fly up to six hundred miles in a couple of days, and then by the time we biologists get up there to go find out what the hell it's do and it's on its way back. So that that then tells you it's not that condors

were so dense they were all across the US. Is they had the ability to travel widely, and of course it would be seasonal based on all their their biology. Learning about the natural history of a species, a single species, anytime you study it to the level we've studied condors, you learn more things about the greater environment. That's the benefit of the scientific process and what we glean from

studying a species. We did happen to come to find out that the number one cause of mortality for the California condor range wide in the reintroduction since is lead poisoning. Now there were there were sufferings in here. How that's determined well, when birds are tracked with telemetry, when they are tracked with telemetry, both GPS and VHF telemetry, because honestly, because there are so few of them, you can track them on individual basis and because they were so endangered

that the birds are monitored individual basis. So when I came onto the scene as a as a state biologist fairs on a game and fish, there were six of us out there in February of watching six condoors and that was a the first Birds release December twelfth, which I thought was cool as hell because we're out in there for a million cliffs, which is also a really

cool cheap spot. So you know, like we're gonna scan for condoors and while they're sitting there, we can scan for sheep and there's some pronghorn there and we're getting paid for this. I didn't know you could have this as a career. But anyway, my point is we had

six people watching six condoors. And while that might seem crazy because do you really need to study them that much to really, you know, understand well, I would argue that yes, if you want to know what affects their survival or lack thereof you do need to study them that way. So as we study them, and and we we were able to monitor the way in which a species that once ranged in the Grand Canyon region, we're not reintroducing them. And there's all these big questions out there.

Will they find enough food because one of the early posts in the thirties as to why their populations were declining is because there wasn't enough food anymore. The birds too big, or the birds too big, or or they eat too much and they can't fly afterwards, or they are all these different things that you hear, these old wives tales. And for me, as you know, look, I I grew up outside of Bakersfield, California, and a little farming community. So it was the oil field and the

farm and cattle. That's where I grew up. To me, the way I was introduced to the California condor is uh, it's an endangered species. It's going to ruin our life, right. And so as I studied more and more biology because of my interest in hunting and angling only, and then I found out you could have a career in it. And the more and more I studied, I realized that, you know what the problem wasn't the species, and the problem wasn't us ignorant, you know, hillbillies or rednecks out

in Button Willow. The problem was there's a disconnect between science the people of the communities, and there's a lack of trust because of this inability to communicate. Because one of the ranchers that I worked for was the son of an original homesteader in the southern San Juanquin Valley. He as a kid saw as many as fifty condors on a cal carcass. As a kid, he had natural history in his experience and knew more about condors than the people who were studying them right as the last

one was taken out the wild in the eighties. And I thought, Man, if we could just get these two folks talking, there would be a shared understanding of the landscape and what's happening. That would be far greater than just science or just somebody who says, yeah, they're on they're on their way out, because that's the way of the you know, that's the way of God's creatures. They go extinct. So we would have thought, had we not studied the species, we could have thought that they were

just on their way out. Hit real quick. You just said it, but the last one was taken out the wild. I think it's important people, important point to get that, like there were so few that they were all the living ones were collected. Well yeah, because they were declining so steeply, and that's only been since, you know, since they started being studied and studied in earnest in the twenties, thirties, and really a pivotal study by Carl Cooeford in the forties.

Well there was a break because he had to go to war, but when he got back he finished it up. That's the way folks were back then. Um. Anyway, Um, the population was in such such deep steep decline, and there were all these theories. One is there's not enough food. The other is you know, goofy things, like they're so dumb,

they're just not surviving well. From a biologist, a burgeoning biologists like myself and kind of a kid of the landscape, I was like, you know when nature really produce a loser, because it seems to me evolutionary biology hones and polishes every species to its finest representation as a wild animal. So why all of a sudden are they struggling it's got to be a major imposition on the landscape or

something that's going on. And then there were people said, oh, it's it's it's l a, you know, it's uh, they lost their habitat or condors are so sensitive that if you if they see somebody and they're sitting on their nest, they'll abandon their nest. But once again, from just basic biology and my experiences as a hunter and angler, I was like, does does nature build something like that? It doesn't make sense to me, right, or find me that

other comparison, because if one behaves like that, there's something else. Well, there are a host of things that are sensitive to development. Oh absolutely, yeah, Oh yeah, and there's that little town, you know, Los Angeles, right there in the core heart of their range. Right. But if you look at me that like that, they eat so much and they can't walk around and get killed. Okay, I'm like, well, but

that would always have been the case. And the idea that habitat, the idea that you had, like a habitat issue, that doesn't seem to be as silly as like some other other things. Oh no, you can rank them, you can rank them, but ill, but I'll tell you. I'll give you a few examples about how by reintroducing the birds and studying them to the degree that we have, we've really narrowed it. Set aside, you know, were also some who said, and if you look at the early

writings and um Audubon for example. I'm not I'm not bashing Audubon here, but Audbon was against the collection of the birds and starting a captive flock. And and you, I know you've probably read this. It was in Matheson's book America's what was it called Wildlife in America. I

read it, but I don't remember it. Yeah, he talks about that that that, look, we need to to to conserve these birds and prevent their extinction and then maybe understand why they were going extinct, because it may not only benefit that species, it may benefit our understanding of the ecosystem, which would be far greater used. But you have to collect these birds and retain them in captivity so that you can go and figure out what the

problem was. Because by the time they were studied intensively, their population was already in such a steep decline that a captive population was the only thing that saved them from extinction. So December Easter Sunday, the last wild condor was captured and removed from the wild cat Uh, you

gotta go check this out. You guys would dig this a pit trap, dig a hole, put a netting across you, fill it with debris and things to hide, and put a dripping rotting and carcass on top of that and lie under it in weight so when the bird comes and lands, you can grab it by the legs. Who's the guy to grab that? I think it was Pete Bloom, who still is your tombstone. It's one of the same ways that falconers. He's still alive. Yeah, how does he? Yeah,

I don't know. He's like he's the generation. I mean, he's one of our I look up to him as one of the He's one of the gods in the world of conservation biology because of the stuff that they were doing back then. So so anyway, I find that feller that bird that was captured, the last one. A C nine stands for adult condor nine because we're into

labeling ship I like all those names. So A C nine was the ninth condor given a number, and now every condoor produced since then, and we're up into the eleven and twelve hundreds now both for birds produced in the wild end in captivity, every bird has a number, So a C nine was captured added to the captive flock. Luckily, the people running the captive propagation programs, the ones who really started it at Los Angeles Zoo in the San Diego Wild Animal Park or Zoo Global or what they're called,

it's still the same outfit. They just changed their names. Well, um, that all started and they had that captive flock. A C nine was put in and paired up with a female, which again is not natural. And you have to understand two about the reproductive biology. Condors take eight years before

they're able to reproduce in the wild. They're capable of it at five and six, respectively for males and females, but they're usually not successful until eight years of age, so they have a very slow rate of reproduction, which also lends to why weren't they able to respond naturally in the wild to increase causes of mortality because they don't produce quickly enough and their long lives species, so it's a difference between a K and are selected species. Anyway,

go off on all kinds of tangents. So like a mus grats live a few months. It is throwing babies off. Oh yeah, but these things got tough at out for yeah, close to a decade. Yeah, so to replace themselves and they only lay, well, not they, it's only the female. I don't know if you knew that, but I read that.

I read that. I always say they, and my my daughter's pointed out, like, dad, the male doesn't lay anything, Like I know that, Like, yeah, but you say they the pair, Well, okay, they have an egg that the female lays and then they incubate it together. It takes like fifty seven days and then the thing hatches and then six months later it finally is ready to leave the nest. And the nest for six months six months, yeah, and then after it fledges, the parents take care of

it for an additional year. So now you really have the currency of exchange for you know, the the game of replacing yourself for condors, that's very limiting. But in captivity they could get the it's to read annually. And not only that, but they could prey upon another thing. We learned about a lot of different birds. They multiple clutch if they lose their first egg to predation. In the wild, the female is able to recycle and lay another fertile egg. Sometimes that can happen two or three

times if their nest is predated. But of course all these things in nature, they would have had to elaid it early enough. Anyway, I know I'm geeking out on that part of it, but we take it. I didn't want to talk about condors, you got you got it all. I love talking about condors, but you talked. But you started it with lead and then condors, which I'll tell you why that's that's a bad idea. I don't know. Well, you were getting down to six of you watching six birds. Yeah,

six of us watching six birds. We learned a lot. So by multiple um you know, um double clutching, which were some of us probably old enough to we think that has a different all right, Well, double clutching and birds is getting too in the in the same same year, same season. So you put the other egg in the incubator, you raise it up. Well, you don't want it to

imprint on people. So they used the puppet to make sure that it was fair it and nurtured until it was then put into a foster care and then you take those young and you release them too the wild. Then we released into the wild, we put transmitters on them. We watched them now and back to the six people watching six birds, and you're like, now, we'll find out

what happens to these sons of bitches exactly. And as we did, we found out it took them several years to occupy in behavior and in space what we now think is natural behavior because it's it's not very you know, we're seeing like a seventy eighty mile home range. These birds are moving seasonally around following the food. So during hunting season they eat the hell out of gut piles.

It's a great food source. During calving season, they're eating the drop calves, the ones that don't survive, they're eating the remains left behind. All of these things are we're learning because birds like a C nine last one captured put into captivity produce so many young artificially enhanced because we left to play with things as we learned about it. So we've been able to exponentially grow the population a short period of time to maximize the return on investment

of the cost of this. To pump these birds out and then monitor them. Well, here's a neat thing about the testament to the condor's resiliency. A C nine finally was so well represented, and we have a team of geneticists that monitor this to make sure that for every release site they have an equal representation of genetic diversity, so that if we lose one population to some catastrophe, we still have that genetic stock somewhere, either in captivity

in Arizona and Utah or in California and Baja. Those are the three main groups, and your dozen egg carton, you're there's a lot of parents represented in that dozen egg carton, well as many as you could have because they are only you know, the all time low was twenty two individuals. So from those twenty two came the breeding stock for the entire population today, which begs the question of is there enough genetic diversity for them to

be viable in the first place. Luckily, in avian species that's not as much of an issue as it is with primates. So the Mauritius kestral is probably the best example. That was down to four birds in in the island of Mauritius, and now that bird has been brought back to over four repairs. It's either fods or four innerpairs. Yeah, but as you start studying now with our capacities and science to study that, to look back using genetics, to look back and see what that bottleneck was and how

many family groups there are. Well, the Andean condor, the closest living relative to the California condor. It too went through a bottleneck that has like three or four family groups is all. They have, same thing with California condor. Anyway, My point about A C nine is he was so well represented they decided, why don't we rerelease him. He came from the wild, Let's put him back out there. Damned if he didn't get back back released and start breeding in the wild again and took a new mate

and continued to produce young. He's probably pretty good at the reproducing part of this well because he had been Yeah, he'd been doing an annual basis right. My My point is people think that the condor is so fragile, and I think people have that misconception that all endangered species are so fragile that's why they're endangered. That's not the case.

Species get endangered and we get upity as people when changes too rapid, because too rapid a change causes us to get tense about it, which and and too rapid a change for wildlife interrupts their ability to respond to it, like if there's a new cause of mortality. And so I'm prefacing all this stuff because it's gonna matter when we talk about lead. But what I know about lead is mostly from my work with condors. So we go on,

we're studying these birds. They start, uh, first lead lead poisoning case comes in, and this gets back to finally answering your question, I do hear you, and I'm not ignoring you. How do you know about lead? How you know how many diet birds die of lead? We had a bird drop out of a tree south ron the Grand Canyon in the summer of two thousand. They went and recovered the bird, took it in, They did an EE cropsy, an autopsy for wildlife did an e cropsy.

Come to find out the bird had lead pellets in it's digestive system, meaning it had consumed something with digestive in its digestive system and consumed that meat that had pellets, which is odd because it's summertime and it's a Grand Canyon that's what the hell is going on there? Well, I got my ideas and I almost got fired for it. A game and fish, but that's another story. Um Now we know that. I looked at the X ray and

I was like, that's number six and sevens. I know those are sevens because I've reloaded a hell a lot of them, and that's a six and I see some of those in duck hunting. That's six and sevens. What in the world's going on there? One bird had thirty three pellets in its stomach. Turns out, after that bird we got the diagnosis back to pets, not lead pellets. No, we're gonna get the fragments. That's a whole another venue and it's way more conclusive than the where in the

hell these pellets come from? So we um. After that bird gets diagnosed, we see a couple of weather birds looking lethargic, which is similar to any other vertebrate species and how they respond with lead poisoning. We're starting to see it, like, man, something wrong with this bird. It's lethargic, it's not going anywhere, it's not feeding with the rest of the birds. You go in and and well, let's trap the population we found thirteen birds after trapping the

population in two thousand. I can't remember what the total was, but we had thirteen birds that had pellets in their gut and someone were sick and we had to keylate them. So luckily you can keylate the same process we use. Keylating is the is the Basically it's a you inject a solution and humans they do it through I V and the root word keel is claw and and it molecularly binds to the lead and then can be passed

through the system. So in condors we just give them two injections a day and the intermuscular injections in the pack and then it helps to reduce the lead. It debriates more quickly because if it doesn't get taken out of the system like other vertebrate system, lead precipitates out of the blood stream into the organs, into the bone and brain, where there's an increasing difficulty of getting rid of it because the half life of lead and blood is like fourteen days. Half life of lead in the

brain might be forty years. So we can start doing real damage with accumulations over a lifetime. Can we to find deporate? Oh gosh, yeah, I can't believe I used words of that. No, it's cool. No, people get to learn stuff. Deporation is the ability or the way in which a a an element. In this case, it precipitates out of the system. So they're different ways. Some of it is through waste, some of it is through being locked up into other compartments. So sorry, snort, I thought

that was you for a minute. So um so, So we learned that lead poisoning in fact is something that reared its ugly head in our reintroduction program in Arizona. Now this wasn't unknown. There were studies in the eighties where they found a few birds and this gets back to another thing I was talking about earlier. They found a few birds near waterways and they had such huge crops that it looked like they were they had gorged themselves.

But one of the effects that lead poisoning has on on a condor is, like other vertebrate species, there are neural neural impacts. They're neural pathways that are blocked and you get paralysis. And this happens with humans and lead poisoning as well. Um So, the condor's digestive system is paralyzed. Therefore, the sphincter that controls the food from the crop that goes down through the proventriculous and ventriculous and into the gut.

It can't function anymore. So they're starving essentially, and they can't they they they're still eating more and more and more, and so they're filling up this huge crop. And because they're in a weakened state because they're not processing food, they can't fly. And because they can't fly and they're not processing food, they usually don't need metabolic water because they can I mean, they don't need water because they can get water through the metabolic processes of processing their food.

So if they're not getting the benefit of their food, they're eating themselves into this and gorge state and they're not getting the moisture they need to go to water. So these birds were found I learned this when I was doing my dissertation research. And so we found that these birds would be there with this huge crop and they couldn't fly. It wasn't because they had over eaten. It's because they were dying lead poisoning, and they'd be

collected near water. Yeah, yeah, and and that's common. So over like here's where this wive's tail came from exactly, like exactly, thank you. That was the point I wanted to come all the way back to. So as I started researching this, and because you know when birds go go silent on telemetry or GPS, when they're GPS is moving around as we expect them to, and ban they

stop and they're there for two weeks. Something's wrong. You go there and and we started putting this together, is like is there a creek, yep, go to that creek, hike up that creek. We're gonna find that bird. So you get your VHF telemetry. You'd either fly at first to kind of narrow it down, and then we'd go in by by you know, a TV and then hike in the rest and then we would would find that bird.

And sure enough it's got a full crop. And it smells because the crop is soured, which is not normal for I mean it it's when you smell like a like a paragrine that's just eating, that's just eating a meal. It doesn't smell what people think. It smells like, oh

it's dead meat or it's red meat. It has a sweet smell, just like a good piece of elk does you know, and condors when they're scavenging, they're scavenging on carcasses when they're new because they find them by eyesight, not by their smell, and so their big bill allows them to tear into carcasses that other scavenging species like turkey vultures can't do. So condors are eating fresher carrying, if there is such a thing. So they usually don't stink.

You can smell when they're sick and they have a soured crop and you can see it because it looks like a big balloon. Um. So we're so we're learning all this stuff, and then I start reading these old papers from the eighties where they said, well, we know lead poisoning could be a contributing factor. Well, as it turns out, lead poison is the number one factor. And so for us, that's how we came to our understanding of lead poisoning and how it could have really contributed

to the steep decline and near extinction. And so rather than rest thing on that, we went to our partners that airs on the Game and Fish and Utah Division Wildlife and said, hey, folks, we've been monitoring these birds now since and beginning in two thousand two when the condors found the Kaibab plateau and they started feeding on gut piles in like, this was the seasonal thing you did. It's like State Fair in Bakersfield, right, everybody goes there. Well,

hunting season on the Kaibab. All the condors. You can see all their location data if they're wearing gps is or we're tracking them with VHF. They all go to the Kaibab and we get a signal in the stationary signal means they're either perched or they're perched because they're they're feeding. Well, you have to wait awhile because they

stop and rest and then fly quite a bit. But if they're there for a couple of hours and there's five or six birds, you go there and you rush up and there you are at a camp, at hunters camp, and there's a bloody greasy spot in the pine needles over there, and there's a bunch of condoors with big fat crops, and the hunters are long gone, and there's the bones, there's the hide, and the condors are fat and happy. You're like, great, it's a great food source.

Until we started seeing seasonally high levels of lead speaking coinciding with the hunting season. So we took and sampled the bird's blood every time we caught them so that we could have samples of blood year round. And sure enough, we saw a spike that coincided with October November, which was when the two deer hunts are in the Kibab. But you're not seeing deaths at this point, oh no, No,

deaths were creeping along. And then after like two or three years of consistent use of the kaibab, you could count on it. We were going to lose six to ten condors a year to lead poisoning. And that's when Steve we finally found the pictures in the radiographs. We we got an X ray machine and if a bird was sick and it had a high blood lead level, we would X ray it and sure as hell we'd

find fragments. And then we started asking a question of okay, but wait a second, is this because of wounding loss? We didn't. We didn't yet understand the relationship between gut piles.

So being lifelong hunters and being you know, the fund is founded by hunters falconers who don't do d and d uh, so they say, so we said, well, hell, let's do a study because because wounding loss we know is only about ten eleven percent in deer hunting, we looked at studies all over the place and like, we're not talking about ten or eleven percent of the dear harvested being the source of lead poisoning that accounts for of the condor flock having high lead levels. We're talking

about something more ubiquitous on the landscape. We've got to figure out how much lead there can be. So we did our first study where we went and shot thirty deer up in Wyoming at one of our our board members places, and and sure enough, this was another point in my personal wildlife career is like, are you kidding me? We're all got five dopon permits and we're gonna go do this study and we're gonna shoot all these deer.

We're gonna x raym hole. We're gonna shoot him with everything from a two forty three to three wimmag x ray m hole. Then we're gonna gut them into a supplement tub. If any of you know what that is. You know they find them out in the field all the time. We throw in the supplement tub. Then we're gonna xtray the supplement tub. It's that thing that you briefly know as an animal and you throw your binoculars on it. What the hell is a big bucket doing out,

especially when you're hog hunting in California. So so we started extraying um these carcasses of deer hole at a with a veterinarian up there, and we put an narrow shaft through the wound channel so we could hold it perfectly straight up and down, so that the wound channel was in a kilumter fashion, so that when we had the x ray, we could also see if fragmentation occurred, how far those fragments UM got away from the bullets path. So we would started being blown away with just that alone.

And we're like, man, that's a lot of that's a lot of lead. But still most we take the deer out of the we got it in Arizona. We got it, and we take it out of the field. And so we're like, well, let's do the gut piles. This blew our minds and we're lifelong hunters. We x rayed those fragments and and I'll give you I won't say the names of the manufacturers because I don't pick on anybody. But anyway, a soft point lead core bullet that everybody has probably used in their life and most common on

the shelf. It's said to retain sixty four to sixty percent of its mass. Damn sure does. It's perfect. The mushroom looks beautiful when you actually that gut pile. And and people say not, probably your listeners. They say, well, I don't shoot them in the guts. Well, you know what I mean, everything for and aft of the diaphragm is what we call the gut. You're leaving on the ground, but you're leaving on the ground or the grolic if you're in you know, Ireland or whatever. No, that's that's

diaphragm back garlic? Is this diaphragm back? All right? Well let see there it goes a t question. Yeah, there you go. Get that in there. I hope he does ask about that. So anyway, um that when we actually the gut piles, that's what blew our minds. A single shot from say a hundred thirty grain two seventy soft soft lead core tip bullet could produce as many as four fragments from a single shot. Holy cow, it looks like a snowstorm. And so I started investigating and looking

into the snow storm. You know, I didn't know what to call it at the time, but I said, well, there's gotta be fragmentation studies, you know, elsewhere, especially during wartime, because unfortunately, it's not like you see on the John Wayne flicks. You know, take a shot of whiskey, bite this dick, I'll get that bullet out. Well, you might get the core of the slugout, but you're not getting

a let out. And there's what was defined in wartime as the snowstorm effect, which was the fragmentation that occurs. And it's basically the stripping off of the front end of that bullet as it comes in hot with its highest velocity and as it begins to lose velocity because it's losing mass, little pieces are being stripped off, and it looks like this little galaxy. And that's what these X rays look like. Uh, let me hit you with

some what about is ms? You bet? What was going on like when the hide hunters and the commercial hunters, we're re shedding like shiploads of condors. I don't know, if you look at the condor's estimated decline, and you look at our increase in those activities, it looks like an inverse relationship wine inverse relationship. Well, oh got it? Yeah, maybe I said that wrong. I don't know, honey, activity is going up and then the harvest. So someone could

have it. You had the right tool kit, you could have in eighteen seventy gone out and found lead contamination and condors and might have charted a declining if I if I was a betting man and I had the money to bet, I'd be betting on that. Because look, and that's the beauty of this study. We weren't looking for lead to be the problem. We were looking and open to the idea of what what are the problems that contribute to Maybe it is the lack of genetic variability,

stuff like that. We were thinking that. And there were people who said that all these birds hatching captivity, they're not going to know how to breed. And I was like, again, would nature produce something like that in just a few generations?

And get this, Some of the birds we released when they became of breeding age at five and six years of age, they chose caves in the Grand Canyon that later through investigation of those caves were used by their ancestors in the place to see there were fonal remains that were carried there, likely by condors, because you're not going to get a Harrison's Mountain goat uh tooth, you know, in in one of those caves on the sheer red wall. Yeah, it was kind and they found condor remains and those

condors that were hatched in captivity. Who by some people's assertions, you know, they're not gonna know what to do, Well, yeah they did, and they did it just like you know, they're great, great, great great whatever uh did. So we became we became more and more confident that what we're seeing is more indicative of of what a wild condors doing.

Like people said, well, there's not enough food out there. Again, I think about that and and a lot of what I think about as a conversation guys have had on this podcast. Wait a second, we're at the peak of productivity on the landscape right now with respect to carrying the potential for carrying wildlife populations of deer and elk and turkeys and whatever else you want to talk about. The the the age of conservation has produced an abundance

of biomass of potential carrying. And then you add from the years of the Spaniards on through to today, the introduction of domestic stock and having the stocking rates we use on the landscape, I would posit that there might be more potential carrying today than there might have been right after the last the end, the less ice age when you factor in live stock. It's interesting. Oh, absolutely, Now there's because in a lot of areas you just

you're you're constantly making sure that you're hitting max capacity. Yeah, and and people have made the argument. I think it's worthy the most. You know, with the the advent of veterinary care, the loss rates are are much less too, So one could argue, you know, I'm just saying that from what you've seen and observing the condors. We put food out there when we release birds because our management

tool is the release site. If we can't keep them coming back to the release site, we can't go trap them. They're damn hard to trap once they're out in the field. Um, we we thought, well, we don't want them to come dependent on the food that we put out, So like five six months after you know, this is in the early years. We put the food out there, we'd move it every night, make them work for it, make them have to do what they're going to have to do

in the landscape to survive. And then later we found that it doesn't matter what you do and how much foods there come the flying season as soon as March and April hit in northern Arizona and southern Utah and the winds pick up, Hey fuels cheap. Condors are gliding birds. They have nine and a half foot wingspan. They're gonna use it and they're gonna go and they're gonna feed elsewhere. So they're not dependent on the food. So we're beginning

to answer these original questions. Was that their reproductive biology? Was it the amount of food on the landscape. And then you know people saying that they're they they're so uh, they're so vulnerable to people. Does that make sense? For as long as humans have hunted in North America, condors have been here, and condors follow scavengers, I mean follow predators. So I would argue that wait a second, condors aren't

looking at us as a predator. And with the birds we see produced today, they're not afraid of humans, which is another major problem when it comes to people that have shot condors, which still happens today unfortunately. But they're not fearful of humans because we're a predator and they probably followed predators. Can you imagine in one of those old buffles, they don't look at us as a predator of them, of them, but they look at us as

a predator that produces carrying were a food source. So can you imagine one of those buffalo jumps if there were condors that extended out into the planes, you know, which is entirely possible, and how that would have supported a population of condors long after you know, the natives left and there's there's so many tangents here. Well yeah, and look, well this this is all great, but in

the interest of time, let's let's up to something. Uh. Out of that research, and I'm sure that there was plenty of fighting and suing, okay, but out of that research we get what I brought up initially, hunters and their ammunition, and we came to know about the condor recovery area, and folks were introduced to the idea of the FURST, the first widespread ammal restriction since the water foul the first widespread ammal restriction since the waterfowl. All right,

you're jumping. I'm gonna have to back you up though, because you're jumping straight to the ban in California. I assume. Yeah, it wasn't that, Like, well, it's it's spread to other places, right, like portions of Arizona had were in the condo recovery area. No. Yeah, the recovery, the addressing the lead issue as it was UM defined by condors. Addressing that began in Arizona and Utah long before the band in California. Yeah, and our

approach was entirely differently. Okay, well that's always trying to I don't know the history. I just wanted to bump along and like sending the interest of time. You bet, so, let me give you the fast track. So from early two thousand's two thousand uh four or five, we did the Dear Study. UM put out a few more studies showing that the coincidence of increased lead exposure and let cause mortality in the hunting season, And then we went

to Arizona game and fish. We built a program to share this information with hunters and asked hunters that they would consider using non lead Arizona game, and Fish took it a step further and said, hey, if you get drawn for a kaibab tag, which is the one once a decade thing, if you're lucky, we're gonna also give you two free boxes non lead ammunition. We need your help to address this problem for condors. Within three years, there's on a game and Fish reached voluntary participation within

three years. Seeing the reason I back you up is because nobody knows this part of the Condoran lead story. All they know is what happened in California, and I'm gonna get to that for the sake of time. But for the last twelve years, I didn't know. I never I didn't know about the ammo. Yeah, yeah, I don't know that there was a voluntary components, that a voluntary opponent.

It was comprised of voluntary activities. And and to be further, um uh, I hardly know what to say to to be a better bunch of conservation scientists and wildlife managers who are all hunters. We said, and if you just can't get the stuff to shooting your gun, or we don't have there at caliber, you can still help prevent that potential exposure and that prevents potential poisoning by hauling

your gut pile of the field. And when we first proposed that, some people like who the hell's gonna haul a gup pile out of the field, I was like, well, if you make that Cabella's gift certificate, they might win big enough. I can tell you a lot of folks that would. And it worked even with the ammunition shortages of late which I know is something you to talk about,

and the price and price and availability. Even with that being an imposition last year, the hunters in Arizona continued to participate and they just transitioned if they couldn't get the AMMO, they still participated and helped wildlife because they were asked to do so, and we incentivised it to to say thank you. And even though there was fewer rounds of non let AMMO available for use last year, we saw the same annual participation. It's annual over that

twelve year time for it. So nobody talks about that. And so when when California. It all started in California. It started because litigious based groups who quote unquote do

conservation started with California. Because California was easy pickings because of the way the politics are there, And so when those groups started threatening litigation and saying you have to do a ban or else, I ended up over there talking to the Commission on two separate occasions, on behalf of the condor program AM and the research that had

really put a lot of this on the map. And I was there at the Commission meetings saying no, no, no, I'm We're saying this information is new and it's real and it's worthy of consideration. But we're saying the assumption that a ban is the only solution. We're not quite convinced. And we have a perfect case in point here in Arizona and later into Utah that shows that you can work with hunters and ask for their help and share with them the information, and you can seek maybe higher

rates of participation. Then you may even get with compliance with the law, especially if it comes from the angle of approach that it's coming. So that the crap deal for the way that went down in California, and the crap deal for why I'm hesitant to talk about lead and condors unless we do it the right way, which sharing our story I think is a better way. Is that it turned into a political quagmire where if you were talking about non lead today you're talking about oh,

your condor lover. And I even had a mutual friend I won't say his name here, but a mutual friend of ours. He said, yeah, but you're a raptor nut. I said, no, I'm not. I'm a hunter conservation nut. The condor or another species is symbolic of what we as a society or capable. The guy we're talking about real smart. Yeah, I'm smart and very energetic. Yeah. And

you yeah, yeah, anybody. And he'll know that I'm talking about him, because when he talks about this issue, he knows I'm gonna call him right after, right after the the oh, I almost gave too much away, right after some of their media um outputs go go live. God, I gave way too much anyway, um deep Yeah, there you go, so so for me. And I told him this, I said, what I love about this is it the fact that we can combine hunting and conservation and science

altogether and own it. We can walk away on this issue of lead poisoning and how it affects the condor or the eagle. Because there's those recent studies that you reported on col Um, you know, with with the limitations to the eagle populations and going down those paths of the arguments, well, eagles are doing eagles are doing great, so how can let be a problem. It was like, yeah, humans are too, so COVID doesn't matter, right, just the

logic we use today. We really have to shape this conversation. And if we, as hunters who who believe we are leading the way in conservation, if we're not out there in the front talking about it, then it will go by the wayside of those groups who have the loudest voice, those groups who spend their money on campaigns and litigation um and telling everybody they're saving the condor by passing

this law. But the reality of it is, and what we were guarding against and warning against when they were petitioning and and cowfish and wildlife was put in a tight spot because they're gonna be suited if they don't do something. And and I was very proud to be a biologist to scientists who was there saying, hey, I did some of that work. I'm my name is on those papers, and I'm telling you I'm not sure a band will solve the problem. It'll change the law, which

sounds good. But if people think that it's all um, you know, mocked up and and it's about an attack on our rights as hunters. I won't say we predicted it. It was obvious you didn't. Nobody had to predict it. And when that happened, that what the perception would be. Oh absolutely, And now guess what, lead poisoning still occurring?

Where it lead his band? And and to those people who believe that the band was the only solution, I said to them, so if you are successful in your band, you have your parade in the streets, you say you solve the problem. You know. The crappy thing for us who are out there monitoring and watching taking care of these condors, they're still gonna be lead poisoned. And they're still gonna be lead poison because people are gonna say, yeah, I realize it's a law, but I think it's bullshit,

So I'm not gonna worry about it. And it's unenforceable. Can you tell the difference between a polymer tip solid copper bullet versus a polymer tip lead core copper, Yeah, you can't tell. So there are all these issues that we were pointing out and saying, guys, don't get the cart before the horse here, do what we're doing, and not because we were right, but because we were seeing success.

Hunters are responding in kind. We're the only people with the study and the study has this type of results, right, And then we would say and then finally I would just say, and I know, I'm I'm I'm going on too long about this too, but um I said, if hunters are the only ones that can solve this problem, so do you want to alienate them? That's an interesting point because that's part of the waterfowl ban was that North Dakota Game and Fish kind of hung their hat

on that. They did, like, uh, they put on shooting clinics for hunters and they're like, we're gonna teach you how to shoot with Steele. We're gonna teach you that Steele isn't some awful thing. And you know, they spent the time and money to to work with hunters. Put on today like shooting clinics, show them lead poisoning, all this, and the hunters leave it and there they're positive about it.

So I'm so glad you brought that up, because that is the foundation that I've laid for you, and what we experienced in Arizona and Utah is the philosophy and foundation that gave rise to the North American on lead partnership. And I hope someday we can come back with my co founder Leland Brown and talk about that partnership, because that's exactly what we're doing. So state agencies are are rightfully so they're concerned about the public perception about how

big a deal is this lead thing? Do we need to do anything? And we're saying, hey, we can help you with that. We've already done it, and we did it in the range of the condor where it's even more contentious. But if you want to have this conversation about the potential for lead exposure and how to prevent the potential for lead exposure as a as an opportunity for an ethically minded, uh conservation minded hunter, we can we can give you confidence that this will resonate well

with him. Let me let me uh, let me lay one on you. UM. I'll start off by saying you can comment on this comment. Start up by saying this goes beyond the problem with lead poison, or I don't even want to use value. I don't want to use value laid in terminology rafters. Besides condors, cannon do die from lead ingestion. Okay. Um, people who are uneasy or outright opposed to bands, as we discussed in California, where moves it beyond hunter choice? Okay, and you just raise

your hand. So so people who oppose lead bands, yeah, and I don't oppose it, but go ahead, some people do. Yeah, Okay, I'm very like I'm not. I'm highly highly uneasy with the idea of a lead band when you could get with compliance and technology gradually land in a similar place. So to the point where now if you had someone like if you come to me and said I could shoot uh letter Bismuth, right, like, I'll shoot business. Well,

it's really expensive, but it performs well. So you have a technology function outside of any conversation, like, outside of any conversation about lead I know a lot of guys that shoot copper bullets. Yeah, okay, outside of it, Like they could be not even aware of the debate, but

they're switching for issues of performance and other stuff. Okay, there's a cost factor, but I'm strange from what my point is going to be someone who's gonna come and say, like, I am gonna resist any kind of mandate that tells shooters what they have to use. And someone says, what about the fact that that raptors die from lead, They would say, uh, raptors die from collisions with glass, Raptors die from wind turbans, Raptors get hit by vehicles and die.

Raptors die all manner of ways. They die from lighting with fences. Um, why is there not a conversation about we can't have fences, we can't have glass windshields, we can't have glass sky rises. Why do you seem to not care about all these significant causes of death but you care about this one. And they'll say this, we're

not talking about population level impact. They might say there's like this is an argument, and they're saying, sure, some die, they all die eventually, many die from many causes, but short of their being population level impact, it doesn't matter. Beautiful, I'm glad you brought this up. Okay, So that's that's a way of that's a not a fringe, not a fringe viewpoint. No, And what I would what I would enter into that because there's there's several things you need

to impact there. Um. The first of which is yes, lead is not in many cases of population limiting effect for those other raptors. It's only proven to be so right now. Well, it can affect populations. That's that latest latest paper in science pretty much nailed that UM, and the condor is obviously affected a population limit limiting level, population limiting level. But they're all affecting population. But you

can't say it's not either. But the argument it shouldn't be about that there are programs to educate and mitigate for all those other cause of mortality. Look at the stuff we're seeing about Ferrell cats right now, not that they're out killing eagles. But my point is, UM, there are programs out there, just hasn't been proven yet, but

there are programs that do address it. The sticking point is are there programs problems and is addressed by let I won't get into the details of a law enforcement interview I had one time about the way I learned to shoot and whether it did or did not have anything to do with Ferrell cats, But UM, I won't

get into that. UM. The point is is we're not talking about we we at the non the partnership or the Paragne fundering of our partners, and now we have over forty partners, including one of your else close outfits, First Light is one of our partners. We're not out there saying that the band's a solution. We're out there saying education, outreach, educating yourself, being able to make an

informed decision. We are confident based on our experience in Arizona, Utah, now Oregon, beginning in Washington for new new partner to new partners to the two original of state agencies, we are confident that if you provide that information and you and you shape a path forward through Yes, incentives work great, and it's it's fun to maybe win something. Um that you can change people's perceptions, their awareness and that can lead to changes in behavior without telling them what to do.

And me as a hunter, and that's why I'm so passionate about this. I want us to have our cake and eat it too. I want us to say when we a that hunters the original conservationists, Yeah, are they continuing to be? I hope what we're doing represents that because I want to be a hunter leading a way in conservation and far greater than any single species that we've prevented extinction from or or brought back to take them off of the endangered species list. All of those

are testaments of what we're capable of. The way in which we go about it is the process that will see us through to the challenges in the future. It's well beyond a single species, and it's beyond a single issue like lead poisoning. There are other issues that are way bigger on the on the scale of things for wildlife management agencies to be dealing with. I I understand that. That's why I think we as a nonprofit, for example of the Paragrine Fund, that's why we we put our

two cents in. We show our our We lead by example by saying we'll help you with that. That's why we co founded the non lad Partnership. You know what I forgot to do when I was laying out my no thing, I forgot to include this one which winds up in there and you continue unpacking the whole thing will be like, uh uh the bald eagle? Yeah, okay, what was it? What was the thing we did to save the bald eagle? What was the thing called silent

spring and all that? Oh? Well, you are you talking about d d T or no, no, what was it? What was then there that made their eggs their eggshells and d d E, which is the residuees yea eggshell thinning. Well, I mean the paagrine falcon is probably a better example of that, but yeah, I mean the paregrine falcon was was was far greater affected. I mean it was oh yeah, they the paragn falcon. We we nearly lost because of that, and that obviously is thus the namesake of our organization,

the Paragrin Fund. But that's why we were founded. Those falconers who noticed that populations of of Paragrine's were plummeting and wondering why and thought, well, we've we've got to be able to breathe these birds in captivity and re repopulate those areas. But we got to find out the problem, and the d d T was identified as the problem.

And even though the science was there, kind of like what you were talking about with a hundred years of lead lead information, even though the science was there, one of the things that put it on the map was silent spring, you know, and like like Bell Rose, you know, Bell Rose was the guy who finally got it through to everyone. He was the Rachel Carson of I would argue that he was the guy at the time people finally came around to really accepting what was going on.

He was the expert at the time. But it's never one person that finally did it, because you don't introduce something that's controversial, controversial that is going to require a great amount of change in human society's that that is listened to. They hear the case and they say, yeah,

we're gonna do it, and then they do it. No, you hear about it, and the first one is called a radical, and then later on they're they're immortalized and talking, you know, exactly mountain from making a lot of wilderness, making a lot of forests and wilderness, and then everyone, every politician since then wants to compare himself to a guy that was ridicule yeah in his day, and and that's exactly beat pre hugging to some bitch on the plane exactly. So, uh, let me finish my bald eagle thing.

I haven't gotten there yet. Sorry. Recently, there's a news story wing all day man, Well there's a news story. They got all kinds of pressed. I mean, in the last month or two some about like a prevalency of leading eagles, and people like, holy shit, these eagles all

got lead at some point out home? Are we talking about the same bird that we quite famously removed from the Endangered Species Act protection because it's recovered and now it's everywhere and you don't even comment on bald eagles anymore. Is this the bird we're talking about that's getting killed by lead? Well, they do, they do in Alaska. They comment about that bird. Yeah, like at our fish chack. I think someone once counted right in a in a

collection trees. But I'm saying that so like, on one hand, the media is running with this ball eagle thing. On the other hand, people are like, but hol on man, I thought that was like one of the great conservation success stories. How bad could the lead be? Yeah? Absolutely, And that's my point. It's not about does it affect a single species to the point where they might we might lose them. That's not the stake of the game.

The game is understanding and having the information to be able to comprehend the system and be able to make wise choices. Because what's the one of the first tenants of of hunter education, No you're no your targetget beyond Well, there's a new dimension of this and I want, I want, I won't steal this because this is Leland Brown, my co founder that works for the organ Zoo was beyond the target. Yeah, this is a new dimension. We own that bullet. We're responsible to make sure it hits the

target we intend to kill. And if we do our job, and we know our equipment, it does its job. What about after we leave and the remains of that bullet are there. All we want to do is make sure people know that there's a potential potential for that to poison a bird. Now, if it does poison a bird, does that mean that we're gonna lose that species that they did? That's not the point, folks. It's like leaving trash in the forest. Right, We're not telling people. Look,

it's banned. It's it is banned. You can't leave trash in the forest. It doesn't mean that's what people do. You know, doesn't mean something's gonna die. Pick up your paper, right. I mean it's a good thing to do for ecosystem health. We want people to think about it that way, not that if we don't do it, we'll lose a species.

I think that paradigm of that style of conservation is over because one, the science is still science, it's still evolving, and there's still the pera viewed process that that tests the science and our assumptions of what we know. That's an ever ongoing thing. But the thing is the way we do conservation, because now people don't trust the science and they don't know who to trust when they're talking about whatever. You know, PhD on this side and on

that side of every every issue. Um, we need. This is a new paradigm of conservation, and I think we just have to go back and do the hard work and earning relationships and trust so that you can share it in the way that in some form or fashion we've been able to share share here today. Um, you've got to build that that trust before people are going to change their behavior because once again, just like those species that don't adapt well to major perturbations in an environment,

we don't adapt well to major change either. Uh, you're not a physicist, you're not a human physiologist. And that's I know you're gonna ask about human health. Well let's do it. I'm not gonna ask about it. I'm gonna comment on it, all, right, Uh, no one has been able to tie in a way that that achieves some sort of academic consensus. No one has been able to tie hunting eating wild game meat with adverse health effects

due to lead. In fact, remember they did this thing where they went and looked at North Dakota hunters to see how much lead they had, and they're like, oh, some of these hunters have elevated lead, but the average they had less. They had less lead in their system than urban nights who don't eat wild game because exposure comes from a a ways, lead paint, soil, all the leaded gasoline burning prologies. Right, So I don't want I don't want to get into the and because you're not

a human physiologist, you can comment on it. But I think it's like you can comment on it, not that I need to tell you what to comment on. I try and put this way. Do you contest? Do you contest my statement if I say there is no proof that hunters are suffering healthy facts not not leading their system, are suffering health effects greater than the American public in general. No, And I would not contest that. But what I would say is, and this is the way I treat this issue.

Because if you lead with the human health issue and and you try to tell people what's good for him, but you're not here to talk about human health. I'm trying to get to a different point. But I don't want to just leave it. I don't want to drop a hand grenade here and then walk away, right yeah

atch it? UM? So so yeah, UM do I would I contest that, um, based on my interpretation the science, I would say I don't contest that that that the studies aren't conclusive that if you hunt and you eat the meat that you eat, UM, that you are suffering suffering delitarious effects of lead poisoning. However, I will say this that the science that goes along with our understanding

of lead and its effects on humans. UM. The the median allowed blood or the allowed blood lead level when I was a kid and you were a kid I might be able to older than you, UM was like micrograms per desolader um. That's that's pretty pretty high the

safe level today. UM. When you look at that CDC study, the one that followed the when you're talking about they said zero and so while while the zero how about because really when you think about it, there's there's no there's no species ever studied organism that uses that that that lead is a use of except us because it's great for amals. So when you look at all the yes, when you look at all the like like magnesium, potassium, like,

there's no, there's no, like you didn't get your daily lead. Yeah, the way I answered that question, and just to to really and and again, we have some other mutual friends that have been on the podcast, and they have very strong feelings about it. Though you can't say that it

is affecting human health. And then I hear the argument, well, you can't say it's not because when you have a lead poisoning amount, an amount of measurable lead in your system, how do you determine where it came from unless you're doing is topic analyses? And again does it matter? Here's where I go to. But but okay, but you can't sit here, and like I said, we can't and we can't be doing we can't be doing the follow the science, listen to the science. Follow the science. Will say, okay,

let's all agree to follow the science. Okay, if we're gonna agree to follow the science, there's not a human health risk. It's supposition. You could argue that. Yeah, you could argue, so let's and people do. Okay, So if if like if we because I almost roll my eyes now when someone says they're gonna follow the science or they don't want to listen to the science, I'm like,

you know why, because science is weaponized. They've burned. Like if I was gonna look not that the scientific community is monolithic, if I was going to give advice to the scientific community as a monolithic unit, I would say, don't let your research be weaponized, because it's so weaponized that when someone says follow the science, you can reasonably say, who's exactly? I agree? And what you need to do is use the products of science as a way of

informing yourself. But it doesn't mean it's the holy grail. I remember asking research your body mind, he's working on something. I said, what do you hope happens? Because I don't hope anything. What are you talking about hope happens? Right? No? And what I was like, man, I would be rooting for that ship. I would point out to that, like following the science, if you do want to do that, that means actually, like clicking the links in the article.

All that grabbed your attention, opening up the actual paper, and then reading that paper. Yeah, you usually find that the paper there's a lot less explosive than when it got picked up by the news agents. Sometimes you read it two or three different times to find out how that article that you started out with actually has anything to do with this paper. So, yeah, absolutely, and and so the way I usually answer that question is like, man,

let me tell you about my experience. I had two youngsters at home when we were doing that deer study. We're shooting all those deer, and because we shoot eight or ten deer a day and we processed them all to take us all day, we wanted their carcass, the carcasses to be shipped out to the processors to make sure we had thirty different processors so it wouldn't biased by the Yeah. Yeah, so that meant we had two

days off from shooting more deer. Well, we had hauled but up to Montana with our bird dogs and shotguns and go hunt hunt upland birds because it was in the right season. Let all of our ship up. Well, yeah, exactly exactly. It's from Arizona, man. Anyway, um, we'd go do that, and my wife said, I called her. I said, man, I got not only we're gonna have all the dear meat from the study, I mean five tags worth the dophons, and it's all be gonna be cutting packaged professionally, which okay,

let's either get or bad. But I like doing my Yeah, it's easy. We're gonna come home and I've got sharp tail, I got pheasant, I got huns, and we're probably gonna kill a few ducks with with falcons too to to boot and she goes, what do you hunt the uplom birds with? I was like, what a shotgun? Well, what'd you use? I was like, well, you use the four tail on the huns and the twenty on the sharp tails. And and it was at the end of of of stage grouse seasons and I got a stage grouse in

my twelve. She's like, no, dummy, would you use well ammunition? I was like, I don't know. They were double as something good, you know. She goes lead and I was like, yeah, oh right, well, uh, I have an X ray let me extra car. Because she was put putting it in my face, that are are you thinking? I was like, you know, that's a damn good point. I wasn't thinking, so yeah, maybe I'll try steal. And I tried steal

and I've been using it ever since. Like I said, I'm only saying as to tea something up because I'm kind of teeing like what, I can't wait till you get there. Well, it's not as it's not as explosive. I think. What I'm trying tea up is if what's your like, what is your ask of your peers, like

your peers being hunters, what is your ask? But I want you to say that like considering that, um if if if you can't look him in this straight in the eye, Okay, you can't look at hunter straight in the eye and say you are imperiling your family's health, which it's not my business. Okay, I'd never do that. Well and and you'd have a hard time making the case you would. Yeah, So I'm not gonna tell you that.

But and I'm not going to tell you that you're having population and I'm not gonna tell you that you're gonna put the ball ego back on the endangered species list. But we as hunters are killing some number of birds by putting let out on the on the landscape, in gut piles. It's just it's like, it's not a debatable point. What you want to do about that. It's your business, Okay,

are you like, hey, tough shit? Are you like, well, if I can if it's six and one half, if it's six and one half dozen the other maybe I don't want to do that, right, Like, like, what is the ask? I think the ask is to to one educate yourself before you make a decision. You want to make an informed decision, and there's a lot of information out there to make a decision. I have confidence that when the information is shared with hunters, they make good

decisions for wildlife. M hm so. And and I'll also add a little another little little salt and pepper here, a little extra spice that you know the rest of the world is watching. And if the hunter and you gave one of these options or these alternative responses like I don't give a shit. Okay, careful, don't say he don't give a ship, because if you happen to be the hunter who the rest of the world is watching,

that is not a hunter where ship? If they're an anti hunter and they can say, well, look he said, they don't care because it's not population limiting. They don't care if they kill a few eagles. That's that's a tough way that that's a tough place to be. So I guard against that by telling people will, well, there's a great way to representing the conservation ethical hunters if you say, yeah, I educated myself and I do take some precautions because I don't want to harm wildlife while

I'm deliberately taking other wildlife. You know that I'm targeting um that I think that's the norm. Like do you do you feel that hunters would be rewarded in a legal sense, like rewarded by the legislation if they were demonstrating a year over year reduction in certain activities, or do you feel that in the end they're going to get hit by In the end, they're gonna get hit by bands no matter what they do. I hope not.

I fear that if we don't mobilize and educate ourselves and come to some consensus about what best practices are when it comes to the potential for lead exposure in wildlife, I think we're more vulnerable than ever to a band. I you know, our our statement is we don't support legislation or litigation to solve this problem. I've had some good buddies of mine who I would assume that would

never support a band say well, it's just time. I was like, WHOA, Well, Um, I don't know that it is because I don't have the confidence that hunters understand the problem. If I thought hunters really understood the potential for lead exposure and we, as a populacet said we don't give a ship, we don't care, I wouldn't be working so hard in this effort. But I don't believe it's the case because everywhere we go, even wildlife professionals. I'm not picking on them either. You go and talk

about it and they're like, oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I think do you mind if I jumped in here real quick, Steve? Yeah, you gotta pick your moments. Uh. I think something that would help me, Chris, because I, first off of preface, I am a I use both copper and lead. Um. I think you know the waterfowl story going from lead to steel has like man, massive

die offs. We need to stop this now we're going to steal I think we would help somebody like me with making these decisions because I have educated myself to a moderate level on this and I'm not he knows more about guns name than anybody I know, um uh and um. And I'm not a blatant asshole like I

do care about the wildlife. Right. So when I hear like, well, if you just educate yourself, like, it's a very easy decision, um, for me, I have not come to the same conclusion because part of my decision making has to do with that bullets performance. Can you stop from it, Scarrett long speaking, Oh yeah, he's just been hanging out. Yeah, I's been hanging out here. Um. Part of this has to do

with that bullets performance downrange. So a lot of folks And I'm not trying to make parallels to steal and lead, right because I know it's like easy to jump there. But there's like a very very very obvious case with with the water fell side. Um, I know that at a certain speed my copper bullet isn't gonna do what it's designed to do. I think a lot of people don't understand that they get their six five creed more.

A lot of people don't get that a opera bullet you get beyond depending on the length of barrel and everything like that. But you get beyond about three hundred ish yards, you're going to have performance. You can have performance related issues with that bullet, right with any bullet, but it's it's more likely because of how hard copper is it, there's a higher likelihood that it's not going

to expand. So for me, when I'm making my kind of lead copper decision, part of that is mortality rate on the animal I'm hunting and likelihood of recovery, right, And so I think something that would help folks like me that are in this position, right that if if we just had copper and lead animal and it's like they're equally just as good, and it was like you choose one or the other. Well, I think you're right, the decision is a lot easier, but they're not just

like one another. What would help me is what what is the level of risk? Right? When you say, like Steve brought it up earlier, like we know there's eagles dying from gut piles right somewhere at some point, Okay, but like, do we know that frequency in that level

of risk? Because I know that I might hit a deer on the way home, right, and that's calculated in me driving, right, but it's it's probably not likely, and I think that would help me come to that decision a little easier, you know, you know, a good parallel what you're talking about with the switch, Remember, like b p A free water bottles, Like you can't even look and tell the difference between the water balls. They cost the same ones b p A Free. You made switch.

They made switching so easy. Right, it's like it still holds water, right, costs the same amount of money. I can't tell if I'm looking at it, but right, it just becomes like people don't sit around arguing about it, right, right, Yeah, So so I guess I'm maybe I didn't. Um. What you point out is is very worthy of you know, and depending on the bullet and what its composition is copper and whatever, then um, some of them, you know, the monolithics, the solids that don't have all the pre

scoring and all that stuff. Yeah, you need eight feet per second to get that boot bullet to open up like it's supposed to. Um. But now there are other companies making bullets that that will fully expand, if not fragment into you know, eight or ten pieces that I would never use on game meat that identity eat. I mean, those bullets will will do what they're supposed to at way lower. So you're absolutely right. You have to know

your tools and you have to know the capabilities. The first time I shot all copper, the first time I shot an all copper bullet was look a decade ago. Remember I shot up Stagg with it, or Red Stag with it. He didn't know he'd been hit. He eventually fell over and it looked like someone like shoved U. Look, he took a field point arrow ran it through him and I was six yards away. But just come a

long way since then, it has. And I think something that would be interesting too is because man, my bullets at a certain range, like when I'm out of range, like, I know what they're gonna do more than likely, right, like, and it's gonna be very catastrophic. And we're doing a test on this actually in a couple of weeks on different bullet types and how they react to bone and things like that speed. But like, I would love to

also see the data on a bonded bullet. Right. We know it's lead, right, but we know it's retention is a lot higher, right than that of a normal lead

softcore bullet. So just be interesting to intertwine that to see, like what's my level of risk and choosing this, and how does that compare to you my perceived um potential of losing an animal, because I, like, I don't have a massive like I don't have massive ballist sticks expertise just for that sake, but I have, like I do a lot of big game hunting and shooting like trophy Copper,

Federal trophy copper. I've yet to have what I get like a handful of big and animals every year, and I've yet to be like that son of a bit and both like never in fact, it will usually bring the opposite where people like hunting Couzi ever, but it's like, can't believe you're shooting right. It makes mushrooms perfectly, makes a perfect hole through them, things fall over. There's not a bunch of superfluous damage and a giant wound channel,

but it mushroomed. I just had like, I'm sure you can find extremes, but in terms of like the performance thing just me as a dude out hunting and pretty normal Western big game situations, I haven't encountered the issue. And I think for a guy like you that um shoots a big gun, a three wind mag that goes pretty damn fast, and you don't reach outside a certain yardage like you have a fairly close like like that makes total sense. That's when I use copper right. I

love it. I think it's when you get beyond that into different caliber types that it matters out to the shots where I'm like, I hear you. I'm glad you brought that up, because I wouldn't have remembered to bring that up. And it's a valid point. And and again it is to me just as simple as know your tools, know the information, and make an informed decision. And I think the impact from us just doing that as a hunting populace um it will make an impact. It will

make a difference, which may make it more defensible. Back to your comments, Steve, that we don't need to be told what to do. We can we can operate as hunters, as the conservationists that we claim to be. We can do that with all of these things. Tell people ro out of time, tell people I get that all the time. Where if they want to find out more about the organizations you're involved, and if they want to read more about um whatever, uh you think they should go read

about you. I know you've done a bunch of work on comparative ballistics and stuff. So just tell people to find what you guys work on. Yeah, I'll give you to UM non Lead Partnership dot org. UM and the hunting with Non Lead dot org. Those are those are two of the co founders UM Oregon Zoo because they have a program there that are co founder Leland Brown runs UM. Those are three good resources. And you can get a hold of us and we'll come to a

ballistics demo. We'll bring ballistics. Jael bring a bullet trap. We did one of those years ago. And and I'd love to talk more more with you offline about the bonded bullets because yes, they do retain their weight, but there's some interesting things about that. So Nonlair Partnership dot org, the Paragrine Fund, any of our other partners. Arizona Game and Fish is a great resource. They've been at this long time Utah Division of Wildlife and soft down in Arizona.

Yea soft Well you're gonna pay for that one. Yeah yeah, but um, yeah, I'd say hunting with non Lead dot Org is probably one of the best resources. And I also want to plug another another closer to here, um outfit that started up with a colleague of ours, Brian Bedrosian, and and they started one up called Sporting Lead Free

in Wyoming. And it's another one that now pushing for bands, pushing forward, sharing information and pushing forward movements that show we can take that information and make really good decisions for wildlife. Alright, buddy, Chris Parrish, President CEO of the Peregrine Fund, thank you very much. Man. You're sticking around for trivia. Yeah, sure, I think you do good, but I don't think you'll win. I probably I'm not good, But no, I'm saying that because I think you might win.

Because Brodie's now here. Okay, stick around with here and don't forget to stay tuned to get an exclusive first listen to one of the stories on our new Campfire Stories audio book, Narrow Escapes and More Close Calls The Best Shot of My Life by Cameron kirk Connell. A lot of the stories we're dealing with in the collection originally came to us in just little snippets, like little details of stories in a couple of cases, we would later find out that the details originally provided to us

weren't actually part of the story at all. In other cases, we might have just gotten a little snippet of a story that was in fact the most tantalizing bit this story. Here is an example of the latter. Our next storyteller, Cameron kirk Connell his friends with the spear fisher woman Kimmy Werner, who you heard from earlier. And earlier I mentioned how Kimmy keeps a lot of things to herself. She lets experiences in the ocean oftentimes just stay between

her and the water. Cameron is guided by that same principle and was not particularly eager to talk about this. In the end, he decided to tell us his story because he feels as though it might be helpful to other people who could wind up in a simil really dangerous position. He is anything but a glory seeker. However, perhaps to his own embarrassment, I'll point out that his actions and bravery were recognized by the United States Coast Guard.

I called a little bit of the story, and I knew that if the part I heard was right, this story just couldn't be ignored. We had to go track it down, and I'm glad we did, and I think you'll be glad as well. I'm camera er'connell. I'm a professional spear fishing guide, and my family is from the Cayman Islands, so we grew up spear fishing and around the water, and I grew up doing nothing but wanting

to be on the water. At the time this story takes place, I was working down in book a Grand as a tarpan guide, you know, helping people catch tarpin. When whenever I had a chance when I was off of work, I would go and and spear. And I saw a really good day of weather coming in where it's gonna be like flat calm, and there were some other guys at the marina that had a good boat that we could run way off shot of these really good spots. So I called a buddy of mine, Steve,

who was up at the University of Florida. I was like, dude, come down, like it's gonna be like banner conditions, I've got everything, just show up. He was a really good diver, and it's it's hard to find other guys that are good at diving, so he drove through the night after having a pretty big July four and came down and met me, and I think he probably had about two or three hours of sleep by the time he got there. Um,

so he was pretty whipped. This day, we were diving about sixty miles off the west coast of Florida on a spot that was in about eighty feet of water, and during that time of year, the water is usually nice and blue. Even in a feet of water, you can usually see far enough down to see some good fish, and the fish will come up midwater, so you're not diving all the way to the bottom on a free dive, which is breath hold diving, but you're actually chumming them up.

Chumming What we do is we will take another fish or a bait fish, cut it up into small pieces, and slowly toss a couple of pieces out so the boat was anchored, and we would throw like three pieces of chum, Wait thirty seconds, three more pieces of chum, wait thirty seconds. And what that does is it sinks down and eventually it's going to go all the way to the bottom. You figure if you're a fish and eighty feet of water and you smell this delicious, you know,

chum coming down the chunks of fish. You're gonna eat those little pieces and then you're gonna look up and be like, oh ho, so it's coming from up there. And then you follow that trail all the way up, so you can be out in a hundred or two feet of water and bring fish that are usually bottom fish nearly to the surface, so all the way up into range of what we can do free diving by chumming. We had just an epic day, Like the water conditions

were awesome. It was really clear, beautiful blue um Both of us shot our biggest amberjacks, and the one that I shot I remember distinctly. I dove down and shot at it about seventy ft and I was in a hundred fifty water and the fish ended up weighing I think a hunned five or hundred seven pounds, so I can remember, like you celebrate with Steve on the surface.

And then he shot another one, his best one. So it was getting towards the end of the day and we anchored up on a new spot and we were chumming for a while and getting in in the water so uh, the current was going straight off the back of the boat. So for the first thirty ft of depth, the current was going straight back and there was only

about thirty ft of visibility in there. Uh below that there was a current that was going exactly ninety degrees perpendicular to it, and it was crystal blue water, and there was a group of Couberra snappers, which are a big, powerful snapper that fight really hard and really difficult to get and they really wouldn't come up over about a

hundred feet. So Steve and I talked about it, and we decided that, you know, because of the rigs that we were using, which was spear guns with a hundred foot float line and a buoy, we weren't going to be able to get him with that rig So a spear gun is basically a piece of wood with a trigger mechanism and rubber bands that propel a metal shaft with a barb on it, and when it's loaded, it's like a rubber band gun. You had a kid except

slings out of a metal shaft. So that spear has a hole in it and you tie a line off to that and then you've got about fifteen to thirty feet of slack line. That's attached to the gun, and then that is clipped off to a float line, which is a line that goes from the gun all the

way to the surface. And you can have all kinds of different lengths of float lines and materials, but for what we were doing this day, we had a hundred foot float line, and then on the surface we have a float which is a big inflatable buoy that looks like a lifeguard float, so that when you shoot a fish, you don't have to fight them while you're down there. You can shoot them, keep the gun in your hands, the line comes away from it, and the line is attached to the buoy, so you can relax get to

the surface. But the problem we were having is because of the way the currents were in the depths that we were diving, that boo was coming tight each time, and I was like just out of range of shooting that really big snapper and the other fish that were

down deep. So we theorized the only way to do this was to use the fishing reel that was in the boat clip that off to the gun into the line, so if that fish came up to a hut, I'd be able to get to it shoot it and then be able to let go and just free ascend to the surface without having to fight anything, and the guys in the boat would be attached to it and be able to crank it up. So in order to give me enough slack to go deep enough to shoot one of these fish, we rigged the line from the spear

actually to the fishing reel. So we talked it over with the guys in the boat and said, look, I'm gonna go down. I'm gonna make this dive. Steve's gonna stay on the surface and watch me. I'm gonna shoot this fish, and when you feel a tug, you guys crank this thing up. And we all decided this was a pretty good plan. And up until that day and until now, I've never done that again. It's amazing that we actually did it on on that occasion. It could

not have been timed better. At this point in the day, Steve was kind of getting a little bit tired, and I was the stronger deeper diver. I told Steve, I'm gonna rest up. You watch me, and I'm holding onto the back of the boat, currents flowing past and trying to relax every muscle in my body. Every muscle that

you're tensing is burning oxygen. So I'm totally relaxed, chilling on the surface and just waiting, doing nice relaxed breast like you do in yoga um to auction date your body, lower your your heart rate, and then for the last thirty seconds, I'm doing a series of breasts before my last giant breath, which is belly, chest, shoulder, and then going.

And during that time of waiting for me, I think Steve got bored and made a dive and I kind of noticed it out of the corner of my eye and didn't think much of it because there were pelagic fish wahoo's and mackerel and rainbow runners and stuff that would come by every once in a while. So I was like, he's just he's just gonna shoot something shallower. He's just going to look or whatever. Like I know, he's focused on watching me because my next dive is

probably gonna be over a hundred foot. So I kicked down nice and slow. When you make a perfectly efficient relax dive, as soon as you hold your breath and invert and start kicking down, you can do three ft per second for your dive, So to get to ninety ft. It's gonna take you thirty seconds. Then you sit down there and relax. And my general routine is just about that. It's like thirty seconds down, spend thirty or forty five

seconds down, and then thirty seconds back up. So my average dive is about a minute and a half minute forty five. After about seconds, I'm down at and sitting there waiting, and a nice school of snappers came up. There was four, like really good fish that at the time would have been one of my best Kubera snappers. I'm sitting there looking at these snappers, and my mind has always been so focused on records, and I always say, like, in order to get a hundred pound fish, you gotta

let all the ninety pound fish swim past. And at the time I knew the record was a few pounds off of one that we had seen that had a huge white mark on its face. So down there, say thirty seconds or so, and I'm drifting, you know, from seventy down. So it's towards the end of my dive.

I've got this school snapper here, but I still haven't seen the big one, the big one with the white spot on his face, and that's the one I really wanted, so um getting ready ahead the surfings, I was like, I'm gonna go ahead and shoot one of these other snapper. Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of white and I turned to look, and in the distance, six year seventy plus feet away is the white handle of Steve's gun, which still loaded,

heading straight for the bottom like a rocket. And I was like, oh God, that's not good. And I look and above that, just on the edge of my visibility, is Steve in a seated position, floating down towards the bottom, and I immediately know that he has blacked out. When you hold your breath too long and you're on land, eventually you're gonna pass out. But on land, your body is going to know that you're outside. There's arroganst your face. You're gonna take another breath. In the water, your body

also knows that, hey, I'm in the water. Your body has a kind of a self preservation system that protects you and your vocal cords closed so you're not taking in any water. And basically it's like closing your your laptop. It goes into a sleep mode, so you pass out. You're not conscious. Your heart is still beating, but you're not breathing. So this is the state that Steve is in.

The water was eight feet deep, and he was sinking at such a rate that I could not go to the surface and take another breath and come down and get him, because he would be gone forever. I knew then that I had one chance, and that was right now, to try and save him, at the very least recover his body. We didn't have any scuba tanks on the boat. We had no way of getting him. I have no one else on the surface, no one else to help me. Him and I were the only divers. So I dropped

my weight belt and I kicked steadily towards him. He is maybe sixty or seventy feet away, which is a huge distance to swim horizontally underwater, even if I had been planning to do that on a dive, and then I knew that I had thirty seconds of breath to get back to the surface. Having to tack on that additional twenty seconds working like having to kick horizontally is a big deal, and one second makes a difference. Normally, when you help somebody that is blacked out, you go

and grab them and bring him to the surface. And you can imagine the exertion it would take to bring someone's body up from seventy or eighty feet, which is where he would have been. Like when I got to him, and I knew there was just no way, Like it was absolutely impossible for me to do that, Like I would have died too, and no one you know, would have ever found us. As I'm closing the distance towards him, in my mind, I'm like, the only option I have

here is to shoot him. We had talked, you know, over the years with different you know, friends around the world, that in a situation like this, it was totally hopeless that we would just shot each other, and at least then you'd be rigidly connected to him. The guys probably be pretty mad at you for shooting him, but at least he saved his life and you were attached to him.

So I started kicking towards Steve. So now this is going through my mind in milliseconds, I'm trying to calculate can I get to him who's pretty far away, and then from there go to the surface, and in retrospect, I knew that I probably couldn't do it, but knowing that this was the only chance that I was going to have to be able to get a hold of him and secure him kind of overshadowed that, and I knew that I had to do something. I had to

try because I figured he's gonna die either way. As I got about halfway there, I was like, I'm gonna shoot him in the calf. I'm a pretty good shot. I'm gonna shoot him in the calf that way. There's no major art rereas or anything in there. I can punch through it and I'll have a good hold of him.

So as I'm getting closer to him, I get about away and his whole body rotates towards me, and my heart just sank because there's no way I'm shooting him in, you know, in the chest or the abdomen or the thigh, and I was worried that the shin bones would be too hard to punch through at the distance, and I didn't have any more breath. I didn't have any more time, so I made a split second decision and aimed just in front of his toes and shot him through the

fin As soon as I shot. I'm like, oh, my spear gun, and now the line is attached to the boat. And I looked to the surface and I'll never forget I'll never forget that feeling when I looked at the surface and new that I wasn't going to make it either. Just absolutely the most dreadful feeling I've ever felt my life, seeing the surface, knowing how much air I had, and knowing there was no way I was going to make it.

I think it was probably eighty ft down at the time, and I kicked away immediately and thought back to my training and my free diving that I've done and went into the absolute most efficient, perfect technique I possibly could, and that is your hands. I love your head tied against your ears, hands overlapping and just basically making yourself a perfect arrow. And started kicking steadily up, trying to relax, sniffing the air out of my mask as I went up,

trying to get every little bit of it. And I hit the surface and if my first breath screamed at the boat, which is the absolute worst thing to do. You need to take recovery breaths and get the CEO two out of your system and get air back in. So when I screamed like that, I started to pass out myself, and again I remembered the free diving training and when pilots pulled gs when they're flying their jets.

To keep from passing out, they do something called a hook breath, which is and you do five of those and it pressurizes, brings out O two back in, gets the CEO two out. And those breaths saved my life because when I surfaced, I was more than a hundred foot behind the boat, down current and away from you know, the guys and anybody that could help me. So now I'm I'm conscious, and I'm hauling asked for the boat. I'm swimming as hard as I can for the boat,

yelling at them the whole way. Cut the anchor line, pull it up, cut the anchor line. Steve's on it. Those guys are cranking like crazy, they're hooting, holler and thinking they've got, you know, the fish of a lifetime that I've just speared, this giant hundred plus colbera snapper. I climb on the back of the boat, immediately start throwing coolers and bean bags and crap off the back of the boat to make room and telling him cut the anchor line, get on the radio, called the coastguard,

crank this up. It has Steve on it. He's blacked out. We're gonna have to revive him. I need you guys to help me. And they're looking at me like what they're they're just they can't even wrap their heads around it. So they're cranking. I mean, this rod is bent like we've got the fish of a lifetime coming up. And up comes Steve backwards then first, and we grab his ankle, grab his arms and pull him into the boat. His skin was the worst color blue gray of death I've

ever seen. He was bleeding from his eyes, his ears, his nose, and out of his mouth was just orange, foamy, horrible blood just foaming out of his mouth. He had a white rash guard on at the time, and within a couple of seconds, like his whole rash guard was orange. So we pull him up on the back of the boat and I lay him on the back of the boat, and you can imagine, like my adrenaline was, you know, going pretty hard. So I checked to see if he has a pulse, and he had a very very faint pulse.

He wasn't breathing. I took his mask off, and when someone does black out, the quickest, easiest way to bring them back is to blow across their cheeks, because you have sensors in your cheeks that tell you, hey, I'm I'm in the air. I can breathe. So I blew across his cheeks, you know, opened his airway, tapped on his cheek, and I was talking to him, say breathe, Steve, breathe, You're okay, breathe. So I did two or three cycles of that, and he was unresponsive. In spear fishing, I've

saved nine or ten people. Now, every single other person that I have helped recover from a blackout within the first two breaths has come back. They would come back immediately. In my mind, I'm like, this is really really bad, Like I've never seen anything like this. So I opened his air way again, nothing's happening. So there's so much orange foam in his mouth, like this bloody foam. I was like, maybe I'll roll him on his side. So I rolled him on his side and just this horrible

orange foam is just leaking out of his mouth. And just as I'm getting ready to do rescue, breaths, which is, you know, like a CPR breasts. He goes and I was like, oh my god, that was that was like the death you know, the death breath that you hear about and you read about. And he did that the one time, and there was a pause and he took what I would say as a one percent breath. I

blew on his face hard again, said breathe, Steve, breathe. Yeah, he took a little bit more of a breath, and that orange foam was just coming out, and you could hear it like just gurgling in his lungs, like there's no room in his lungs, you know, for for even any air. So he started breathing slowly like that too, and five percent breasts and he's still unconscious, and I

got him down into the boat. We got the anchor line off, we got the coast Guard on on the radio, and I told the guys, just as fast as you can go, head towards Tampa, head towards land. Coast Guard helicopter was on its way. So he's unconscious for fifteen or twenty minutes, still that orange phones coming out, and finally he kind of comes to and the first thing he said, is thank you, And uh, that doesn't seem like a big deal. But when you black out and

you're unconscious that you have amnesia. So people that have blacked out don't remember anything so lasting remembers. He was, you know, ten fift ft from the surface and then lights out and this is the next thing is me holding him in in my arms and I held him and uh, and we we zoomed in as fast as that boat could go, and the helicopter came when we

were about, you know, forty miles offshore. Lower the basket put him in the basket, and I'd been on the radio with them, trying to explain to the coast guard the whole time he's blacked out, it's a three diving thing. He needs oxygen immediately, and he just got to get him to the hospital. So the lower the basket put him in the basket in the front of the boat, lift him off, put him in, and they just poof, they're out of sight. They're gone. And I just sat

down in the boat and just totally broke down. And I couldn't really talk to anybody in the boat, and um, it was it was tough. So Steve got to got to the hospital. UM, he was in the ICU for three or four days. His lungs were almost completely full of fluids and there was a big risk of secondary drowning, so he was in there for a while. UM he made a full recovery, no brain damage or anything. He played football at University of Florida for another two years

or so, and him and I are still friends. He's actually my insurance broker and a and a really good buddy of mine. We still dive together. The tough thing about blackouts and free diving is you're basically watching your your friend die and it's all on you. In that moment, two make the right decisions in a very short period of time to save their lives. I wish I never had had to to shoot him in the fin but I'm glad it turned out the way it did. Obviously, it's the best shot of my life.