Ep. 373: Shirker Bucks, Baubellum, and Binturongs

I'd like to donate to Mealer Foundation. You already got it figured out, because see I feel like you're already gonna win anyway. And then Spencer's gonna throw you a bone. Yeah, well he should. Everybody gets the ringer, don't. They just don't like it. I don't know. When I play at home sometimes I really don't do very well, and those bones don't seem to be automatic, and by any means they're not. So Yeah, Um, the Instagram came for you, Jim.

They did shut me down, banished. I understand, how Like I don't get it, and they don't call you and say, Jim, by god, we've had enough, there's nobody that makes those decisions. In my Instagram account. My old one that I had built for years, which was Jim Dear, was just shut down. They just said the account's been disabled. No, you don't think it has to do with like the fact that you're not Jim to your tractors. Yeah, I don't think so, like like like because yeah, but I mean, didn't you

use that little icon? Yeah? I use the icon and photoshoped that to be a mule deer instead of a white tailed But if you look on there, there's a whole bunch of other people that use that icon and everything else. So I don't I don't think that was it, and it was because you like to shoot pistols. I do. I shoot pistols competitively, but I've been posting those pistol shooting videos for ten years, as have everybody I shoot

competitively with. So it's really I think it's just like a random a I bought some kind of something randomly was triggered. Well, have you tried to do the appeals? Yeah, I just have a certified account. I don't know what certified is. I don't either, but it's the thing I did. I didn't have feel like if you have the little blue check mark next to your name, Yeah, I don't think so. I'm is there a point at which you just get too big though, when they're not going to

shut you down? Like, is there? You could take the President United States for instance, you get shut down on social media? So maybe no, maybe not? Yeah, I did send it a pie. Sure, Kardashian is no way, there's too bad. There's too bad. No. Yeah, you can get kicked off. You can, they'll kick you off. It depends on your politics, don't get they don't kick off like super left wing people. Maybe they do. Does Bill Marv get kicked off Instagram? No? No clue, b huh you're

not super left wing. No, you're right. But he's controversial. He's controversial. He's like to have a list of famous left wingers kicked off social media. There's guy be some I don't know. Um, so that's too bad, man, So you had to start over again. I feel like you need to get in there and try to like figure

it out, man. I did for two months. For two months, and for the first month and a half, I sent one of those appeals at least every other day, and it just out ends the black hole, no response, no response from from Instagram at all. So after about two months, I just shrugged my shoulders and started a new one.

Is it really that uh lifeless and soulless that know that you can appeal that many times and no one's ever going to just shoot you a note saying there's nothing that can be done, here's what you did wrong. I wouldn't have thought so, but yeah, apparently apparently like no response for like nobody, nobody is listening to, nobody's responding,

and there's probably not like a phone number you can. Yeah, like you get some customers if your account has been canceled, press five and they have over a billion subscribers Instagram does worldwide, So I mean they're not watching accounts. They're not they're not probably not manually canceling accounts. There's probably some AI s, a artificial intelligence that's that's just getting triggered and shutting things down because there's made people that

are dup duplicates and businesses and stuff. I mean, you got like eight billion people. One of our camera guys, when you hear someone doing something totally insane, or someone says like I wonder if anyone blank. His reply is, man, there's eight million people on this planet. Eight billion people on this planet. Of course someone does that. Yeah. Yeah, So the new accounts servant Nut, which is you got you gotta start from scratch now, Yeah, it's really exciting

to put together these. Really, I don't think I'm gonna follow serving Nut right now. I'm sitting here. You're already on Zuckerberg's radar, Man, I know, I know I'm on the list. Let's see. It's ce r v I D and ut don't tell you know? Zuckerberg is building a development in town here. Really. I learned that from Kylie's husband because I follow him on Instagram. What kind of development,

housing development? I don't know. Yeah. So you know, I can't think of that dude without thinking of him in the movie that movie, uh, Social Network, Like, I can't think of him without being that kid, the character. Okay, here I am, I'm following you and then, um, but you're already up to you, do you? You already up to four or fifty four? Yeah? I know it? Four hundred? That amazing? How many? How many did you have had?

About four thousand? So I wasn't a huge account you build? Yeah, you build some you you build some followers, and then you just start over and then you put this really cool post out there, and and you you know, you got a hundred and two followers and two dogars. Do everything I can to help you out. Oh your kids all good for the tickets? Oh excellent? Can you rest easy now? So are you just gonna keep posting like

you did before or you're gonna change things? Yeah? I know I've already already posted, already posted some shooting videos right after I established account. And some said what do you do when you're gonna get banned again? And I said, well, I better try it out now when you have a hundred followers than to build it up again that because everybody else does it. I mean everybody is a competitive

shooters posting videos of them shooting. And plus we don't know, you don't know, because what about like Taylor Thorn, all she does is poet. Let me look, is she still alive? And I know she's alive. I mean she's is she like she's she's still on the Graham. But that's what Jim saying is that he doesn't we don't know what canceled it. No, but I'm trying to know. Here she is shooting up a storm. What's that guy's name that was at the Vortex shooting Ruben? But no, there was

another guy. It's like Josh, I forget his name. Oh yeah, I was just watching his shooting videos the other day instag because I shoot competitively and I have a lot of friends that are shooters. You know my fee He's gonna come on the show someday. Here he is shooting up a storm. Yeah, he posts a bunch about shoot Maybe maybe you're maybe you're not good at shooting. Maybe they maybe they got an AI that finds people who aren't that good with a pistol, probably too slow. It's

like inaccurate. Shut his account down. I guess you'd better pistol behind my back. I hesitate to bring this up. Jim Um, I called you dumb. Did you have one last thing you wanted to say about hottest spell white tailed deer? I do, but you know you you said that I say stupid shot all the time, which I do. But no, no, no, no, I would have never have said that, but that balanced. I think the previous podcaster where you said I was the smartest guy on the planet.

So I said about one thing. Maybe you say that one thing too much. Well, now that you're stupid about two things, I feel like you just got burned. You put your hand in the fire and got burned. Your hands back on the fire on Instagram. So there's like one way I think being really smart and so've done things are not excluding mutually exclusively. The second way you're dumb is this is you and Dirkin's like like white

dot tailed dear thing. You you almost cleared it all up recently, and then right at the end you just you botched it. Yeah, like like you realiz I'm not. You feel as though I'm not giving your argument effective. Yeah, previously you weren't explaining the argument, and then you read my email and you got it like you got it perfect because you're reading my email. And then right at the end we rehash that's because I didn't read the email. It's okay, Jim's gonna set the whole damn thing up.

But when you do, you better give my point. Good, No, you can do it. It would be more entertaining. Problem. Okay, how do you feel this is the I swear to God we will never talk about this again. How do you if you had a spell. Okay, the deer that lives in America, but not mule deer. Spell it for me?

Do you I T E t A I L e ed. Okay, okay, that's a different Okay, sorry, So yeah, yeah, some people spell e D. You could just put T A I l A well correct correct, but but but I know there's a hepple finger here and Dirk and they're like, I acquit it to people who go V and thou. They feel that it's w H I T E dash t A I L E D and like, sure, but no one in their right mind is going to write that.

And I was pointing out that every book I've ever written, when I get it back from the copy editor, the copy editor has gone in and turned them all into that, and I then need to go back in and stat. Let me give you a little book, right, and STAT is when an editor makes like if, when an editor makes a correction in your manuscript and you're like, no, you're wrong, you write STAT. That stands for stop doing that,

back off, back on. So the editor wanted to hyphenate it because it's like it's sort of if it's like the and thou, it's almost antiquated spelling, and and Dirk and like once it's Dirk and what was the magazine? Dirk And used to work for Deer and Deer Hunting. He bought the first Megan the article I ever sold Dirkin when he was the editor of Deer and Deer Honey in the nineties. Yeah, the long we've known each other.

That's back when they said, okay, and on the cover of that magazine, was it like on the white tail rut the right way and they would write the hyphen no, well sometimes, but here here's the deal where it gets all mixed up. There's there's no um, it's not the thou. There's no kind of question about what the official name is. I mean, official name of that deer is white hyphen tailed with an E D deer. I mean that's the name of that animal. No changing it. Well, there's no

changing it. But but we always we shorten it and we say white tail white tails. That's fine. But when you say white tail deer, now you've just taken the two acceptable forms of that word and you smash them together. It's not even grammatically correct white tail deer. You gotta put the e d like when you trivia a couple of weeks ago, and you wrote Ivory build woodpecker. You hope you didn't have a hyphen a E D on that.

Did you write? Ivy bill, Ivory bill woodpecker, I rebuild, And if you look at the names of the top of my bills, I'll tell you some something that stuff that book about that go on. But but durkincent a list of animals that have like a hyphen E D. And it's pretty rare to find any animal that is just smashed together and doesn't have the hyphen the E D. So the correct word, the correct name of that animal is white hyphen tailed deer. But nobody wants to run

around saying white tailed deer, white tailed deer. And even when I write all the time, I mix it up with white tails, white tail, white tailed deer with an E D, and the hyphen would not correct. Is when you hybridize those and you say white tail and then you add dear to the end of it. White tailed deer, white tail deer, that's not correct. That's just someone hybrid of the two acceptable forms of it. So you say

white tails, We're gonna hut white tails. Look at that white tail these are white tailed deer in a little more formal setting. But you don't say white tail and then add deer to the end of it. Do you say? Mooses means? Oh? Chris got a note here when I was when we were I passed along to were in Alaska hunting moves my inn reach. I passed along to Kylie. I sent Carl a note that said, tell Karin that I had a dream that you fell from the sky and landed in my mom's yard with a compound fracture

in her left femur. You came out of the sky, hit a tree branch, and land in the yard of the compound fraction left fem I wonder what that means. And then weirdly, we then had to go do something or another, and I was very distracted by the bone sticking out of her thigh, and you're very nonplused. That's

does that mean I'm tough? I just found that hilarious, because that's that's what Steve sometimes uses in Reach for it to communicate right across your you just came out of nowhere, bamn, right into the ground in your mom's yard, my mom's yard, So watch your ass. I think we need to. This is actually a Savannah's idea that there'll be some kind of coffee table book or calendar something with a compilation of all your random in reach message

and reach messages would be hilarious. Um, maybe that'll be now. It would be like the next calendar message. Your books back in print, Jim, Yeah, Deer of the Southwest, Yeah, yeah, publish that. And that's desert meal deer Cow's whitetailed Deer in the Southwest der folks interpret. Yeah, so it's been out of print. Actually the first time I was on the podcast here, I don't know how many copies were left, but shortly after that it just it was on the

out of print. Um did it get to? Where is it so out of print that people sell them for stupid amounts of money and no one wants to buy it. I've got some screenshots of eight hundred dollars. Is the

rare books? Yeah? They have good books, you know, because it would be like someone well, yeah, because you'll see it where there's an out of print book and the like a slight spike in demand, and then there's some guys like I don't know, maybe someone needs it for like some thing, and then all of a sudden it shoots up and they're selling. And then and then you go back the next day as someone made some more

and they're back to normal. But it's always like a last gasp, like I don't know, you never know, maybe someone will give me a hairbox for this book. Yeah, So I I shortly after I was on the podcast the first time, I went and ordered some because I

sell some of my website deernut dot com. They haven't banned that web, they have not banned that, and and I had orders, I had standing orders, and so I called the publisher to get some more and they said, well, we're waiting for what we're out and and we're waiting for more. And I said, were you waiting for more books from? Because they're the publisher, they're the ones that have the store of the warehouse of them. And it turns out it was out of print. And so that

was right when COVID started. And there's COVID and there's some revolution in UM, changes in the personnel and Texas A and M University Press. So it drug out for three years, but just about two months ago it became available and it's it's available everywhere. Awesome do you get a your money off that a little bit? Yeah? I think, Um, the first run, I think I calculated I got sixty two cents in royalties for the for the book at that time, sixty two copy. You know, you know what,

that's actually not that insane. It's not that Yeah. People don't realize that. They think if you sell a book, you know, the author probably gets or so, but get the tiny fraction. No, if you buy a paper back and author might get a dollar. Yeah. Oh you know what I was gonna mention about your thinking your account getting suspended if you're reading, Um, it could be from the it could be high up. Because I was reading in the I can't hear if it was reported in

the Wall Street Journal or the Times. I think it was reported in the Journal that the the Biden administration was actually had had a list of people that they felt like people they felt were disseminating COVID disinformation, and the administration themselves were working with social media platforms on a hit list and even pointing out if they'd like cancel from one, they'd be like, oh, yeah, but he's

still on this, so it could come from associated. Yeah, that's the that's the thing about that Instagram account, the original one. I'd never talked politics, I never talked controversy. You know, that was my place for just really fun interesting deer stuff, you know, sometimes dad jokes, sometimes funny stuff. It was really benign, really vanilla and and interesting. So it's not like there was anything you never said. You know, if you want to cure COVID, get a copper is

it brass or copper? You gotta get a copper rod a copper Dowell and swirl each Nostril never said that's a dirt told us no, I don't think I said the word COVID on my account. Um, I suppressing. Why do you want to talk about John Coulter, John Johnson trivia for you? Well, who's this buddy that? Yeah, who's this buddy that got chopped all the pieces? Not far from here? You know they smeared those pieces on John Colter. Oh, I don't know that story, Potts. They were Lewis and

Clark alum, huh, I don't know that. But culture was one of the lews and Clark expedition. He shot a mule deer um and that mulder ended up when it was described in the journals of the of the expedition that end up to be the original description that found its way in the scientific literature. For the very first

description of of mule deer in the West. There's a French guy named Rafinesque who named a whole bunch of of animals, gave them scientific names, and he published in in eighteen seventeen, he published the first account of mulder and he based that on the the journals of Charles Lay and Charles Ray. Journal is famous. A lot of people have have published and talked about how Charles Ray was the first one to describe mule deer. I've written

about it several times. Turned out I was full of ship that time too, because the Charles Loray journal is a complete fraud. Charles Larray never existed, um and I read about this at some point in time. And so that Charles Lay journal they've traced actually Patrick Gass from he was he was on the leuc and Clark expedition. So the journal kept by Patrick Gass, you know, they all kept different journals. Patrick Gass describes a mule there that turned out to be the first description of mule there.

It was it was incorrectly folded into this fraudulent, completely fraudulent and fabricated journal of charge Charles Ray and then Charles Lay's journal was used to describe mulder by this rafinesque guy into the scientific literature, and they trace that back. It turns out this mule er that John Coulter shot and was was described in Patrick Gass's journal and published, was actually the first description of mule here where they started talking about it. Now, what like, what makes it

the first description? We were we recently had a Coronado Uh, we recently had a Coronado expert on the show. And no doubt, I haven't read everything from everybody on the Coronado expedition, but they no one on the Coronado expedition was like, oh and there's a deer. Yeah, that's true. They weren't writing things like that, whereas losing Clark, I mean, that was their purpose to go document all the natural things.

And so um, what little written word that exists from the Coronado expedition, I don't even know what that is, but I know there is some they weren't. They weren't talking about types of deer, and and even if they said dear, it would it wasn't a description of this Arizona. They both live in Tucsas. You need to go listen to the You need to go listen to the finding that just found the oldest gun in America in your state. Right, I heard that whole podcast. Yeah it was good. What

do you do? Who Cornado is? Never paid any attention to it? Well, you just listen to the podcast I did, so you know, Now what was the question? What you just said? I don't know anything about Coronado. Just listened to about it, right, you said, other than the podcast? Yeah, I mean, it's just not a topic that I've duve into and and read about at all. Um So, either or they never, like like Lewis and Clark's account counts as because they said it's yeah big, it's got this,

it's got this, it's got this. That counts as a scientific explanation. Yes, it's a scientist has to take that and then describe it into scientific journal and but they have to base it on something that's uh, you know, earlier journal. That what makes it the first description is how accurate it was. It talks about the rope like

tale with a black tip. It talks about the fact that they jump and they hop like goats, um, talks about these long ears, talks about having more of a grayer coat, and so all of those descriptions make it um no question that they're talking about a mulder. And that was the first time someone described it accurate. The first white tale that was described was like one in Virginia, actually with North Carolina, but everything on the East coast

was considered Virginia at that time. And it's funny because they were Europeans, Europeans trying to describe these white tailed deer which they hadn't seen before. And one of the main parts of the description as they said that thelers are backwards. And so if you think about a European the road deer, they're going backwards. The red deer, they're going backwards. And they came to North America and these antlers are going forward. So they said their antlers are backward.

You know. They they never saw a deer where the antlers swept forward. Everything was back. So that was one of the descriptions of the head backwards antlers. Who was it that wrote that description, Um, oh, it was eighteen fifty one and it was I can't come up with it, yeah, right, right, right, fifty one at the time. So what's your new deer book then, Yeah, so we've been working, me and a lot of people throughout the West, been working on a big what will be the Bible of Mulder and blacktailed

deer in in North America. About forty one years ago Charles Walmo put together a book called Milder and Blacktailed Deer in North America UM with different people writing different chapters, and that thing is is still used as a reference for Melder information, but it's four decades old. And so as a chair of the Melder Working Group, I'm in touch with all of the West leading Melder people. And so about four years ago we we embarked on a a new book to create another Milder and Blacktail Deer

that was updated with all the latest information. So that is that the publisher. Now it's it's in layout. That's it's gonna be about five fifty pages, a hundred color photographs, chapters eighty author's five fifty pages, a hundred color photos. Yeah, published by CRCs. So there's some some mediator podcasts alone here because Matt Kaufman did the Migration lad the Migration chapter, Kevin Monteth who's been on the show led the nutrition chapter. At our Nett who's been on the show, led a

habitat chapter. So that the cool thing is there's twenty three chapters and each chapter was written by the international leader of the national leader for that topic, I mean, the expert for the topics. So this is a compendium of all of the latest information written by the people that are on black tails and black tailed melder In fact seven chapter did you lead up there? Did you not?

Because you're doing that overall editing. I was the lead editor, me and Paul Krautsman, who used to be a professor at University Arizona was later a professor University of Montana before retiring, and and I've known him for a long time, so he and I teamed up. So I'm the lead editor UM and then I wrote UM a good part of chapter one, which is historical distribution taxonomy UM, where we take the eleven meld deer subspecies and distill them down to only five valid subspecies. So we pulled that

down at. Emily Latch was my co author. She's a geneticist that I've been working with with decades UM doing dear genetics, but we've got the Tiberonne Island melder, which is a Mexican island melder, got the Cedros Island meld deer. Those islands have been separated for ten thousand years, and they're genetically and they're physically different. And then we've got Sitka black tail and Clumbian black tail as different subspecies. And then the fifth meal deer so species is continental meal.

Here everything in North America is the same subspecies because there's no geographic divider between. There's no genetic differences that you can really define. Physical differences that their tails change as you go in different areas, but there's no physical differences that you could really say these are different deer, the different subspecies. What is up with why are Sitka black tails seemingly so different in appearance then Colombia black tail.

They seem to have like a little white tailed deer or sorry, a little white tailed deer. They look like white tails laid up in them. Yeah, that's fascinating, and there's white tailed. You can just taste the hyphen in there. White. But to the Sitka, they've got these white tailed like tails.

They've got shorter metatarsal glands on their back. Legs closer to um white tails, and they've got darker faces like a white tail, which which makes it appear like they have white eye rings um like a white tail, short, smaller antlers. It's fascinating. I don't have an answer why they look like white tails. They're not not because of hybridization. I thought I remembered reading in uh, what's the old

timer's name? Canadian valerious Guys that I could be wrong, but I thought there was a theory that when the ice was moving south, the white tails kind of like work the edge of that ice south across the you know what would be the lower forty eight up the west coast, and somehow yeah, those like yeah, not quite, they weren't coming along the coast. But what he talked about was we had white tails already in the east. White Orticolius, the white tailed mulder genus has been in

North America for five million years. We've got fossils in Florida five million years ago. So what he was saying, my bookshelf, Yeah, that's right, gave me we had white tails in the east, and then we had this differentiated into kind of a western mule deer, black tailed deer, thing, and then later glacial um glacial action separated the black tails along the coast and then the mule deer in the central part Geiss's theory about um like they met somewhere.

Geis The theory was that black tail males interbred with white tailed fieldmales and created the mule there in my chapter one. I discussed that a long time, and I don't think it's valid be there's a lot of reason, Like he had this kind of elaborate I can't what do you call that? When you as a scientist, what do you call what? He would do a theory monger. He's a vow as a friend of mine, lifelong friend, um.

But he would kind of throw out some stuff and he'd be like, well, how like okay, show me you're you know, I want to help my kids with their homework, you know, and you kind of like show me your word. Yeah right, They're like, what's that? Wasn't necessarily bad thing? So it's like show me the work. His thing was

that you had did that. It went like this, you had white tails and what's now the southeastern US million three million years ago, four million years ago, at some point in time, climatic conditions were such that they colonized America coast to coast, and then in the southern portion, Yeah, from from they made it. And then it got real hot and dry in the middle, and so there became a gap between the two, and then they had all

this separate time to evolve. And then it got real nice weather again, and the white tails came back west. These abandoned black tails came east. They had sex along the rockies. And yeah, then there's the milder. Was he the one? Was he the one that said they muled there been around for ten thousand years, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're gone in ten Yeah. He wrote an article I think in Outdoor Life that talked about

the melder disappearing. Um, and he says that they are a new species that arose in the place the scene, and um. We spent a lot of time in that chapter one because this information has been out there so much and I haven't always agreed with it, and I did. I sent Val the draft of my chapter to review. Unfortunately didn't get to it before he died. He was actually because I wanted his input on it, because I was disagreeing with a lot of things. But we've been

friends a long time, and that's what scientists do. It's okay to disagree. Unfortunately, I would have really liked to have his comment. But with Vale's theories, the thing is it's it's not necessarily a bad thing. He was a thinker man. He thought outside the box all the time, and he was throwing these theories out. In a lot of cases, he threw a theory out without showing his work just I think this is what happened, and people followed up and did a master's a PhD on it

and either proved it right or proved it wrong. And I remember him telling me one time that that someone had done this work and they proved that one of his theories was wrong, and he called it splendid work. It was fantastic. Now we know he said that was a theory of mine. Someone did a great job of investigating it found out I was wrong, and he was excited that someone we actually had that information. He was

that kind of gearing. So he threw a lot of theories out, and some of those theories really helped people think about these Some of these concepts and um in relationships and someone were just just batch it crazy. That picture that Muley back on the cover makes you want to get that buck so bad. That's the Kia buck. Yeah, as George and Ranco took that photo on the Kaibab, so that it says here the last book like that

was published like this was forty one years ago. There's a lot like with mule deer, especially like lots changed for them, and and and blacktail deer and and actually um Steve's brother Danny reviewed the chapter on blacktail deer to one of the seven of the chapters. Of those twenty three chapters are are a separate chapter on each

of these seven eco regions in North America. So we divided the Coastal Rainforest as one ecoregion, the Great Plains is one ecoregion, um, the California Chaparral is one eco region, the the Colorado Plateau, and the South with the desert. And so we have a chapter on each one of those ecoregions written by those experts that that manage and survey and hunt deer in in those areas, that have been researching and managing the deer in those areas. So

so there's even these seven chapters just focusing on ecoregions. Um. And there's one on the coastal rainforest with the black tail deer there. So um, it's pretty excited. It's pretty exciting. How are you, um, pessimistic about the future of mule deer, No, not at all, not all. I think we just need to focus on habitat and if we preserved some the open places for them to live, um, they'll they'll be fine. And I've written about the future of mule deer and um,

people love mual there too much. We're not gonna you know, we're not gonna let anything bad happen. How important is predator control of mule deer in your view? Not not very important. Locally you can do something, but um, you know the idea that we're gonna kill some predators and it's just gonna air quotes help the deer out. Um. You have to really intensively control predators in a fairly localized area to to actually increase survival, either increased survival

of fauns or increased survival of adults. And you can do it in a small area, but you can't do it even on a game management unit size area. It would take so much money and so much effort to depress the predator population so much that you actually relax the predation pressure and improve survival um of of deer. And it's so expensive to do it in one game

management unit. I mean it my view, you you spend those millions of dollars doing some long lasting habitat work or some overpasses to preserve some migration corridors or something. So it's really it can it can be beneficial in a local area, um, but you're not gonna be able to do it on a large scale area just as

a matter of deer management. So when we as hunters are like walk around touting around on Instagram, Hey everybody do your part, and someone kills a wolf for a mountain lion, Yeah, it's not doing anything from a population standpoint, And people say, you know, we killed this line and so we did the deer population the favor. Not really, I mean you're just not having that much. Matter of fact,

did you follow their lions come in there? Did you follow that predator predator program that they were doing in Colorado on the Rhan Plateau that did not That was but that was like extremely specific in time and intensity. Yeah, that's exactly what talk yeah, And it wasn't just like doing it in January, so it was like focus on you know, yeah, And they did a long a long term study Mark Early, and now there was a Mark Early's the lead author on our predator chapter UM in

the book. He did a long term study in Idaho where they controlled coyotes and lions in certain game management units UM and and in the end in a focused area kyote control and focused there you can can save enough fall. And if you've got habitat, it's tied very closely with habitat. In fact, my next article in the Meelder Foundation magazine is on on Predators UM, and we talked about how closely that's tied with the quality habitat, because if you go in and you kill a bunch

of predators, you save a bunch of fawns. You absolutely save a bunch of fawns in that area. If the deer population is overcarring capacity, they're gonna die from something else, some other causes. So the habitat has to be such that it can hold a lot more dear so when you save them from the jaws of predators, then then they actually have a place to live and they've been up food. So it's very closely tied with habitat quality

and caring. I hear every now and then speaking to habitat people are like, well, I see deer all the time in my little suburb neighborhood. Um, they seem to be just fine. They're adapting there in the they just live in the yards. Everything's fine. You don't need to preserve wide open habitat. With my sister. My sister keeps sending me videos of the two Melder books right outside her window, and they lay in her front lawn in

the shade, and they eat out of the bird feeder. Um, and they grow out and they graze in the in the yard. So that's one little snapshot of their year round habitat needs. And so you know they need they need to winter range free from snow and with some four during the winter. Um. They need some really good nutritious summer range. And and then they might wance in a whilcome into a neighborhood and eat a little bit

and hang out. But that that's not providing the habit their habitat needs for the whole year or even really that month. It's just a it's just a stop at dairy Queen as all it is. We had a text message. Who found this text message? Oh that was that someone sent that to me. Instagram thing and Instagram messes of Brody they're called d M. Yeah. I'm in an argument this from someone who says the broidy this read it Brody. I'm in an argument with a friend who is claiming

that of game animals and anyway are tagged with trackers. Well, I know this number is unbelievably wrong. I'm having a hard time finding numbers for tracked game animal any insight that I just replied, like, there's twenty five million deer and states do the math. But but yeah, I I mean, you probably know better than anyone. But I would guess it's way less than one percent. Helicopter level it is. Utah has more radio collared ungulus than any other state

right now. They're putting out like five GPS colors a year as part of their herd monitoring their statewide and it's really an incredible effort. They after no one's even close their survival rates, um cause specific mortality, what's killing them? And then overall how are they surviving? And movements, migration patterns and movements and habitat use um. They're they're getting

some fantastic information, for example, talking about predators. They have a whole bunch of units that from all of those radio colors, they know that those animals are limited by habitat because they're taking fat levels and nutrition information and they're they're malnourished. That you know, they know these animals

are limited by habitat. They've got another unit. The animals are fat, they're doing really well, they've got really good nutrition, and still the adult female survival is really low, and most of them are getting killed by mountain lions. So here they actually have the information where all these populations are limited by habitat and predator control is not gonna help anything. In this unit right here, they're doing really well habitat and nutrition wise, and predators are killing snot

a out of them. And so if you have that kind of information, you can go to that game management unit then and and up the mountain lion quota let people kill twice as many mountain lions in that area and try to get that dear population to recover. So that's the benefit of that kind of information. But they have about twelve they have about twelve hundred meal deer right now, radio collared with GPS colors in the state of Utah. Their populations about three hundred thousand meal deer.

That's less than half a one percent of of the of the population color. So it sounds like someone's frustrated they saw a big buck with the collar, yeah, or they're worried about the black helicopters finding them when they're poaching something. I don't know. I thought that all aren't all birds now tracking us? Or drones or something? What was that? What was that hashtag that was going around? Well, yeah, I posted that on my old Instagram account. It was

a poster that said birds are drones. Wake up, the government's watching us. Birds aren't real. It said birds aren't real, and I think they're the website. I think there's a big movement in a website that's called birds Aren't Real. What'd you know that? The first spend a waging with time on conspiracy ship. But did you know that, um like the whole flat the earth flat? Things started ke It was like a guy just made a guy was like making a point and it started out as a joke,

but it caught on. I didn't know that like the flat earth folks, the new kind of flat earth folks. It started out as a dude like goofing on people like that, but then his goof caught on and he created a movement. Yeah, Like there's a great YouTube video about how Steve you wonder wasn't blind would be like, uh, it would be like that. But also it becomes like a big movement. You know, they say that the earth can't be flatter. Cats would have pushed everything off it

by now. The I want to talk about the word of the day, antler genesis, and I'm looking at a thing that describes antler growth more closely resembles bone cancer growth than regular bone growth. Right yeah, antler growth, I mean that's the growth of bone. It's a growth of nerves. You think about when you injure a nerve, how how long it takes to heal that nerve. Here we have antlers that are growing in the course of a couple of months, and these bones are growing a couple of feet.

Nerves are growing a couple of feet. That skins growing so fast, so that bone growth, which you can be up to an inch a day in some species, think about that an inch a day. That's that's incredible. And so the bone growth is so fast. Antler growth of that bone material is actually more rapid than than bone cancer growth. And so there's people doing research with with

the deer family. To be able to grow bone that fast and then to shut it down and then to have it stop and then then shed the velvet and and calcify that bone, they've got to have some physiological or chemical mechanism to stop that runaway bone growth of the antlers. They've got to have some regulation of this

bone growth. So people are studying that um in relation to to bone cancer and saying, well, if they're able to shut down that that crazy bone growth, maybe we can tap into that and find a way to shut down cancerous bone growth um and regulate it in that way.

And so when you look at captive deer, they've surveyed people that have deer in captivity about how many died of can how many deer head cancer because they're in captivity and they get sick, they take them in and they check them out, and the deer family seems to be five times less likely to get cancer. So it seems like they've got some kind of mechanism to control

this tumor growth or bone growth. UM. So that that that's pretty exciting if that can be tapped into and and um, maybe we could do something with cancer growth, regulating, slowing, stopping the growth of cancer cells. Do you know when uh, I'll see about it. There days we're watching some uh we're watching moose thrashing a lot of brush. We're seeing a lot of bulls that got little bits of velvet

dry it on their antlers. Yet, um, if a buck or a bowl or whatever never thrashed brush would all that velvet to stick there, now it would come out. It loosens from that antler. And you see pictures sometimes of of antler's big milder or an elk and it's falling off. It's starting to slough off of that. And even because you know they haven't been thrashing at brush, because it's so loose, it would just it would have been gone. But you can see it just loosen and

and start falling off. What about cactus bucks? Why are they holding? Why fall That's a hormonal issue. And there's a whole bunch of different things that you thought Seth just new hearts man. I thought I thought Seth maybe stumped him. He's like, well, yeah, what about like Kelson's shot a few years ago that was and that it was all intact, like not even trying. I think I sent you the article. I wrote an article in Melder Foundation magazine, Cactus Books, and and it's a it's a

hormonal issue, but it's really complicated. So people are frustrated when they say, why is that buck seal van or what's causing that? And there's there's a thing called the crypt orchid buck, which is a buck that has his testes descend um into the scrow them, but they stay like the size of a p They're just they're they're just super small. Um, those are hype. I'm sorry. Those are hypogonado bucks. Hypogonado just means really small, really small

gonads in the in the scrowed them. But then the um the crypt orchid bucks don't have their tests descend into the scrow them. They stay in the body cavity, usually encased in fat there and and those conditions can cause disruptions on the testosterone that that animal gets because the shed velvet you need that peak and testosterone as you lead up to the rut, and so it's that surgeon testosterone that dries a velvet and it strips it off.

And so if the tests are still in the abdominal cavity, or if they're too small and not producing testosterone, you just lack that that tystosterone to shed that. But it can be more complicated than that, because you can have antler does which are invalvet and people call cactus bucks, and they're actually does that have had a tumor around the ovary which disrupted destrogen production, um or other things in the in the hypothalamous gland which can disrupt the

production and distribution of of hormones. There's also been cases where animals, because sometimes you get like if you have an individual animal, you've got some individual malformation, some individual problem with that animal. Sometimes you get a population where like half of the bucks are still in velvet in November. Now, something's going on um in that population and and nobody's

been able to nail that down. The leading theory is that some plants produce phytoestrogens, like plant based estrogens, and into the certain in a certain uh season, you might have a certain rainfall pattern or temperature pattern, which makes a whole bunch of those plants just flourish, and the deer eating a lot of them and they're just eating a lot of estrogen is disrupting the flow of testosterone in there, and so all of those different things can happen.

And unless you get an animal in you get a blood sample to look at testosterone levels. Um, you're able to look at the testes, the condition of the testes, and look at the the antlers. There's also the receptors. The testosterone receptors in velvet might malfunction and they might have a lot of testosterone, but the velvet receptors aren't

detecting it. So there's a whole bunch of really complex things and you can't really get to the bottom of it without a really intensive necropsy with a physiologist and a chemist. And what do you see antler does that are viable? Yes, yeah, there's The last white Tail book actually had a picture of an antler dough with a fallen sucklinger. So they can reproduce, and it depends what causes that injury to the injury to the skull on a dough might actually um cause an antler growth to form.

They've done that experimentally. What about like surviving like e h D. I've heard that being a thing that causes Yeah, not not antler does, but yeah, that's definitely thing. Um. There's a veterinarian Dr Fox from I Believe Utah wrote a really good paper about um a case of e h D and and e h D is episode of hemorrhagic disease and it causes its hemorrhaging and it will cause hemorrhaging in the body and the nose and the eyes and anus and everything, but also can cause hemorrhaging

in the test testicles. And so if it's hemorrhaging and swollen, it interferes with that production of testosterone and then it interferes with the antler cycle. So they her team of Wildlife that's documented this case of e h D in the population causing a whole bunch of cactus bucks from disrupting that hormonal isn't a sign of that like the

the hooves slough off. Yeah, one sign of episode out of cameragic disease is lines or cracks in the hooves and and it runs it's not lengthwise from the tip to the fur, but it's across the hoof and it's what it is is a stress line. It's when they get sick. At the time they get sick because those hooves are constantly growing like fingernails, So at the time that they get sick, that stops growing because they're really sick.

Just like a big horn cheap get those annual rings every year during rut because that horn cheet stops growing and then when it starts growing again, it leaves that stress line there. And it's the same thing with the h D hooves, and there'll be a stress line. Yeah. I think with Kelsey's buck, remember right, the hooves were basically it looked like they were falling off on that one, and then that week we saw probably half a dozen

different bucks in velmot Still. Yeah, so when you've got especially when you have evidence like on the hooves like that, or if you've had some animals die earlier in the fall from h D, you know, then it's indication. It's not something like the phyto estrogens I was talking about. Yeah, Hey, why do people use a little follow up on that too? Just um, but does any any of that what causes a buck to be a shirgar buck? Yeah, that was a guy I think we may even as it was

a geys thing. It was a guys thing. Yeah, Yeah, even talked about it last time you were on. We could have um, I don't remember, but yeah, shirgar bucks are those bucks that maybe mature mu So you're saying you're defining it as it's a thing, or you're just saying, this is theory that was laid out. Yeah, I'm explaining.

I'm explaining about guys' theory. Yeah, because I don't. He spent his PhD in Bath National Park observing mulder that apparently we're pretty tamed, so he could observe them a close range, and from those observations he wrote a lot about um about mulder breeding. But his theory was that there's some sugar bucks and they shirre they and he calls it that because they shirked their responsive ability to breathe that year. It's a great work and they he said,

they just opt out of rut. They gained a lot of fat. They don't burn their fat because they're not running dough. They could just just stand around and the time and and and bide their time. And hopefully his theory was at some point then they're so big and so fat and so powerful they come down the mountain. They're like, I'll take your boys, I'll take them all on hunts for Yeah, um, I don't. I don't know of any evidence of any other evidence of that other

than his stories. Yeah did he just kicks it and I do all the pre rut He was saying that it would go on for multiple years and then one year it's like, oh yeah, not just a season. No, he would go grow to be four or five years old and shirk all those seasons was up on the day of that. It would be a cumulative effect that at five years he's like, now, boys, nobody's messing all other Like, holy shit, yeah he's been gaining shirking out there.

So it was like a lifetime play. And the only way that would work from an evolutionary standpoint if on year five or whatever, he was able to to father a whole bunch of offspring. I mean, that would be the only advantage I do. We did talk of this. I remember you making the you're making an astute observation that if that's your reproductive strategy, you have a high degree of cockiness that you're not gonna die in year two, year three, year four. You better be nocturnal. Yeah, yeah,

you gotta have a good place to shirk. What why do people use UM? I don't know how to ask questions? Why does it? Why do people use blue tongue and e h D kind of synonymously? But they're not the same, right, Yeah, they're not. They're not the same thing, but they're they're very close. They're both hemorrhagic disease. They both cause kind of the same symptoms, but they are very much different things. There's two forms of h D e h D one

and two, and then blue tongue. I don't remember. There's like seven different types of blue tongue, and they're the virologists can tell them apart when they do like phr genetic analysis UM. So they're definitely different things that e h D is is usually more of a deer cattle thing. Blue tongue tends to be more prong horn goats, sheep kind of thing. For some reason, give me the life

cycle of that disease. It's spread by aculoquoits vera pennis it's a it's a gnat basically a noseum is what spreads that and so you'll so it's you've got to have some moisture in order to spread that disease. But it's a virus that's just spread by the bites of those gnats, and so he's got to bite a deer

then bite another deer. Yeah right. Why is it that, like in a place like Montana here where you have places where there's mule deer and white tail like overlapping in the same habitat, Why is it that it hits white tails so much harder and mule deer seem to not be as affected by it. I don't know the species difference, but there's definitely a multi year protection once once animals get e h D and if they survive, and most animals do survive, they've got antibodies for that

for that virus and when it comes. That's why it usually doesn't hit like every year. It'll it would be bad one year, and then it won't hit for a couple of years because even if it's in the environment, those animals have high end bodies and they fight it off. Um they had they had some capsive deer in Mississippi and some capsive deer in in Michigan. And it's it's something that's mostly has been it's moving North definitely, but it has been a southern uh kind of disease in

the in the warmer climates. And they brought some Michigan deer down into the pens with the Mississippi deer. In the Michigan deer just all died because they had no exposure to they're very susceptible to it, and whereas the whereas the Mississippi deer had some antibodies and had some exposure to it. And so it's that there's definitely some

of that protection. Um. I and are some diseases that it is more of a white tail thing and not so much immediate Yeah, like up on the Milk River, like I don't know the last time e h D hit like a crush like the white tails last year. Old there were last year from what ranchers were saying, the build there were basically un effected. Yeah, And and that's a known thing, um But I don't know why.

I don't know. It's just species are different species are susceptible to different things, like different um, different dog breeds are more or less susceptible to rattlesnake bites and things like that. They're just does that have anything to do with the amount of moisture you get in a year.

It's gonna be a bad year, a good year. Yeah, it's super dry because we I co authored a scientific paper like twenty five years ago when we documented for the first time in Arizona, so in an arid climates where there isn't a lot of water for those no sums, a little gnats to reproduce, which is the vector. It won't spread animal to animal. It's got to be insect bites. It's gonna be a bad insect year. Yeah, it's gotta be bad. There's a lot of no sums this year

kind of thing. Yep, definitely. And we and they found out that the one that some of them in the Southwest can actually reproduce in the moisture of like cactus, broken cactus. That's all the moisture they need to reproduce. So that's been fun. But but definitely some moisture around where you've got a lot of gnats that year. Now, Okay, it's gonna get a little complicated. I think I know the answer to this, but I wanna make sure I

know the answer to this. Why do when when dear get e h D, why do they all turn up land and rivers and ponds and creeks. Yeah, I think they're water tanks. They're byremic. They're just like you know, like when you've got the flu, you want to drink a lot of water. They just want to drink a lot when they when they get their temperature comes up and they've got that virus and they're sick, they just naturally head to water to drink or to cool off

and they usually die like late summer early fall. Yeah, it's definitely a late summer thing that that's the first thing that makes you suspicious that maybe it's an e h D thing there by water in late summer. Now, last year, I think it was last year Nebraska. Let me know when it starts. Bringing a bell i for you guys. Last year in some portion of Nebraska, maybe it's two years ago, they were buying back dear tags. I think that happened in the Dakotas to maybe North North.

They're they're buying back deer tags and some of them and there's different people department people talking about the cause. They were attributing it to the incredible dryness. But but here's the catch. It was congregating dear more around water. Do you buy that it could be? I don't. I don't know the details of that North Dakota incident. To that degree. You've got to have the vectors, you've got

to have the insects to do that. Concentrated around water would put them all together, like feeding deer in the CWD area or whatever. Definitely you've got disease spread much more than that. But I don't know if they had like a wet spring with a whole bunch of gnats all over the place and then it got dried through the summer and they were concentrated. I don't know that kind of kind of details. What might have happened. Hey, what's a nude mouse model? Yes, well, it's like the

naked um, naked mole rat, the hairless cat let. Let me read the article title Development of a nude mouse model for the study of ant loo genesis, Mechanism of tissue interactions and ossification pathway. Yeah, they basically bred some naked rats, some naked mice for studies for in in in the lab so that they didn't have all that fur on there and they could do skin grafting studies

and things like that. They would have this nude mouse, and so the model part of it is just they use this nude mouse as a model to do all kinds of different research and have found it apparently have found it pretty useful. But they we were talking about the um and there's when a when a fall and a buckfhone is born. It has what's called an antler periosteum um underneath the skin of the forehead and it's

not attached. It's it's a tissue not attached to the skull and it's not really attached to the skin initially, just floats just in between there and then eventually it's insert that into Yoni's head, you could and he would grow antlers. Because they haven't done it with humans, but they this nude mouse model paper. They took some of that antler pereostium, which is a stem cells and stem cells or cells that can develop into anything organs or

skin or bone or anything. And so they took some of those the antler pereostium material, grafted it under the skin of the forehead of these nude mice and they grew little antler buds on top of their their heads. And they've taken that antler pereostium and even grafted onto a leg of a deer and it grew a spike on its leg bone, on the side of the leg bone, and so they can grab that people shape testing out

shampoo on him. Little buggers, but like that, Yeah, and then it's like rogue taxidermy and the and then that least secure bone cancer and then everybody I thought they just I thought it was just like it was like part of the Texas. But those like they will grow one for you out of his butt. And when they do it to a deer that antlers still on the legs still reacts to the whole the annual hormonal cycle,

and the antlers actually shed. Antlers are shed because it's still feeding all of the same hormones out of the blood system. That's wild and so they've been able to transplocate that. And they've also taken the stem cells from the antler periosteum. Tuny Leah researcher in china Um has cloned to adult red deer just from the cells from an antler periostum and about eight deer some other deer species. I don't love their roos deer. Can you send me that.

Can you get me? Can you send me in Will the picture of the pink mouse with the antlers put it on Instagram? You want. We're talking about going at stephen or Nell and will show you an antlers. Yeah, pink mouse with a big ball bunet's head, you know, and that was from the quarter inch adler. So they've taken those. Yeah at the vase. The vase is big. Yeah, say, I mean they've cloned whole red deer just from the

cells of the antler periostume. Man, what Yeah, I guess if it's like if it I guess if you've got an eyeball toward cancer, or you think about if you've got an endangered species and there you've got five left and they're ready to blink out. If you could clone those not ideal, but it's better than losing them completely. Yeah. Well, I'm with you. I'm just talking about like making mice

have antlers. Yeah right, all right. You know in CWD research, they have what's called servitized mice and they have some SERVA genes inserted into the genome of the mouse and then they can study with mice with their their fast generation time. You know, they're reproducing all the time. You can get ten generations in a year or two. And so those mice have deer jeans inserted in them and they can study deer jeans that are that are relevant

to CWD research. So they can they can have all these mice instead of having deer and waiting to get ten years old and do research on the genetics dear, dear jeans. But in mice, they're called serviantized mice. And I was in the lab in Denver once and I asked the director did they get and I started raising my hands like little antlers. They said no, no no, no, they don't get antlers. Recently, you and I have been

swapping photos a two headed deer. It started out with a two headed spike YEP in Mexico, and you said, don't do anything with this right, but we can release it now. At the beginning the picture, it came to a friend of mine and then come to me and I asked if we could post it, and he said, well, let's wait a second, but I've now got the go ahead we can. We can post that. And I don't have any additional information that was killed, any better photos of it. I don't that's the only that's the only

photos tell the story of this, dear. So it's a it's a year obviously year laying it's a spike. There's a picture of it laying there, bloody tongues hanging out. It was harvested by someone u in in the Mexican state of Guerrero, which is like Acapulco, is kind of up the coast in southwestern Mexico. Um in the mountains of pet that land, and the picture came to a friend of mine, uh and apparently all of the locals were pretty freaked out just for superstitious reasons about this

two headed deer. I mean it was it was um. People were pretty worried about it because it looks so strange and if the one photo we have it looks legit, you know, you never know these things. I'm always a little guarded um about that. But we've had two headed fawns documented years on my instagram from Jim sent this to me on my Instagram. I have photos X rays

of a two headed fawn. Yeah. But the thing that blew me away about the little spike as they get actually lived right, and dude, I wish I had video of it, like could he eat with both of its heads that one just kind of hang out. That's why a little part of me is guarded. You know that it's a it's a hoax. But I've looked at the picture and and if you have a fawn that's two headed, it's only one more year. It would only have to live a year for that thing to be a spike

and to get shot. And it would depend on what's going on inside. With these what's called conjoined twins, where they're just twins that are joined and they share body parts. It depends what's going on inside. Every every individual is different. And that two headed phone that you posted that did not have two complete digestive tracks when they did the knee cropsy on it, the right head had a complete digestive track, the left head the digestive track was intermittent

and was blind. Came to a blind end, and in at least two places it's esophagus didn't fuse in with the main line. That he wouldn't have been able to eat right and then the and then back by the wrectum somewhere there was another blind stop. And so it depends with the spike. If it had two complete digestive tracks. It's conceivable it could live live one year and get shot. Um as a spike. What what kind of deer? Was it? Just that white tailed deer? Yeah, the the spike was

white tailed deer in the Yeah, that's right. It might have been one of the other Mexican Highlands subspecies, but none of those have been studied. All of those are just kind of smaller deer in Mexico. So tell about this one we do know is in fact like totally legit, right. The fawn, the faun, Yeah, was it found dead. It was found dead in two thousands sixteen in in um was it Michigan or Minnesota? Minnesota? Um got mushroom hunter was out and he found this fall and it was

in perfect condition. That wasn't decomposing. It was dead um and it looked like it had been cleaned off by the mother. But they did a knee cropsy. They did a fantastic job. Luke Cornicelli who was a big game leader in Minnesota, and and Gino D'Angelo was a University of Georgia professor, and they did X rays, They did a complete knee cropsy to look at it. One thing they did was they they put the lungs in water, and the lung sunk, which means they've never had air

in them. That's the way you can tell if it's still born us. So they so it never had taken a breath, so it was still born, but it seemed to be cleaned off, so they felt like it was still born. The mother cleaned it and then abandoned it, and this guy must have found it right after that because it was in in pristine condition. I was just watching a movie about that. Um, what was that famous operation they did in World War two where they they

threw a guy in the ocean. They threw an officer in the fake officer in the ocean, but they had to make up a whole background on him, and he had and he was carrying like letters, fake letters, and it's what led the So it's what led the Nazis to believe that the ants that the Sicily landing was going to be in Greece. Yeah, I remember that they put fake documents that he'd wash and they made him

a whole fake pass. They made a girlfriend talk about they took a corpse and and it had They took a corpse and just dumped it off summary and um, and they made up like this thing with a person with a past. They had an actual girlfriend with the past to pull one over on the nuts and it worked. But they had a hell of a time. Um. I guess for a long time they needed a body and they were afraid that someone would be this person didn't die in the water, and I always and they didn't

really get into it. But I wonder if that's what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm certainly there's forensic ways to tell whether they drowned or roun like something about like what the condition of the lungs would be or something. Did they determine why this thing like didn't take a breath, like why it didn't you know? And when they when they look at the discontinuous um digestive track, you know, there's probably just all kinds of things um wrong with it.

There's been two other white tailed deer fawns, two headed fawns, documented, but this is the first one that's been documented to have been born even still born. The rest were in fetuses where they didn't need crops. He's on pregnant females and then they ran into these two headed fawns inside the let's start Baculum, bacula, baculus. Okay, hit me. So I was looking. I was looking for some information for Spencer, and I think it's for an upcoming trivial question. So

I won't one of details. But I ran into this paper. But I ran into this paper. That's all I needed to hear. Right, believe what I just do? Some read no, believe me what I What I just said isn't gonna be a hint for whatever is coming up. But I started Spencer three duzies for when I'm not here. They're killing me. I want to ask you, guys, if you

know I'm so bad, I'm not gonna well. I was reading this paper and had a whole bunch of different things, and that one thing it had was um was extra skeleton bones like bones and I aren't attached to the skeleton. Had a whole bunch of science on Bacula. Thought about that it's a bone unattached to the skeleton, just like, can't rouse have these bones that support the pouch? They do?

They do. They support the pouch. And the males have them too, which obviously don't support the pouch because male kangaroos don't have a pouch, but they's part of the pelvic girdle and it's not attached. It's just another example of one of these shoulders not attached. Yeah, I know that that's that's true. Oh yeah, pretty damn good. I mean with muscles. Yeah, you're right now, once you start

cutting it, it's not right, right. Yeah. Okay, So there's a whole paper on these the extra extra bones actually had antlers in there and and um and cheap horns in there too. But I was reading about these bacula and was surprised. Which is what was the question that Spencer asked? Yeah, I forgot that one. So so I'm reading the paper vaculum, and I run into the fact that females have um, a companion to the baculum, which is actually a clearteresst bone, is what it is. All

the species that have vaculums the female. Yeah, not but almost all of those species. And you don't find it in other speech. She's if they don't have a vaculum um, then then they're not gonna have And the female black take a black bear, for instance, a female black bear has a floating clitoral bacula, genital bone and it's called a barbell um b a U bl like. So let's say a bore black beard like whatever five six inch long? Yeah,

how what size would that female bone? Being much smaller and and there they don't look just like it, they're they're completely different, um in shape as you'd imagine how big you say, um, the you haven't he was looking at some No, I don't know. It'd be interesting. I didn't even know about it strong enough if you were, you know, cleaning that bear butcher that you probably wouldn't

even notice. No, you'd have to look for it. You have to go in there and certainly look for it, because like even like a Walworth's vaculum is is like eighteen inches long, and the female Um, I've seen pictures of both, isn't I thought you can use those as a walking stick, just about can. No, it's like a thing. Walce Walas has the largest vacuum in relation to body length, like eighteen percent of its body length, so like one

fifth of its body length is vaculum. Yeah. I think people used to make little walking sticks that they're like little miniature baseball get bats you get at the at the ball game, but for short. No, it would be short, Danny DeVito add but it's like, but they you know, vaculum, they're found in a lot of carnivores, they're founded bears, found in rodents Um primates bats. Bat vaculum is about zero point one five millimeters. A tenth of a millimeter

is a bat vaculum. Had them and then and then they talked about the ball bellum, the female version of it. Of almost all of these, probably eighty percent of the species that have vaculums, the females have a ball bellum too, so it comes hand in hand. I have never even heard it. So a bunch of research on that is like, well why would you have a bone um for the female genital you And they think it's just something that

came along in evolution, like male nipples. I mean two sexes having something and it's really only functional in one of the sexes. So it's probably something that just came along in evolution with that, and it's more variable to the female ball bellum. Even in some species that have it, you may have some individual females that don't have it and some that do have it, like it's it's not functional and so it's it's real variable now, but we

know for a fact that it's not functional. Yeah, I mean, well, I don't think you can never say that, but nobody's been able to. There's a whole bunch of different um theories, even the vaculum theories about what what purpose that serves? And there's a whole bunch of different theories, and and the scientists will will tell you throw up their hands and we're not really sure, um what what purposes? There's a couple obvious ones, but um, there's a lot of

theories that have come across on that. If anyone out there collects the what do you call it, a taxidermist or anyone just starting and send them to us, and maybe I'll make some jewelry the next the next auction house. Yeah. And and so there's there's a lot of variability in in um animals that have it, all of those like the bear family, the raccoon family, UM, the a lot of carnivores um. There's a lot of exceptions in there of species like primates are one that have vaculums. Humans

obviously are are an exception to that. But there's exceptions in all those categories of certain species that don't actually have a vaculum. M just just species that are exceptions to that. Uh, we've been we we've been talking a lot about UM lead in wildlife. UM. You had written a piece for our website about lead and wildlife. Yep, yep, give me the give me the quick and dirty where

you add on it. So the reason the reason I wrote that piece is there's just there's a lot of talk you read about lead and wild life, and you seem to get the same old things. But there's some other things that I think aren't being talked about. Mostly all the nuance people are happy to glom onto these the bumper sticker sayings or just generalities like like having lead in your vendicine is obviously bad for human health UM and and people talk about like lead using lead

ammunition is um toxic to wildlife. Well, my piece was, let's focus on what the real issue is. The real issue isn't mammals, reptiles, amphibians with lead ammunition. The real issue with birds that are that are consuming mostly that are consuming um meat, or birds that will pick up lead pellets as grit um. Both both of those ways. But birds are very susceptible to to lead poisoning. So let's focus on what the issue is. The issue is

lead ingestion by birds. That's what the issue is. And and it's not just generally leading exposure because I hear people saying, you know, they talk about lead exposure being bad. Let's be specific. It's ingestion of lead by those birds. And then let's focus on where it is a problem and if we need to make some management changes in a local area or local valley. State and provincial and tribal game and fish agencies are in the position to to change regulations if if it if it's deemed a problem.

But nationwide bands, statewide bands about lead exposure of wildlife, so we need to we need to ban lead or or implement regulations. When you look at the science banning lead or or advocating um that everybody switched to non lead bullets and ammunition is not very well supported from a conservation standpoint, population um level conservation is not very

well supported from a human health standpoint. Metallic lead is very different than um organic lead compounds, which is what's in lead paint and lead gasoline, and and and clutch um clutch pads and break pads. Those those that's a very different kind of lead that can poison people very easily. Consuming a number eight lead pellet once every week is not going to elevate your blood levels. You've got to

consume metallic lead almost daily. And that's what the that's what the human medical research shows before your blood levels are elevated to the point where it's the CDC safe levels. This might be a little out of your wheelhouse, but what would you say if I told you that seth ate so much tuna that he got mercury poisoning. Apparently that's possible because I eat a lot of sushi, and I've also I've often wondered about that you did get that? Didn'to? You?

Do you have mercury levels? I didn't actually get my levels check, but I was I had symptoms of He came back with a lot of tune and ate at all one fell swoop. I eat tuna. I eat sushi enough that I kind of think about that. Well, yes, part partially that in Louisiana, eat and kobea and just I would a fish. In a month's time, at least fifty of my meals were fish, big red snapper. And what were the symptoms my hands were going numb um like I was having weird memory loss. But this is

the thing. See, I would have thought I would have rolled my eyes like that's the dumbest thing I ever heard. However, I really I had read a piece recently. There's this guy that like never ate fish. There's a there's a he got pulled off a cruise ship. He never ate fish. He's on a cruise ship that has like a sushi deal and just camped out on it with like developed mrket like a it's a temporary thing. You get better, you stop eating, you get better. He developed like a

like a like a temporary mercury poisoning. But it stays in your system, doesn't it. No, eventually, where do we sure about that? Well, I mean, I'm sure you have some we're talking about enough to liken you dee in the dirt like like it did set. I was looking

at that. I was looking at the recommended that, uh, like the consumption recommendations for just for like Kane Ferry local Lake here, and they say five servings of walleye per month is what they don't they recommend like no more than that, and the servings eight ounces of fish definitely, Like I was eating eight ounces of fish, Like I

was eating way more than that a night. Is that an issue with big plagic fish though, these little lakes sometimes gets and minds going into I was when I was doing research, it said that Kobe is one of the highest, like one of the fish has the highest mercury levels. And it's an issue with big plagic fatty are like the living pretty long time, their bioaccumulating big fish and it's like industrial it's industrial. Um, what do you call like shipping the air a flute? What's what

I'm looking for? Industrial fluent that comes down on the ocean surface and big fish that and that they're big enough that they're eating their bioaccumulating from older fish. Yeah, it gets more. Think about a marlin. Marlin will eat Mahia gets more fish eat a great white shrik, You're probably in trouble. One of my favorite fish writers, he like does these great books. His name is Vick Dunaway.

I got a bunch of his books. He does, like these books that are um, if you're going fishing somewhere, let's say you're going on vacation to the Gulf coast, you get Vick Dunaway's like sport fish of the Gulf Coast and it's um, great picture of the fish. What's up with it? So if you catch fish like the hell's that, you flip through Vic Dunaway and find your fish and he always he has He's really great, like very concise food quality assessments which are like spot on

and very concise. And his one for great white shark is don't even ask how did you put two and two together? Uh? You were getting weird symptoms and then yeah, well I was just I was just eating a lot of fish, and I was like, um, I've always thought about mercur was psychosomatic? You thought about it before you got symptoms. I had two symptoms first, and then I was like, you got to thinking and then got symptoms, and you tell me right now he had liver cancer

due in five minutes. My livered hurt, you know. I mean, it just wasn't that um. And I mentioned it to Kelsey. I was like, I've kind of been having like weird uh, like my hands are going numb um, and yeah, she goes, yeah, I'm having the same thing. WHOA So the Morris household man, Well, I mean the one week. I eat fish every single night for dinner. We did. We eat a lot of fish too. Well, you gotta eat it when it's fresh, right, It's like that's one of those things that doesn't last

in the freezer forever. Yeah, but it's Yeah. I eat a lot of fish too, and I feed my kids a lot of fish. But we punctuated. Not. I don't punctuate it because of mercury. I just punctuated because I don't know, like whatever. Yeah, well usually I do too. I just I'm like on a low red meat here. So there's some I can help you out with that. Wow, it's I'll be good. Yeah, it would be it'd be cool to test some of that stuff the next time

you get some. That would be great. Many Maybe you can buy a really expensive machine that Greg Fons has had some test that I believe. I think he's done there somehow or another. Hey, let me ask you this where I want to cover this some more detail when I got my story straight. But there's some legislation coming up, um, some federal legislation coming up that I'm not I'm a little hazy on details, so I want to tiptoe around

it a little bit. Having to do with limiting the ability of federal land management agencies two restrict lead shot and land ammunition on lands under their purview. Wasn't there? I thought there was just something about wildlife refugees like

a big bank, So that's that's what That's what I thought. Well, No, it would be like limiting the ability in the future that that some national forest can't at the federal level say hey, even those the states handling wildlife management, we're gonna come in and say that just because no lad ammunition on our national forest, like limiting their ability and making it be that it has your chiefs certain like it has to be that that that the lead has to be linked to a population as the primary cause

of a population decline and not done frivolously. Do you got any comment on that or is it a little or to tell I don't know about limiting the ability of agencies to do that. There is UM a federal registered notice now about some refugees. They're being open to hunting, but that comes with the caveat of of no lead and so that's open for comment right now, and and their justification for that UM is not only not compelling,

but there isn't much of a justification. They just have general statements about um lead and health and wildlife and doing the right thing and good conservation, so they don't they don't justify why lead couldn't be used in those particular cases. But as far as limiting federal agencies ability, I just wanted to be based on science, and it often isn't. So if if there's, uh, if you can demonstrate some particular problem with using lead AMMO in that spot,

you know, let's regulate it. But state, state, and provincial and tribal agencies, that's what they do. They have an issue that that impacts conservation and and they make some changes to to address that. And my meat eat piece did had really four um four topics that often don't get talked about, and and one is what species are actually actually affected, and I mentioned that. The other thing

is that the idea of population level effects. So for a long time me and other people have said, hey, there's no population level effects, so there so we don't need to regulate it. The truth is there probably is a whole bunch of population level effects with golden eagles and with bald eagles, um and and and other animals we're just not monitoring them and studying them with such intensity that we would be able to detect a population level effect. But other than condors, condors is a big issue.

But other than condors, I don't see any population level effects that are significant enough that would drive me to want to make some wide sweeping changes and what what ammal people use? And so I think we have to be careful in saying there's no population level effects, because there is, They're just small and in some cases we haven't detected them. Um So, so I don't say that

any more population level effects. I talk more in terms of is using lead ammunition such an issue to the conservation of that speech sheets that we need to make some changes and and and I don't find any compelling arguments for um for species to that we would need to change. What do you personally shoot when you're hunting solid copper? Last twelve years, all of our rifles and I have two pistols, the ten millimeter and a four sixt year rolland that I've built up to be hunting pistols,

and it's all copper, solid copper ammunition. And I've done that. I did that a long time ago. It started when my kids had junior hunts on the Kaibab and Arizona Game of Fish department gave us two boxes of premium copper Hammo um. So I have forty rounds of AMMO just free every time the kids got drawn. And then you could also get a box of fifty bullets if you reload, which I do. And so I was getting some of this free copper amos, started using it and

really liked it. It It shoots really clean, it's accurate, it puts animals down, it's effective at that range, and I like the wound channel is so clean. You know, lead bullet will blow up and create a lot of blood shot um meat and there's a lot of They've shown some of those lead dust and those lead fragments to go of inches from the wound channel. I mean it does. That lead does spread into a lot of meat. And I like the fact that a copper bullet will punch

a hole in there and you lose very little meat. Dude, listen, we so I was just hunting. We're just hunting moose, and we shot a bull three wind meg clay shot a bull three wind mag I'll stand it right next to him nineteen yards hunter eighty grain bullet I a three meg shooting Federal trophy copper. It went through the like ball, it went through the ball of the shoulder, Okay, cut that bone clean in half, went through both lungs, lodged against the high down the other side, and it

was a absolutely perfect mushroom. Mushroom. Man. Yeah, that's that's amazing. Anything I'm making through that in a He's got things in his pocket right now and absolutely perfect mushroom at nineteen Like, is that only shot you shooting more times? No? He put no one right next to it, but didn't need to. None of the pedals sheared off or anything.

That's crazy. But one thing I want to say about the whole lead issue, and I address it at the end of of my article online, is that even if if it's not a compelling issue too for everybody's which a copper for wide scale conservation issues or human health issues, we better be paying attention to hunter image because when they hold up a bald eagle, the symbol of freedom, and the thing is sick or dying because it adjusted a lead bullet, and they tell the whole audience that

you know, hunters are still using lead bullets, and if they stop using lead bullets, we won't have this issue anymore. There's no doubt. It makes us look really bad, and we should be paying attention to that because of the public doesn't hunt, and that of the public still supports legal, regulated hunting to the tune of like percent support for hunting. So why why is there five percent of us that hunt and the other ninety five percent of the population

supports us to such a high degree. It's because they know that hunting is a positive force for conservation. It does a lot of really good things for wild things in wild places, and so anything we've got like that that gives us a black eye, we'd better pay attention to and we better be careful of because we can't

lose that support and we're gonna lose everything. So I I advocate people if they can start moving towards using non lead bullets, but mostly for the purpose of of of hunter um hunter image and just maintaining public support for what we do. And that's the main thing that that I think that's the best argument for hunters. When you start telling them that you're killing, you know, some small percentage of raptor populations, it's just not very compelling

to get people a switch. But we better pay attention to how we look to the that don't hunt. I shoot copper, and I'm deeply uneasy with widespread ammunition bands that likes that aren't targeted. Now, I like to ask myself what what would I have been saying back when they did it for waterfowl? Yeah, no, in waterfall, there's a small percentage of ducks that were actually dying. That was not a population level of fact that that was done.

It was lead pellets for for waterfowl was banned because bald eagles were still endangered at that time, and there were lawsuits about killing bald eagles that were eating ducks that had lead, and so bald eagles were getting poisoned by lead bald eagles around the Endangered Species Act. And that was the dry sweat drove. That's what drove the waterfowl lead band. Not impact, not population impacts to waterfall. What's have been to wrong? I've been drong A is

a bear cat. It's a ververve. It it's a it's a kind of a goofy mammal that lives in Southeast Asia and in the forest, and they have a particular smell. They smell like popcorn. Um, and that that popcorn or But this isn't the guy that's that might be linked to No, no, no no, this isn't the raccoon looking thing that might be linked to COVID. No, that's a civit cat, right, it's the thing that a pangolin. Oh that's not no, no, no, no, no no, no, you're right. Penguin. I think they even

live in Lavia. Raccoon dogs the same the pangolin was read it on Jim's Instagram. Yeah, the penguin. The penguin was involved too. They found they found some DNA that was linked to the penguin. But these bear cats, people have observed for a long time, um that they actually like smell like fresh popcorn, which is bizarre because that the that smell, that fresh popcorn smell, or browned um buns or even seared steak, or that really nice smell

when you're browning. Something comes from a reaction of amino acids and sugars and high heat. It's called a mail or Maillard reaction. It's like you have on here in the notes. It says unrelated to waterfall because it's action reaction. Yeah, there's a there's an steaks, fried dumplings, cookies, biscuits, breads, toasted marshmallows. Yep. So it creates that that chemical process of searing things with amino acids and and sure creates that smell. But these bear cats in um Southeast Asia

running around with that same smell. And so some researchers looked at a whole bunch of compounds in their urine trying to find some compound that might correlate something that they all had um. And they found this too. Uh to a p is what's what it's called, and it's to a setal one pyrolane, and it's just a it's just a compound, but it's the compound that results from when you're browning bread or your searing steak, this this

Maillard reaction um. And so they found that compound and it was the only of about fifty compounds, it was the only one that was in all the individuals, like twenty six bear cats that they tested. It was in all individuals. And it's known to create this smell um through the mailor reaction. But I mean, nobody's toasting these bent wrongs in the forest. So Um, it's coming from something else in their urinary track or their digestive track.

And there's some bacteria that have been shown to actually create as a byproduct this two AP that makes that smell. And so they're they're only at this point theorizing that there's maybe some bacteria in the urine that's interacting and it's resulting in this two AP being produced and making them smell like like brown bones in the oven. Wow. You know, it might be a good little research project for you, Jim. Why do prong horns smell like freed to lake corn ship? I know I haven't heard that.

I've heard that. And who you run your hands through their hair and smell your hands? You think you've been eating fried olcornship. I'm looking forward to that smell real soon. It is a crazy thing. I ate some Maillard reacted mallards last night. Oh delicious. Okay, I got I got one. I got one more for a gym unless unless you got out more things you want to add. No, it's good.

Where are we at with um? You know, keep reading about COVID and white tails and the crazy rates of COVID and you know, sixties some percent of the white tailed deer sampled in let me clarify, sixties some percent of the white tailed deer sampled in Michigan. I remember, it's not that they had COVID, but they showed what the hell is it? They had exposure to the stars Kobe too virus that causes COVID. They didn't have the disease and the symptoms, but they had high end body levels.

The body levels. Where does that sit right now? There hasn't been a lot. I was just this earlier this week. I was in the um Fort work that the Association Fishing Wilife Agencies, which is all fifty wilife agencies and all Canadian provinces and territories like Yukon and Northwest Territories, and they have a Wildlife Health meeting and they had a lot to address in that Wildlife Health meeting, which I always attend because that's the place you can get

the latest information. And they weren't. They didn't have time to go into any detail. But the people from m U S d A and U S g S that are tracking us UM there's not a lot of new stuff since we talked in December about the fact, like you mentioned that these white tailed deer in the East UM are getting not only getting exposed to the stars Kobe two virus and having antibodies, but they're they're showing that they're being exposed to the actual UM variants that

are circulating in the human population. At that time, pretty obvious that they're getting it from humans. I thought it was coming from Doug Duran's urine. Yeah, yeah, there is a lot of updates. They're they're right right, and so so as a sample like the sample white tails two years ago over here at the beginning of the pandemic, and they had the the original version, and then they sample next year, they sample during this other area and they've got the delta version, and then the deer over

here have his omicron version later on. So they're getting them as the circulates through the human from really good like like what so it's still it definitely spilling over into the deer population. Now the concern is then that it circulates independently in the deer population and mutates as it does mutates and changes, and then they're they're worried

about it's spelling back into humans. And that was documented in one case in Ontario where some guy that picks up road kills, shows up with the version that's circulating in the deer population at that time. So that was a case where deer actually the guy caught it people, but it didn't cause any unusual sickness. It was just um,

he had a case of COVID. What's weird about that case is that mink are also susceptible, and mink farms have had to be depopulated because they've they've they've got the syrus Kobe two and make farm workers have caught it from the mink, those versions that are circulating in the mink. This guy they were pelting, like in Denmark and else where. They were pelting millions of mink or a should they were gassing millions of mink, and I thought it would lead to a real spike in in

like mink and muskrat fur prices. But apparently they pelted. They pelted tons of those. Man can actually flooded the markets with with COVID mink pelts. Interesting, the one guy that got COVID from white tailed deer from picking up road kills in Ontario, that version he got from deer, but it was actually a mink variant that was in dear and then into human weird just weird weird stuff. So if you went to this wild this health thing, did you hear about this big bad hog virus? Stay

tuned for that. Sean Weaver has been been a whistleblower about some big bad hog virus hog wild hog or domestic. Could you know? He said? He was saying to me and Cal, He's like, hey man, pay attention to this because I got you know, some disease. People are telling me this could turn into a huge deal. Yeah. I wish I knew that, because that's the spreading among hog populations on other continents. But there was some prediction. I see.

I shouldn't be saying this ship because I don't know. Listen, let me let me keep your eye on those Listen, I am talking. I don't have no idea what I'm talking about. I don't know, however, something about some hog thing that could just be insane. I shouldn't need the hogs, we know it. Yeah, I wish I knew that from Jim. Yeah, you need to have Sean Sean's d report. We need to have Sean's hard report, and Sean will come hit us with a hog report. What else you got Jim's

been a long time since we talked. Man, Yeah, I know. It's just good to be back. Good talk about fun stuff. Do you need anything? Is there anything I didn't that I didn't ask you that you needed to be asked about. I don't think so. Just my Instagram account. I got rookie numbers with Yeah, if you guys could go and help bolster Jim back up. But listen, you just shoot you, Jim. I was gonna say, shooting yourself at the foot. I don't know. You might just need to make a new

one that sticks to. I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but you might need to make a new one at just sticks to, like dear Biology, and not do what you think might And you know what, want you do this and just cave into the a I bought. No, No, here's an idea. I got an idea for you because I don't want That's what I do. I don't want you to cave into the a ibots. Why don't you start to pistol Jim. Okay, pistol Jim. Pistol Jim. And that's like you're shooting account. And then

you got your dear Biology account. Then you run these two accounts and see if the Pistol account blows up and never gets flagged and your Dear Biology account gets taken down, then it'll deepen the mystery. Yeah. I don't like that idea, don't know. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for deal accounts. I'm gonna hit the icon and go to the Instagram account. Okay, So help Jim out if we could. How many followers did you have when you report me? How many followers when

he stole your account? For a thousand? If you guys, just come on help. If you don't have an Instagram account, make one. Follow Jim. Follow Jim at Serving Nut not serving nuts served, Yeah, served nuts served like Dear Served Nut, and follow the Wild Turkey Doc. And that's all you need to do. Yep, yep in my website deer nut dot com Dear d W R. N Ut and you can get Deer to the Southwest there and get Jim's new books. Yeah, and that'll be out probably January February,

that Big Meal Deer and Black Tail Deer book. Did you follow him something? Oh? Yeah, I'm just looking at your kind of Now you have a picture of deer on ice floes. Yeah, using them to travel with three examples, that's insane. But did you see all the pictures ringing endorsement from the last one is the last one is Rudolph and Cornelia's had a nice flow. But there's one of a big white tail bucket looks like standing Yeah, bring it like Seth, like serving nut. Yeah, go to

serving nut. Get get Jim back up and run and so they can come and shut his countdown again. And then you'll have to go with that. I don't know. You have to think of some other thing that means dear gun nut buck nut. I might get buck nut right now that Bill sell to Jim later? What do this his accouch shutdown for not learning his last all right, Jim Heffelfinger. Eric, can you say where you work? Yeah, Arizona Game at fish do they get mad when you

come out on the shore. They like it because it's outreach. I think they're ambivalent. I mean, it's good information. That's not what I wanted to hear. It just they don't care. They do care. No, there are there are a lot of fans, of course, in the in the in the agency.

I was I was at a sandwich shop in Fort Worth last week and sitting down at the table, and some guy came with me and said, are you Jim Heffelfinger, Like, I feel like I'm near someone famous and introduced myself, shook my hand and he said, yeah, I'm a real fan of the Meat Eater and I really like when you're on there. I like your stuff, and I said he And then he said what are you doing in town? And so I thought he was another biologist at the meeting because that's usually who knows who I am. And

he wasn't He just living for Worth? And I said, well, how did you know who I was randomly here in the sandwich shop? And he said, with a big name tag on the lanyard. That's great man. All right, So here's what happened. We're gonna end the show. We're gonna do trivia. Karin's gonna work with you to build up. As stuff comes to mind, You'll continue to send us what's on your mind. We'll make a big stack of it.

And then there was enough stuff that's on your mind, you'll come back and we'll cover what's on your mind again. Sounds good? Oh, actually I have one more question. I should have put this before. Um. When I first met you, I just I knew you as like that hair hunter hair hunters you know, yeah jack jackrabbit, Mum, jack grabbit have like disposable you didn't have so many of them lose. Next, I had a Facebook page that was Jack Rabbit Jim, and Facebook shutting me down long time. They said they

and it was all about jack rabbit hunting. And they said jack Rabbit Gym not your real name, and so you need to send us a photo. I D a government issue jack rabbit gym is like not and and so I and so I didn't have an obviously didn't have an idea with jack Rabbit Gym on it. So they shut it down. And I was telling my director or pass director um that story because he knows about the jack rabbit camp I used to have, and he says, I can I can fix that. I can get you

a government issued idea. This is jack rabbit gym and my my Arizona game official. I d said jack Rabbit Jim Heffelfinger with my but it was too late. It was too late to say social media. Um, wow, that's hilarious. Go follow Jim. Question. The next year you said that the season and I think was closed because their numbers weren't crazy and not closed there, just their numbers were loose.

I just wanted to see what what the state. Yeah, they're they're coming back, but we've also had a horrible drought last year, and so we had this rabbit We had this rabbit virus that swept through it's New Mexico, Arizona, but then it went all the way up into somewhat into the Northwest and the Rocky Mountain States. Um, it really knocked him our cotton tail and blacktail jack rabbit, analope jack rabbit population down. And then the drought came after that, and so it was kind of a double whammy.

So they're building their their populations back up. Um, the season not closed because what little hunting occurs isn't impacting the population. But I'd say they're just building back. You guys, we're going you guys are going easy yet because there wasn't it wasn't worth the chase at the time. Well, we also I know a lot of people that jack rabbit hunt that said they were just laying off them for a while. And then we had this junior jack

rabbit camp. We had every year, and we didn't have it two years ago because of COVID, and then last year they just decided not to have it just because of the population. Do you want a bird squirrels? M So here's the deal I got. I know we're trying to wrap up. Let me tell this real quick. There's the National squirrel is the International or National Squirrel cook Off National happens in Arkansas. Apparently we gotta kid we got.

We're trying to work on this. They were gonna do it in Tennessee, but they got run out by the animal rights people. So Yanni's got Yann he's been working with the people. They got a whole venue. We want to have a giant blowout squirreld world. But I want to get the guy, the the guy that actually does it in Arkansas involved. We want to have the most hugest squirrel cook off blowout in Tennessee. I think that's Joe Wilson in Arkansas. I'm not positive play. I don't know.

It's because the Tennessee Boys said they've been reaching out to the Arkansas Boys, and the Arkansas Boys haven't been returning communications. No, Well, if they don't want to do it. They don't want to do it. I mean, I don't know, but um does a bird? Squirrels are big, then bring some a birds and end of the competition. That cooked there. They don't want to do it. I thought that they would run the whole program, the Arkansas boys. I don't.

I'm just saying that previously already there's before we ever got involved, they Tennessee had tried to make communications with the people that have been running that one in Arkansas, and they've been having difficulties getting a hold of them. That's all. Don't figure it out. Yeah, if if we do it, you'll come up. Yeah, oh yeah, that would be awesome. You know, those kipap squirrels are black a birds, pretty cool. They look really neat. They've got reddish stripe

on their back. They looked like their sides of cotton tails. I like to go down and hunt a couple. Do that. I'd like to do it. Did you know what? I just transferred all my old Garmen way points. I had to call some of the on X figured out because on that good that kind of stuff. I have bazillions of old way points from like an old GPS. Yeah, are around my Montana six hundred way back, and I was like, I wanted to get him onto on X, which is exceedingly easy to do, but it was like

the most baffling. I was looking at it like mass tam forever to enter all these cordants. So I called it one on X, like no, just no, just do this, this this over the phone. I got it all loaded up. When I was going through them all, I got a lot of like I hit a lot of way points to say Abert. It was like Abert one, Abert two, Abert three down in Mats Just what's that down Mats No, in New Mexico. And it was I was walking around, hitting and making way points every time I saw Abert. Squirrel.

So I'm sitting on hot intel now that I thought was just lost to whatever. But I know specific trees. Yeah. I hung out with one of those pelts for your squirrel collection too, when we gave those the guy Zucker. Yeah, well we should get get one of those forms. Yeah, alright, squirrel cook off man. Now you know what, maybe you could do like a lecture on squirrel biology down there. You could do that would be interesting. It's gonna be so cool, man. But we should bring in our squirrel

to ye. My office is right down the hall from his. Before he went to the University of Wyom and I saw. I knew him for more than ten years. One of my favorite people in the world. Oh he's awesome. He know, he's helped me out. Speaking of interesting vaculums, remember the squirrels baculum, Oh, barbed corkscrew, corkscrew. There's a dirty limerick about that that I'll not tell. Don't even don't tell the plush line, don't nothing. Remember this is family friendly.

You know. There's actually some theories that some of those things, a vacuum like that might actually pull the sperm plug from the previous mail out we covered that. Oh did you well? Your body covered that? Yeah? Fast. He gave you a little shit as I remember. He's good. He was good. Where'd he go? He went the University Wyomen. He's the dean of the hob School, so he's over Monteth and not so much Coffin because he's U s g S. But Monteth is in the program, so he's

gonna put all those guys on squirrel research. Al right, probably no, I want to all the squirrel migration corridors. John has done a ton of other research. You know, he's a squirrel guy, my son. I tell my son about him, and he says, so do they call him the nutty professor? All right, thanks for coming on, man, Yeah. Yeah, and we'll see a squirrel cook off. Yeah, sure, World Squirrel cook Off.