This is a me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to us, you can't predict anything presented by First Light creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear. For every hunt, First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, Phil Turn the Machinity. I got a I got a medical hot tip that I want to share. Go Ahead is already on its on. So years ago I had a very convoluted health problem that had like a lot of
steps to it. Reboard like will this happened? And I ate that you know? And then this happened? And I got sick of telling when you go to the doctor, how everybody wants you to tell happened, And then they don't talk, and then another person comes in and you got to tell the story again. The other day I had to take my kids down. It was a very convoluted story about who had strap win and what happened to them, okay, and then what happened after that, and
then what happened after that. So the first person that comes into the like and I knew they weren't the person. They're the person that weighs your kid and she said, so tell me what's going on? And I said, it's a long, complicated story. Can I just tell the next person? Yeah? So my whole life, I've been doing that, not knowing that you could just skip the part. You know what
I'm saying. It's like, yeah, it's like being like hitting zero with a person manager yas, I'm like, there's no point in me telling you all this because I get someone else is gonna come in the door and they're not gonna know. Yeah, that's smart, and you're not gonna do anything about it. Why do I have to tell you? You don't the person way and your kid just has a fetish for the stories red It's like, doesn't go beyond that, Like, oh I heard a good one today,
a twenty two pounder. Can I tell a funny doctor visit story? Please? It's from our buddy Jake. Did he tell you this already? Nobody know he's got the He's got the West Nile, West Nile. Yeah, he's on he's on the man. Now. I think he's back. He's back hunting. But as they were trying, where did he Mississippi? When you told me that, I feared he had to be somewhere because it's like the wintertime here. Okay, Yeah, So he's going through the process trying to figure that out,
probably retelling his story over and over. Oh yeah. Finally gets to the infectious disease doctor and uh. He sends me a text says, the infectious disease doctor just asked me if I had if I've had contact with any wild animals over the past thirty days. I listed Bobcat's, mountain lions, elk, wild pigs, coyotes, ducks, and deer. Her response, you're weird. Had a very similar conversation with the Montana
State Game Harvest Survey the volunteer lady who called me yesterday. Yeah, She's like, upland birds and I was like, well, yeah, but like you want to be more specific because she's like, well what region. I'm like all of them, you know, and it's like, well, how many an eat? And then she's like, well, what do you do with this? We had an equally long conversation about cooking various birds, what I do with them, and at the end she's like, well,
thank you so much. This has been great, awesome because most people are like, didn't make it out, She's like, hey, can I just piggyback on that. I got a lovely call from our local fishing game office the other day doing like a postseason survey, and we had a lovely conversation and he was like so thankful for taking time to answer his questions. And I asked him, like if that was rare and apparently a lot of people are really mean and hang up right in their faces, and yeah,
so if you're no, he wasn't hitting on me. But if your local fishing game calls to add you know, it's not like they're trying to find out uh right, like like secrety stuff that you've done right exactly, Like it's not like they're not like if you didn't poach creature, like you've got nothing to hide, Like that individual's not trying to find out your hunting spot. Like they are just taking dad and information and collating that and passing
that along to you know, volunteers. To keep in mind too, that when you buy a license, you agree legally that you would escort someone to the kill site. If asked, I didn't, like, you don't use surrender your right to have it be a secret. We so, uh the um lady. I was speaking too. She's like, well, you drew this antelope tag in this region. I'm like yep. She's like, were you successful? I said yep, So how many days? I said? I was probably out there six days. It's like, okay,
and what region did you harvest the animal in? Oh? She was trying to catch. It's like the one on the tag. They are just playing a sting Join a Day by Megan Baker born in Michigan. Yeah, so's Megan Denin. I just got married. I just got married. To name your email, still, says Megan Baker. I know, I know. Did you did you debate I'm changing this right here? Did you debate maybe not taking his name? You know?
I didn't think it would be that hard until now that I switched it, and I went from a really basic English name that nobody mispronounces to something that everybody mispronounces. So it's definitely been a learning curve. How's it spelled? D E N E A n oh? Yeah? Yeah. Did he you think if you'd have said that you weren't going to change it? What he'd have called off the whole wedding? No, because at first I was like, I just I don't really don't know if I want to
change it. And he's like, is this some weird feminist thing. It's like, no, it just seems like a pain in the butt. Yeah, man, I've told it. Like, that's what my wife did to me. Is she she said the weird feminist thing? No, no, no, no, she laid out the pain thing. She said, well, I'm gonna change it when my passport expires because I got to renew it anyway, and I'll just change my name then. So I was like, oh, okay, so in eight years when my passport expires then well
and then that happened and still has changing name. Yeah, I should have take in her advice. So now, like I'll say, um, I'll say the Ronnell's are coming in Katie too, because yeah, because there's no use dropping that. That's great. No, keep that one right in my back pocket. And I don't think it stings at all. You are, uh you're the first airport biologist we've ever had on the show. Yeah. Yeah, um. So as an airport biologist, my job is to reduce damaging wildlife strikes with aircraft.
That's pretty much all of it. Keep planes from hitting critters. Yes, we had a trivia question one day. God, I can't remember the answer and I can't remember if I got it right. I don't think I got it right. I think it was like, what is the most common Yeah, animal, No, he didn't say bird, he said animal. What's the most common animal that a that an airplane runs into? Yeah? I think it was a morning dove. I think I got that right now. I think I put down like
crows or Canada geese or something like that. It's morning doves. Yeah, they're Yeah, they're just everywhere. I think they're just across North America, So they're just pretty common. Do you do a lot of that? Um, we're gonna dig way into your we gotta do some other stuff first, but we're gonna dig a way into your occupation. But do you do um, what do you call it? Like? Do you do any lethal control? That's kind of last resort, but
it does happen? Does that happen? And then real quick, what's the weirdest thing you've ever heard of a plane? Has a plane ever hit a turtle? I'm sure that has. Um the weirdest strikes that we have are there was a deer that was struck but at thirty thousand feet. So yeah, so that was that was a real stumper.
So we work with the Smithsonian and when they ran the DNA analysis on the strike, it was deer and they called the pilot and he's like, no, I heard it, like I know it hit at thirty thousand agl and of ground levels a good one. Yeah, And so someone's got like, that's what the Chinese are doing with that balloon deer into plane pads. I can't believe you guys went there because my mind is at right now that this fall. I'm gonna be Mark will be like where you sitting, I'll be like, I'm on the oak flat
about twenty two agl on the ground. You can be like I saw it from six foot two. Yeah. It happened around Christmas time and so everyone kind of joked that, you know, Santa Claus was just doing his last rounds. So then they took some more of the strike. Um, we call it snarge. So snargees that's no, it's all now, and I think I'm looking at it. Yeah, no, I don't believe two things you told me. So snarge is
the remains of a bird on an aircraft. So that would be blood, tissue, and feathers, and so when they collect the snarge off the aircraft. So imagine when you were driving and you hit a bog against splats on your windshield. When that's a bird on an airplane, that is snarche. You want a little history on that. Sure, In nineteen sixty, Lockheed L one eight eight electric airplane
nose dived into Boston Harbor, killing sixty two people. As investigators sorted through the rubble, they kept finding globs of what appeared to be black feathers. Such material came to be known snarge. There I go, you know, we all do a far amount of flying, and I'm definitely gonna be talking to my seat made about that. Hey wings
a little dirty out there. I think that's snarge. But yeah, to conclude that story, though they did find it, they did more DNA analysis, took some other samples and found out it was a vulture. So most likely a vulture had been eating maybe on a deer carcass. And so then when it splatted, they actually hit pick up the DNA from the stomach. But could that thing be that high? How high? Thirty thousand? Yeah, So when birds migrate, they
migrate really high, and a lot of people don't realize that. Um. So when you're migrating from North America, South America, Europe to Africa. Um, they're not flying you know where we can see them. They're flying as high as they can, just like how we when we fly, you know, cross continents and stuff, we try to fly as high as we can to shorten the distance and looking for the
gray air currents. Ruple's Vulture is the bird that claims the highest air strike ever recorded at thirty seven thousand, one h a gl Well, no, because no, she's only she's down to one line now because the other two lives weren't lies. She was off by how many feet? Well, that was just different, right right? That is wild man. Yeah. They also have fish strikes too, So a lot of
times like your offsprey, bald eagle, stuff like that. Either they'll get you know, get struck and same thing, the DNA will be picked up by the fish, or they'll just drop a fish because they're scared of the aircraft and splat a fish on your wind shield. Man, does every strike get a DNA test? Um? So, basically, when when your aircraft lands, maintenance crews are checking out the aircraft. If they see us like a snarge, they do collect it. We work so snarge is uh, it can't be singular
like there can be a snarge. Yeah, because my favorite smear of SNAr. Yeah. So when we when we collect all that information, we have a partnership with Smithonia Feather Lab and when we send in all this material, they can use their archives of all the carcasses and stuff they have, so they'll do feather ID so they can actually compare if there's like a feather, compare with the feather that's in the archive. Then they can do DNA analysis and then they also do microscopic analysis as well.
It might hear. We got to cover a couple of things. But my next question when we come back, it's gonna be this. I'm not trying to be I'm not trying to be like a like a smart ass, but after a strike has occurred, it brings up the question of I don't want to say who cares? But you know what I mean, why Like if a strike occurs, why is it important to know what? Yeah, So as an airport biologist, that information is really crucial for us because
it'll tell us what do we need to manage. For so, if we're hitting a lot of water fowl, then we know that. We look at the habitat and we'll go, oh, there's a lot. Maybe there's a lot of water on an airfield or near the airfield, and can we manage that? Can we change that habitat or modify it to keep these waterfowl out? So we knowing what we hit is going to help us manage the air feel better. Like you see a spike in some type of strike and you gotta be okay, what are these what are these
doing hanging out here? So bad? Uh, you're not going anywhere? Can you can you alter your flight paths though, like like can that be a solution versus like altering a
wetland like certain times a year? Right, you have different migratory species moving in, they fly at certain altitudes or certain times of the day typically, and you can suggest that the seven thirty sevens go yeah, so that fun word AGL A can so um seventy percent of our birth strikes will hop in below seven hundred AGL and so that is within that air fills your takeoff and landing areas. So it's really hard to say, okay, well just don't take off this direction because that's that's just
where the runway is. You can't really change the direction. Um. So yeah, when you get a little farther out, we can say, you know, we'll let Tower know. Um, and the pilots will talk to each other too, like, hey, I see a group of docks over here, there's a flower gastline. Yeah. Yeah, they'll talk to each other and um, sometimes I'll even let them. Now, I'll call Tower and be like, hey, you know, I'm five miles out, I see a you know, flock a geese fly and over
and they'll roll out their pilots. Now, no, kid, all right, hang tight, you're gonna tell us a moose story later. Yes, we were talking about the other day. I was saying, I was reading a book these my you know, we're gonna start a book club. Spencer's working on it all right. People have been asking for that for a long start. A monthly book club. Cool, and I think we're gonna we're gonna do the book club. Will drop the book club on this feed. Can we call it Oprah's book Club?
But better so, tell me how it's gonna work. Well, we're working out the details. I think if you become like a book club member, will probably just mail you the books. But I guess how does it become part of the podcast feed? Well, because then everybody reads the book. I've never been in the book club my whole life. Oh, so everybody, all of us would just come back in after we read said book, discussed what we would say this for this week's book, we're gonna do um, maybe
I would maybe we'd make it both. Uh, the memoir of Um Human Row Human Row who lived with the Blackfeet starting around eighteen ten. And then then there's a so his book was called a Rising Woolf or something like that. Then there's another book called My Life as an Indian, which is Charles Willard Shoals who live with the Blackfeet, kind of like right after he did. And then these books are collected together. So it's just this portrait of these it's this like basically amateur ethnography by
two individuals who lived in hunted with the Blackfeet. We would read that, everybody would read it. So you're at home, you're in the book, you're in the book circle. You read the book, and then after some amount of time, we have a discussion. We have a one hour discussion of the book where you'd be like, oh, I like that part. Where right? And that's the book club and then we have like little titillating facts about the book that you might not know. We can maybe even have
some authors join us. We talked about that would be great that the book club would end with, well, these people I just mentioned are dead, but yes, that would be the ideal situations you do living authors, Like let's say we did coming into the country and we somehow manage you get John McPhee to come in. Oh, but I'd read that one. Um again, I think he might be like way up there, maybe not alive. There used to be a radio station did a show called dead
or Alive. I think he's I think they name a name and then you have to guess whether they're dead or alive. He's dead. I think he's alive. He should be. Yeah, he made a different one. I mean, I don't. I don't mean mean macab content for the eventual podcast we
should cut. So yeah, point being, point being. I My new favorite book is This is Human Rose Story as told to the Shul's character In it, he names the he names the blackfeet word for moose, as he understood it to be six sis, I'm not pronouncing it right. When he later learned the language, and he learned it very well. Their word for moose was they didn't have many of them. They're out on the plane, so they're east of the Rockies. Their word for moose was black
going out of sight. And I mentioned this on the podcast a couple of episodes ago, and I said, I wonder if our word means anything like our word, Like, what does our word for moose mean? A guy brought it in and he says, our word for moose is derived from the Eastern Abanaki word mos. However that's pronounced or there's an eric Gansit word that's m o s or m o o s u variously translated. It's a long bill up, isn't it? Phil? Phil? He he's messing
with the knobs and stuff. He's so lost. That's his job. Bro, Guess what moose means when you say moose, Hey, I saw a moose. Guess what you're saying. I saw a twig eater. I saw he who strips off leaves and bark. Well, I mean the word moose exists in German, right, like moose's elk like deer. So yeah, so I find it very interesting that we're like, oh, it had to come from the Native Americans und around. I find it very maybe wrong. You sure about that? Yeah? Yeah, damn it.
Did you check into that? Grin Nope? I well, Phil, I want you to research it, and if it makes me look bad, cut it out. I got up. I want to believe that in these Blackfoot camps with these dudes, that the entire time that they were present, the black Feet were like Noah, remember like guy's media, so be careful what you say around them. Yeah, it is. It's like I was trying to explain to someone. Well, I
was talking to Clay Nucombe about reading. Right, you get into so you're reading journals of Euro Americans who spent time with tribes. Invariably they were not understanding, they were misunderstanding. People were not telling them things, sometimes just messing with them. Yeah, having fun with them, not telling them things that they didn't want them to know. Whatever. Like you're with someone,
you're very suspicious of them, you're suspicious of other motives. Right. However, each of these chronicles, each of these individuals that spent time with Indigenous Americans and like a precor in early contact times. Every one of them had biases, no doubt every one of them was getting some sort of incomplete picture. However, taken as a whole, it still is a window into It's like a snapshot of a culture in a life, right, Like you know that it's not all wrong, right, absolutely,
But I'm a sucker for those books. But I always read those books with some level of skepticism, being when someone you have someone over for dinner and you portray to them how shit goes in your family and everything, and then they walk on and be like, here's how shit is in that household. Right, they make a big meal, they put out cheese and crackers every time. Yeah, And you're like, no, we actually never done that. I was doing time. I've ever done that, you know, because you
were coming over. Yeah I heard you like cheese crackers. I don't know, I hate that ship whatever. So but anyways, they're great books. Oh it gets way more complicated too, because like think of like the true things that had to have seemed so like fancifully drawn up, like the number of bison on the plane, right, like people coming back and saying like, yeah, this is how it is people had to have a real level of skepticism. I'm still a defender of the books. If they're super cool.
I haven't your stomping grounds, dude. Every place he talks about in those books, you'd be like, Oh, I've been there, I've been there, I've been there. I'm man, I'll read them. Sign me up for the book club. They get to a creek and they get to drainage and I found the drainage. I'm a map. We don't call it what
they called it. They get to a drainage that flows into the Missouri and they said that that creek is called it crushed to them because some people were gathering clay blow a high cut bank and the cut bank collapsed and killed them. And that cup, that creek's name is it crushed them. That's cool. Yeah, Yeah, It's not like Dickens Creek. The old man Dickins got crushed by some he lived there. Yeah. Uh man. A lot of
feedback on cadavers people. When we had Jonathan Reisman, doctor Jonathan Risman on the lung King, which is a little inside joke about the liver King. Knows the outside joke about the liver King. He had a lot to say about cadavers, and my goodness, makes you seem like everybody that listens has cadaver experience. Yeah, and these emails especially
are wild, this person was saying. Someone wrote in in regards to a recent show where the Meat Eater crew was surprised about mobile labs on our roads carrying bodies. I worked a certain government agency's forensic laboratory. I was surprised to find out that we would receive human body parts via ups and FedEx. He worked with a woman that was in charge of examining human heads involved in homicide, and she would put the heads in a crock pot to get the skin and muscle off, to check the
skulls for injuries. She went into you better mark that crock pot. She went into Walmart. Listen, are you ready for this? She went into Walmart and put her head into various crock pots to find the one that was going to work best for her application. Think about that. It's a very normal sight at Walmart. I don't think anyone a coworker taking like profile pictures. Make sure your
chins in there. We used to joke about going to like a Walmart buying like everything you'd ever need if you just murdered somebody like latex gloves, plastic sheeting, duct tape like whatever, like, yeah, what point with some of goal at a minute? All I am out here? What's going on? Yeah? And then the last thing is a crock pot that you've been going like to see if it fits your head or not. I like how Nicholas
puts in there a second to last sentences. I'm not sure you wanted this information, but there it is, Nicholas, You don't know. Steve very well keep sending that stuff in. Here's another really interesting one about the cadaver business. I was asking doctor Reisman if he because he spent a lot of time with his cadaver in medical school, and I said, what did you wind up knowing about the person? Now? When I had cadaver bone in my jaw, I asked if what I could find out about whose bone it was?
And they said, they can tell you whose bone it is. So I was spitting out a little hunks with some guy for two weeks, no idea who he was. He's all over this studio. I mean, I say, right here, as the little bone hunks would come up out of that hole. My job. He says this, this is very interesting. University of Oklahoma. You were given so this is a medical school anatomy Okay. You were given a seat assignment in the lecture hall and what appeared to be a
random name on a sticker. About six to eight other classmates had the same sticker with the same name. We soon found out the name on the sticker was the person we would be dissecting in anatomy lab in a few weeks, one hundred and sixty students, twenty different names on the stickers. Later that week, we were all bust to a ballroom you'll state this cow at the Cowboy Hall of Fame to sit with the family of the
person whose name was on your sticker. This was called the donor Lunch and was a way to show the person you were dissecting was really a person. I sat with the son and daughter in law of my cadaver. There were pictures of her on the table, and they brought photo albums to show us her through the years. They discussed injury she had sustained through her life, which we correlated with later in anatomy lab. Broken leg here
scar their new hip. Here. The only rules we could not contact the families later with any information about what we found in the lab. All the remains were cremated and scattered on school grounds. Unreal, Yeah, right, unreal that I mean, yeah, it'd be an interesting lunch to sit down too. Obviously, if you sit there as yourself, why you listen to this show? That's why right there? Think you're getting that on Maury Povich. No, not not even this American Life good stuff, man, No, that causes you
to think a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I would have gone a little bit deeper and said exactly why you know, I mean, obviously he says, just so you know that
it's jokes man, It's referenced everywhere. But like the yeah, just gave it, just didn't say anything, but he expressed facially he doesn't think that that's why there might be one little bitty reason why the you know, the origins like the medical educational system, right, like body theft, stealing bodies in order to be able to research because there
are so many taboos around, like dissecting a human. It's amazing to think that that existed within the same profession that now you can sit down with a family of people that donate anybody. H that's wild, real weird. Um, I was gonna say something that I should say. Here's another one. I'm I was gonna talk about like a thing. I just realized about a good grave Robin strategy that I learned reading a book that I was just reading.
But you shouldn't be doing that. No, but it does does make us wonder if our guest Megan used to be Baker Denne will ever get some snarge off of vulture that had dined on a human, so to be a human strike at thirty sound agl um. I think if that happens, it's usually because the person who collected the stars didn't use gloves. Yeah, I am. Here's the more on this same subject. Not me. When I say I am, I'm the listener. This is the listener talking.
I am a student working on my Doctor of Chiropractic degree. Is that an actual can you get it? Is that an actual doctor? Either way, it doesn't matter. I trust the person who's in the program and studying and writing into this lovely show. Yeah, he opercased d as such. I have dissected close to half a dozen human cadavers from head to toe in the last year. In my experience, the vast majority of cadavers are just as doctor Reissman was saying, out of shape and full of large fat deposits.
That being said, oh, does this get any better? Yes? Oh, I mean said he encourages everybody to donate your body. Remember, like Spencer was like, I'm sure that the only people who donate their bodies are are yeah, young in vain and want their eight pack to be shown off when they're dead. Ye there Yeah, where He's like, I'm so good looking. I hope they dissect my body and find out just how good looking I am. That was Spencer's thought. This,
this art, this letter does get great. For someone who's fascinated by the inner workings of the human machine, as I am, human cadavers are a gift. No, here's where it gets good. The unsettling part for me, I say this at risk of sounding like a psychopath, is the hunger that comes along with dissecting. Ah, as well as many of my classmates, have all experienced the same phenomenon. After about a half hour of dissecting skeletal muscle, one
tends to get hit with a severe hunger. At first, I thought and hoped that it was a chemical reaction with the formal behind and other preservatives that causes this to happen. But after asking several of my professors and the lab managers themselves, I have learned that it is an instinctual response to seeing meat. Yeah, next time you're at the old Cairo fractor. I'm not saying who this guy is. I just wanted you know, he might be
sitting there being like loins. That is interesting. Eventually, it's when he's back there. Yeah, But have you ever felt this phenomenon when you're skidding and breaking down an elk? And absolutely? Oh yeah, yeah, I like some things like dear mule deer elk, stuff like that. I'm like, I find it's like when I'm cutting it up, it's very appetizing. But I don't find myself like insatiately hungry, a severe hunger. Yeah no, no, I don't find myself insatiably hungry. Thirty
minutes later. He might be a psychic because I feel like we've got it a lot of stuff together, butchered a lot of stuff in the field together. Cal you too, I can't remember any time we're like thirty minutes in either of you are like my god, am I hungry. All of a sudden, I had no, yeah, because I think we got stuff to do, right, like clocks ticking. Typically he's describing maybe it's I think it's like psychopath the federal be I may want to pay attention to
this one. You know, when I'm collecting snarge, I instantly have a craving for chicken wings. No you don't, Okay, Well, there's one more about this. Oh, this is something that caldies know about. Just in case this is a strange behavior. This has nothing to do with cadavers. This guy's an electrical lineman for a local public power district. They install and repair electrical poles and utility structures. His crew will often work in areas far from restrooms, and especially after storms.
It isn't uncommon for him to work twenty four hours straight to repair damage to electrical poles. Because it is They often pack several meals worth of food and the haul around drinking water those large orange igloo drink coolers. They also will haul a green drink cooler for the purpose of housing their number two, since they are often far from a restroom but still too close to houses to do their business. When they're done with the cooler, they toss it into the trash. This is a note
for cow it's a little wasteful. It is right when Cal's doing all of his dumpster diving, guys staying watch out for the green coolers. That's good info than it is. They should find something else wanted. It's going to contractor bag. But I was just gonna say that is pretty trying to keep it. We already covered the whole thing. He could they sell those fancy five gallon buckets that you could just take a bag out of, And why they wanted to keep it warm. Well, I think it's right.
It's you're not gonna have a ruptured bag as you're jostling around stuff in the track to be an insulated container you're trying to keep No, I think you're gonna trap in the smell. But you're also not gonna have liquids escaping, you know, because it's a fortified vessel. Cal sympathizes with him. Well, I understand, for sure, but I'd rather I'd be more for Lynne just doing being able to have carte blanche to do their deed on the side of the road. Yeah, dig a little cat hole
or whatever exactly. Yep uh. Speaking of cat holes, see that good one. Good one. This is another one that the cow will appreciate. Some women. This is a strange story. Two women in Alabama got in all kinds. They got decurdy, then they actually got roughed up by the police, which I don't know if this is true or not. This is the kind of thing Crine should have called them and talked to them. Well, their lawyers put out statements and there's some video footage out there showing them get
roughed up. I mean roughed up is the bruises. That's all kind of like up to interpretation. They were feeding cats in their neighborhood and what Tumpka What Tumpka Alabama, and the guy points out and the regional Native American language rumbling Water Alabama. They've been feeding lots of house cats, which is illegal, feeding stray house cats, but they would feed them to lure them in and catch them and
then fix them. M So it's like letter the law of spirit of the law not supposed to feed stray cats, but they're catching them and fixing them. They've been warned and warned, and they felt that they had the moral high ground and then they got coughed and stuffed. I think five year old and a sixty one year old should point out that we don't want our a bunch of people writing in and being like, oh, it's not illegal to feed straight cat. This is probably like a
municipal or county ordinance that they're violating. Yeah, people over sixty years of age, Like, you're you're not gonna fix those people either. They're gonna do whatever they want. Um, but it is never a good idea to feed a bunch of stray cats. What if you're fixing them trying to solve the stray cat the Uh, the kiddies aren't having sex with birds to death, they're eating them. So yeah, I'm with you. He can be, he can be as fixed as you want. We're still gonna go kill like
three birds a day. Yeah, I was talking about we were talking recently about a Bob Kat getting hit by a train. This is the last thing, Megan, Bobcat getting hit by a train, and I was talking about how why you know, how does that happen? Um? And a guy from the railroad. Uh, he calls himself a train track station biologist. No, no, no, that that was my little topic yeah, oh no, just like as a transition into talking about good transition. Here's what they find happens.
Stuff gets between the tracks, between the rails, and for whatever reason, it's impulse when the train comes, it's impulses to like the Bob bobcat for instance, its impulse will be to turn from the train, not jump the rails, but just go down. He's like he's like consciously staying within the line. Yeah, like like he's he's They they they feel corralled by the corralled by the rails, and so they just take off, Yeah, something like it. Yeah, that's wild, um, the earl he says this about them.
They then tend to stretch out and try to jump the rail once the locomotives are on top of them, so they'll get overtaken and they try to bail out from under the thing. They're only saving gray seems to be if they come upon a grade crossing at that point, they will veer off to the side. He said, I've seen this in everything from raccoons to cattle. Oh, it's sad. Possums get up on the rail and run down the rail. That's terrible, man, that's sad. I think it's a natural
instinct for animals to follow lines. So when we I've trapped like you know, ducks and stuff, and we have confusion traps where it's like a funnel that they go into these traps and then they're gonna hit the edge of the cage and it'll funnel around and they'll just keep following that line and they'll never actually just like the opens wide open, but because they follow that line.
And the same thing when we're managing moves up in Alaska, we can get them up on a fence line and they'll follow that line and something about following the lines. So your trap they could get out like the duck one, but there keyboard do yeah, but most of them will just keep doing this figure eight because they just follow the line. Really, that makes for inexpensive trapping materials. Right there, you get a rope. So what was how did you get into your How did you get into your business
in your line of work? Yeah, so I went to Michigan Tech University up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I got a degree in wildlife management. Like every other person, I wanted to work for the state and went to a conference and somebody was given a talk on wildlife damage management from Wildlife Services and I was like, oh, that sounds fascinating. He happened to be the state director out of Michigan, so I went to his office a few
weeks later and he said. I was in his office and he's like, oh, there was a seasonal position that just opened in Alaska. He printed it off and said, here you go. And I'm from the cornfields of Michigan. I never have left Michigan before at that moment, and I was like, I'm never moving to Alaska so far away from home. So you were damned close to ly even by the time you go up to Michigan Tech. Yeah, because you had that big ass lake you'd had, Yeah, yeah,
exactly cross the ice. Yeah, my parents said, was the forest I could get away from home with still paying state college? Yea, um, so you know, naturally, six months later I was in Alaska. So after I graduated, I ended up doing a seasonal position up in Kotsabue, Alaska for Wildlife Services. Part of being an airport biologist is
a lot of surveys and creating management plans. So my position was working in Kotzebue, Alaska, and I was up there for six months just doing surveys on wildlife and but related to an airport or not really started right out in the airport business. Yeah, I got you. So just doing surveys um you just trying to see where animals are moving, their behaviors, stuff like that, and it was It's one of the greatest experience of my life. Just the cultural experience is just getting to live in
that native village. You know, it's way up it's remote, like I think the closest row systems like five hundred miles away, and it was a really really great experience. And then the wildlife up there was really interesting. So some of like the weird things that can happen up there on an airport are like muskox. So you guys
might be familiar with the muskox like defense circle. So imagine you have a group of muskox and they get on your airfield and you try to you know, harass them off, and they just stop and they create that defense circle and they're on your runway and it's like really difficult to get them off. So then you got to cancel flights, Yeah, exactly, So it'll definitely delay some stuff.
I know, my airfields. Like right after I left, they actually had a caribou migration go through and it like disrupted the airfield because just thousands of cariboos were walking across and you can't. They don't fence the airfield there, some do, so it's just part of that management plan. Some airfields, you know, they'll have eight foot because why I tell dear, can't jump over eight feet? Sometimes they
don't haven't. Could be a funding issue, could just be they might not think it's important until you know, they get a strike with a cariboo or something. They'll learn pretty quick. And with those muskox that's gonna be you know, you know what we didn't, what we had, we weren't talking about. But it just we keep not talking about it. And it got so long ago? Was it? They just Alaska had their first um the first person ever killed by a musk Ox, right reported first reported person a
trooper was he stay a trooper? Let me pull that back up. I actually did not hear about this. This is a shocking. Well, someone rolled in. They had just they were trying to get some kind of ATF permit or something. I think he had just someone rolled in, Like yeah, man, that guy. I was with the guy an hour before. He was doing some kind of filling out some form or checking my ID for a form. The guy went home. There was a musk ox harass and his dogs. Maybe he had sled dogs and uh
they yep. Officer with officer with Alaska State Troopers killed by muskoks while trying to scare away a pack of wild animals outside his house stomped him and gored him to death. Whoa. He was trying to scare away a group of muskoks from near a dog kennel at his home when one of the animals attacked him. He was declared dead at the scene. Horrible, isn't that's very rare? I thought, I remember seeing that it was the first.
No one, I'm sure it's happened, right, But in terms of first, but with muskoks on the air, if you got a bunch of muskaks or a bunch of caribou out there, I mean, there's got to be a little bit of an element of sort of public perception, like you don't just you can't just run out and start shooting at him. Probably no, on top of you wouldn't want to shoot something like that because they're also a large animal, because now you're delaying time trying to get
that animal off too, so you created more problems. Yeah, exactly, so you're just trying to harass him off, get him off there? What Why was that a temporary position? So that was just temporary so they Wildlife Hazard Management Plan only has to be renewed every couple of years. So I was just doing surveys for this plan. So it was just a written up plan and it's just recommendations.
So we do these surveys and then we'll be able to be like, hey, you know this particular part of your air fields a hot spot, Maybe you might want to change something around that area. And then what have you heard of getting run over by planes up there? Oh? Gosh, just about everything. I mean, ay, we're like you're talking cotso Beyer just in Alaska in general. Yeah, like like Cotsaby for instance, what's a typical strike up there? It's not a morning dove. Um, So you have ptarmigan up there,
and I remember they had ptarmigan issues. Honestly, it was pretty low strikes up there, because I mean, there's just not a whole lot that I know. They had to remove a seal off the runway after I had left as well. Really, yeah, seal on the runway? Was that in your management plan? Actually? No, so the like we flew this person up here, did a whole management plan, she leaves in and here's a seal. No mention of that in the management plan? Yeah, yeah, I know, I remember.
They're really easy to do though. You just take a red ball and you bounce it down the runway and they follow it right off. You know, do you remember? I think that the most this has to be the most famous bird strike is the Miracle on the Hudson Captain Sully. Yep, they hit what they had a flock of candy geese. How many? I don't know the exact flock size, but I know it took out some of their engines and that's why they couldn't couldn't get back
to the airfield and time like a bunch of geese. Yeah, it was a flock. Yeah, so imagine that flying v going across. That's what I'm curious about because movies make it seemed like a bird at any time can take down a giant plane. How fragile are the planes? Like? What's like a concerning bird strike? What has to have on. I think it's just like any you know, when you hit something with your car as well, like something that could just splatter off some things that could actually cause damage,
depends on how it got hit. But I know, you know, with technology and stuff, they're testing more and more on how to like, you know, toughen up these aircraft. So I know a lot of agencies that are, you know, building engines. They use like frozen turkeys and frozen chickens. They'll toss them into an engine to see how well they handle the impact. You know, what they ought to do, You ought to tell them this thought out. I bet they do, Steve well, then wouldn't be frozen, she said,
She just said that they buy frozen ones. She just stood, buy frozen. I mean you can ask the because if you throw a rosen turkey there, man, yeah, you might as well throw a rock in there. Yeah. Yeah, what about honing the wing tip to a razor's edge, slice them so you're just slice them through the sky. Well that's like if you run into them at that at an angle where they're sliceable, you know, yeah, because they may Yeah, well I would elsewhere. What if it's not
the way that they're hitting. Well, I don't think the geese are going to like t bone a seven thirty seven. Well wasn't it? Did you? Did you say to me that if there is a strike that occurs, depending upon like how far the aircraft is from the runway, uh, the plane actually needs to turn back around. A lot of strikes people don't even like the pilots won't even realize that happened. Okay, Um, so that's a lot of times. That's why a lot of times they don't realize that
happened until they're doing their maintenance checks. I'm like, oh, hey, obviously if it goes through an engine, you know, they might feel it. They may smell it. I know, pilots say they can smell when a bird gets ingested. Lo'll get like a burnt bird smell. Um. So yeah, I just kind of he'd be hungry, I'll get But like you know, like JFK, LaGuardia, places like that, I would imagine like lots of pigeon strikes, and that's like that's a light bird. It's not gonna bring down a plane, right. Yeah.
If there's one thing I learned from my travels is every airfield they got a runway, they got taxi ways. Like there's things that are very standard in an airfield, but when it comes to managing the wildlife itself, it is vastly different. Because you can have cultural things, environmental things, the type of wildlife that's there, the regulations on what you can do to that wildlife is going to change
on every Airfield's really fun. How often do planes hit? Um? Like, if a bit, give me just a like, what's a normal jet? Like a normal jet that's flying nowadays there's both okay, seven thirty seven's coming down the land and there's a white tailed deer. Is it just blam deer flies out of the way or can that screw the plane up? Oh, if it hits a deer, Yeah, that would probably cause a lot of damage. That doesn't happen.
It doesn't happen very often. Oh So I looked up some numbers and I believe it's about you have a point zero eight percent chance of hitting a bird, and that's just to hit a bird, but to actually cause damage is going to be like a point zero zero three to five percent. So the chances of hitting birds are really low. But when they do hit and it does cause damage it causes on average like two hundred and eight million dollars a year. Wow, So do you
have any nice states? Do you have a number? So if the chances are low though, do you have a number of how many strikes maybe happen on average? Yeah? On average is looking through numbers between nineteen ninety to like two twenty one, So like it's there are growing more because as we fly more, we're gonna be hitting more birds and stuff like that. But it's on average like one hundred and fifty five strikes a week or so, but there's also one hundred and seventy five thousand flights
in a week. Two. Sure. Oh, it may seem like you guys doing a good job of de gating bird crashes. We do our best. What what's the best airport in terms of the wildlife habitat? I mean, are they are they actually trying to make it not good wildlife habitat? Yeah, So that's part of the steps of being an airport biologist. So one of the first things we do is, you know,
observing wildlife and serving wildlife. We look at the habitat, so we look at the airfield as a hole in the surrounding areas and we go, Okay, we're looking for food, water, and shelter. Which of those three components are on the airfield or near the airfield that are attracting wildlife? And can we change that? Can we modify them? Can we remove a forest? The type of grasses that are on an airfield, you know, can we change that? Can we
make it a grass that geese don't like? Um, it's just changing, you know, just the habitat to make it less desirable for wildlife to be around. So you'd be like that food plot that runs down the length of the air has to go. Yeah, the corn feeder can't be there anymore. But what ones have like a what ones have great great habitat? I mean, but it's a weird occupation to have to have to like interrupt habitat. Yeah, I don't know. I know a lot of airfields, you
know that we're built fifty hundred years ago. You know a lot of times they were just looking for land that was wide and open, so allocatet wetlands. Nobody likes these,
so they would build on those. But obviously conservation efforts and stuff have ramped up a lot in the last hundred years and now we're going, ah, these are actually really great habitats, and so it you know, we kind of have to balance this of like, Okay, we need to make sure the air field self doesn't have great habitat, but also conserving what we have on the outside of the airfield as well, just outside of our flight paths. Yeah, because I imagine the mandate becomes a little bit different,
Like you could picture. In the old days, it'd be listen, kill anything that might possibly come near an airplane, and now there's a lot you know, we try to be a little more surgical and delicate. Yeah, it's just a lot more research and stuff too. I mean just the technology in the research and technology that we've had throughout the years, as well as just also increasing our understanding of wild wildlife is on the airfields and what we can do, Like you know, you can sit there and
try to shoot every duck that comes on. Why not just remove that pond of water and now you just removed all those future ducks from coming in. Yeah. Do you ever have to get involved in the like, how do you guys do if you get where you just get like a deer infestation in some area? How has it ever decided that you're going to have the mechanically removed deer. So it kind of depends on where it's at,
you know, what is the fencing situation. So that's another stuff that we often take is just you know, creating exclusion, creating barriers to make it harder for wildlife to get on. So, you know, you remove all that habitat, you remove those forests and stuff off the airfield, you're adding fences up, and when deer are on there, like, they are at risk and they are hazards. So oftentimes we will remove
those individuals. And I know at my particular base, when we were move them, we actually donate all the meat and stuff, so is they're not wasted When you have to remove a deer, is it like is it a thing you're just sort of working away at or is it, oh my god, right now there's a deer that's presenting risk. We need to go get the deer. So yeah, if it's like right there, right on the runway rate within that strike zone, like it's if if an airplane takes off,
that thing is going to be hit. We also try to remove those. Yeah, how is that done? Oh we just use firearms? Yeah, huh. Does every airport I'm a little confused. We just need to and to straighten this out for me. You have like a home base airport, but you're also traveling around reviewing other airports. Does every
airport have a biologist? It's do Some airports have full time biologists that are constantly working, constantly watching the skies and that way when they see the flock, they radio in,
can you yeah. Yeah, So we cover eight hundred and thirteen air fields across the United States agency as an agency as USDA Wildlife Services, and so there's some airfields that'll have full time people like me, Like your larger airfields will have multiple you know, wildlife texts and wildlife biologists, and then some might even just be Wildlife services going in and telling, you know, teaching our airfield operations like hey, this is kind of what you need to do if
you see a bird or see some wildlife and giving those recommendations so that they can handle themselves if they're a smaller airfield. But yeah, any FAA regulated airfield will have some sort of wildlife management plan. Well, we're during a normal day of work. You're not just sitting there watching the skies and watching the runway now, So we'll do patrols, we'll do like observations and like I said, if I see a flock of geese flying over, I
will call tower and let them know. But you know, we're doing a lot of those other steps of harassment. So part of harassment is you know, scaring birds or like professionals. So I think there was like a joke. It was like, you know, describe your profession badly, and it was like, I'm a professional bird shooter. Um, so I shoe birds off the airfields, shoot you know, go away birds, and using um pyrotechnics so glorified we shoot
like glorified bottle rockets at birds. So if you have flocks of birds, flocks of geese and stuff on the airfield, we'll just harass them off. We use bird cannons. Just how's your accuracy? You got it? You gotta do it enough to where you can refine glorified bottle rocket, right. Yeah.
So like our pyrotechnics, the ones that we use, they're like like a revolver and so it's just you know, you're not shooting it at the birds, you're just shooting them in the proximity to make it uncomfortable for them to be there, and they'll take off. My old man had a big gallon size ziplock when I was a kid, probably wasn't even ziplock. He had a giant plastic bag someone had given them. You shoot him up A twelve gage shotgun. Oh yeah, Oh yeah, we use some airfields
will use those. Um, we use them up in Alaska because a lot of the birds that we're working with up there, you know, they're so you have Lake Hood out there, which is the world's largest plane lake, and so you'll have ducks and stuff. They're way out in the middle of the lake and so you can't really reach them. So we had to use those. You know, it was a break action that we would. You guys get involved in that. What was that they get involved in?
Scaring them off lakes for floatplanes. Yeah, so that's part of Anchorage National Airport. That's their floatplane lake. A million times you guys will scare birds off that. Yeah, it's still a hazard. Here's one thing I don't get about this though, running around an airport with a shotgun, if that's concerning. Everybody knows I'm out here right and I'm on the same team just triple checking today. If a plane okay, a plane's haul and ass and and burt
at what foot at? What was that acronym? Hl agl uh? The plane takes off but his he's left airport and his wheels are still right like scraping the ground. How many miles out is the plane by the time it hits a thousand agl I'd have to look that up. I'm not sure way ass out there? So how does does your jurisdiction extent? Like let's say this, Let's say I live a mile from the airport and I say, man, I'm gonna start planting waterfowl food, I'm gonna do all
kinds of habitat improvement. I'm going to make the duck hangout of all duck hangouts. So yeah, so part of the job we do what So we'll put out recommendations, be like, hey, like this is what's going on. We do have like safety zones outside of airfields as well, so you hold some jurisdiction the airfield does not while I services but yeah, yeah, yeah, so just so you can go bang on the guy's door and be like you gotta cool it on the ducks. The airport maybe
the airport, but again we'll just give recommendations. And oftentimes if you explain to someone like Okay, what you're doing, this is what could happen often there. You know, Okay, I can understand that. Do you ever need to go have those conversations not at my current base now? Yeah, and you're assigned out like you're assigned out all over the place to go do airport assessments. Like my profession or like my career has just taken me all over the place. So I've worked in seven air fields in
five different countries. Yeah. You and Yanni were talking about hanging out in Latvia. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm currently a Selfridge Air National Guard base, which is just outside Detroit, Michigan, and our sister base is in Leovard, Lafia, And so I've had the opportunity to go out there twice, and then my counterpart has been able to come to Michigan
as well. Are there any major differences, like any any safety things that are concerns in Europe VERSUS and not concerns in the US vice versa, where like in the US they'd be like, oh, make sure there's no geese here, and then Europeans are like, oh, who cares about geese anything like that. I mean, everything is going to be are if it's on the airfield. So maybe not so much as they don't consider it a concern, but they just have different concerns. So in Latvia you have those
the white storks, which are really large bird. They really like the airfield and they're really protected as well, so you know, just trying to keep them off the airfield there and they just aren't They don't scare very easy. They're completely non lethal over there, so it's not something that you know, we can lethally remove. So it's just you know, learning the behavior of the bird and when we harass it or chase it down, like what it's
going to do, and trying to get it out of there. Yeah, do you find around the country do you find that there are very different perspective as people have about In some areas they kind of got like a kill them all that God sort them out attitude, And in some areas they're very concerned about not harming anything or not scaring anything. So that like cultural aspects are definitely a
part of you know, airfield management. So when you have you know, if you're in a country that has sacred animals, you got to be very conscious of that, like, hey, I'm in this country and a white pigeon is a sacred animal. Like, let's not do anything to those guys. But it's just you know, being cognizant of where you are and what you're doing. But you know, everything we do is you know, we can justify. So when I'm doing you know, starling removal on my airfield and people
are like, oh, what are you doing with those? And it's like, well, those are an invasive species and they compete with twenty seven of our native species, nobody argues like and then you know it is a safety aspect. So when you say this, you know these birds or this wildlife could cause you know, a strike or it can cause damage from aircraft and you know the very very rare cases of fatal crash. You know, when the name of safety not made, people argue with it. How
do you get rid of a bunch of starlings? So we have different traps and stuff that we can use. Um So we have as a starling trap, which is it's just a large cage with a funnel on top and we put in different feed and stuff that when they get inside of it again, they can't figure out how to get back out. Yeah, just set it out, so you're like catching handfuls them out of time. Yeah.
And then as well as the other thing that we like to trap our raptors, so hawk owls and falcons, So we have live traps for those are modified specific four raptors. And this is something I get to do a lot in Michigan. And so when we catch these birds, we catch them live. And how do you catch them? So we I guess the most popular one is our gossac trap. So the best way to explain it is we'll use like a pigeon and we put it in a cage and then on the top of it we
put this trap. That is the doors are opened with springs and there's a trip pole that hold it open. And so when this raptors flying around and sees that pigeon, it'll come down, it'll hit that pole, clothes and so pigeons in the bottom, he's totally fine. Well, be a little traumatized because then he's got oh heste yeah. Yeah. So then when we catch these raptors, we put a federal band on them and then we work with our
states to find suitable habitat for these guys. So we'll fly or I'll drive them out hour hour and a half away from the airfield and release them and hopefully that they don't come back. Do you very often just catch the same bird on occasion? I think it's less than a ten percent recapture, right, It just kind of it's effective moving them how far I usually drive like an hour hour and a half. It still doesn't seem that doesn't seem like you'd thrown It seems like he'd
be back before you got back, right. It just depends on the birds. So is it If it's like an adult bird that this has been their territory for years, chances are those are guys are going to come back where a lot of birds, you know, if they're young especially, they're going to fly back and when they see that airfield, they're like, I remember what happened there last time, And they're out there talking about that. What that pigeons day
is like? Right where he here's that thing gossip caught a trap right above him and he's got to hang out there. We had a guy on the show that was doing work with ocelots, so it's like a souped up little cat like a spotted like a jaguar. The ocelots, so they use they'll put they put their traps out and they put two roosters. They'll set two traps with the rooster in each trap as bait, and they get to cock, they get to talking to each oart so
it's making a lot of racket. And then the ocelot gets caught, but he's got a little little cage that separates the rooster from the ocelot, and then that rooster has to hang out there for however long with that cat. And I was like, that's gotta be like a fatal level of fear. But he said, man, I got, I got roosters have caught multiple cats. But just imagine when we gotta run around with that biologist in California trapping
mountain lions years ago. Now, they had a live quail that they would use for you know, luring in a mountain line into these big cage traps that they had to use. That works. I just I thought it was hilarious because I was like, there's no way this works because in California, like the amount of signage that they had to have up saying like this quail is being very well cared for. Please don't release that. Don't worry
about this quail. Yeah, yeah, very happy. Like this doesn't seem like it's worth the effort, Like cat has to figure this out. You ever had to get rid of a cat, bobcat or line off a cougar? No, not any of the places I've worked. Now, feral cats. There's got to be a lot of feral cats around airports. Yeah, I mean I see them on occasion, but they're not enough for me to be like, ah, these guys are going to be causing a strike. You mentioned that porcupines
can cause a lot of stir Yeah, up in an Anchorage, Alaska. Porcupines. It's probably like one of my favorite things to catch. So I'm sure Tower probably loves watching whileye services employees. So when you see a porkypine, you take a tub with a lid and you run with it usually above your head, and you're chasing this porkypine down and eventually you'll catch out to it. You drop the tub on it, and you grab the lid and you slide it under, you flip it, and that's how you could catch a porcupine.
And but these guys, yeah, if they're up on like the runways and stuff, they can actually pop tires. What do you do with the porkupines? We'll just relocate them. How many porcupine is? He's probably whatever, you know, just keep slowly moving. There's so like I don't want to call them oblivious, but they're just easy going man, easy going animals. What back to, like the social acceptance thing?
What is the Have you ever get witnessed something that like straight out of like the movie Airplane or National Lampoom in regards to an animal strike on the runway. I've never seen either of those. I don't know read that old geez there were two apocalypse now, don't worry about like, um, there's never been like a strike on the runway where folks are you know, sitting, are ready to take off and it's like grape jelly across all the windows at one point or something like that. Yeah,
I'm sure that could. I mean, yeah, when the bird gets hit, it's just like again, if you hit like a bug with your car, like they splat, that's a snarge. Oh you know what you did? Do it? Tell us the moose story? Oh, yeah, so when I so after I left Cots of You, I went and worked in South Africa for a little bit volunteering, and then came back to Anchorage. And when I was an Anchorage, I got to do more of the hands on direct control. And they're mixing it up with porcupines. Yeah, yeah, working
with the porcupines. And I got a call that there was a moose going on and they were damaging airfield property and I was like what, And it was the middle of the rut, and I show up and sure enough, there were two huge bulls fighting. But they were fighting on each side of a chain link fence and it was an airfield fence, so one got on the inside and one got on the out and they were just hitting each other so hard, and every time they'd hit that fence, you were just ping, ping, ping, ping, just
coming off like all the wires and stuff. And I couldn't get them to pull apart. I mean, they were just raging to stopsterone bowls, and so it was kind of the fence through the fence, and so it just kind of turned into just getting people to stay back, and because people were wanting to get pictures, they were trying to get closer, and it was like, ah, these
guys are not safe. Well, one of them, as they were, you know, growing at it, got his antler caught up in barbed wire, and the barbed wire ended up you know, from every move back and forth, they kept getting tangled and tangled. So we end up having to call the Laska State Game to come in and trank liz Us moose because I mean it was he was just covered
in this barbed wire after an hour. And this was I was twenty two, so I was just bright eyed, bushy tailed, fresh into the wildlife field and moose are my favorite animal by far, and so I was just like, can I help, And they're like, yeah, here's the clippers you can clip off the wire. And I was so excited and so we get the moose down. I run up to it. I'm clipping all the wire and the biologist was like, yeah, I just can't a run your fingers through the firm make sure there's no large gashes.
And the best way I can explain this is that in a Jurassic Park, when the couple go to the park for the first times out of very familiar with so they see that try saratops and it's on the ground and the guy gives it a big hug and it takes that deep breath. I did that with a moose and it was the greatest day of my life. And so we were able to get the barbed tire off of it, you know, we're able to put the reversal ind and he was able to get up and walk away. That's cool wild. But oh, my backtrack a
little bit. So when this moose was covered in barbed wire, he eventually stopped fighting the other moose because he was just more concerned with this barbed wire. Though he's been licked, right, yeah, So I mean he's just shaking his hand, he's trying to get it off, and like I said, there's a lot of people all, you know, spectating, and he was rubbing up against a bush trying to get this barbed wire off. And there was this car parked next to this bush, and he walks right up to this car
and this lady has her falling out. She's just taking pictures and he just rubs himself across the side of her car. And I was like that insurance claim, He's gonna be great. Like what happened all this moose try to rub barbed wire off on my car. Yeah yeah, you imagine the skepticism. Yeah wow, No kid, You know I had a thing. I put it on Instagram, but
I don't think we talked about on the show. Is this guy sitting in in Ohio three perfectly fine deer, like a really nice buck, a nice buck and a doe dead in a pile and it had there It was a down power line and these two bucks must have been duking it out and there was a dough there and one of them hit that power line with
its antler and just in a pile. Wow. Well, and they said that they got to the fire department, got the skulls and got them cleaned for to decorate the firebarn, and a dude down the road took all the meat, which leads me to my next question. I'm not gonna ask you a question. I'm gonna ask you this because so you have a you have a job, and you want to keep your job, and no doubt, there's like certain things you just don't talk about. I'm gonna tell
you a story before I ask the question. A friend of mine I can't name them, used to do fish surveys um for this well for our home state used to do fish surveys in Michigan and they would have to do nets surveys just to count what was in the lake, right, but they were not allowed to utilize the resource because they felt that it was a conflict of interest. So they would go and do these net surveys, and then he would go out and they had a spot out in the woods where they would have to
dump it all. So he would come home, get his own vehicle, get his cooler full of ice, and promptly zip back out there and get all the whitefish and northerns and perch and get them all filaied up and give them out to everybody. Question being if I asked you if you ever eat the stuff that you control, would you be able to answer honestly or would you
probably not answer honestly? Yeah, No, honestly we don't. So a lot of things that we control, well no, no, So like when we like when we shoot deer, we donate all that meat, so it actually goes to food for hunger, donate the meaning so do you have to do all the field dressing? So yeah, we have to um field dress it. But then the butcher will do all the processing, so you gotta go fiel dress. Yeah, well, let me ask you this. So you dragged the gut pile off to the side of the runway, A bunch
of big ass vultures land on there. Old Souley comes in and what hits a vulture? Do you ever think about that? Well, I wouldn't dress it right next. Yeah, you don't want to put anything like attractive next to your runaway, so yeah, no, we would you describe the white starks and labba as a tender meat. That'd have been a better way to do it. Yeah. Yeah, Like which region were you? So? Do you like the deer
meat that you take? No? So you guys will you guys will fin you'll you'll be responsible for getting it dressed yep, and bring it to a butcher yep. Yeah. So then it gets donated and then it just depends again. It's all region. So when I was in Alaska, even all the ducks and stuff that we caught, we wou address him and then they would get donated to the elders of the community. You're kidding, huh. That's a lot of extra work. That's cool, It's worth it, though, it's
better than just tossing them all the time. I'm telling their story about my same friend that I can't mention his name. He later in life had a job as a surveyor and they were surveying a place one time and it was full of He found someone's little weed plantation. This is pre pre when everybody loved weed, like when a lot of people still hate a weed, like the cops.
He finds a giant where a guy's growing a giant thing of weed, and they're surveying it, and he keeps an eye on this area and pretty soon they go they clear it. Dozers come in to clear the lot. So just like he did with those fish, he then snuck back out there at night and got all the weed that the bulldozers, that got all the buds that the bulldozers had cleared off into the back end of the debris pile, and brought all that home. I think about that. That's a good gig. No, this guy's very
a job. I'll say one more thing. He told me. They would go into the up where you're familiar with surveying, and sometimes they'd be surveying in the wintertime and they're out and all that seedar swamp, you know, and they'd cuddle line way through the woods and the deer would be you know, let deer have a hard go of it. And those winners up there and those deer would know they would come to a sound of a chainsaw and
you'd clear a big line to shoot a line. So you'd like clear it all through the swamp and you get your two things, those little looking holes in there that you look through the line them up when you survey in, and the deer would flood in so much to the sound of the chainsaw that you couldn't shoot the even though you cleared the line, you couldn't shoot the line because so many deer would be in that thing, and they'd have to have a person such as yourself
trying to clear the deer out to be able to survey the thing. That's amazing. It's an amazing story. You like that story, Phil loved it. I just have a question about any stats that you have of like yearly or over the course of a number of years, like the costs to airlines of damage. Yeah, so the average right now is about two hundred and eight million um it did it has gone up, So this is like again, this is like an average between the last thirty years.
So it's you know, it's going up a little bit more. But it's just I mean, it's our planes are getting faster. We're flying a lot more. Again, there's one hundred and seventy five thousand flights in a week. That's that's just in the United States. That's not across the world. And we've been hitting birds forever. So the first documented bird strike was Orville right in nineteen oh five, right to it. Yeah, he wrote in his diary that he hit a red
being blackbirds. So this is not anything new. It's just our aircraft are getting faster. We're in the air Moore were sharing those these guys like it's just going to happen. Did he refer to it as snarge? I think he did. When when did I guess the airport biology become h formalized, just like a job within the USDA to even have
you know, have this be a position. Yeah, I think it was in the early nineties, And it was that strike that happened in Alaska, that was that fatal strike, and that fatal strike was um it was a military aircraft and it was brought the whole aircraft was brought down by a flock of geese and it killed everybody on board. There was like over thirty souls, and so that was kind of a big jump with like, Okay, we need to do something about this so this doesn't
happen again. That's when they recognized it as Yeah, even though that's so funny, that was his name was Wilbur Orville. Orville was will Who the hell? Oh no? Those two brothers, the brothers, Yeah, okay, yeah, the two brothers, which one which one of the brothers had a red wing blackbird or and I think he did his first flight in nineteen oh three. Yeah, it's amazing those like he like identified it. Did he write about it as have you
ever read his journal? Did he write about it as, oh, hey, if we get into this flying thing, this is gonna be something to keep in mind. I think it was just a really brief mention about the fact that he hit or read being blackbird out and when he was in I think Dayton, Ohio. Yeah. Yeah. If you if someone if someone comes you and says, man, I want to get a job as an airport biologist, do you do you say good luck? Or are you like, oh, you just gotta do X, Y and Z and you'll
get the job. Yeah. So it's it's definitely a growing field. So it's just again as we're recognizing more and more need for it. You know, we have technicians, we have biologists. I mean, we cover all the airfield or mostly airfields in the state or sorry, gosh, mostly airfields in the country, and so it's definitely growing. A lot of people just don't know that we exist. So I mean, like wildlife
tech positions, they are open quite often. And if you're ever interested getting into this field, as long as you're willing to move around, it's like how I moved right to Alaska. Once you're that foot is in the door, like, you can pretty much you can live anywhere in the country really, because every airfield needs somebody like us. Yeah. And then it's a it's a federal salary deal yep, it's good healthcare. Yeah. Then you gotta worry about when
the government shuts down. Nope, because we are considering emergency personnel. You need to worry about that. So when that happens, and when that happens coming up here, you'll just you'll still be out there cranking away. Oh yeah, because they're still flying. Yeah, I got you. Uh does every airport have to use the federal agencies? Like, let's like, why does an O'Hare airport or some giant ass airport like that? They don't do in house like you guys do that work.
There are some private agencies that do it as well. Just with a federal we get the federal expertise, and we are wildlife professionals and you know, we don't have inherent authority like we don't we're not a regulated service, so we do work closely with US Fish and Wildlife Service. We work with the state agencies to get permits and stuff. Um, so we have the ability to really you know, trap and relocate raptors and working with all the migratory birds
and stuff. Yeah, do you You know what I also want to ask you about is do you are you from with a thing called avatroll like an avian like an avian poison. Yeah, I've like I've heard of it, but that's not something that you guys use are allowed to use. I hear people use it for street pigeons. Yeah, we don't use it in myerfields. No, no, but what like what is it? I don't know because I hear people refer it like uh like um like rat poison for pigeons. You don't have any exposure to that. I
don't personally have any experience using it. See that's you guys can't get like you guys can't get like medieval like that with with poisons. Um not for me personally, No, No, I just don't have the experience. Do you guys have issues with iguanas? Let I say we have iguanas in Michigan. No, no, no,
I mean not in Michigan. No. But you know, I guess what are the top like maybe other than birds, the top disruptive critters that we maybe wouldn't think I think additionally, Yeah, so I know, like white tail deer and coyote are going to be our two highest mammal strikes. Yeah really yeah. They love airfields. What does the picture of being a little I don't know, spooked or like a little sly, you know, like like I don't get off because they because there's a bunch of out there,
they're they're hunting, all their presources are right on that airfield. Really, short grass vowles my stuff, like yep, exactly what do you do to get rid of them, are usually trapping. How do you catch well? You do, yeah, seriously, So you gotta make a little dirt hole set alongside the runway, not exactly alongside the runway, but yeah, I mean because
you're not focusing just on that runway. I mean you're using the entire de of the airfield properties, and so it's you know, finding their habitat and stuff and where you get to do a little kyote trapping too. Okaid, what else do you gotta catch like that? Using like old school stuff boxes? Yeah, some air fields probably, Yeah, I will catch boxes and stuff too. It's just again, every air fields different. So it's really just whatever is
prevalent at your airfield and running around your airfield. So let's say you call it a bobcat, You're probably gonna move them somewhere. I think Bob's cats are pretty sly. Like you just said of kayotes, I've never heard of any bobcats causing issues on an airfield. But again, I've never been in a region that had bobcat issues like that. Coyotes and deer deer, I could definitely picture snowy owls. Yeah, snowy owls are probably one of the big things this
time of year. So that's the other thing is just every time of year, seasonally, you're gonna have different things that you're after. So this time of year in you know, in Michigan and a lot of these like the northern Lower States, all the snowy owls will come from the Arctic and they migrate down and when they come down here, they're trying to find something that is as close to their habitat as possible. What's the closest thing to the Arctic.
They want something wide open and flat. So when I tell when people are like I really want to see a snowy owl, I'm like, go to your local airfield because they love it there. And then when they're down there or when they come down here, they they love
the airfield. Maybe if there's not a whole lot of snow, they're gonna watch sun something white and a lot of runway lines are white, and so they'll hang out on a US sit on the runway, they'll use the signs, they'll just and then great, there's just tons of like voles and mice and like it's like a buffet out there for them. How do you catch one of those using those raptor traps. What do you bait it with pigeons? Do you ever get a snowy owl that you've banded it in a litt skill that shows up on an
airfield in the lower forty eight um. Not necessarily out of Alaska, but there are times that we will ban something, relocate them, and then they'll get picked up into another airfield because again it's just they love that wide open flat area. So they just airfield hop are sandhill crane's an issue? Yeah, so I have them on occasion, but I have heard, you know, in other states that they can you know, they'll come across and like large flocks
and stuff. Probably picture that taking a plane down. Yeah, snargo come off one of those things, big long bones and stuff coming out of there. Oh oh, so when you're doing your foothold draps, I mean, air airfields are pretty busy places just from you know, my point of view,
a landing on them and taking off and stuff. There's like folks walking around all so do you kind of have to like I imagine there's a lot of communication, right, like, oh, there's foothold traps out here, so don't go walking out on this area to have lunch or something like that. Or is there just a huge amount of ground that nobody ever walks on in an airfield. So yeah, most of the time it's just a huge amount of ground
that people are just not around. But you put the signs out, you know, this is going what's going on on my base. You know, we work with security forces and let them know. You know, we'll let if there's an airfield that's got kenine units and stuff. We always you know, we try to be cognizant of who may be coming around here, who may be attracted to the lures and stuff we're using. Yeah, so yeah, it is. You know, you're working with your airfield. You're working with
your airfield operations, your airfild managers. You know, there's it's a whole team of people that are doing this. So you know, we are the experts in doing the airfield managed wildlife management, but with airfield we have then actual airfield management who are out there all the time, so they probably observe just as much as we do. So we do a lot of education and outreach with people across our base, people across the airfield. This last year I just started a I'm calling it the snow spot.
So I put out flyers and was like, hey, who's the first person to see a snowy owl? Now this is my You know a lot of people are just birders and they're just excited to see a snowy But for me, it's like, this is great because the second snowy owl shows up on my base, I'm going to be notified about it and I can start managing for them. So just getting people involved is actually so a lot of times people are like, oh, you're trying to be
hush hush. It's like for me, no, Like I love telling people what we do and educating people what we do because in turn it'll help us do our job. Cool if you go, if you go to do an interview like this, you gotta go get you probably just can't do it on your own, right, you gotta go
get permission. Yeah, pretty much. It's hard to get permission, no, because we're not ashamed or we're not hiding anything that we're doing, And so getting to do stuff like this is a really great opportunity for people to know what we do because a lot of times it's a thankless job. I remember when I was in an anchorage there was there was a group of ducks along in a ditch along one of the runways. You know, A shot one of my techniques at them. They flew away, airplane landed.
I happened to look up and it was one of my friends flying. I texted him and I'm like, I just saved your life. So, I mean, and it's people don't realize that we're out there and what we're doing. And you know, it's hard to be like, oh, yes, because of us, we prevent an x amount of strike, because it's it's a preventive thing. You know, we're just
trying to reduce the amount of wildlife strikes. We can't say we're never going to have a wildish strike, but we're hoping, as you know, those damaging ones will go down because you know, that's money for the airfield. That's money, you know, our government money and stuff too with new military aircraft. And then it's people's lives. I mean, if you have even like a small Cessna hit a large bird like that can bring it down. Yeah. Like a great proof of a great job is that there's no news. Yeah,
it's yeah. I try to think of some way to brag it up. But it would be hard. It'd be like people that point out with TSA, like I don't know, does it really work? I'm like, I mean, has that happened since have we had that happened since TSA became of things? I see, like it seems like something's working. Yeah, because if he looks atistically, strike numbers have like gone up exponentially. But it's because of that outreach and education
that we're doing. It's hey, guys, like, if you see something, even if you're like, I don't know if this is a bug or a bird, snarge collected anyway, because we can decide that for ourselves. If this is just a bug and we can ditch it. But if it is a bird, it's you know, using that information and then we can get that information to then your return and you know, manage for it. Who actually collects that's just yeah, right, Like when your plane lands, you know there's like a
cleanup crew that comes into the airplane. Is there like a snarge specimen collecting crew on the outside of the aircraft, not specifically, but there are the crews that are checking to make sure, you know, mechanics are working right and stuff, and so they're the ones that usually are going to collect them, So I work with you know, on my base, I'll work with our maintainers and stuff, making sure they
have the kids collecting them appropriately. You know, don't wear you know, gosh, wear gloves, don't try to touch things bare hand. Um, and just getting that information we can and then if we do we get like a whole bird and stuff we can just if we can identify it, like yep, that was an Eastern metal arc, We'll just swim in that a freezer and send it the Smithsonian
some pictures. They're like, yep, it is, then we can dish the carcass it Does it throw off a whole plane's whole schedule when that happens, Like if that flight has to leave in forty minutes to go somewhere else, is it up too bad? We got to take care of this strike or whatever? Does it? Snarge is usually pretty depending on if it's just you know, a little snarge splatter, it's pretty quick just to clear up. If it's a damaging strike, you know, that could probably slow
down the aircraft itself. But they're actually doing a lot of studies right now on the economic impact of a strike. So if you have you know it a civilian and real busy o hair or something, and you have one an aircraft takeoff, hit some birds. They call in tower like, hey, I just hit some birds. I got to turn around. I'm not sure like if that caused damage. And so
they turn around. Now all the aircraft that we're about to take off, we'll all pause because they're you know, they'll have a your wildlie professionals run out there and make sure there's nothing that's that they can handle and take care and get out of the way. And then now that aircraft just got delayed, the one behind that one got delayed. The next thing. He knows this domino effect not only for those airplanes that are trying to take off, but now all those passengers on that aircraft
now they ought to rebook their flights. So there's actually a pretty un I mean they're working on it right now. I mean there's been some studies coming out, you know, trying to see what the economic impact is. You know, we can say damaging is two hundred and eight million, but like what about all those ripple effect costs? Right? I wanted to do one of those analyzes around air Force one because like during Obama's two terms. I got seriously,
seriously screwed. When they decide to land the plane. I mean no, I mean it has undo with who it was as president, but it happened to be. Then how's for anybody where I'm like, oh, where did they get off? I mean it close the airport down. And one time I learned they close the airport down. Listen to this, They closed an airport. This is how audacious I think this program is. Someone should look into this. He lands in the big plane, okay, and he's going to make
a stump speech for someone running for Congress. They shut the entire airport down for the plane to land, Get in a helicopter, take the helicopter to give a stump speech, a campaign speech, stays closed, comes back, helicopter lands, speech is over, gets on air force one, air force one leaves the airport, can resume flying. Wow. Now I traced the economic impact, and I was particularly incense because I didn't feel like it was of national significance. It was
a speech. Well, I guess you could have like a plane that would be otherwise taking off for landing, that would try to crash into the plane issue, right, Like I think but that's that's why I think, right, I felt as though if it was I felt as though, you can't do that to people, to go give a speech for a guy. Okay, I got it. I got over the anger. But I was like particularly angry for a while, and I said some things that probably would have put me on the UM no fly list or
like the Secret Service whatever. You know. I was like, I was pretty mad. Man, that was pretty bad out shape about it? Yeah, like fly someplace to diffuse some international situation or make something better for everyone. Yeah, I can wait. That's great, man. You're gonna diffuse tensions with North Korea? You know, I can wait. I can wait. You're gonna go give a speech for some Yahoo running for office yep, so we can lock up some sector in Iowa or yeah. Man, people got a place to go,
they got things to do. Got it? You seem incredulous? No, I just I'm amused. Megan. You can play trivia? Yes, oh I got. I had one last question for you, though. Did you grow up hunting? Yes? Okay, yes, I did grow up. My I have an older brother that just wasn't into the hunting fish. Well, he does fish, but he was just not into that outdoorsy thing. And so when I came around, my Dad's like, it's gonna be you. Oh really, So he took me out hunting and I was real little, and you know, it just gave me
some hostess, you know, cupcakes and stuff. We're like to sit here quietly. Your brother wasn't into it, and your dad was cool. Your dad like it took you on. Yep. Do you look him back on it? Do you think that, let's say your brother had been into it, would you have gotten the same opportunity or would your dad have been Oh no, this I got my boy and that's my hunting body and you'd got left in the dust. Or do you think he would have either way of
giving you the opportunities. Oh, I'm pretty bullheaded, So I probably would have still tried to join because it was interesting me. Right. So it's just something that interested me, and my dad capitalized on it. And it wasn't just the hunting and ching aspect. But you know, when I went out to I was like eight or nine years old. We did this big road trip out to Yellowstone, hit all the national parks and my mom had me and
my fund all the way through. Yeah, but just like you know, being out in nature getting to see all these like the megafauna and stuff. And my mom had me and my brother write essays about our trip, and I wrote in there how I wanted to like work in the wildlife sector like that, Like all right, yeah, I said, I think I wanted to be a National park ranger. But like I didn't you know to me at eight year old, like that was all the same
any but it was in the wildlife fields. Like I've known what I wanted to do since I was a kid. Were you big into Independence Day celebrations too, fireworks? Yeah, it really spoke to me. Yeah. So yeah, when you filled out your application, you'd be like, I love doing shooting off fireworks. I like shooting guns romaniac. Yeah. Did they when you applied, did you weigh in how you'd had Like did they care that you'd had hunting experience
or did that? Was that inconsequential to them? Yeah? So with the work that we do in wildlife services, having those grounds definitely help because you just want people to be comfortable with it. You don't want to give a firearm to somebody who has never touched one before, maybe be you know, really scared to hold one, and you know, not even just to shoot stuff. So having those backgrounds are definitely beneficial. Great, not necessary, but it definitely helps.
Now back to trivia. Have you have you ever heard the trivia shell? Yeah, my husband and I have played trivia every week since it came out. WHOA and how do you do? Do you beat the Shelby Index? Do you beat like? Do you beat like krine? Do you beat cow? Everybody beats karne Um? I usually am right there with the Shelby Index, But disclaimer, I also I also pause it and think about it. So actually being in person, real time, I have no idea how all
this is stressful. Yeah, so you're not. You don't know how. You don't think you're gonna like tear it up. You're gonna hold your own. I'm gonna survive, Okay. And then have you coordinated with Spencer about what bone he's gonna throw you when he gives you like a bonus question. I haven't had a chance to talk to him yet, So how does he how does he? I don't understand how does he do this? Because yeah, we talked, we talked about her. He looked at the podcast. No you're
I'm a laugh if he's like, what snarge? Yeah, you know, when we record the pot, when we record the trivia show in a minute, I'm gonna be like, well, how do you know? Well, I know yesterday. That's happened once before where Spencer's not a part of not always a part of the podcast we do before trivia, and we've things would come up on that podcast that were the bone that Spencer eventually threw to the guests. That happened
once or twice I've noticed. So yesterday the bone he threw was he just like the person was from Texas, So you had a Texas reservoir question. But I'm curious. I'm gonna I'm gonna dig in with him a little bit about how he's determining what to throw your way. Yeah, could be a host of good questions. Well, you're gonna stay, You're gonna stick around. Yes, we're gonna need some lunch or something, and then we're gonna have a trivia Thanks for coming on. Thank you