Ep. 421: Wolverines

on wolverines today. We've got a lot of stuff to cover, but we're gonna get way into wolverines with Rebecca Waters. Is that right, Yes, Director of the Wolverine Foundation. I'm gonna start things off by fact checking Yanni. Do you believe Rebecca? Do you believe that Yanni believes that a wolverine hang out with his dad? Oh, and then one day, how's it going? One day he kicks his dad's ass. They're getting a big getting a big fight, and they're

basically like, fight, duke it out. He was saying that, how it's a lot like people like you're raised by your dad, eventually getting a giant fight, duke it out, and then you separate ways, never to talk again. Do I believe that he believes that? No? No No, no, no no, No, do you know do you believe that's true about wolverines? Do I believe that it's true? Um? I think so that they will actually separate at a certain point, Yeah, from their dad, from their from their parents. Yes. Do

you know if it's precipitated by a large fight. Oh, I don't think it's like a father son thing. Oh you know, Um, I don't. I don't know that that that we have recorded instances of father son fights like that, So I'm not sure, you know, I don't know whether I'm believing it or not believing it makes it true. It's just I can tell you that we've never actually

observed that happening. But we have observed young male wolverines coming into the territory of an older male wolverine and getting into a big fight with them and kicking them out. So maybe kicking the old man out, kicking the old man out, but maybe not your dad, you know, like, maybe it's just some random old man who you don't like. Wow, that's like everybody knows the part about Oedipus about what he happens with his mom, but they don't know what

happens with his dad. Do you know, I can't remember, okay, Oedipus doesn't Oedipus the edible complex. Oedipus doesn't know that he's He doesn't. He doesn't know that he like he's not raised by his parents, but he thinks he's raised by his parents. He does know he's adopted. And he goes to like a witch doctor, and the witch doctor says, I'll tell you your future. What are you? What are you smirking about? And he goes to a witch doctor? What do you think? I love? He went to se

yes because I love the modernized er. He goes to a same same witch doctor. The seer says, here's here's your fortune, here's your what's the word. I'm looking for your future? Here's your future. You're gonna kill your dad and marry your mom. So he says, bet not. I'm just gonna run away, far away. But he doesn't know he's adopted. Where does he wind up in another town? What's he do? Kills his dad, marries his mom. I don't know why that wolverine story made me think of that.

So we're gonna get into all We're gonna get into um way into wolverines. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. We'll sitting crimin ile sitting talk about what would be the best animal to have. Someone that knows a lot about said animal coming right, and we'll we'll we'll reject animals. What do we reject? Recently? Wasn't sexy enough for us? Well, we hit Mountain lions a bunch. I was like, do you want panther jaguar? And you were like a little less, Um, what was

the one that he's too? Well? I was into. You were like that's just not sexy enough. Um, Yeah, you wanted to do one like on Marmots or something like that. I was like, no, I don't think it was Marmots. We should just go through the mart No. Maybe, no, I think it was Martin. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I think it was No. I think you were like in shaping now shopping him. We got we're thinking about beavers.

Beaver a beaver biologist. No, she's a historian. While I was in in Nashville at the Turkey convention that there's some people pointing their fingers directly at the fisher cat in Maine as to why the turkey populations are declining there. I'll buy it there's a lot Chamber. Mike Chamber said, no, he doesn't think so. Um Man, I'll report right now.

I was telling you guys, I'm covered in poison ivy, which I was telling Brodi I didn't get real serious about climate change now because to get poison ivy in Michigan in February is unheard of. Yeah, I wish we could drow up a visual for people. It's bad. And here's the thing. Let me tell you. Yeah, well, zones, So it's clearing up on my face. That's getting better here. Oh that looks like the should I have my hands the other week? Yeah, but it's not. So here's the deal.

We're hunting squirrels and zuck guy zuck. He for some reason he had what he was like admiring the haft of a big fox squirrel okay, which he called which it annoys the hell out of me. He calls him red squirrels, which confuses everybody because that's another word for a pine squirrels. No one knows anybody's talking about that. They don't have pies. I know they're like, you guys call them something else. But down here, these big old red squirrels, I'm like yeah, but they're not. They're fox

squirrels anyways, So he lays one. He had one laid like on his arm, you know, and he gets he I I have I'm like a twenty four hour delay on poison ivy. But he gets it fast and he's like, man, that's poison ivvy on my arm. I'm like, that can't be poison ivy. He's like, man, I've had poison ivy enough times. No, because they got on him and he transferred from the squirrel because here's what he was telling me, he's seen it that he sees this happen, you know,

the vines. So they're nesting, they're getting ready to nest right now. No, he says, they gather that. Oh, they gather that and line their nests with it this time of year. So those suckers must be Oh yeah, I'm sure they're immune. So clean and squirrels, man, well did you see it coming? Nothing like this has ever happened. Finally, today it was the first day I haven't developed new spots. Yeah. My wife thinks I'm like a lapper. I'm like, dude,

it doesn't work like that, you know. My question is, um, like, did you shove one inside your shirt like how because you get the oil on you and you just whatever you do go to scratch. Like here, my forehead was the first thing that got bad, just because rubbing it on there. Yea. And that eurissiol can be um basically like vaporized, I think, is there. I've gotten it in

my lungs and burnout. Yeah yeah, but it really sick if you get it like on your wrists and ankles and then you sweat, just that heat can actually carry that uh that oil like up through your pant legs, because how and how else do you literally get on the inside of your thighs That's where I got it anywhere where your skin, anywhere on your body where you got real shitty skin, like thin, hasty, shitty skin, like between your fingers. It's just my whole body. Yeah, yeah,

I feel he'd be like right under like underneath your feet. No, never there in between your fingers, inside the arch, not the it's not the kind of shitty things. Yeah. I had running with poison oak one time, and it was all inner thighs and like my stomach. It was just thin, shitty areas on your hide. And that's not the first time you've gotten it via another animal. No, I got it. The worst I've ever gotten was from a wild pig that landed me in the hospital, and I wound up

in a Jewish hospital. And the last thing the doctor said to me when she's walking out the door, I'm not kidding you. I'm not joking. She's walking out the door and she turns and says, stay away from pigs. Yeah. I when I told the story, she's kind of like, what the fucking thing's gonna happen? But now you're a climate No, this is what you know, like Nimby, like not in my backyard. Yeah, this is what This is my wake up call? Man, um So, Yanni, real quick

hit that owl hoot. Yanni was just at an owl hoot and explain this now. I was at the National Turkey Federation's annual convention down in Nashville, Tennessee, and unfortunately, the only competent calling competition that I got to go and watch was the owl Hoot and the Gobble because it was later in the evening. We were recording turkey stories from nine to four every day. We got forty one serious was Phil? Phil did he go to the Tiki Barn? Downer. Oh yeah, I say you had the

picture of us at the tiki bar. I didn't get that, which is very It's not the normal tiki bar. This place is like robot themed, and instead of having Jimmy Buffett playing, it's got Furgie playing. And the next table down to has had some twenty year old gals standing up apping Furgie at full capacity. I was quite entertained that we ran into a lady with a pet possum or something. That's right, it must have been a different place.

I don't know how we got crowd there. Yeah, we got I don't know how we got on the subject with her, but she had had a pet possum. AnyWho, Um, we got forty one. It was cool. I was telling you a story from Mike Chamberlain. It was pretty interesting. Yeah, I want you to touch on that. I want you to touch on that turkey call in your hand. So yeah, the the air and friction contests were going on during the day, so I didn't get to go and check those out, but one evening we went and checked out

Ala hooting and then gobbling. I was surprised to find out out of the thirty six competitors for ali hooting, only one uses natural voice. Everybody else is running a hooter, Like, I can't believe that you're allowed to use I can't believe that you'd be allowed to use a hooter. That's That's Yanni's train of thought too. They were, um, and I was surprised that they didn't have both, but they said,

it literally just comes down to participation. They said, we could open up a voice calling out hooting, you know section, yeah, and just nobody would be in there. He just and it's only recent the last ten years, ten to fifteen, I think these were developed, and they just sound so much more realistic that the voice guys can't compete with the with the hooter. But yeah, I felt the same

way even with the with the gobbling. I thought that, you know, because when we were recording stories, we had some great storytellers that could gobble, you know, within their story, and it just brings so much the story. Yeah, yeah, definitely, maybe a little better. HER's still a little high pitched, you know, but uh anyways, um, yeah, I was surprised

to not hear voice callers. Um, so there's a Phelps game calls now has a thing called out the Harrison hooter and I didn't even know when I'm watching James Harrison on stage that I didn't put two and two together, that the hooters that were at my house that I was trying to blow on and it didn't even sound like a train whistle. And my wife's like, please put those away. Stop, you're not making owl sounds. I'm watching him, and then later I run into him at the show.

I'm like, oh, Phelps t shirt, Oh okay, and I put two and two together, and then he ran through and gave me the one oh one who who had the bear grease hat on? That was another competitor. I didn't run into him, but he was using a mouth call, yes, like a hooter like this, and he very likely was using this one because out of thirty six competitors, ten or twelve we're actually running the Harrison Hood, not the crylic.

You know, some of them um tape it all up in black electrical tape so that the other competitors can't see what call they're usually. I like it. He said that even some of them will add like another four or five inches. It doesn't do any not for any other room, and just to throw people off to what call. There one of the East Coast goose tutors. But yeah, i'll be probably by the time this airs, I'll have posted a video. James Harrison given me the one on one on how to use it, and yeah, there's a

couple of great tips. The best tip though, he said, when you hold it, you make like an okay symbol with the one hand that you're gonna hold the call with, and then your other hand comes around. You want to cut the bottom of the call, as if holding a baby chicken. A chick. I'm with you, right, so it's head sticking out of your hands. You're controlling it, but you're not squishing it, right, so a little bit of air can get out. After that, you make the same notes.

Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? All? Um? Rip it. I got a lot to tell you about this because we're I've got on order coming. You might already have it. The piliated woodpecker call that can that can also sound like the screech or the scream of a bard owl. Yeah, yeah, that gets them god one you think so? Yeah, I mean it's the stuff that you like. It's super loud and super high. Their goblin because I don't think their goblin because they think it

sounded exactly like an owl. No, no, no no, but it's a sound that just carries. That's what Chamberlain out of study his point when I brought up your point that you always make, which is what you just said, his point, He's like, yes, but if you sound like a real owl, you might get other owls going on other ridges that are then reaching turkeys that your sound, whatever you decided to use, is not reaching. And thus you're sort of being able to broadcast farther and possibly hear other turkeys.

Pretty soon the whole county's got and then everybody else is gonna get all the turkeys waking up the woods. Um, all right, here it goes. So there's your little chick Harrison hooter. This is a Phelps Harrison hooter. Yeah. I like that little role in the end, But now do it with no call. I have a hard time rolling for whatever reason. Again, it does sound better at the call. The do a far off out buhicle for everybody is the out way off. I want to do this often.

I wanted to be one. So far you're not even gonna go over there. That's too cool. I'd go after that, they'll just turn the volume down. Um, okay, go ahead. That well, I could keep blowing on that thing, but real quick, the uh chamber, doctor chamber, the unkillable turkey. Can you hit that real quick for us? I will, and I'll go to say too that it was cool.

Out of forty one stories, it was great to start recognizing the different themes that flowed through these stories, and not just because it's a theme of stories that people like to tell, but what people think is important or important to them to come and tell you about. It's a lot of first timers, a lot of first time turkey stories, a lot of mentorship stories, a lot of

family type stories. You know, I was out with my kids or my kid whatever, I took my dad first first, and the one that got away or the unkillable turkey, or one fella called this bird the boss, which we've heard before. But anyways, Yeah, Mike had a story and I'll summarize it quickly, but basically, this turkey he thinks cannot be killed because he's developed a tactic whereas he comes closer, as he realizes that he's being fooled with, he'll actually fly up into trees out of shotgun range.

And then hot from tree to tree, or sit on one limb, walking back and forth and looking for the hand that is supposed to be there. And then once he says, once he clears it out and there's no hen just pitches and flies off the other direction. I don't know, and you're a shout of turkey. Alabat tree. Yes, fall in Nebraska. I don't even know if it was legal, but I did blood lust. I haven't missed one, so I tried. Um, there's a couple of hard things I'm

gonna talk about. No, we talking about that. Oh, here's an interesting deal. We have covered none stop since since the beginning, the why the famous now Wyoming corner crossing case, and as we pointed out, a whole bunch. I don't want to recap. I don't want to recap the whole thing. Don't recap. Everybody knows what's going on, right, Okay, here's the deal. How many millions did the landowners say his property value went down because these guys corner crossed down?

Three or seven million? Yeah, I think it was six or seven. He's saying, because you corner crossed on my land, you cost me. Let's look it up. Let me look it up six or seven million bucks m because he felt that he felt that he had the exclusive access and now he doesn't. And then everybody was like, well, I don't understand how could that, Like, why would someone corner crossing um cost you millions of dollars right and damages?

It just didn't make sense. Well, there's an interesting development in this case, now, Judge scav Doll ska v d A H. L. Scave Doll, I don't know cloes it off. Can I interject for a second. Yeah, I'm seeing ranges from three point one million to seven point seven five million. Another. Uh, seems like a real estate agent was saying on behalf of Elk Mountain Ranch that it would be devalued about nine point three nine million, so a lot, I think.

In our article on the mediator dot com says the um the ram Schoner was claiming as much as seven point seven five millions. Yeah, if you're unfamiliar with this whole read that and that's my synopsis. Well, here's the deal. You know who this guy really should the landowner, who

his complaint is. He should be contacting the real estate broker like it's not the he should be calling the listing agent saying because we saw the listing when he bought it, saying, you're real estate listing UM says that it's exclusive access to all this public land. So or his attorney, who's supposed to vet and due diligence, that's who's that's who cost him money. That's who led him down the path of thinking that all this public land was his and his alone. That's true. Like he's suing

the wrong person either way. The judge, the whelming judge ruled okay, Judge scabbed all. Sorry judge from dicking your name up. Judge scave Doll ruled the evidence of diminution of value of private property if corner crossing is legal, is irrelevant, meaning the court will focus solely on the issue of whether corner crossing is legal, not whether legalized corner crossing will affect the value of private property. I

mean that makes total sense. It's two different things. You know, he's like, he's getting way ahead of himself to be like and I'm out seven million dollars. Yeah, but because he like, because the criminal case just said we didn't break a law, So you're saying I owe you money and I need to break a law. Usually when I summed this up, I usually use the story about the juice when he um got acquitted for killing his wife and that waiter, but then in civil trial got found guilty.

But I'm not cad becas we're not gonna sum it up. Um we had a law. So this this letter begins. We get a letter from a listener, ohmigos. We're having tough We're a conversation about why refried like what makes refried beans refried beans? But it wasn't. Also, it was like stemming off the fact that we had people write in about like when you put the prefix in front of like dry curing something and people are like, no, you're just putting rub on it. He he does like

all those food terms. And then we got talking about with refried beans, Like my understanding is they're not refried, they're fried. They're fried. Yeah, this guy has a lot to say about it. My name is Adrian Martin and I'm a second generation Mexican American. Both my parents were born in Mexico and immigrated over to what is now the People's Republic of Washington. Abakan first generation Halma. Both his parents are born in Mexico first generation. Sorry, buddy,

that makes his material. That makes his information more relevant. It does not what less relevant. He says, I'm gonna have a bean eater myself. I believe that with my background, I can provide some insight to the recent refried bean dilemma. Here's my take on it. Refried beans come about from

first boiling beans until soft. He prefers pinto beans. He says, as a parenthetical aside, back to the quote, you take those beans and fry them for the first time in some kind of oil and smashing them until you get desired consistency. Another parenthetical aside, I prefer using olive oil that has had a halopeno cooking in it for five to ten minutes prior to adding to the beans doesn't large.

But then he breaks from his parenthetical aside to say leave the halopeno in there with the beans, which I feel it should be part of the parent going on. You can eat these quote fried beans at this point, and most of the Mexicans I know referred to the beans at this point as refried beans. However, you could also let those beans sit in the fridge overnight and proceed to fry the fried beans with a little bit of oil and eat them that way as well. Technically speaking,

only then would they become refried beans. You could repeat the refrying process a couple more times, but usually I eat them all by the second fried. You could create an evolutionary chart of beans becoming refried beans. The stages would go something like hard beans to boiled beans, to fried beans, to refried beans to refried refried beans. Truth be told, I've had beans refried up to three times a four and air pretty good, but I prefer a true refried bean. Audios That clears that up. Do we

need a new T shirt? The evolution of the ban? It would be good? Okay. A little clarification on scorpions. Someone says, I was listening to episode four when three in a question came up about whether or not smaller scorpions are really more dangerous. Steve didn't seem to believe it, but in general it is true. Here's where I screwed up. I got there's a couple of these. I screwed up this and another thing. What I meant was this, I was mixing up two things. They're talking what is it?

When is it? What is it? When they're talking about across different species intra uka within a species. Okay. When I said that about bigger littler, I was talking about this idea that let's say you take the same rattlesnake. Okay, you take a prairie rattler or green mojave or whatever, any kind of rattlesnake, and there's a myth, there's a there's a local legend that that within the species. Okay, So a prairie rattler, that a smaller prairie rattler is

more venomous than a big prairie rattler. And they say because it somehow can't control the venom output. And herpetologists have repeatedly written in to say that's not true. Toxicity would have to do with when did it last strike something? Okay, Okay, So when this came up, like a big scorpion versus a little scorpion, I pointed that out, and I was erroneously meaning like within a species. So say you're taking

the northern scorpion. I was saying, I don't know that I believe that a small northern scorpion is more venomous than a fully mature, larger specimen of a northern scorpion. But this person wrote in to say, well, in general, first off, there are twelve hundred scorpion species. In general, you got some big honkers. The Emperor scorpion okay, relatively hard. That's a giant scorpion, relatively harmless. While the much smaller death stalker scorpion that's a hell of a name. Yeah, yeah,

I would call him the death deal. Yeah, he stalks. He's so bad. He stalks death the death stalkers. He says, I've owned two Emperor scorpions. You can handle them without a glove, but I'd never try that with a fat tail or a death stalker. Um. So generally, big old honkers, um, big old honkers are less venomous than some smaller varieties scorpions sting more than a million people a year and kill three thousand, not phelps. Do we know what kind of scorpion he got stung by because you guys like

kept it as a pet. How's that scorpion doing? Okay? The guy goes on to say, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I gave up on Indiana just long before. When was that? I only was the fourth one that it's yeah, it's bad. I think they had lost a lot of audience by then, he says. Indy says, when it comes to scorpion, the bigger the better. Indy has a scientific evidence to back him up. Uh, anything else interesting? Here? Last highlight about the evolutionary trade off.

It's pretty interesting. Oh, but I think we got into this when we had the guy. Remember that research we had on about animal weapons Doug Emlyn. Oh, good memory. Gosh, yeah, is it dogma? The findings point to an evolutionary trade off. They're talking about a researcher name Fry, some guy or a woman. I don't know Fry. When scorpions first appeared, scorpions relied on big crab like clause to attack prey, he speculates, But once they evolved a deadly sting, they

didn't need to grow big clause. Yeah, we're we're a little inn over at waiters now on that one. We have to get the thing. Here's my big correction. I have a bunch of times of misuses. To someone point this out, I need to offer up a correction on the use of the on the on the usage of the founder effect. Steve Is multiple times on the podcast referred to this effect as new animals doing well in a new environment. I was mixing something up. I can't think of what I was actually talk let me finish

the crack. While it's possible that this could be happening concurrently with the Founder effect, isn't the same thing. The Founder effect is basically basically a statistical misrepresentation of a population by taking only a few members of that species to found a new population. For example, let's say there's a population of black bears and the continental US that is ninety five percent black with five percent blind. He goes,

I don't know the real numbers, but just making this up. Okay, So let's just say, right then, three bears swim to a new island and start a new population of black bears, and two of them happen to be blond. So like a freak statistical freak occurrence. Right now, you've got this whole population that starts off of an atypical representation, and then the founder effect the new population winds up being.

In this instance, he points out, possibly the new population becomes largely blonde due to the attributes of the founders.

I was using it for something that Vlarious Geiss used to talk about which is like like I should look up what it is when when animals are colonizing new habitat, like when the when the glaciers were receding and animals are colonizing new habitat, you have um you know, or like when you introduce a predator to like, let say you introduce a predator an island has never had predators, and the praise not used to it, right, they kick ass is bringing it like when wolves came into Yellowstone

in the late nineties. They kicks or it's founding, do you know. I don't know the technical word for it, but there is a you know, a kind of like a colonization or recalonization effect. Wherefore a while, if you introduce a new species to a place, they will like their population will go like this and then eventually plateau very quickly and then plateau like this place is great. Yeah,

the animals don't run. There's a lot of them, uh, he says, for example, the Afrikaner population of just that's just an aside that I just did a little bit of googling, So that wasn't him that this is like from UC Berkeley's Department of evolution rim talking. The African or population of Dutch settlers in South Africa is descended

mainly from a few colonists. Today, the Afrikaner population has an unusually high frequency of the gene that causes Huntington's disease because those original Dutch colonists just happened to carry that gene with unusually high frequency. This effect is easy to recognize in genetic diseases, but of course the frequencies of all sorts of genes are affected by founder events.

That's interesting. This is why our wolves here are so big and bad because when they trapped a remember they trapped fifty and chose the biggest, meanest ones to bring the Yellowstone. We even heard from a guy they'd go in and he was telling us they'd poke them with a stick, pick the mean victim, meanest mask, not mean enough, Let that one go. Don't send him that one. It's not mean enough. When he smiled at me when we poke them with a stick, he wasn't mean enough. Okay.

The Wolverine Foundation, yes, tell me what the Wolverine Foundation is for starters. So back in nineteen ninety six, all of the wolverine biologists in the entire world, which was like probably five people you know, got together and they were really looking for a way to raise the profile of this veryly poorly understood, poorly studied species, and you know, in order to raise money and in order to raise awareness,

they started the Wolverine Foundation. And they've run it as an organization that does education and outreach and also gets pretty small grants in the in the world of like you know, grant making up to like maybe twenty thousand dollars at the most to help facilitate wolverine research projects. UM I took over in twenty fifteen, and um it's still a very small organization and continue to run it.

Run it primarily as a small grant making organization and then again like outreach and education, So coming onto podcasts, traveling to universities to give lectures and uh, you know, just generally raising awareness about this amazing species. You come on a lot of podcasts. I've been on two, and I've never had one that officially has like a recording studio before. So this is a new and fascinating experience. Let's get jealous. UM are you affiliated with a university?

Though no, neither as an individual nor as a Wolverine Foundation, we are we are an independent of five one C three nonprofit, but you work within you probably work with university people. Yes, So it works is if you the interested public happens to have a wolverine project, and that can be a graduate project, some kind of academic project, an agency project, or a project that's run through a nonprofit, you can write a grant application to us and then

we will review it and potentially grant funds. So yeah, a lot of the people who we grant funds too, are actually affiliated with universities or with agencies like the Forest Service or you know, nonprofit organizations. But we ourselves once we give the money. We can still serve in an advisory capacity if the people running the project want that, but we don't. We're not like actually involved in the field work once we make the grants. Yeah, yeah, explain.

I know that Mongolia played a big role in your resume and your sort of genesis as a Wolverine person. Yeah, so that's my personal story and it's a little bit aside from the Wolverine Foundation, But I was a Peace Corp volunteer in Mongolia from two thousand to two thous In two and Peace Corps. Peace Corp is a great program. It's what you make of it. But in like the

infinite wisdom of like bureaucracy. I had an undergraduate degree in anthropology and I had been like sort of involved with the environmental organization on campus, and they were like, great, we're going to make you into an ecology teacher. I'd never take an ecology class in my life. So they sent me out to this town in central Mongolia. The

Peace Corps wanted you to be an ecology teacher. Yes, yes, I mean I thought you guys mostly like delivered vaccinations and water stuff and no, no, I think that in probably at the closer to the founding of the Peace Corps, it was more of that like humanitarian aid type of organization. But by the time I went, they, you know, Mongolia was coming out of seventy years of socialism and they were trying to bring their educational system up to speed, and they had all of these national parks that they

had just founded. A lot of environmental organizations had gone there, and they were trying to work with the Mongolian government to set aside a land to be protected in a sort of in the system of landscape protection and conservation that we're more familiar with as opposed to sort of

the Soviet model that they had been working under. And so they wanted to reorganize their ecology and biology education program within the schools, and so they decided Peace Corps matched me up with a town that had requested a school in a town that had requested somebody to help work on both English teaching and also on refining their biology curriculum and retraining their biology teachers to incorporate ecology

into the curriculum. So I went over there. I was there for two years, and in my spare time in the summers when school wasn't in session, I started kind of volunteering with snow uppord research programs. So I would go out and help do snowuppord surveys for the animals themselves and also for prey species ibex in our Golly, did you ever lay eyes on a snow leppard? I did, but not um, not, not while I was a Peace Corps volunteer. It was, yeah, it was in twenty seventeen.

I was on a UM assisting with a snow leopard collaring operation in the Altaie and we uh trapped two snow leopards and collared them. So it trapped them out with legs snares. Um really and you got to see them? Oh yeah, I got to like how, how like what what do they what do they use for a set? It's a it's like a it's a wire snare ye and then um you uh, I think you it's on a spring lock, right, it's I don't. I didn't actually set the snares, so I can't. I'm trying to remember how.

And it wasn't my project either, so I wasn't reminding you as in charge of doing it. I was actually there to try to set up cameras for camera trapping wolverines and then went along with these these two snow Leppard captures. Um. So it's a leg snare. You bury it in the um in the kind of talis and then you spray. For whatever reason, snow Leppards are like really attracted to high quality perfume. Oh yeah, remember we're talking about this before they found some. I can't remember.

There's some. There's some clone or perfume that's like kill around cats. The Chanel number five. Yeah, we had a news article about that. We covered one obsession for men Calvin Klein. So like when I'm when I figured that out,

I think they did it was snow leppers in the zoo. Um. But like, yeah, when I'm when I'm doing camera trapping for snow leppards, which I have done, you know, you're in the back country of Mongolia, you haven't showered for like two weeks, and you reek of like very very high quality perfume crawling around like putting up your your camera traps and then like spraying rocks with like eighty

dollars worth of you know. So that's what like, Okay, so when you're setting a camera trap for uh, for a snow Leppard, you're not hanging like a road kill carcass. You can just use just perfume. Yeah, get into their camp and bring it into the camera. Yeah yeah, and then um, I don't know how like effective this was, but you know snow leopards also scrape, so if you you know they do that little paw yeah to I

do with their hind legs. My other role on that snow Leppard coloring expedition was to be the scraping snow leopard, so they would they would make me do all the scrapes um by the snares to get to get the snow leppard to like come in and be like, oh, is there another snow leopard here that's marking territory and then um put their paw in Nasso's little um. Like mountain lions do it like that little remember I usually

they do with their front foot. But I think it is I think some Floyd Green, I think sent Us trailcam stuff where the cat does it with his back foot. It's not like after dogs go to the bathroom and they kind of like wipe off their feet. It's different than that. It seems to be some kind of it's like a territorial kind of marker. You can tell what wait he was. I don't know if this is true, and I don't know if you do. You guys still like in the in the in the Mountain lion world,

do you still believing tell Us line to travel? Yeah, that it does it, it leaves, It does it as leaves, so it kicks his dirt bag it's back. Yeah, there's like a little wall of debris behind it, and he was going the other stuff. Yeah, so they do that. The other day when I was it was the last spring.

I was with my buddy Jeff Flood, and he pointed one out and I was like, oh, yeah, I know all about that, and I said, yeah, it's going that way, or he asked, I said yeah, it's going that way, and we literally went ten yards and there's another one going the other drag and I'm like, well, no, we don't know. Changed his mind. Yeah, so, um gosh, what was it? So they had they had him to foot snare and then they tranquilized and you got the hold one.

We yeah, we tranquilize them. And then not only did I get to hold it, but I had to like shove my hand down its throat to attach like the oxygen monitor to its tongue. So you know, there's that like that that moment where you're like, oh my gosh, I have my hands on a snow Leppard. This is like the mystical moment of achievement for a wildlife biologist.

And then the person in chargees like grab its tongue and you're like, what, like actually put my hand down its throat and like yeah, and so you're like avoiding the teeth and trying to like pull the tongue out, and it's actually a lot harder to get the little monitor attached to unconscious cat's tongue than you would suspect. And that's just why you're working it up. You got to do that. Yeah, yeah, you just want to make

sure that you're not going to harm the animal. Oh um, oh you had to ask me about an I mean it was like inaccessible hundred pounds or it was about one hundred pounds. Um. The other thing is that we yeah, we had to use my duffel bag because they had forgotten the um, you know, the little thing that they usually used to weigh it. So my my duffel bag has been retired as like a shrine to the snow

leppard because it's still covered with snow leopard fur. So I just have this duffel bag at home that conscious snow leopard fur in it. And um, yeah, so I think it was somewhere around one hundred pounds. And it was a male, a young male that we caught. At first, he might have weighed a little bit less, and then the next animal that we caught was his mother, and she weighed a little bit more. So she was traveling with two um cubs and that we caught one we

didn't catch the other. So yeah, I was talking these guys. I think I've told this story before. I'm gonna telegrams. I like it. I saw it in these guys that they were uh, some green Brays that served in Afghanistan and they were doing a thing in a mountain pass one time and they caught a guy. They caught some guys coming up through this pass and shot one of them and he dropped the big recoiless rifle and then

his buddies carried him back down off the pass. But that recoilless rifle was set up there, and his kid was telling me how he sat there all night watching thinking that someone was going to come back for that RECOILSS rifle and he saw a snow leopard come through that pass and smell the blood where he shot that guy. Wow. Wow, Yeah, that is u sa he saw. He saw it through his night vision again, just like incredible man seeing a

snow lepard in the wild. Actually, I mean I actually haven't seen a snow leopard in the wild because we trapped him, so it doesn't it doesn't count to the same degree that it would if it were just like casually, you know, crossing a mountain pass while you happen to be looking at a gun intently, um, waiting for some human to come back. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, very emotional things. Yeah, I mean it's the war situation is quite horrible. But um, seeing the snow leopard, that's that's

pretty cool. Where did Peter Mathison write the snow Leopard about? That was in Nepal? Okay, I think out where you were? No, no, um, and yeah that's a different I don't know as much about what the conservation status of or what field research is like in those environments because it is, I think fairly different. Um. But yeah that was Nepal and do and when I know, we're still getting into your time Mongoli,

but wolverines overlap with snow leopards and Mongolia. Yeah, so to pick up the Mongolia wolverine connection piece again, Um, I was doing work with these snow leopard uh, you know programs, and I really wanted to do snow leopards stuff, but I didn't. First of all, I grew up in New England. My parents are both historians, so until I went to Mongolia, I did not realize that there was such a thing as like making a living running around

in the mountains looking at wildlife. I think if I had known that when I was younger, I would have like keyed into that and followed that trajectory a lot earlier. But it was really revelatory to me that like you could actually make a living doing that, and that was a thing. And so I really was like, hmm, I think I want to do this, and I think I

want to study snow leopards. But I didn't have any idea how to go about getting into the field and snow leopards, you know, scientists, researchers of like charismatic megafauna are sort of notoriously territorial. There's that saying, of course, that you start to resemble the animal you're studying, And so it just seemed like a very limited field. And I was thinking about like other species that might be in the same kind of environment, because the cold northern

mountains was huge part of it. Like, there's no way I wanted to study things in some hot like jungle environment or anything like that. Yeah. Too much poison, too much poison, ivy leeches in the trees. Um. I have actually worked in those environments too, It's not my thing. Um, and so wolverines. I didn't really know anything about wolverines when I was in Mongolia, but when I was leaving, somebody gave me a wolverine pelt as a parting gift,

and I was like, what is this. It's just like this weird brown pelt, Like I don't I don't even know what this is, um, And so I looked it up, and because it's a sight e species, I was like, you know, I can't really take this out of the country. And I ended up leaving the wolverine pelt there, and

then I was in graduate school. I ended up going to grad school for wildlife ecology, and I was doing my master's research on wolves and the wolf ree introduction, and I was working with during this you know all about picking the big nasty ones, and I do. And I would actually rather not get into too many of the too many of my thoughts about that, but um, yes,

and indeed I heard many of those stories. I was interviewing ranchers in the Upper Green and I was interviewing Shahoni and Arapaho tribal members about their thoughts about the wolf reintroduction ten years after it had happened, and the organization that was hosting my summer research. The director of that organization was also the field coordinator for the Absorber Beartooth Wolverine Project, and he invited me to go out on a wolverine expedition because the guy who was supposed

to go with him couldn't go. And over the course of talking to him about wolverine stuff, he said, Oh, there's this unstudied population in Mongolia that nobody knows anything about, but we'd really like to learn more about them. And he made some kind of comment about like, but who knows anything about Mongolia or like who knows anybody who

knows anything about Mongolia? And I was like, oh, well, actually, I'm fluent in Mongolian and I have worked on wildlife issues there in the past, and so it's kind of your fluent Mongolian. Yes, yeah, actually today and today is actually the first year of the Mongolian New Year, so I should also say, which is like best wishes um for the year of the water rabbit um. So it's very auspicious day. Say when oh, Kevin Murphy, he's been

fired up about that water rabbits rabbits? Can you say that? Say? Um, say something like uh, Yanni is probably not correct. In Mongolian, Yanni's probably not correct if we don't have anything to back us up on how the mom, the father and son fight it out. Some just want to hear some Mongolian du Oh my gosh. I hate questions like this because it's always so like on the spot. Uh in ni sat qui hiwe you yah? Uh? Oh my god?

What is the word for two animals fighting? Uh out? Yeah, this is actually not not a word uh that I actually know off the top of my head. Um, but yeah, so uh yeah, that's beautiful. I didn't actually, I didn't actually get to the verbs. So anybody who speaks Mongolian out there is going to recognize that that is not actually complete sentence. But I apologize about that. Um. That's pretty good, though. How the hell do you learned that

the Peace Corps training in that? So? Peace Corp does this thing, or they did when I was a volunteer, where they send you to like three months of it's basically like the worst adult summer camp you've ever been to, where you're like there with fifty other volunteers in a small Mongolian town. Um, and you they give you like three months of language training and cultural training. You're living with a Mongolian family. That part was great. Um, and

uh yeah that's how I mean. I learned the basics through their language training, and then I was put into a town where nobody else spoke English, so I either had to figure out how to speak Mongolian or I was not going to talk to anybody for two years. Yeah, yeah, seriously,

And I still can't spell anything. It's really funny because, like you know, when you learn a language primarily through talking to people, like I, people try to I try to write things to people, and I have to go back to the dictionary all the time because I'm like, how do you spell that word? How do you spell that word? Um? So it's a very different kind of experience, I think than if you're in a classroom learning a language. But yeah, yeah, but it's like highly functional though, right

it is. It's very functional. And um yeah, I've been told my accent is really good, so I'll buy on it, Okay, great? Um. Yeah. So I had this conversation with this guy who was absolved involved in the Absorba Beartooth Wolverine project and then ended up um starting my own project in Mongolia, and uh,

you know that was not a callering project. That would be and way too difficult to run just because of the way you call our wolverines that you have to kind of have a vet on hand, and you know, it's a lot of like backcountry access issues and that's hard enough here where we have like snowmobiles and helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, it's still really really hard to man the traps and monitor the traps and get people in once you have a wolverine in the trap, to

get people in there on time, to make sure that the animal isn't hurt. And so instead of sort of trying to do something like that, I was thinking about how much more all of my Mongolian colleagues know about wildlife than I do. You know. They're just they're people who a third of the population is still like on

the landscape as herders every day. And when I showed up as an environmental volunteer with my ecology book that I was going to teach the Mongolians, you know, about how to do ecology or whatever, I had a one of my fellow teachers put me in my place really fast. She was like, know what Chingis Khan passed the world's first environmental laws over a thousand years ago. Like, what the heck have you guys done that's comparable to that. We know how to manage our wildlife and we know

how to manage our environment. And I was like, oh yeah, and if you're twenty two years old and you're like a cocky American going into a foreign country, let me

tell you people about environmentalism. I am so grateful to her for doing that because I see so many people who work internationally with this kind of attitude of like it's almost like a missionary like superiority complex kind of thing where you're like, guys, you got to humble yourselves a little bit and see this as an exchange, not as just you showing up in this place to tell people how to live their lives and how to do their thing. Um, you know, can I like talking about

the Peace Corps what you're talking about right now? Have you read the Ugly American? I have not. Yeah, everybody thinks like the ugly American was the good guy. Like people say like, oh, you know when when Americans go overseas and they're out of touch, people like, oh, this classic ugly American, but like the ugly American and the ugly American in this fictitious country of Sarcan is ugly and humble and shuts up, and he's very effective. Okay, yeah, I mean I think I haven't read the book, but

I think that that is. Like, the most effective people I have seen working internationally are the people who are who listen. Yeah, they show up in a place and they sit there for six months. They learn the language to the best of their ability, and they listen to what people are telling them, and then they have a basis for doing better work because they have the relationships that they need and they have the understanding that they need. And you know, they're not going in with a preconceived

notion of what's best. They're like actually co creating something that's much stronger. So anyway, sorry, that's a little bit of a soap box spield, but um yeah, So I was fortunate to have this woman put me in my place, and I think what I was trying to do was create, um a wildlife monitoring project and a conservation project that was really built from Mongolian values and perspectives and that

prioritize Mongolian knowledge and understanding of the species. And so I just traveled around Mongolia and asked a lot of questions and interviewed people about what they knew about wolverines, and UM we went. I went to places that we're wolverine habitat, and I went to places that were not modeled wolverine habitat as kind of a control to understand like what people in wolverine habitat were saying versus what people outside of wolverine habitat we're saying about this species UM.

And the background, there's like a side note background to this is that there are pretty tight models of wolverine distribution worldwide UM that have to do with environmental factors. I think we're going to talk about this a little bit more hit it because it's like like like there's a when when I was reading in the and Cren's notes, Huh,

there's like some really a somewhat simple parameter. Yeah, So there's a there's a paper that was published in twenty ten about the bioclimatic envelope of the wolverine, and bio climatic envelopes are UM. You know, species distribution models that are defined by UM basically climatic and biological factors, and so for wolverines, it seems like you can model their distribution worldwide UM based on places that have maximum August

temperatures of less than seventy degrees fahrenheit. And that's not averages, no, that's that's the maximum August temperature, right, So, UM, does that correspond generally with a certain latitude or is there some it's latitude and elevation and so yeah, because like because like the alpine zone, like super High Country in Colorado would have wolverines exactly right, Yeah, which had to be like little teeny islands of shit. Right, you guys

are hitting all of them. This is great. I love talking to you guys because you're hitting all of these important ideas about like where wolverines are and why they are there, and you understand how that distribution is working. So at maximum augus temperatures of seventy degrees fahrenheit was one of the parameters, and the other was late spring snowpack, so snow that remains on the ground through in that

twenty ten model through May fifteenth. So if and then and then there is a latitude breakoff, so UM north of sixty degrees north latitude, that relationship breaks down. Um. But south of sixty degrees north, it's it's very, very very strict, except in Mongolia where you have a lot of reports or you had a lot of reports of wolverines. Well outside of this this uh um, at least outside of the snow model, they still tend to be inside

the temperature model. UM. So the point of like traveling all over Mongolia and talking to people inside the snow model, inside the temperature model, and then outside of both of those models, because there are places in the Gobi Desert where it's really outside of the both of those models, was to understand from using local ecological knowledge and bringing that into the center of the work to understand like where wolverines were, how they were behaving, how much people

knew about them, what they were saying about them, what they were eating, and using that as a as a main source of information what is generally I got two Mongolia questions. I'm just gonna hit you both right now. There's gotta be some wild ass country in Mongolia. Yes, So put it to me, like if you walk that distance, if you walk that direction for blank distance, you're not going to run into a road. Oh hit me with

some of that. And also, um, what is their general like in MONGOLDI what do they regard the wolverine as? Do they regard it as a furbearing animal? Do they regard it as like a don't touch like? What's like generally? What is what is the view of it? Um? So the question about roads, when I went to Mongolia in two thousand, I think there were there were only nine hundred kilometers of roads in the country or something like that when I first went there, So you could go

forever without running into a road. Um, It's there is a lot of very very wild country there and like hundreds of miles and not running anything. Yeah, I mean you. So there's a there's a little bit of a paradox though the land. I've heard it described as the land is like very lightly inhabited on the surface in terms of like the density of people, in the density of infrastructure, But the relationship that people have with that land over

every square kilometer is so deep. Um. And so I don't I don't I get really hesitant to describe it as wilderness because people do have these these relationships with with all of it. You know, there's always somebody who has some kind of relationship with with whatever piece of land you are on. But in terms of the things that we consider markers of human habitation, like infrastructure, it's very sparsely spread. But but herd ors whoever, like people

are people. If you stay in some spot, people are at some point in the year for some purpose utilizing the area, Yes, and they wouldn't regard it as uninhabited, or they would definitely not regard it as uninhabited. And the other thing that's important to mention about Mongolia when I first went there was there was no private property in the country. So you know, there was no private

landownership in the country when I arrived. So you know that that idea of inhabiting a place or you know, having a sense of like ownership or connection to the place wasn't vested in the same things that we would consider markers of that So nobody had the right to like say, oh, this is my property, you can't cut across it to go hunting. You know, that's like that would be a very would have been a very foreign

concept at that time. In two thousand and one, they did start into introducing a limited system of private ownership for people who had been occupying their houses in towns, they were able to receive title to it. But my friends came to me at that time and they were like, Oh, the Cadastral Service is doing this whole thing where we're supposed to have title to our land and we don't

understand what that means. Can you explain to us? And that was another one of those moments where I was like, Oh, this place is just a really different and interesting place. And so, yeah, there's been a lot of change in those twenty years, and now there is a fairly significant amount of private land, but all pasture constitutionally, in the Mongolian constitution, the bulk of Mongolia's landscape must remain public.

That's in their constitution. There have been also a lot of roads built since I was first there, so now you can probably go much shorter distance before you run into a road. As for how Mongolians relate to wolverines, they the majority of people I've spoken to do not consider it a significant animal um because they're so rare on the landscape, people don't run into them that much. They still know way more than an average American would like.

If you go up to somebody on the street in the US because I've done this, and you say, tell me what you know about wolverines, they're like will like the X Men, you know, or something like that, you know, where they just don't really even understand that it's an actual animal. In Mongolia, you can ask people about wolverines and they will generally know the basic outlines of what it is, and you know that it's that it's a species that wanders around a lot, and that you that

it eats meat and it scavenges. But they don't. They don't. They're not present strongly enough to be like very culturally significant. Wolves are hugely culturally significant in Mongolia. Um, And I was thinking when I first started talking to people about wolverines, Oh, maybe there's going to be some of this kind of like wolf similar to the wolf stuff, where you know there's some kind of spiritual connotation or something like that.

They're really wasn't on the same order, but they are associated with er La Khan, who's the king of the underworld, So there's that sort of spooky like, Um, you know, wolverines are a little dubious. They kind of seem to be somewhat associated with some chaotic powers kind of thing. Yeah, and they have like a lot of Northern and North America, a lot of northern indigenous groups have a sort of like it's like a devil yes type creature because of

their ability to like ruin your ship. Yeah, it's um, yes, there they're getting your food cash, they'll rob your trap lines, they'll like, you know, they're they're not always welcome. They are unapologetically about their own uh you know, um well being. I think it's a good way to put it. And

there are there are also many of those stories. Like one of the populations I work with in Mongolia are reindeer herders, and they so they're up in the tiger in the mountains with their reindeer and they are still largely hunting people. They use their reindeer for transportation. They milk their reindeer, but they don't usually eat them. So

most of their protein comes from hunting. And they go out on these winter expeditions, um, where they will hunt and then they build these like little log shelters and they put the meat in there and then they'll leave it elevated around the ground. Um, they're on the they're built the ones I've seen are built. They're just like little log boxes. They're not like they're not that elevated. Um and the but they but they they have a

platform inside. They do have a platform inside. Yeah, um, And then they'll go and they'll continue their hunting rounds and they'll like come back and retrieve the meat because it stays frozen. And one of those guys was telling

me a story about how he came. He came back to a place where he had cashed a moose and there was a hole that had been chewed through and that the wolverine, he said, must have been in there for like weeks, just eating the entire moose and that um, and the wolverine could have been going and coming back.

But he said, oh, you know, actually, wolverines I think are a very tidy animal because you know, there was a place where it was doing its business inside them, inside the box, and then there was a place where it was clearly sleeping and these were all like and then there was a place where it was eating, and so it was keeping its household in order. Layout yeah so um, but yeah, they do have this reputation of course, like one of the colloquial terms in English is devil bear. Um.

They they have a reputation for being tricksters. They are kind of known as like buffoons sometimes but also with that dark edge of like you know, potential potential chaos and problematic association if you if you do the wrong thing or if you cross them. If you look at a Mongolian wolverine, um, are there distinctive like in terms of size, coloration, the bars. Would you ever be like, Oh, that's a Eurasian wolverine and that's a North American wolverine. No?

I think visually they appear quite similar genetically, Um, you know, at least in terms of the half types, which is what we look at for evolution. Um. You know, there are there are different haplotypes in North America and in Eurasia, but they are also overlapping haplotypes. U. So it's basically the same animal as far as we can tell behaviorally and in terms of like what they look like. Yeah, yeah, how many have you seen without how you see in

the wild without like not trying to lure him in one? Yeah? Yeah to what you've seen too, right, Anny, Yeah, I'd love to hear about Yeah, oh you did drag that moose leg? Well? We were all in the same hunt with my dad. But you but then you saw one robin caribou carcass, Yeah, and you saw on robin moose car. Yes. And on that trip I saw in a way off, on a way off distant mountain, I saw another wolverine. It was miles from where we saw the one that

was stashing the cariboo parts. More than likely probably the same one, but could have in my third one. Wow, where did you see the one you saw Mongolia? No, actually it was in It was in Wyoming. So that very I was mentioning the guy who I worked with, who was the field director for the Absorka Beartooth Wolverine project,

and so it was that expedition. In fact, here they had had callers out on a bunch of their wolverines, and he wanted to go in and look at a cluster of locations from that collar to see if we could figure out what the wolverine had been doing in that location. And it was up on the you know, the Absorka Beartooth Plateau. We went on and off of Toga Te Pass and it was like a hike. It

was like forty two miles in two days. I was not in shape to do something like that, but he really needed somebody to go with him because the four Service protocols said that he couldn't do it by himself. So he's like, it'll be fine, it'll be fine, it's totally fine. Once we get up there, it'll be entirely flat. And I was like, okay, you know, I'm up for whatever. I'll go. And so we went, and he kept saying like, it's gonna be a little bit hard, it's going to

be a long hike, but it'll be fine. It'll be flat when we get up there. But we're not going to see the wolverine, because you never see the wolverine, so don't get your hopes up. And so he had his dog with him. And the first night that we were out, it was dusk and we were I was washing the dishes after we had eaten, and all of a sudden I heard him just screaming his dog's name and he's like, come back, no, come back. And I was like, WHOA, what is going on? And he's like,

it's the wolverine. It's the wolverine. And so I looked down over the little ridge and the dog and the wolverine were like running at each other. Yeah, and I dropped. I remember dropping my dishes and just like sprinting for my binoculars. And then luckily his dog was obedient and came back, because I don't think that would have ended

well for her if she hadn't done. And so she came back and we out there with our binoculars as the sun went down and it got dark, and that wolverine circled our camp for probably like seventeen minutes, and it really Yeah, it came up and it kept like it kept like looking at us from one rock and then it would like hop off of that rock and it would go to another rock and get up on the rock and look at us again. And you know, we were staring at it, and it was staring at us,

and it was just this moment of mutual curiosity. And that was when I was hooked. I was like, Okay, this is really cool, and now I definitely want to do this project in Mongolia and go learn more about this this species. So yeah, that's the only wolverine I've ever seen in the wild. I've handled two in traps, and I've seen a lot on camera traps, but that remains my only wild wolverine sighting. Were you doing the camera traps in Mongolia? Yes? Yes, And how are you

getting to what were you doing to lure men? Nothing? You know they So this is one of the really interesting things about the Mongolian wolverine work. Um. With wolverines in the US, it seems like if you set even camera traps, um, you need to put a lure out to get them to come to that location. And usually what you do as you hang a bundle of bones from a wire up in the trees and you put scent on it so it broadcasts the scent. Yeah, exactly and um, and eventually you'll get a wolverine coming in

and they will return. Once they know that there's a source of food someplace, they will return again and again and again to that place even after the food source has gone like, they they'll check it out. Um. In Mongolia, we had we set up a grid of fifty cameras in these national parks where I was working in northern Mongolia. And I do know that my ranger colleagues were like they were peeing much in the same way that I use the um, you know, perfume to learn the snow efforts.

They would like pee on a spot um near the where the camera was aimed. Um. But that was the only lure that that we used, and in some cases they weren't even doing that, And so you would just get these these wolverines that were like traveling. You're setting it up on trails or not even on trails. Well, trails is like a I mean there are like travel routes that are used by both wildlife and by human

herders in those national parks. Yeah, and I think you know a lot of it really depended on the rangers knowledge of where they had seen tracks in the past, and so they would set these these cameras up so they'd know a likely cross and spot or whatever from pass that they're using. Yeah, because they've been out on

this landscape their whole life. Every single one of those rangers had been Some of them were former hunters U And of course hunting is now illegal in those national parks, which is a whole other discussion, but you know, some of them had been brought into the national parks by giving them a salary to not kill the wildlife anymore, but rather to to protect it U. So yeah, again it just for me, it foregrounds the importance of having

a population working on wildlife research and conservation that is really tied to that that wildlife population and knows the landscape really really well. What else are you picking off on those cameras? Snow leppards one snow leopard. Yeah, and we know that she's a female. It's the first snow lepperd that was found in that park in fifty years I think. And I had also done the Long Range ski expedition in twenty thirteen in those parks and we had seen snow leppard tracks, so we knew that there

was one up there. But we did get her on camera. We get a lot of links bore elk moose. Yeah. Tigers and Mongolia not anymore, Nope. But you know if the Russians, I mean, say what you want about the Russians, they do have some cool tiger conservation stuff going on, and maybe if they keep it up, there might be sun back in eastern Mongolia at some point. Huh. Yeah, the Russians are good about tigers. Yeah, I mean a man you can hold there should be like like, let's

just talk about tigers and Russias. They got some tiger conservation they do. Yeah, tigers, and it doesn't mean they should have invaded Ukraine. No, I know, I completely agree with you. But there's there's like we used to we used to kind of have this like affectionate, like scornful thing about Vladimir Putin and tigers, because he had these photos of himself like shirtless, like arting darting tigers and

riding horses around on tiger content. There's a shirtless photo of him with a huge yellow perch, which I don't know the head. It's a different species. They're not they're European perch. I call the boys did some research on this because they've seen those pictures of those like four pounders in Europe. There. I wouldn't if I called that perch, I wouldn't have had any clothes on make apistern. Now

he bought a big perch. Yeah, So part of Vladimir Putin's like I don't know he was trying to do like twelve months of Vladimir Putin shirtless calendar with all the wildest species or whatever, but he yeah, he had a shirtless tiger photo at some point and um, yeah, so that's that's Putin and the tiger thing. That's what's not not banged. They're ammer tigers. Yeah, ammer tigers. So the emmer river. What's another one, like Siberian tigers? No? No, no no, Like, what's the you know, the um dear

sue Uzala. What's that tiger species that would have been also the ammer tiger. Oh? Yeah, Siberian tigers. Siberian tigers the same thing or not? Yeah? I mean well, you know there are lumpers and splitters and they are all of these taxonomic debates all the time. But Siberian tigers. The only extant population of Siberian tigers are ammer tigers at this point, so those are the same thing. Heads up, people at home. Uh, who's the famous Japanese director that

made all the samurai movies. He made a movie dar suit Uzala the Hunter, nothing to do with samurai stuff, and it's like Russians. It's like the Russian army working in Siberian they hire a hunter as a guide and he's like, has this crazy relationship with Siberian tigers. There's that book too that was popular whatever ten years ago about the guy who's trying to kill a tiger who was killing last talk about having him on the show Man. It's a good book, but he does a lot of

like I was like text messages buddies. He does a lot of like don't say anything, bag, we were text buddies. No, there's a lot of like speculation about how the tiger thinks and things like that in the you know, it's interesting. Um that same author though, wrote The Golden Spruce. That's right. You want a book that will curl your hair anyhow cool bug links, Yes, moose Elk Boer place sounds like the Promised Land. I love it. Yeah, it's my second home. So you just hail Mary out of trail camera on

a trail. Some guys like I saw track you once. I mean you got to have like a lot of cameras, a lot of days, and a lot of ship besides wolverines. It's yeah, I mean it's there's so much wildlife in these in these protected areas, and I think it's a People say that Mongolia is kind of this like last refuge for Eurasian wildlife because of this very deep um rappor and sense of relationship that that Mongolians have with wildlife,

like it is cosmologically important to them. In a general sense, like maybe not wolverines specifically, but but wildlife and relationships with wildlife are important, and they didn't have a lot of infrastructure, so you know, it was it was a place where there was still full connective on the landscape. And although respecting wildlife and having this rapport with wildlife does not mean that you don't hunt them, or you might be less inclined to think they should kill every

last one of those things precisely. Yeah, Like when I talked to a lot of my hurt her friends about how we wiped we European settlers wiped wolves out of the lower forty eight and you know, this is a hurting culture. They are constantly dealing with wolves coming in and attacking their livestock, and they were so I mean categorically everybody has just been like, what is wrong with you people? That is completely stupid? Why did you do that? M Yeah, So they deal they they deal with it.

Like wolves are adversarial in some respects, So that doesn't mean that you'd want them, yes, to cease existing. Yeah, because wolves carry this this power called humor, and they're they're like humor comes from the from the sky and it conduits through wolves. And so there's a saying in Mongolia that it's lucky to see a wolf's luckier to kill a wolf. So if you see the wolf, you get you get hum or. If you kill the wolf,

you get even more humor. But if all the wolves are gone, it's gone, right, And so I write this now, Yeah, And so basically it's really important for men too, because uh, you know, women can get humor in a number of ways, but for men it's like a lot more precarious. So basically what they're saying is like when they when they're astonished that we wiped out wolves, they're astonished precisely because you're like, well, you know, how are men men? There

are no men if there are no wolves. So well from wolves as well, but um, mostly from seeing them, not killing them. Women can, I've been told, get renew their humor, Like if your humor is down, your life starts to go badly. So, um, you know women can do it by just like doing embroidery. Um, yeah of course, yeah, you know, like just taking care of their kids, like

lighting the fire. Women have a specific relationship with the hearth and fire to which helps keep them more more in order in that regard cosmologically, um, that that men don't necessarily have. So anyway, I like, I'm not I'm just describing things that have been told to me. I don't want to be like saying that I'm necessarily advocating for women doing more embroidery or well, yes, this is what I have been told. I want to move. Um, I can talk about my mongol Ya all day. I

want to talk about America a little bit. Okay, why um their day? Who's I talking to? Not you? I was talking about how you were coming on the show, and I was in Michigan and that's where I was brought up, okay, and I was like, why do they

call Michigan, Like why is it the Wolverine State? So I looked up current and historical range maps, and a number of them showed historical range and I don't know how far back they're going, Like I don't want to look at historical range maps from like twenty thousand years ago, like ice sheets and shit. But I was trying to like, like at the time of European contact, let's say, right, Um, So if I was looking at that, it was saying like like all of Michigan, which I don't buy. I

don't know all of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota. Like, what's the best understanding of in in UH in the in historic times, Okay, wherever you can use as a jump off point, like European contact, historic times, whatever, where were they it's a it's this is it is a matter of some discussion and debate, but we think that you know, wolverine habitat requirements still within the historic past from European contact and before you know, they still had

the biological requirements of needing a cold, snowy niche to occupy. So um, what is generally accept now is that they were through the rocky mountains of the US down to New Mexico. They were in the Sierra Nevada in California. They may have been in the very northern part of New England, and they may have been in some of those northern parts of UM, you know, Michigan and Minnesota

in the Midwest. I think Lewis and Clark record a wolverine sighting in like Nebraska in their journals or something like that, but I'm not totally convinced that that was actually a wolverine, you know, dirt Miss Dad saw one in Miles City. There was one in downtown Lewistown last winter, Yes, like in the cemetery or something. It was a badger. And he's like, listen, this one thing. My old man knows. It's a badger, not a badger. So we can talk

about why that those are. I don't ever dismiss completely out of hand people who report out of range wolverine sightings to me, because you're saying, did some some guys treed one, like scared one into a tree in Michigan? Yeah, so, um, the Michigan thing is interesting. I think what is what people speculate about why Michigan is known as the wolverine State.

And I hope I'm not disillusioning you as somebody who was raised there, but that the fur trade was the first encounter that a lot of Europeans had with wolverine pelts, Like that was the first time they ever ran into wolverines because most of these people were coming from England and France and there were no longer any wolverines spaces, and so they were like, oh, here's this weird animal

that's coming through these fur trading posts. In Michigan. So Michigan was the point of first encounter, but it might not have been the place of Canada down into Detroit exactly. And you're like, oh, I wanted to Detroit to the Fort, and yeah, some guys that came from four hundred miles north had a bunch of wolverine pelts exactly. Wolverine state, Yeah, exactly, and so that's probably a conduit to the north. Yes, um, those Yeah, the trade routes that were converging in Michigan

were kind of the source of that. And then it's a great theory. I'm gonna starting to tell people that that's what it is. Yeah, you should. I mean, as far as we understand that is, that is the case.

There was a wolverine that was treed in Michigan, and I think it was two thousand, like two thousand and eight, and some guys were out coyote hunting and they had dogs with them and they they ran this this animal into a tree and fortunately they realized that it was I mean, obviously they knew it was not a coyote because it was up a tree. But fortunately they didn't shoot it. Speaking of shooting things out of trees, they did not do that. They called the game in fish department.

They were like, I think this is a wolverine, And sure enough it was. And there was a math and science teacher from the local area who set up some camera traps and decided to track this this wolverine. He was baiting his traps with chicken and um, so obviously that was a big incentive for this this wolverine. UM. And she would show up on the camera with a whole bunch of raccoons. Apparently she had some raccoon buddies she was just like hanging out with or they were

all drawn to the chicken. I don't know. Yeah, um, but they seemed to be very tolerant of each other, and they he continued to monitor her. The teacher continued to monitor her until in twenty and ten or early twenty eleven she died of congestive heart failure. So they were able to find her body and neck cropsy it, and that's how they knew that she was a female. And you know, they know how she died. They ran her genetics and she did group with if you exclude

Alaskan wolverines. This is my understanding of this. I haven't actually seen this report. But my understanding is that if if you exclude Alaskan wolverines from that genetic analysis, she groups with Ontario wolverines, So there is a possibility that she came into Michigan naturally. Um. The theory is that she might have been on like a garbage disposal ship that came down from from Ontario and just jumped off

in Michigan. If you include a Alaskan wolverines in that genetic analysis, she I think she groups with Alaskan wolverines, and that would suggest that she might actually have been an escape captive animal because that's where that's the genetic grouping for most I know, but they always go that route. That's how they dismissed people that would see mountain lions in crazy places. For decades, Yeah, skate pets like help a lot of escape, you know what I mean, And

after a while it kind of fell apart. But it's like it's like the first thing that but look at crazy places they go, Yeah, I mean, it's not that it's not that unreasonable, it's not that unreasonable. You know why people dismiss those sightings. I mean, those game and fish agencies, they're like Oh my god. The last thing they want to do is have to manage a population of mountain lions or manage a population of wolverines. Like,

people are going to freak out. So it's better if we can just have some other explanation for another biologist. And then you got to have like a plan you have like people who are like freaking out about their kids getting eaten at the bus stop or what. You know. You just just a whole host of things. You just then to get one. It's like, well, here's a female that was never d claude, it has babies, it's reproduced multiple times. Yeah, well it's got like porcupine quills embedded

in it from like years ago. There wasn't tell me. It's another pet mountain lion from like north or South Dakota that was killed on a highway in Connecticut, you know, and that clearly was a natural dispersal. So wolverines are capable of those kinds of movements. UM. We have a record of a wolverine who was collared off of Toga Tea Pass in the winter of two thousand and eight.

UM he was collared by the Wildlife Conservation Society. His UM, his identifier was M fifty six and he my sister and I tracked him off of Toga Tea Pass in January of two thousand and nine. We heard him, We didn't see him and heard him. Yeah, we had he had a caller, so we went out with the telemetry equipment and we could we could hear that. Yeah, not

just him. Um, it was no, these are they are gp S callers before at that point, like satellite upload collars were still really really expensive, so most of the callers they were putting out had internal GIS trackers UM and then they would also have the UM shoot telemetry just yeah, the little antenna UM and just and you have to be within range of it, like the animal has to be kind of like within us almost like a site line for you to actually hear that, Like

you have to be in proximity to the animal, as opposed to GPSGIS which will upload now they'll upload to a satellite and like download to your phone. So when you heard it, when you payned, it was it just like thick shit. You couldn't tell what was going on or when we were up in some stuff that Yeah, it was a lot of um, there was a lot of forest and there was a lot of topography, so I think it might have been he might have been like a couple of ridges over or something like that.

Um so we heard him. That was January of two thousand and nine, and then they were flying um flights like once so every couple weeks or something to it or where he was. And this happens a lot, especially with young male wolverines, like you'll put a collar on him and you'll fly and then you'll never hear from them again. They'll just disappear one day and you have

no idea where they went. In this case, the guy who had the plane flew down the wind River Range and picked up this M fifty six at the southern end of the of the wind River Range, and the wolverine community was kind of all a buzz because like, at that point we didn't have any definite evidence that there were wolverines in the wind River Range, so we

were like, great, he's like colonizing a new range. And then they flew again a few weeks later and he wasn't there anymore, and they were like, oh my god, did his collar malfunction? Like where did he go? What happened? So we gave him up as like another wolverine that we were never gonna know anything about. A few weeks later, there was a rancher in central Wyoming who went out to look at a cow carcass and there was a wolverine on the cow carcass. This is way outside of

what is modeled verine habitat. And again luckily, this guy was like, oh that's weird and called Wyoming Game and Fish. They called the pilot, They went down and flew sure enough, it was M fifty six, And at that point, the whole environment or whole wolverine research Commune's like, oh my god, this animal is going to go to Colorado. And there had been no definite recorded resident wolverines in Colorado for about one hundred years. So for a few months all

of us were just like, where's M fifty six? Where is he now? Where is he now? How is he going to get across the interstate? Shoot he might get hit? And it was I think it was Memorial Day. He went across the interstate and sure enough went into Colorado, and his transmitter remained online until two twelve. People would see him periodically in Colorado, so we knew where he was he went all over Colorado through Rocky Mountain National Park.

He did, yeah, and people would photograph him there. You know, he just was enjoying his time as a mountaineer. In twenty twelve, his transmitter died and we were like, well, who knows where he is, uh, but maybe people will continue to see him. In twenty sixteen, somebody picked up a photo or saw wolverine and took a photo of a wolverine running across a field in um Northern Montana and in Northern Montana. I do not know for sure that is M fifty six, but I do know that

a straight line trajectory from from that sighting. A couple of weeks later, I think it was in April of twenty sixteen. UM, there was a ranch hand in North Dakota who came out into his pasture and saw an animal in with the cows and unfortunately shot it um and put it. He apparently didn't know what it was. He put it on Facebook. He's like, you know, I shot this critter in my in with my cows this morning.

And people on Facebook were like, dude, that's a wolverine, like call game and fish, and so they came in they netcropsied the animal. And we also um implant transmitters when we call wolverines, because you know, they're built like football players. They can shrug those collars, shrug those collars off like relatively easily. And so when they opened up his abdomen, they found the transmitter in there, and that was m fifty six. Yeah. So from okay, yeah, just

do a quick run through. Yeah, from where he was collared on Tokte Pass to Colorado is a straight line distance of like five hundred miles. He certainly was not traveling in a straight line during that time. From his last known sighting location in Colorado to the place where he was shot in North Dakota is seven hundred straight line now, and did he ever did that wolverine ever run into a wolverine? Who knows? I mean, there's two

there's two ways that you can speculate about this. Of course, a male wolverine when he's dispersing, is probably primarily interested in finding a place with a female wolverine, preferably not his mother, to avoid that Oedipus thing that we were talking about at the outside of the program. So he wants to go as far as he can from his natal area to find another area that has female wolverines

in it. The fact that he didn't stick anywhere either suggests that there were no female wolverines in those areas, or it suggests that there was another male wolverine in that area that you know, booted him out all the highways he crossed without getting ahead, And I hate, I hate to think that he ended the way that he did because he's truly like he's one of those wolverines

whose story we actually know, which is really rare. Most of the time wolverines are out doing this stuff, and I'm sure they've done even more amazing stuff and we just don't know about it. But this happens to be a wolverine who's who's famous? You know. I get letters from school kids who are like, where's him fifty six? What happened to him? And then I have to write to a classroom of fourth graders like, oh, yeah, it's not like things that going to kill a cow anyway.

I know, I'm definitely not. That's another thing from from the Mongolia work. Like I talked to a lot of people about livestock conflict with wolverines, and there they laugh about that. They're like, this is the only way a wolverine could kill of like healthy livestock animal, as if it wasn't actually healthy, you know, so, Um, it was definitely not a threat to wild he went that fart. That's the thing about all this. Oh sorry, well, no, no,

go ahead. But I was just gonna say, we should talk about their viciousness, right because that's what everybody likes

to talk about. And everybody has a story and I think it was even in our notes that there's a moose that was taken down by a wolverine, and everybody there's some story where a grizzly bear has a keel and the wolverine runs the grizzly bear off because they're so And then we should also talk about their territoriality, mating behavior, all the other great things in our notes on I just want to observe though, Um, there's not that many, Like, we don't have that many critters run

around with collars on them. So you go and put a collar on something, and how many I mean, how many wolverines in America are run around the collar on them right now? Oh? Very very few. How you hav what about the one you don't know about exactly. I mean, statistically, what about the one that like isn't wearing a collar that how many are in the lower forty eight like

right now? Oh gosh. Um, So this is a really tricky question to answer because there have not been the kind of long term, consistent studies over a wide enough area to really give us a good idea of how many there are. Do this for me? I know you guys whole every time you deal with the biologist, they do they played this game. Okay, pretensity is holding a gun, and tell tell Brody fill this sentence out. I would be surprised to hear there are more than blank, and

I would be surprised to hear there are less than blank. Okay, I would be surprised to hear that there are more than three hundred and maybe twenty five in the lower forty eight close, good number. I'm going to give you a really precise number in a moment, so I will not do the biologist game all the way through this this little spiel. Um, I would be extremely surprised if there were more than like three hundred and fifty. Yeah, and I'm we typically have said three hundred animals that's

the number that we use. I've upped it a little bit because we know that there's a reproducing population now in the Cascades which was not there at the time that we initially were estimating how many were in the lower forty eight. There's also there was one wolverine in the Sierra Nevada in California, which brings me back to it as something I should have talked about before when we were talking about the original range and you know

range contraction. So why why was it that M fifty six was the first wolverine in Colorado in a century and the first wolverine in North Dakota in a century. That's because when there were predator control programs primarily against wolves in the ear the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, part of that was poison carcasses. Right, you can put out a lot of poison carcasses to try to get

rid of the wolves. And wolverines are a naturally rare, sparsely distributed animal on the landscape, and they are really really good at sniffing out dead animals. And Alaska's wolf man when he's checking his wolf poison, yeah, yeah, real common. Yeah, So it's like five wolves and two wolverines. Yeah, so that just wiped wolverines out of the Lower forty eight all the way back up to the Canadian border. And what you've seen since the middle of the twentieth century

is recolonization. So you have that effect that you were talking about where wolverines are coming back into unoccupied habitat and so there's a pretty sharp population increase because they are this is like a wonderland for wolverine actually filling in. Yeah, so that's that's the that's what happened there. Now there's also an effective population, which is the number of adults that are actually contributing genes to the population. And there this we can actually get a fairly precise number on

because we can use genetics to do it. And so in two thousand and nine, there was a study that was done out of the Rocky Mountain Research Station which took all of the genetic samples from wolverines in the Lower forty eight or in the US Rockies actually and analyze the number of contributing reproductive adults and that number was somewhere between like thirty nine and fifty two. So the adults are females adults. So these are territorial adults

who are actually contributing to the population through reproduction. So you can have three hundred animals on the landscape, but two hundred and fifty of them are extraneous. They're not actually occupying a territory. They're not successful enough to reproduce.

Which makes managing the species in this situation where they are living in islands of habitat that are widely separated because most of where they are is on the mountaintops, right, it makes managing the population a lot more complicated than it does in a place like Alaska, where basically everything is wolverine habitat. Right, You're managing populations and you have

to maintain dispersal corridors. You have to make sure that reproductive adults are occupying these mountain ranges at a pretty consistent rate to continue to produce offspring, to disperse to new areas and so on and so forth. So is the carrying capacity there in the lower forty eight for there to be a lot more of them or is it like there's only a limited number that could ever live down here now? Yeah, precisely, Krent and I were talking about this. But for people who live here in Bozeman.

I like to point to the Bridgers and say that that mountain range could hold maybe one wolverine. They have really huge territories when they're territorial adults. Males can have territories that are up to five hundred square miles. Females can have territories that are up to three hundred square miles. So like, even a range the size of the Bridgers couldn't really serve as an effective population node within the larger meta population because you know, you have you have

to buy happenstance. You have to have a female arrived there, decide to stay. You have to have a male arrived there decide to stay. She has to like the male enough to reproduce with him, and then you know they're reproducing, and then they'll send out kits who may or may not make it. You know, those kids have to disperse to some other mountain range, maybe the Crazies, maybe they go down into yellow Stone, maybe they go to the Abzorkers. Who knows. But all of this is like it's really

really a delicate balance. And then inherently, because they only occupy these areas that have snow on the ground until May fifteenth. You have a very limited amount of habitat within this area for them to occupy. So there is a natural carrying capacity that they are going to reach,

and it is based on habitat. And that also brings us to the kind of the crux of the conservation issue, which is that there are climate models that suggests that Late Springs snowpack is going to decline substantially within the coming century, and so you're really dealing with an expanding population and a contracting amount of habitat for them, which is a really that also makes a management very complicated because it's easy to point to the population between nineteen

fifty and now and say like, oh, look, the population is on this great upward trajectory. So wolverines, it looks like they're doing great. But at the same time you have this oncoming, you know, locomotive just like bearing down on them of climate change that's going to contract the habitat. So people who say, oh, the population is increasing and wolverines are doing fine are sort of posed against people who are like, but climate change is coming, and yeah,

we have a guy. We're going to get into that issue around polar bears where it's where it's you can get like you can get reprimanded by the scientific community for pointing to the fact that polar bear numbers are really strong right now. Yeah, because they like climate activists don't want people to know that polar bear numbers are really strong right now because they feel that then people will become apathetic about climate Yeah, they want to be like,

sure they're strong, but trust me, it's going to get bad. Yeah, don't even tell anybody that they're doing well right now because it's counterproductive, as though people can't like be intelligent enough to to like sort this out in their head. Yeah, they want to conceal the information. I think it's I mean, it's a really that is when we talk about climate change. I think it's really interesting that people have decided that charismatic wildlife need to be the root through which human

beings should care about climate change. Like you're covered in poison ivy and you've said that you were going to be a committed anti climate change activists now because you don't like to itch right, Like, maybe it's better, Maybe it's better to talk to people about you're going to be getting mosquito bites more poison ivy, you have more pandemics, you're going to have more wildfires, You're gonna have less water,

like I don't. I don't know that. I think that it's great to talk about the impending effects of climate change on wildlife, but I don't think it's necessarily the best thing to do to try to organize our entire reason for caring about climate change around narratives about wildlife, like you should care because it's coming for your kids and grandkids, and it's going to make their lives worse and more unhappy in small ways like poison ivy, and

in very large ways like conflict over water. And you don't want the wolverine app to carry all that bird not, bet don't. I just want people to think that wolverines are cool and they deserve to persist. Because they're cool, and they deserve to persist. They're an awesome animal, and they have a right to be here and to continue to live in the world. You know what, I think, you guys mess up in your world. Um, have you

ever read Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper? I have not? Okay, A very meticulous note taker, okay, okay, and he combed out what would have been in eighteen twenties. They worked everything, like all the stuff, like all the stuff the app Sorca's Yellowstone, okay, and he took he takes meticulous notes about where they're at, what they saw. He it's interesting he calls wolverine's common. Oh, and he's he's you know, like like his journal is sort of one of the

main you know, it's one of the main thing. It's one of the main historical tacts about that era because he was just a fastidious note taker about location, distance counting. You know, it's a little dry at times, but anyways,

he describes wolverines as common. Now you know that there's a big debate here about how many grizzlies are here, right, And we even had the guy that we had a guy from the USGS, Frank can Member his name, he was in charge of like yeah, he ran the count yeah on grizzlies, okay, And he was saying the model he feels I'm paraphrasing here, so apologies, I'm not gonna mess this up too bad. The models outdated. Their understanding of how big of a territory or breeding age female

needed was based on that in the absence of bears. Okay, in the absence of grizzlies, female grizzlies, we're using a much bigger area. So when you take all the suitable habitat and chunk it up into like, well, we know a female needs a chunk of ground this big whatever square mile, hundred square miles, whatever it is. Every breeding age female needs that. So how many of these hexagons

fit in the landmass? Okay, So like, here's the area we know that each let's say each wolverine wants three hundred square miles, and so we take and you make like a shape, and you go like, how many of these shapes fit in this place? But it might be that you're basing an assumption that is bait, Like your assumption about what they need is based on low density and what they can use if they have it. Let me put it to you another way. I pulled you know how a wild raspberry girls around here in the

high country. Yeah, okay, he's grown in the rocks right in a scree slide, and he's got like he's got like four inches of vine and a berry. Yeah. Okay. I took one of those my kids and buried at my yard. Yeah, and my raspberry patch, I started to

fertilize it. I guess I'll make that s bitches now your entire Okay, So, meaning like, if there's no wolverines around because we poison them all off one hundred fifty years ago, and you look and be like, this female uses three hundred square miles, Well maybe in fifty years she's gonna be like it was sweet. I used to have the whole mountain range to myself, but I now

am like a little more boxed in. And the model's wrong because this guy was even saying like he doesn't believe his own model, but he doesn't have the autonomy to update the model. So you'll say, like, oh, how many grizzies are in the Greater Yellostone ecosystem? Seven hundred probably more? Yeah, well how many more than that? But I won't tell you how many? Yeah, because I can't independently update the model even though we realize our model

was wrong. Yeah. So meaning why did Osborne Russell think they were common? So I have two I have well, I have a couple things to say about that. I definitely think I'm so glad that you guys were talking at the beginning about that colonization effect because and this is where I'm going to tie it back to Mongolia.

I remember I was saying that in Mongolia you have wolverines outside of the habitat model, and that this was really puzzling to a lot of people when we talk about wolverine territories, that's the need that that's the amount of a space that a territorial adult needs. But within the territorial adults territory, her kits are also going to be living for up to a year and a half, So we haven't really talked about how the reproductive biology works.

And um, you know, coming back to the whole thing about whether they're attacking their dads or just killing some old man that they meet. Um, wolverines have their kits and then they have this like interesting model of like long term parental care, which is pretty uncommon in in large mammals. So they they actually let their kids hang out in their territory for up to eighteen months after the kids are born, typically two. They can have up

to four. So if you have a female wolverine who has four kids, if she's or if her territory is really rich and she has the body fat and the condition to have four kids. She will become pregnant with four kids, and then she will have those four kids, and then they will be running around in her territory and her partner's territory for you know, quite quite some time. So now there's six wolverines, but it's one females home, one female's territory, two breeding adults, and four of those

extraneous animals. So I we see this in Mongolia too, where again, like you set up a camera and you just get wolverines on the camera, and that's kind of unheard of here in the US Rockies at this point. I think that part of the reason is because we are still in a recolonization phase where the landscape is

not fully saturated with wolverines. And once you get a really interconnected metapopulation where all of the territories are occupied it with reproductive adults and they're all sending out kits, you do get a lot of wolverines that are running through habitat that is not wolverine habitat. Because those are young, they're dispersers. They're like the equivalent of us when we're in college. They're just kind of like gooping off and trying to figure things out out going here, and they're

trying to find a place to be. And then this may also pertain to why you see wolverines in the historical record in places like Maine potentially, or in Michigan, if you did have live wolverines, they're part of the reason is because they were coming down from those much more robust, reproductive populations that are centered further to the north.

So it's a classic sort of source sink. You know, there's there are areas of really good habitat, and there are areas of marginal habitat, and wolverines can reproduce outside of optimal habitat. So that may fifteenth spring snowpack habitat. Female wolverines give birth in the snow in mid February. So we say, for anybody who hates Valentine's Day and or for anybody who wants another reason to celebrate it even more, we say that Valentine's Day is wolverine birthday.

That is the the internationally officially recognized wolverine birthday all day. Yeah, and are they altricial or precocial? Like do they have little hairless babies? They're like they're they're they're they're not hairless, but they're pretty I mean you they can just toss a newborn wolverine out into the world and have it survive. Are they as helpless as like a bear's Yeah, um,

probably not as helpless as a bear. Um. But they are in the den, in that snowden with their mother until Mother's Day, so Valentine's Day to Mother's Day, and at that point, after those three months of staying in the snowden, they are pretty much capable of like going out and surviving um, although they still apparently have a lot to learn, which is why they continue to hang out with their parents, sometimes with their moms, sometimes with

their dads, sometimes with their sibling, just like kind of exploring the landscape, figuring out how to use resources, you know, whatever it is that wolverines do UM in the course of becoming adult dispersers UM. And so the so to go back to the question about like our biologists underestimating the number of animals on a landscape, I think it does depend on the animal that you're talking about and the model that you're using. There is no doubt that

models should be continually updated depending on population density. UM. But in the case of wolverines, I think that a lot of the kind of the perception that they are common comes from the fact that if he was if he was in an area where there were reproductive adults, he was probably seeing a lot of wolverines and a lot of wolverines sign just because they were there with

their with their young. Um, and he's dealing with a lot of carcasses he's dealing with If he's dealing with carcasses, Oh yeah, of course you're going to be like, yeah, they like live off the land in the high country. Ye. So you're exactly right. You're you're creating, and you're probably that you're probably creating in the animals some idea of how to find shit. Oh yeah, I mean association. Right,

You can certainly have wolverines who who I mean. They're very smart animals, I think, and they know what's up. Like when you were talking about the wolverines in the Cariboo hunting area, um coming in and like you know, taking pieces of cariboo and stashing the places. That is that those wolverines are smart. They figured out like, oh, there's a food source here, We're gonna come in and we're gonna you know, optimize our interaction with this food source.

What's the biggest thing they'll kill without needing to find it already dead? Um. I think there is a report, and this is anecdotal. I have not seen the primary source on this, but it's a widespread report that I've heard from multiple wolverine biologists as I was first coming into the field that there was a thirty pound female wolverine in Alaska who killed a full grown moose. Man

I heard, I've heard a report. It's in a book I read, and it was the book was a biologist in Fairbanks of one killing a doll sheet, or it was like someone watched it happened or something. I can't remember. I might be mixing it up. I have a friend who was a fellow Peace Corp volunteer in Mongolia who watched two who watched the wolverine charge to our gallium, which are you know, like two hundred pound big horned

sheet basically and try to run them off a cliff. Um. So there's like there's no doubt that like they are capable of doing that either through and I think what usually happens with large prey, large ungulate prey is that they're stranded in the snow. Wolverines, of course walk plantigrade. They have these big snowshoe feet. They can float up on top of the snow a lot better than um, you know, ungulates and even uh digigrade animals like cats

or dogs, which punch through. Um. And so they find these animals that are bogged down in the snow and they plantigrade versus digigrade. Like you're saying, it just doesn't the foot doesn't flex forward and push through or what is it? Sorry? Yeah, So humans and bears and wolverines, we all walk plantigrade. That means we walk with our heels down. Um digigrade animals have evolved to kind of walk up on their toes. So if you look at a cat or a dog, right, they have that little

like their legs are kind of shape like this. They kind of have that L shape, and that little that the corner of the l is where the heel actually would be if they were walking plantigrade. So, um, when you walk heel down, you've got you know, obviously more surface area. And a wolverine is relatively small. I know, there's a lot of reports that there are like sixty pound wolverines out there, but in this ecosystem, a very large wolverine would be about thirty pounds. That's very large.

That's that's pretty substantial. Yeah. Further north, of course they get a little bit bigger, up to like maybe forty pounds, but um, you know, they don't they don't get much bigger than that. They look bigger because they've got all that fur, but um, yeah, so they will attack animals that are bogged down in the snow. And there's a video if if listeners want to see this, you can google m like Norwegian wolverine attacking reindeer. It'll probably come up. Yeah.

It's like in a snowstorm. The reindeer is kind of blinded and confused by the snow. There was a guy who hap to be like recording this whole thing, and the wolverine just keeps like jumping on the reindeer's back and attacking it and weakening it, and then eventually it dies. It's a it's a messy experience. When we're talking about wolverines being vicious. Um, I don't like to promote that image of them because I think, you know, people don't

like to try to conserve vicious animals. But I also don't like to skirt around the fact that this is an animal that is carnivorous and it is killing other animals in ways that are pretty pretty gruesome. So, um, I think that a lot of a lot of it seems to be that they just wear these animals down by bleeding them out and attacking them and you know, um yeah, and then they have a food source that they can eat for like a month or so, especially

if it stays cold. It's you know, that carcass stays preserved. They know where it is. If it's buried in the snow, so much the better because then other things can't get to it. Did you hear about that collaring project in southeast Alaska where they had they had a bunch of stuff collared in areas they're looking at their eyes, that

building a road as the Haynes Highway or whatever. Hell, And they had a collared moose fall into a crevasse, a collared a part of a grizzly bear that was part of the collaring project climbed in there, Scott stuck died, and then a wolverine that was collared as part of the project got in there. And scavenged the carcasses. I did not hear that. Okay, that is yeah. That wolverine

was like, oh my gosh, my year is made. And another one out of that same project, another one got caught two hundred and fifty miles more they collared it. That got caught by a trapper in British Columbia. That does not surprise me at all. Like that is the kind of thing when and that's why when people say, oh I saw a wolverine running through my field, and Ohio, I'm like, highly skeptical. But tell me more. You know, I I know something about Krim a long time ago.

I said that she ought to get whoever ran that whole collaring project on the podcast. Still doesn't happen. Wait which coloring project where they were where they did that crazy collaring project around that road construction project in southeast Alaska and they had the collared moose, bear, and wolverine all come together. Oh I totally forgot about that. That's not the knock on today's guess, but that a hell

of a guest who did that? Okay, whole work assignment for me dead no old age, because I just forgot about it. For four years. I feel like I was you, I was telling about that. I feel like this might be the first that I've heard of. Maybe I just thought it. Maybe I thought I need to tell Crane about this. What's the what's the most impressive thing about wolverines that people you think people should know about that they don't know about? Who wrote it's like that, like

something you've seen it? Like what blooded killers? Um? I mean, I think I talked about the thing that is most impressive to me, just the endurance that they have, the way that they can travel, you know, pretty much endlessly, and you know they also this is there was a big study in Glacier National Park, and this is probably relatively well known because there was an author named Doug Chadwick who wrote called The Wolverine Way, where he talks

about the wolverine that you know, started to like go around Mount Cleveland and then just decided, you know, the hell with it, it's going to be easier to go over the top and went up five thousand vertical feet or something like that in about forty five minutes and down the other side, and there was a carcass on the other side that it was trying to get to and it you could see in the caller data like it started to go around and then it was like, Nope, I'm just hungry and I want to get to my

meal immediately, and up it went and over and to that carcass. And so that to me, the fact that they are such incredible mountaineers and sort of endurance athletes, I think is something that a lot of people don't

know about them. And then on the softer side, I would say too that they are actually really good parents, which is not something that most people know, but like they invest a lot in their young, they take care of them, they have these ongoing relationships with them for quite a while after they are sort of technically independent. Both sexes take part in the parenting. Yeah, I think that was one of the most interesting things to come

out of that Glacier research um. For a long time, there was a sort of this like myth around wolverines that the male wolverines would go and kill the kits, which doesn't make any sense evolutionarily, like if if those are your kits, like you, the last thing you want to do is actually kill that. Yeah, but that is a thing though, I mean, like on Kodiac, like a primary food source of of male brown bears as baby

brown bears. That is, there's a chance. There is a chance, and I think a lot of people because wolverines look like bears. They've got five toes like bears. They you know, one of their bear, they're like, oh, it's just a little bear. They act the same way. But what they actually saw in the call the data was that these male wolverines were visiting the dens. We don't know what they were doing there, but we do know that they

would regularly visit the dens um. Maybe they were bringing food, and that after the kids came out of the den um, they would travel periodically with their mom and periodically with their dad. Yeah, that's taking a trip with their dad. Yeah, it's just that's when they had that big fight. Yet, I mean, maybe they do get into these big disagrees. He was coming to the dens like you ready yet,

ready for that fight yet? Oh you guys are just now disrupting my whole tranquil vision of wolverine family life. But that is wild, though. Man, he'll come and check. He'll come around and check. Yeah. Yeah, and my kids there are talking about some animal and they're like wonder where his daddy is. You know, I'm like that, dear. Yeah, we'll have no interaction knowledge of it just isn't. It'll stay glued to its mom. But it's like it's not well if it's a buck though, it might sparse dad

one day, Yeah someday, Yeah my spar was dad. But yeah, I'm just like like he he doesn't know or care. Yeah that dear knows his mom like inside no, but has no idea of dad. Yeah. Um no, that's it's different for wolverines, and I would love to know more about why. Um, But they Yeah, they do have these these sort of family relationships that persist for quite a while. I don't know. I don't know if like if a young wolverine left and came back, whether his dad would

still be as like tolerant of him. Um. But you know, as far as we know, they do interact with each other amiably. They also have you guys, not had any chance to go to a den and just set up like good cameras and just observe like what's going on at the den? Or is that just too hard to pull off? I have never done that. They do, Um, So they do call her kits um. I have never

personally done this. You go in right at that cusp where you know it's they're almost ready to be out of the den, so like mid may dig him out,

stick a color on him, and then they're they're out. Um. But there have been a few projects in Canada that have set up cameras next to the den, and what they've seen in I think every instance is they go in, they put this camera up on the den, and the female moves the kits within like forty So even though they are like relatively tolerant of certain levels and kinds of human activity, if you stick an object that they can smell and see, like right at the place where

where she has her kits, she is not going to like that. So um, we tend to I've had a lot of film projects contact me and be like, hey, can you like give us a den location so we can put a camera on it. And I don't think I don't think it's ethical to do that, and I'm not going to assist with things like that. Yeah, do they like does the male let's say he's just out cruising about like old sixty five was it fifty six? Yeah, he does he have a den location. No, So this

is another thing. I get a lot, I guess so many reports of wolverine sightings, and I dearly love interacting with the people who send them. But one of the red flags from me whenever anybody's like, oh I got a wolverine in a den in my backyard, I'm like, that is not a wolverine. Um like, like, that's this little spot where goals asleep at night. They definitely I have seen, you know, males and females alike will dig

holes in the ground and cash meat in there. They will go under talas to rest, especially if it's hot out, like that's probably one of the ways that they throw them or regulate when it's hot. But they don't have a den that they are faithful to the only time that wolverines are in a den is when the female is in there with the kids. My body in the bare Tooths saw one digging through an avalanche debris field. Huh. And then my brother Danny watched to dig through an

avalanche debris field in Alaska. Okay. Yeah, so this is really another interesting thing that they do. You see, like in the collar data, wolverines will cruise the bottoms of avalanche shoots and they are looking for carcasses should got swept up in cheap and goats that have gotten um swept off and you know what I mean, like what

kind of crazy junk gets scraped up by an avalanche. Yeah, and then the other thing they do in talas fields and probably avalanche debris fields as well, if there are pikers in there, they'll go and they'll they'll hunt pikers like they're actually hunting, not living, not scavenge, but living pikes.

Yeah yeah, um. And then also marmots and Mongolia, they will dig hibernating marth a terrible thing for the marmot, but they'll dig hibernating marmots out of out of the ground and just like you know, it's a little fat bomb for them. Coincident's your favorite food. Oh so, yes, there's a background. There's more detail than that. But yeah, yeah, we could just leave it there. People want to wonder, but no, um, so marmot is a delicacy in Mongolia. And I like, if you find the wolverines not just

for wolverines. Yeah no, this is an overlap between wolverine and human um culinary arts, I guess, but um, wolverines eat them, and humans also eat them. Uh. You shoot the marmot and you cut it open, got it? Um, stuff it full of wild onions and hot rocks and cook it up and it is so good. You told me when I was younger that like I would one day be really excited about eating a fat road and I would have just been like not believing about that.

But yeah, it's it's really really good. Um. Of course, then like a little bit of spicy risk to that is that marmots are also the reservoir species for bubonic plague, which is still We had a story we covered some time ago of a couple I don't know how I'd even want up being reported, but a couple that died from Yeah was that in Mongolia? Yeah, that happens every year,

and so there are It was weird. It's like one of those things that you're like, like it got picked up in international news, you know, and you're like, how did like how did this come to be picked up international news? And like, I bet it happens. It's just weird that it and then it got all over the place.

I'm sure because the Black death has like such a like a resonance in like the Western imagination because of how catastrophic that was for European history that people are like, oh my god, the bubonic plague at that sold people on the story probably, I mean, I feel like it pops up like every year or every couple of years in the international press somebody's died of bubonic plague in Mongolia.

But the Mongols, the Mongolians and the Mongol Empire as well, have been managing that disease for you know, hundreds and hundreds of years, and so they know how to, like if somebody comes down with it, they quarantine the whole

town basically. And during marmot hunting season, at least when I was a Peace Corp volunteer, there were checkpoints outside of Ulmboder, and everybody wants to eat marmots, so like people would try to bring them into the city, but they would like stop and search the car and your luggage to make sure that nobody was bringing a marmot into the city. Because it's manageable. When the population density human population density is very low, you can quarantine the town.

But if something like that ever got loose in Ullumboder, where half the population of the country lives, then you would really be in trouble. That's how this became a news story. Okay, you reminded me. Okay, it was a news story because the journalist was stuck in town. Okay, well that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that's what it was. That's how that's how what became reported. Yeah, becase they got quarantined okay because of a of a bubonic plague

death from eating marmot. Okay, so then it yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, and there So this goes to hunting too, and like traditional knowledge in hunting, because I have been told I have not seen anybody hunt this way, but historically there was like a specific thing that you were supposed to do when you were hunting marmots um where you would set up like a little stand for your rifle and you would put the rifle on it, and then you would have a feather and you would like move the

feather and if the marmot could like track the feather and was aware of the feather, then it was like healthy enough. You knew it didn't have the plague, so you could shoot it. Really, people don't bother to do that anymore, so well no one I know either, but um, so like, yeah, then there's a greater risk of of getting an animal that actually is carrying the plate So you're they're eating that. No one, they're playing with fire

by messing with those things. Yeah, I mean usually what you do is after you hunt it, you also blow torch it to kill because it's it's the fleas that actually carry it. So you blow torch the pelt and then you and then you cook it. But if it's already infected, then if you eat anything that has like that limph tissue in it, then you you also still run the risk of getting it. Man, we're hunting cottontail rabbits yesterday my kids got soul full of those little

fleas all over those rabbits. Oh really, God, yeah, it's fram or something. Their clothes are hanging outside right now. Well, at least the rabbits don't have bubonic plate um. They're like, I see them, we're clean rabbits, and I see they're all like itch in their ears a lot, And I'm like, go take a shower, take thirty clothes outside and take a shower. Can you get them a blowtorch? Oh? I guess you hunt rabbits for the pelts, though, don't you No, no, we just eat them. Okay. Well, um man, so how

do people find you and follow your work? M I interrupt. Yeah, And before we do that, I think we have maybe like a public service announcement that you mentioned. Do you want it to talk about before like the public like kind of enlisting the public? Stop stoe, No, they're looking at your cow? No something else? Well? Yeah, please if you if you do see a wolverine looking at your cow,

please don't shoot it. Please just call me. Um. You can find me at the Wolverine Foundation dot org and submit a report immediately if you see a wolverine looking at your cow. And I don't want anyone that sees a wolverine let you know. Yeah, I do. I think it's important to let us know because we do collect

siting reports. And then also it's really important to let the local state Game and Fish department know because they're the ones who are going to be capable of being on the ground there to assess the report and to take any action that might be necessary to monitor the animal. Um. We do get a lot of I do get a lot of reports of wolverines that are not wolverines. I've gotten a few reports of werewolves. We do not study werewolves. Please do not report them to me. That's a different species.

Somebody else deals with that. What is it normally? Um, the most the most common thing I think actually are porcupines and wood chucks. Yeah. People, nobody knows what a porcupine looks like. I mean, you guys, wolverine, you guys know what a porcupine looks like. But like the general American public does see you know how they have that they have a tail. Yep. Wolverine's got that big kind

of tail. Yeah, yeah, they're roughly the same size. And wolverine's got that kind of weird almost like coloration, yes, circles the bodied tail ratio in the in the way the tail rides, yep, And they have that. You know. Porcupines also have that kind of humped profile, so like they look like they're sort of like round on the top. And a lot of people think of wolverines as looking that way. And if you see a wolve porcupine from a distance, you don't see the quills. It just looks

like it's kind of fuzzy right now. And they have a guy a light colored halo yes to them that I think wolverine has too. Yeah, so yeah, thank you, and they walk, you know. Porcupines also have kind of flat feet too, although they're a lot smaller than wolverine feet, they do have that kind of like gait that could be sort of wolverine from from a distance. Wolverines like eating porcupines. No, you know, this is something I have never heard of. Fishers are special Fishers are like fishers

are porcupine specialists? Yeah, they open it up on the belly and yeah, no, I we've never We've seen duck remains, bird remains, Um, we've seen, you know, all kinds of things that wolverines will eat, but I have never heard of a wolverine eating a porcupine. Um. So if you do see a wolverine or you see wolverine sign which

are tracks, um, please take photographs if possible. If you're taking photo if you're taking photos of the tracks, make sure you put something in there for scale, because wolverine tracks and Martin tracks and even like least weasel tracks are the same darned tracks. If I don't have something in there for scale, I can't tell what it is and then send it to me. There's a submission forum on Wolverine Foundation dot org and let your local wildlife management agency know as well, and we will put it

into a database. This is important too. I know that the listeners of your podcasts are in general, really really skilled outdoors people, and I have total faith and trust in people's wildlife knowledge. But because of the way science works, I always have to be a little bit skeptical and I have to ask more questions about the report. So if you send a report to me, do not think that it is a commentary on your own assessment of

your wildlife skills. If I come back to you with questions, it is just because I have to do everything I can to verify and make sure that it is not something else had. Some people get very very angry with me. Yeah, there's some guy who was like riding a four wheeler around a dump in like Alabama or something and reported a wolverine and I was like, um, could you describe what the facial mask looked like? And he got so angry at me. He was like, you need to take

some yoga classes and learn to chill out. So I took a class the other day. My wife, did it help you? Like, no, be awful. Um, so yeah, and then um, if everybody knows how to identify wolverine wolverine tracks, um, that's great. But for those who don't, they have five toes, they have a little crescent pad in the middle. It kind of looks like a it's like arcs, like a like a crescent moon. And then sometimes there's a heel pad that registers, and sometimes there is not a heel

pad that registers. But if the heel pad is there, from the tip of the toes to that heel pad, it's probably like six or seven inches. It's a it's a big it's a big track, and they have a very distinctive three buy track. Give me the dimension again, it's the whole track heel pad shows. If the heel pad shows, it's like six to seven inches, it's like the size of I mean, it's like a wolf track, which and people don't I mean, people are surprised by that. But it's a pretty big track and it could be

like almost as big as your hand. Yeah, I mean that's how I yeah, that's why I'm holding up my hand. It's about talking this guy. This guy looks for tracks all win or you'll find one Okay, well, if I will talk to you about wolverine tracks, rides a snowmobile,

just doing that. Snowmobile, snowmobilers and backcountry skiers, I feel like are an undertapped resource for wolverine citizen science, and I would love to have more people who are out in snowy conditions just being on the lookout and being aware and taking those photos and sending them to us, because it's really important to track where there are actually verified locations for the species. So thanks to anybody who's willing to do that. Is that the public service announcement?

Yea yea, thank you kin? All right, man, that was good. We could we could do like a whole other one, like keep talking about wolverines. I will have a talk about wolverines for hours. So thank you for the opportunity. Tell again how to go find you guys stuff. It's Wolverine Foundation dot org and we have a Facebook page and we have a Twitter account. I am pretty the Wolverine Foundation. I basically am the only person running it.

And it's not a salaried position either, so I'm pretty bad about the social media or spotty about the social media. But you can find us there. And I do periodically

post things. Do you guys accept donations. We do accept donations, yes, and those donations go to support the wolverine research projects in the field, so you can talk If you have a specific wolverine project that you want to support, you can talk to me about that and I can put that money aside in a fund for that specific wolverine project. General contributions go towards the general pot of money that we then periodically open up for proposals from wolverine researchers.

You know we didn't talk about was the idea that the a Row that like the Northern peoples, would use the wolverine fur on the rough of a parka because it's a hollow and it doesn't carry frost. Yes, But then I heard that that's actually not very accurate or is that accurate. I don't know if it's because it's hollow, but it does shed. It does shed with sheds from Yeah, that's why that's why you trim your park so when you're ex hailing. Yes, it doesn't build up on the

park or rough exactly. Yeah, or you can shake it off or whatever, right, and it doesn't just stick on there like if you had a kyote rough, it just gets caked in ice. Yeah, so, and I think wolf fur also does the same thing. I know, ungulate furs hollow, and so that's why it's so insulating that I don't know whether wolverine fur is actually hollow. I don't think it is um, but it does have that property of

shedding frost. And there have been like stories of people who have found wolverine carcasses um where you know, it's in the spring and the snow all around the carcass has melted, and then you like pick up the wolverine and there's still like a patch of snow under there. Because the insulating properties of the fur are so good, they're thermoneutral I think down to like minus forty degrees. So yeah, wolverine is a preferred in some northern places

for that reason. In Mongolia, I have been told you should never put wolverine fur on your head because it is associated it's an animal that's associated with the underworld. You just don't want to be doing that. But that said, also, there are people in Mongolia who wear wolverine fur hats.

So yeah, well, the next time you're in Mongolia and someone gives you a wolverine, hide sew it into your hood and just go home like mine, in your own business, and don't just be don't be showing everybody what you got. He's quiet about it, Pretend I don't know about the sides. Yeah. No, you say you want everybody to send in their wolverine signings,

I'm guessing not if you're an Alaskan. I mean, I'm always interested in hearing about people's wolverine stories, so like, you can totally send me your wolverine stories from Alaska. But as far as what I'm interested in monitoring scientifically, it's much more about the wolverines here in the lower

forty eight. So if Brody's dicking around on there in Colorado, on he finds what you want to hear about it, I do because as far as we know, since m fifty six left, there is still no population in Colorado, and you were mentioning before the fact that there's habitat there. So one of the things they're talking about is potentially reintroducing wolverines to Colorado. So they like doing that stuff in Colorado. I'm all for it, man, I'm all for it.

Why not, there's no negative, No, I'm not saying they did it with links, right. Yeah, I'd be like, I would love to hear the anti wolverine argument she's got. Yeah, there would be no no, no, hit it real quick. Did you have a good one? Well, I know, it's

not that I'm opposed to it. It's just that wolverines are really good dispersers, right, And I think that the best way to handle this personally is just to ensure that the population further to the north is robust enough to keep sending out dispersers to get there naturally, because you Rob and Peter to pay Paul right precisely, Like if you start punching holes in the wolverine population further to the north, because it's so precarious, Like if you

start taking reproductive adults out of Montana to put them in Colorado, you create a hole in this metapopulation that potentially has repercussions later on. So that makes good sense. Yeah, And I generally like the natural I generally like the

natural disbursement thing socially too. Yeah, it's socially better, so much better, because then you don't have the you know, you don't have people getting together arguments about how these like nasty, big northern carnivores are so much more ferocious than the ones that should have been here or um, you know those kind of that kind of resistance doesn't come up. So yeah, Diane Boyd, Yes, you know, she very much said that she wished they never fans planted

them here into Yellowstone, remember that. Yeah, she said, you would have went, you would have wound up in the same place with a lot less friction. All right. Wolverine Foundation, Yes, Wolverine Foundation dot org. All right, everybody, next time you see a badge or gimm call the old for I mean, empty pounds keeps my life interesting. Thanks for Bregan