Ep. 635: Working on Grizzly Bears

If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.

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The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T l I t e dot com. Joined today by Dusty Lassiter, former Wyoming game and fish bear management specialists, the keyword there being former.

Yeah.

I love the agency guys. But the problem with having agency guys on to talk about wildlife management is they got to worry about them getting in trouble. Yeah.

I don't have to worry about getting in trouble anymore.

Real, there's no trouble. Nothing can do it to you. Let the air out of your tires.

Yeah, write me a ticket.

I guess no. Again, I have nothing, But you know, I have like a lot of respect and the admiration for agency biologists and game wardens Like you know, I love it. So many of them are driven by passion and a desire to do good. But when talking about policy just gets tricky for him because you know, they they get reprimanded.

Yeah, you get muzzled a little bit, and you know you're trying to walk the party line a little bit, you know, the department line.

Yeah. Uh, give everybody a run through of what you've done in your career around grizzly bears and wolves.

And oh man, So I started in twenty ten and I was just supposed to be on for one fall. In one spring, I got hired on because one of my coworkers was going back to college. And that was the busiest year that we'd ever had. We caught sixty seven grizzly bears in Wyoming outside of Yellstowe National Park. And then in that year, so damn man. Yeah, yeah, it.

Was all in barrel traps.

Yeah. We we call them culvert traps, but they're really big square box traps. Now the Montana guys still use those culverts, but it's a pain in the butt to pull a bear in and out of them.

Yeah remember that round, Remember that video Callahan climbing in there, climbing one of them tubes of that bearris basically like laid out on it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so we we I think we dealt with enough bears. We came up with a better trap design. Honestly, what do you what were you guys?

Man? I got so many questions go on. I just remember that later. I want to ask you about what kind of how you like, what your favorite bait and stuff is. But keep going. Yeah, so you got on. You guys started just hammering bears.

Yeah, it was just call after call. I would try to go home just to take a nap, and I would get flagged down on the road somebody being like, I got a I got a bear. Actually, one of those guys was Jim Zumbo. You know. He flagged me down on the road and he's like, yeah, I just got back from Alaska. I'd killed my twentieth black bear, and he was he was smoking some salmon and a grizzly bear came by and smashed his salmon smoker.

Oh I got it, so.

Yeah, so I started.

Jim Zumbo, Yeah, came home from Alaska, was smoking salmon that he brought home from Alaska, and a grizzly showed up and smashed Jim zumbole smoker.

Yeah exactly, yep, yep, so pretty legit kind of funny.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I wanted one up with my George Bush story h joke.

Yeah. So that was just a really busy season and there was a need for more help, so they hired me on another season.

And because you were a big game guide, yeah I was.

You know, I went to the University Wyoming, got finance degree, came home and just loved where I lived. And when I came home, I was working on the thoroughfare as a guide, and you know, just doing construction, trying to make ends meet, and.

Home as Cody, Home as Cody.

That's where I grew up. And I was just wrong place, wrong time, honestly, because there weren't a lot of people that went to college and came back and I had a lot of knowledge and skill about horses in the back country, and you know, my life was immersed in wildlife and bears growing up, and my parents worked for outfitters and you know, they were stopping in at the house and telling crazy stories and I was just sucked in.

So were you doing all the were you doing all the relocations on those two? Like how many are euthanized and how many are relocated?

So at the time, my boss was a guy named Mark Persino, and we were really still in the recovery phase with these bears, and we probably only euthanized one out of five when I started, and they were in really bad shape. You know, they'd been repeat offenders. Never it's never the three strikes and you're out. People say that all the time, and I get so sick of that.

That's not true.

No, that's not true. It's not California. So but yeah, there were some bears that, you know, I'd been in multiple livestock conflicts that were removing or I caught a female that year that her back leg was broke and it was six inches shorter than her other back leg, and I had the bone in my office and it's just a you know, melded piece of calcium.

How do you think she broke her leg, No idea.

I always wondered that.

You know, on a bear like that, on a grizzy like that, it's in heart, it's in bad shape, it's desperate, and it's not gonna You're not gonna you know what the word to use. You're not going to rehabilitate it.

No, it just wasn't going to be successful relocating that kind of bear. And she was emaciated, and she actually had a yearling that we didn't know about at the time. You know, she was she was trying to orphan a yearling bear because she was not even producing milk. She was in such poor physical shape.

Got it. You say she was trying to orphan it.

Yeah, I mean it was. It was following her around, but she's not providing for it at all. And we ended up catching that bear too, and and we relocated that bear, but she just wasn't a good candidate for relocation.

Yeah. And when you relocate the grizzlies, how do you how do you figure out where to try because you got to put him so far away from you got to put them so far away, Yeah, to reduce the temptation you're going to get in trouble again. And that's and that's got to be like very time consuming.

Yeah, it definitely takes some man power, but you're trying to take it as far away from the conflict as possible. And there's really about six relocation sites in Wyoming that we use, you know, And that kind of had changed over the time that I'd been at the department. We started doing some relocation that weren't as.

Far and use helicopters to dump them off.

We don't. We had one bear trap that you could take off the wheels and haul with the helicopter, But and the time that I was there, the eleven years I was there, we never did that.

Yeah, now tell me how you catch one.

So most of the time you're using a culvert trap, and you want to get that thing as low to the ground as possible. You want to set it as close to the conflict as possible, and you just put a piece of bait in the front of that thing, usually a road killed deer with a string that goes up up the front wall around the top, and then it's sitting on a pair of ice scripts and the

Stick that back of the trap.

Yeah, even like a trail into it a lot of times. A lot of times you make a drag and they'll follow a drag for a.

Long long ways, like drag a road kill deer, right, yep? How far might you drag that deer to make a cent trail?

I mean, my old boss had done it a couple of miles and cock bears running a couple miles on them. Yeah, and they're finding now with these GPS callers, that a bear can smell a carcass ten to fifteen miles away, and we'll just start blining it for a carcass.

Yeah.

I followed a grizzly bear track and the bob wants nine miles to a I don't know how far he started, but I followed the tracks for nine miles in front of me to a moose carcass.

Yeah, that was impressive. Yeah, they got a pretty good sniffer.

Yeah. I've told the story to anyone that'll listen to it. But we're one time camped up on the Arctic slope and you know of the off the north slope of the Brooks Range. Yeah, and we were camped where a creek came into a bigger river. And one morning we got up and walked three miles up that tributary and killed caribou okay, spent the day up there, carried it down that tributary to our camp. That night, we're sitting in our camp and here comes a grizzly down the

Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what happened.

Yeah, coming down that coming down that creek, and that's only three miles and you're talking about.

How far GPS colors are saying in ten to fifteen.

What do you what do you see on a GPS collar that suggests to you that a grizzly is onto something?

Oh, it's meandering and then all of a sudden it's a straight line.

You know.

It's like, just like you're talking about, there wasn't any second thoughts in that bear's mind.

Got it? And then he's just going there, he's going. Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of bruh on the news right now. There's always been a bear, there's always been a very polarizing bear. Yeah, in the polarizing bear in the Yellowstone National Park area. Yeah, goes by the handle three nine nine, which I always like because I like it when they you know, when they give the animals like a name like pedals or something, then you know it's trouble. So if it has its research number.

There's some clinical detachment there.

Yeah. A research number allows the citizens at large to stay a little usually allows citizens at large to stay a little chilled out aboutelebrity animals. But three nine nine it was. It might as well have been named cookie, right.

Yeah, it's a good analogy.

I guess this bear became that apple. Yeah, bear three nine nine.

It's usually an apple that photographs well and it's pretty dependable. It's an apple that shows up again and again.

Yeah, you know, or it would be like a moose that's piebald. So because moose, you know, generally, people aren't able to distinguish one from the other. Then you get a moose in some neighborhood that as a white splotch on it, and then people are able to put individuality to it. And then someone gets that moose and it causes a whole shit show. Three ninety nine. The bear's had books written about it. It just got hit by

Correct, No, I know her type though.

Yeah, tell me about that bear. What that like? You mentioned a thing about management.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's poor wildlife management. And we learned this lesson early on with a bear named one oh four. So before three ninety nine, there was a bear named the number was.

One O four.

It was a celebrity bear, celebrity bear, another shiny apple, if you will. And my predecessors tried to relocate that bear mover she got so not trap shy, but trap savvy, not savvy like she enjoyed traps. You could you could drive down the road with the door open and she'd come running down the road and jump in the trap and you would catch her.

You know. She was that kind of freaking like I was just associated it with food.

Yeah, because there was so many positive experiences jumping in traps and.

You eat the whole damn deer and then some guy that's yeat yeah exactly, and you walk back home. I get it, I get it.

Yeah. So we just learned early on that those habituated bears aren't successful. And she also got hit by a vehicle one oh four and you know, I always thought that was gonna happen to three ninety nine. It took longer than I would have guessed.

You pictured to getting struck by a car.

Yeah, and one of her cubs got hit by a car, you know.

And really.

The park Service could talk about more. They probably know all the individual cubs that she had, but as far as I'm aware, there's only one of her cubs that's still alive in existing because they just get so habituated to people, they don't learn normal bear manners is what

And you don't think it was.

It was so used to people, it was smiling the whole way it was coming in. I'm sure, you know. So I just don't think it sets bears up for success. And three ninety nine was really polarizing. I mean, some people loved her. Some people hated her. I think people forget that she mauled a guy years ago, so I mean she was still a grizzly bear.

And what do you say people hated that bear? Do you mean that they hated that bear because what it Because it was a symbol for something.

I think. So I think I think people would make comments that I would see and it would really ruffle feathers where you know, if they would say things like if they dealist grizzly bears and I can hunt, I'm gonna shoot that bear, and that just that really affected people negatively.

So well that Shane Shane who got scratched off by the bear.

He said right in his chair, Yeah, and he had.

Good reason to believe that it was three ninety nine.

That's what he had said. Well they well, how would they not know for certain, sorry that he was scratched up by Yeah.

That's that was one of the things that he said.

And she was in the vicinity.

She was in the vicinity. But it was like if three ninety nine was the one that did this to you, we don't want to know about it. Was that kind of a thing. So it's I mean, that was that was one of the things that he mentioned sort of off handedly, and he's like, if it was three ninety nine, I don't think anybody would come out and declare to the world that three ninety nine had done this and needs to get destroyed, because it would just cause such

Wow, let me ask you another one.

Yeah, that was that was a hard question. I'm sure people are gonna cry over that. So three was just touched a lot of heart strings.

Rip yep.

Three nine was never going to die, you know, in a warm bed with a roaring fire, surrounded by loved ones, right, Like, yeah, I was sick. That's the the craziest part is like, getting whacked by cars not the worst way to go.

Wild Animal Cal went out, Cal did there's a col in the field about this on YouTube type and Cal in the Field grizzly Barry, you'll see this one. But there's a col in the field where he goes out with some Idaho guys and they work and they they colvert trap a grizzly and work up the grizzly. So they colvert trap a grizzly and it's got a lip tattoo, so they like an identifying marker, right, they call in the lip tattoo and and they're like, oh, we know

Yeah, people put different values on different animals, and and they even yeah, even at the individual level, put values on animals. And yeah, people just really valued that bear.

So let me hte you with another easier to answer one. But you'll get this will make other people mad. Good, Now you're gonna, Now you're gonna. We have we know, we have a full spectrum of listeners. Sure, we got we got the horseshoe, you got, we got, we got left we got righty's lefties, and then we got where the rights and the lefties meet, which is crazy redneck hippies.

Sure.

Yeah, So no matter what you say, your eyes and get someone that's gonna get mad. And this will be a thing where where the the the the right bottom of the horseshoe get will get very irritated no matter what you say, uh, bear spray or pistols like when

Without a doubt bear spray really, yeah, and.

Tell me more now I'm mad. You promise he's a gun grabber. The other day Yanni was talking about them needing to ban the Red Rider. I was like, now, you're a gun grabber trying to take away people's Red Rider.

What was his?

Uh, he's got some cockamami theory that cheating a kid to shoot on a Red Rider to get used to a heavy trigger pull. My little kids, Yeah, my little kids shooting Red Riders. I remember they used to shoo him with two fingers because you cannot get that go off.

I thought it was going to be like he was anti BB gun fights.

He's he thinks he thinks of Red Rider. He just form And I think that's a very Unamerican statement. You shoot your eye out Bear spray unequivocally.

Yeah. I have one caveat to that. If you're really well experienced with with handguns, then by all means carry a handgun. But a lot of people just aren't and I investigated so many cases of self defense defensive life shootings, and people are just really bad shots with pistols and a lot of times they would even hit the bear, but they don't hit it lethally. And bear spray. The beauty of it is it makes a four foot cloud, so you don't have to be accurate.

And how much do they hate that bear spray?

I've never seen it not work.

So do you know that? Red a statistic and I didn't really spend a lot of time.

If you spray it on the ground, they'll come sniff it though. It becomes an attractant.

Oh oh yeah, I got I'll tell you a good one about that. But I read a statistic and I never really spent much time on it, but it seemed like it seemed significant that twenty five percent of the time a pistol or sorry, twenty five percent of the time when a firearm is discharged in a bear attack, it hits a human.

Yeah, that's the other reason.

Have you heard that?

No, I haven't heard that statistic. That seems high. There's a lot of not shoot not there.

But listen, man, like I know, yeah, I know a bunch of cases where that's happened, and I haven't looked into it. I just read it.

You know, there was a case on the Montana Idaho border. It ended up being in Montana where the guy was getting mauled and his buddy tried to shoot the bear off him and actually killed his friend.

Yeah, they had shot that that bear. They were black bear hunting. They mistook it for a black bear, so they shot it and the bear runs into the into the brush. He thinks he hit a black bear, so he goes trailing in there after it and boom.

I just remember it was so close on the border, they didn't know who had jurisdiction about it. So yeah, so that's that's why I carry bear spray. And you know, ultimately it's up to people. I know there's gun lovers they want to carry guns and that's fine, but a lot of people just don't practice shooting pistols enough.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it does say a lot about your The choice might say more about your mind frame than it does your like your strat your sense of strategy. Right.

I remember being like up at Sportsman's Warehouse and Anchorage and seeing people that just got off a plane and they're going to buy a pistol for their Alaska vacation and then you know, pawn it off or whatever at the end of the vacation. Like, I think there's like a there's an assumption that if you, if you believe in the handgun, like you just go get when you get a box ammo, and you keep it near you,

But I'll tell you, my little my I'll walk you through my irrational thoughts on it. If there's slight risk of First off, I I condemn and yell at and harrass and tease anyone that carries bear spray where there's no grizzlies, indefensible it works on lions.

What if it's just on your by hardness teas worthy in her as.

Bear spray is not nice to get shot with, and they and it like they go off. I've been in two I've been never mauled by a bear, been charged by them, but never mauled. But twice I've been hosed by people's bear spray.

Mine doesn't come off that.

They trust it every two years, Yes, trust me, it's like it happens. Those are not those The plastic nozzles on those cans are not invulnerable. One time, on just standing around a car unloading backpacks, someone stepped on the plastic nozzle everything. And one time I got pickpocketed in the thick in the like a willow choked hell hole. And also I was like, what is that noise going? All your ship's done, all your gear is gone, You cannot get it out.

Wait?

Is it bad to keep your bear spray.

In your car?

Yeah?

Keep itature It'll total your car.

Know, I know people whose car has been told your car. When that goes off your car, it will total your car.

Temperatures are dropping. I had a friend who did that and he's still driving his vehicle giving yeah all the time.

Put get a small amimal can. There's one right outside the door of the of the studio. Get a small animal can and put it in the ammal can. And then when you're using it, Carrie, when you're done using it, put in an animal can. I was gonna I'm gonna tell you my irrational logic. Let me tell my funny story. Yeah, we had the Ranella family. We had we went into the summer with two bear sprays, and we have like

Got yep, got eaten by a bear. Seen that before?

Yeah, Uh, here's my irrational logic. Okay, slight risk of grizzlies, I use spray. High risk of grizzlies. I bring my ten milimeters pistol ultra high risk of grizzlies. I bring my sawd off pump twelve gage with slugs in it.

Yeah, I've found this spray and pray.

And I always look at it, and I always look at all three of them. I'm like, hey, man, like, what are you thinking here?

That's a that's a myth I can dispel too. Is people, Uh, people take shotguns and they alternate buckshot and slugs.

Oh yeah, because you know, I know that. No, I think it's supposed to. Brody told me you're supposed to run two bird shots. Yeah. Then you start going. Then you start going slug but shots, because it's like you warn it, boom, you warn it boom. Then like it's getting closer. Now you hit it with the slug boom. Then it's so close and everything's so chaotic. Then you start going buckshot.

And most bears are aware of this choreography, this elaborate choreography before.

They Yeah, all the time, there's.

The warning shot.

Yeah, there's warning.

He tells his bite. Listen when you're coming in, he's gonna hit you two bird shots. Yeah, then you got to dodge the slug. Watch out for the buckshot.

Yeah, a zig and then a zag.

Here's my scenario that I find myself in all the time. As most hunters, we don't get to pick our weather, but we do get to pick which direction.

We walk when we're out hunting.

And most of the time the winds in my face, and a lot of times the winds honking. I don't trust bear spray when the wind's blowing.

Okay, So I've had that question a bunch over the years. And I had a really good friend who was horn hunting in the spring. It was super windy out. A sow with cubs, real little cubs, charges him, and you know, the winds in his face. He spray's bear spray. Half of it goes in her face, half of it gets in his face. They both ran off trying so it. Yeah, the propellant still gets out there, but not as far as it normally would.

I'd love to practice in the wind, but I don't.

Want to get a case of those inert cans.

Yeah, I think that'd be interesting.

I should get a case of those inert cans. I just like shoot each other around, like laser tag around. That would be fun.

I tried to shoot a sow and cubs with a can of bear spray out of a window.

And the when I was.

Working Yellowstone, they were coming in and tearing up our cat. When I was working up in Alaska, they'd come in and tear up stuff on the portrait and trying to give a bad and like they would come in, they'd get into the fish shack to get into the tool shed that eat rubber boots that do all this stuff.

Killed you shut the window real quick. And then actually we sat around. I was with this kid.

We just like we were sitting in the cabin like later on, like forty five minutes later, and we were both kind of like does it smell weird? And then we started getting like you know, like licking your cheeks and like your lips and stuff, and and we'd gotten like a trace amount inside and it had been swirling and swirling, and we spent like the rest of the night just like kind of licking our lips and rubbing our noses and stuff. Yeah, that was my one experience actually discharging.

A can can't tell you a story.

Yep, please sory here. I'm jealousy. I was. I was impressed that Randall got to shoot at one with a spray, But go on to have video of it somewhere.

I actually never did get at a spray a bear with one. But I was deer hunting one fall and I was going in some really heavy dark timber and my dad always taught me to load around in my gun. So I'm going through the timber and I walk under this tree and there's a magpie sitting in the tree and he's just staring at me. He's just looking right down at me, and I'm looking up at him, and I'm thinking, boy, that's weird that magpie.

Why is he hanging out?

Yeah? Why is he hang out? Or just staring at each other? And I go another i don't know, thirty yards and I hear something and I turn around and there's this bore coming down the hill at me. He's coming right at me and.

How many yards way?

Maybe twenty? Guy, I mean, he's coming for me. And I was thinking myself, I got one shot with this rifle, you know, I got one chance to kill this thing, and it's going to be on top of me. And I realized what my dad was trying to teach me was just to be prepared, you know, And I would have been way better off with a can of bear spray in my hand, just walking through the woods and as a guide. I do that sometimes, you know, if it's real tight quarters, I don't have a problem walking

So what happened?

He Yeah, I sprayed him and he didn't care.

Yeah.

I started yelling at him and he was coming down the hill at me, and he just kind of did a quarter pass, which is like a classic bear move, you know. It was it was a bluff, but I thought it was the real deal. And I just remember thinking, like, I gotta wait until this thing is right on top of me before I shoot, because I only got one chance.

So what is after all those bears you worked up, what is a big bear in the rockies.

A big bear is five hundred pounds. The biggest bear ever caught was six twenty four in the spring, would have been a true seven hundred pound bear in the fall. When people come.

Into big bear, that's a huge bear because every bear is like I just cut.

People's number in half immediately, you know, whatever it is, I cut it in half.

They tell you how big the bear was, Yeah, yep.

And you know, all those bears I worked up. The sows are almost always right around three hundred pounds two seventy five, three twenty five. They stop growing when they're about seven to eight years old, where the males just keep putting on weight, keep getting bigger. So a five hundred pounds adult male is a huge bear in the alstone ecosystem.

That's a huge bear. Yeah. And what's a more typical male like, like, what is like a four or five year old male two fifty?

You know, I don't know, three hundred.

God, they seem so much bigger, badder, Yeah, and they're bad, but they seem so much bigger. Yeah.

And people overestimate wolves too, and really, you know, lions are way bigger than wolves. But people because of the hair, especially the fall bears, animolves, but bears especially they get that that winner code on and people just think they're way bigger than they are. You know, they're like, it's a sow with a two full drown cubs, and it's like, no, that thing weighs one hundred and fifty pounds, but it's got so much hair it looks like as big as her.

Yeah.

Uh.

You were with the agency when the delisting looked like it was going to go through.

Yeah, ok, it did go through.

Well, sorry, when it looked like they were no, well it didn't an undid they were delisted yeah multiple times? Yeah, okay, So help me with the timeline here, just to give people rough sense what will happen is Well, first off, I'm me saying this is not surprise. This is surprisingly not a partisan like Democrat versus Republican issue generally grizzly bears. Well, hear me out, because because I'm going to top of all the dlistings. Okay, yeah, so you can, you can.

Don't remember him, heard of.

Republican signed in the e s A signed Ina signed in. Then he established the EPA.

That's that's the National Environmental Protection Act.

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about the native milk.

No.

Sorry, Oh yeah, Richard Nixon CRAS and Endangered Species Act. And one of the first like marquee species to get protection under that is grizzy bears and lower forty eight. All kinds of years go by and wildlife managers kind of look and say, well, the saying the lower forty eight is not a great way of looking at this.

Zero bears, sometimes one, sometimes one.

It depends on what side of the Yeah, it depends on what side of the border.

If you're from Wyoming, it looks a lot like zero bears.

Yeah, yeah, so yeah, they if they have it bears because one walked over there for a minute. Moving eastward, you have the bitter Root cell Kirk cell Way none.

None, sell Kirks have bears, the bitter bitter Root does.

The Bitterot side. That's one. Oh, I forgot. They gave a name to these things that already say the name they call the distinct distinct population segments. So they say, okay, we're gonna say that there's a grizzly bear population or the possibility of a grizzy bear population in the Lower Cascades.

Uh, there's another one in Cabinet Yacks.

That's right, Cabinet Yack has bears. Bitter Root sell Kirk, Bitter cell Way, Selway. Sorry, sell Kirks are in BC Bitterroot cell Way, Northern Continental Divide, which is Bob Marshall Glacier National Park, in some other areas up there, all the way out to the front Range. Uh. Then the g y E did I do them all? Am I missing any?

I think that's it?

Okay Uh, And they go like, so let's stop talking about the lower forty eight writ large and let's talk about let's get real okay right and talk about where could we actually have these bears. And then they looked at like Okay, So instead of saying that we're going to recover them across their range in the lower forty eight, which basically was the one hundredth meridian westward New Mexico, Arizona, Utah into northern Old Mexico coastal California. Right Like, let's

The risks because then the Fish and Wildlife Service is required as part of that review process to consider all factors, and they kind of have an impossible job, right, I mean, like there's they basically are saying, we did a comprehensive review, our conclusions are x, Y, and Z, and the litigators are saying, it's not that comprehensive. You missed this, you miss that, And they're kind of poking holes in the bigger picture.

Yeah, and it will be It will come from anti hunting organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity, Humane Society, United States, Greater y Elson Coalition. Who else is a common player here? Center H And they'll they'll do these delistings or they'll they'll sue to block the delistings.

Last one was the crow the Crow tribe tribe.

What was the argument there, Uh.

That we shouldn't be delisting.

You know that's interesting. That was a long That was a long preamble to my question yeah, you were around for all this, yes, now, both of them. Okay, what I remember being really interesting about this is the three the three states that have chunks of ground and what we call the Greater Yellstone Ecosystem, a name that I resent because it call they should call it the Greater Cody ecosystem.

They should call Wyoming bears.

Yeah, they should call it the Greater Cody ecosystem.

Most simmar in Wyoming.

Yeah, the Wyoming ecosystem. Yeah, there's three states. The bulk of it's in Wyholming. But the three states take an attitude where they're like, uh, okay, if d listing goes through and we take what that means is the states now manage it as a wild as wildlife under their jurisdiction. Idaho says, this is twenty twenty.

Is this when it's happened last seventeen?

Yeah?

Earlier?

Yeah, Idaho says we're going to give out one grizzly tag.

Yeah.

Montana chicken shits out right and they say, not going to play this game. We're not doing any grizzly tags.

Montana actually had to give part of their quota to Idaho so the Ida Idaho could have one.

Oh is that right? Yeah, Wyoming just lays all on the table. Yeah, and they're gonna give out twenty four tags, right. Yeah. Guys like me who really want who really think that the grizzies should be delisted, and I think that state management and I'm very open and enthusiastic about a very

Not true.

That's why I stopped saying it, because it was intellectually dishonest. Yeah, talk about that. I just spent like an hour setting up the question. But give me your feelings on all of this, all of this whole deal, all of this hunt, don't hunt, the bears need to learn to be scared and respect humans, and blah blah blah.

Yeah, I don't know where you can start. He opened up so many holes there I beight shops.

Do you think grizzlies would be nervous of people if we started hunting them again?

I got one?

If I got one?

Did you hear about bear four twenty two.

I mean maybe at some level. I don't know personally because I haven't been there, but they talk about bears on Kodiak Island being like really weary of human scent because they're heavily hunted and always have been and always have been, and same with Sweden. So maybe at some level, But the reality is, you know, you have black bear populations all over America that are hunted and there's still black bear conflicts, so you're still gonna have conflicts with bears.

Yeah.

So you know, they delisted in two thousand and seven, and that delisting went from two thousand and seven to two thousand and nine when a judge put him back on the list.

Because it's always the same judge in Missoula.

Wow, this was a different judge. I was, Oh, yeah, there was Molloy and then Dana Christiansen, and we knew we were in trouble when when Dana Christiansen had said My spirit animal is the wolverine. You know any judge with.

That, that's cultural appropriation anyways.

Yeah, I don't know any judge with a spirit animal.

Yeah, they should have gotten him. They should have attacked him from the woke spectrum and said that that's cultural appropriation and you should be fired. That was before wokens. I believe man be freaking out. Man, I just don't coffee. It just died.

Get some more coffee on that.

For anyone listening. Steve spilled a large cup of coffee on his computer moments before we began recording Field.

Do you have the tech capabilities to plug that clip in? Which clip? Well, because I was kind of talking about I was talking to Oh, absolutely, yeah, we can do it. Cut out me saying that bad stuff about that actor though it doesn't really inspire. Oh shit, one of those dudes that doesn't really inspire, like it, guys. I was observing that there's an actor that's in a lot of movies, but no one cares about him, and I don't want that to get out. I feel like that's that's the

He always brings it. Yeah.

Uh so so yeah, so back back to this and and and pardon me for not know what I'm talking about. I thought it was the same judge both times.

But anyways, No, you're right that they do go judge shopping. That that's part of this whole thing. But yeah, two thousand and seven, two thousand and nine, Wyoming didn't have a hunting season even though the population was recovered. We could to use hunting as management tool, and when they got relisted, I think the state's opinion was, the next time they get delisted, we're gonna hunt these things, and we're it's not to control the population, it's to create a social pattern of hunting.

That's what see, that's that's a good way of putting it. Yeah, that's what I want the states to do it because I want them to quickly exercise the management authority.

And Montana checking out chickening out was a bad move in my opinion, because you're setting a precedent that that you're not hunting them.

Yeah, and I remember they were going to chicken out for five years or something like that.

Yeah, I think that's true this time around too. They've said that recently in recent history.

Yeah, I don't know that they would make that choice now, but at the time they were they had a plan to like formally chicken out for five years.

Yeah.

Uh. You know what's interesting about that when I say, like even the Idaho play, as weird as it was to do one on the Idaho play of the social maneuver of doing the hunt. I remember I was talking to these guys that were really involved in the elk

Yeah, you're rooting for that.

And they'll always show a sow with cubs, the one they use around here. Sure, they show a saw with cubs with a crosshair. Yeah. I'm like, but you can't shoot cells with cubs. Yeah, so that's a poacher. They should arrest that person.

We actually had, like I remember having five heights talking about how many bears we were going to harvest and a game warden in a district that has a lot of bears thought that twenty four was like not nearly enough and and was upset about it. And it's like, we're not trying to manage the population totally through hunting. We're trying to create a social standard for hunting. You know, I say we, But that was past.

Years when we first started this podcast, million years ago in an office where me and my wife, Me and my wife had dinner not a great one either, across the road from our original old office last night on our little date night. Anyways, in that office upstairs, we and one of our early early podcasts we first launched a podcast. We had a guy from the USGS, Frank mcmahonan man. What is his name, Van Man? We had him on talk about He yeah, he does demographics on Grizzy.

Sure.

So the USGS is a it's a federal organization, and the USGS doesn't do policy. The USGS doesn't manage land, Okay, like the US Forest Service, the Usdaight manages land, US Fish and Wildlife Service manages refuges, the National Park Service manages parks. You have a bunch of land management federal agencies. The USGS doesn't do land management, they don't do policy. Their mandate is information. Sure, they provide information. So this this guest we had, it's a great podcast. We want

Thirty square kilometers was the estimate.

That okayep And they would draw what's that little shape you draw on them at an octagon or polygon?

Yeah, it was actually a grid. Okay, but yeah, and that was called the chow To model.

Yeah. Explain, yeah, okay, so you know about the shit, Yeah, explain how the number was arrived at. And then and then I'm going to share with you something he told me about the number that I was like we spent an hour talking about yeah, because he would say at least I'd go, how many at least seven forty? Well, how many at least seven forty? Yeah, well how many at least seven forty?

Yeah, So that model has been updated twice since then.

Okay, but explain how it's like, it's really fascinating how you make a model like this.

Okay, So bears are really hard to count because they're solitary nature. They're not territory. Their home ranges overlap, so just.

Say solitary but not territorial, right.

They like to be in visialistic, but they don't have territories, not like a mountain lion. Solitary nature has a territory. It's keeping other cats out of there. So if there's food availability, their home ranges overlap.

Oh, I've never even thought about that term. That's a great term. Solitary but not territorial.

Right, And that's what happened with the model. That's what makes them really difficult to count. So the early research showed that a grizzly bear sal's home range was thirty square kilometers, so when they were counting, if you're counting bears and there's you break the system, the ecosystem up into a grid, and there's a sow with cubs in one of those squares. You cross off that grid because you don't want to you want to lean conservative, you

Yep.

So that model maxed out at seven forty, Like I can't remember seven fifty. Maybe you couldn't get it. You couldn't shove any more grizzly bears into the ecosystem in that model. They went back and they looked at color data and they found out that SAO's home range was more like fourteen square kilometers.

You know, I gotta this is great, but I want to add in a thing here. Yeah. That he'd explained is be that when they make the model, you're just you count you're trying to count breeding age females, and then you look.

At what with cubs of the year, okay, and then to.

Look at what you know about the demographics, meaning that you could go into a let's say you could go into a country perhaps and count how many how many females with children are in this country, and then probably go like, okay, so we know human males and human

Yeah, you have. You know that they're the driver of the population. But what you're describing is actually more like a census, and that's closer to what the model is now. It's an integrated population model. But you know, yeah, the ratio of bears in the ecosystem you have, however many adult males you have, however many subadult bears and females

I got it.

So what's the number now, ten oneenty thirty.

How good you think that number is?

I think that's pretty accurate. I think there's definitely parts of the ecosystem where there's higher densities than other parts. And growing up in Cody, I just assumed everywhere had really high densities, and you go to other parts and they're just not. And this new modeling system is going to incorporate some of that and show you where where there's more density of bears. And that's only in the demographic monitoring monitoring area. So there's bears that live outside

They're not counting bears that don't count.

Yeah.

Yeah, So if a bear moves out into like if a bear moves out of and moves out into like Fort Benton, out of out of the Shouldo area and just keeps going east. He leaves the counting.

Area if he's there year round, if he's outside of their their demographic monitoring area. And I don't know about the NCDE, but that's how they did it with the g ye got it. Yeah, you got to be in a bear place to be a bear. Yeah, stract don't count outliers.

So there's about So tell me the number again, you think, oney? Thirty?

Yeah, and it was as high as twelve hundred was estimate a couple of years ago before they changed to this other model. But it has a lot more factors. It's a lot more accurate. God, it's my understanding.

That's good.

No, I still thought it was that old seven.

Yeah. I didn't know that anyone moved beyond that number.

That was laughable. People in my hometown never believe that.

Why do they Why do they seem to congregate in these little micro areas so much. There's just some like valleys that are like such hot spots, and you go to another valley and you could go to another value and hang out there over the years, ten ten years and never lay eyes on one. But then there's like, you can't it just doesn't. You can't really tell the difference from looking at them.

It's just food availability, food sources, and some of it's learned behavior. And my part of the woods, we have what are called moth sites, and there's these bears on moth sites, and you know, I've done flights where I've counted forty bears on moss sites. So there's a high concentration of food, and that's one of the highest caloric value foods in the ecosystem.

He explain what that means.

Cloric value?

No, what a moth? I know about it? Oh, yeah, I know a little bit, but just tell people what that is.

So there's these army cutworm moths that migrate from the Midwest and they come up in the mountains at night pollinate flowers, and then in the daytime they get in these talus slopes and they use that as a heat refugia, and bears come along and they flip over those rocks and eat those bugs. And they're probably eating twenty to forty thousand of.

Those moths a day, licking them up.

Licking them up, yep. And it's just a really rich food source for bears in ecosystem. But what I was going to say is there's places in the ecosystem where there's moss sites and there's not bears utilizing them, So they think it's a learned behavior, like.

They know about it, right yep. Huh, Like if you took all the bears out and put new ones back in, they might not find those.

Moths maybe not for a while, or they use different ones, or they could use different ones.

Yeah, yeah, huh. What are some of the other main foods, Like everybody likes to think of them just you know, eating elk calves, But when you had a list like their main grub sources, what do you think it is?

Uh, vegetation. You know, bears eat a lot of different roots and tubers and corns, and that's a big one. In the spring, elk calves is a big food source. I mean, that's kind of undeniable. These moths sites. There are a few places in the ecosystem where they eat those cutthroat trout that are spawning white bark pine. But they did a food synthesis analysis on bears and found that they eat over two hundred and sixty different plants

Two hundred and sixty species. Yep.

That bear that I caught there was six twenty four. I figured that he was probably eating meat year round. You know, that bear was going from winter kill carcasses to elk calves, to moths, to killing cattle in the fall because we'd caught him before killing cattle, to eating gut piles. You know, he was eating probably nothing but meat. How old was that bear?

Mmm?

I don't remember. I caught another bear that was five hundred and twenty pounds in the spring, same exact location, and I caught him eight years later and he was twenty eight years old.

Wow, Holy cow man.

So that other bear could be thirty I think. I think, well, when he was twenty eight, that bear was past his prime. Maybe when other bear was probably between fifteen and twenty.

Gotcha, Yeah, man, it's twenty eight.

Zach Turnbull caught one that was thirty two in the Upper Green.

And that's got to be getting close to mass.

That's the oldest bear they've caught in the ecosystem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In your mind, what is the what is the most common sort of way things play out when people get scratched up by a bear.

Hmmm, what do you mean, like, how.

If you were if you were no, no, no, no, I'm sorry, if you were going to look at from all the things you've heard and seen, when someone gets mauled by a bear, what is the normal.

Scenario surprise encounter?

Probably like you're spooking it.

Yeah, and probably sounds with cubs more than anything else. You know, I see a big adult mail track, I'm not nervous. I see a little tiny cub track, and I'm like really looking around.

Yeah, so it's that you like jump it at close range.

Yeah, that's the majority of them. You know, there's a lot of cases every year where guys get elk down and and there's bears coming into those dead elk or they're going back to retrieve a bear or excuse me an elk carcass and and they jump a bear. That's pretty common too. I mean it's it's food, cubs and personal space, And a lot of times you're getting cubs and personal space at the same time.

Got it, that's trouble. Yeah, do you believe you know, there's like a thing I don't know if it's a if it's a what's the opposite of an urban legend, rural legend?

Rural myth?

Okay, like my brother redneck talk my brother Danny, he now and then goes in, uh hunts kodyac but after you know, he hunts in the winter for black tail deer. Right, and he'll swear when the bears are down, he'll swear to red fox. No, a gunshot. There's a lot of red fox there. He's like, you shoot a deer and they're just there. Yeah, and he's like, you know, they're smelling it whatever. But it's so fast you can't help. But wonder like, are they're like, oh, they're like and they're.

Like, ooh yeah, go that way.

You hear people say this about grizzlies.

Yeah, all the time.

Do you think that's true?

No, not at all.

You don't think they can't do a gunshot.

No. I'll tell you why, because I have friends that are really poor shots, have guided hunters. They're really poor shots. And you sit there for fifteen twenty minutes and no bears show shows up. We have a shooting range outside of Cody.

It's not full bears.

It's not full of bears, even though I've caught bears adjacent to it, but they're not running to that thing, you know, got it. So it's really when you get an animal down that blood, that room and smell that guts. As soon as that hits the air, you gotta clock on you. And what I like to do as a guide is start a fire, you know, as long as there's not a fireband if I'm in a good location, you know, and started upwind because that kind of masks

Yeah, we do that fire thing caughtting up moose in alask especially when it's real thick, I'll get a fire gone. I don't know if it's like my owne I just have. I don't know. I like to have the idea that it somehow broadcasts the human presence more might be total horseshit.

Yeah, I think so. I don't think bears want to come into a fire. So that's just something I've learned since after the game and fish.

You know, have you handled bears that had killed people?

Hmmm, No, I've handled there's that have mall people. Yeah, after the mall and yeah.

Didn't you tell me that story about how.

Yeah, so the first yeah, one of my yeah, one of my first conflicts that I came on. I wasn't even hired on full time yet. I came in the office. I was just volunteering on my days off. And my boss was on the phone and he said, I remember him saying, three maybe four people mauled. I'm on the way to the hospital. And he got off the phone and he said, hey, can you help us for a couple of days, And I said yeah. And there was a mauling at by cook City, a campground called Soda Butte.

Wow. Yeah, it's weird, like all the shit he bit in his life that that would break his tooth off.

It was It was a sow, but she was so malnourished that she was desperate, and that was Those are predatory attacks, obviously, which is different than your defensive aggressive attacks. So then she, yeah, she went further down the campground and she got in another tent and she killed and ate a guy, and there was three other yearling bears with her through those attacks. So I didn't work up that bear personally, but yeah, I've worked up other bears of mald people.

Does that give you a creepy feeling?

Mmm?

Yeah, I mean I will never forget the look in that bear's eyes. It's so to bete. I mean, she was so demoralized, and yeah, I'll just never forget the way she had her head on her paws and just look completely demoralized.

Like what do you mean demoralized? M just.

There was like a sadness in her eyes. I don't know how else is that?

Right?

And you catch a lot of bears and see a lot of bears and traps and they avoid eye contact. That's really normal, but there was just like a feeling about it. I don't know how else to describe it.

Hum, when they're avoiding eye contact, what do you think.

That is in the bear world? You know, that's aggressive posturing.

When I was teaching, eye contact is aggressive.

Yeah, when I was teaching kids, i'd say, you know, especially middle school girls, you know, when you see somebody in the hallways and you kind of stare them down, that's aggressive posturing. You know you're being mean, right, And they all understand that and that's the same with bears, is they pretty much avoid eye contact until they're raid to rumble the rate to fight.

M so they'll look away from one another.

Yeah, yep, those big adult males, when you see them fight, they'll circle each other and they'll be avoiding eye contact, and when they finally get the nerve to lock eyes, that's when they're you know, trying to fight each other.

Do you think there's a tell if a bear is gonna falls charge or charge charge? Do you think there's a physical tell? Ye?

Head posture, Okay, if they're really intent on hurting you, their head is as low to the ground as possible. They're trying to get there. And you see that with self defense shootings. A lot of times guys aim center mass. Center mass is the hump, you know, and it doesn't kill them. When they're shooting bears. If it's a bluff charge,

With your spray, yeah, shot, yeah, with your yeah at what let's say, once coming you got prayer spray at what distance?

For you personally, Like, at what distance are you touching that spray off?

Oh, thirty yards?

Yeah, and you're just letting it rip. Let it rip, don't be like trying to don't try to conserve.

I would, I'd hold it down for a second and spray, and you know, if it kept coming, I'm going to keep spraying. But yeah, about a second's all it takes.

What do you think about the wolverine situation, the wolverine delisting m or sorry, the wolverine listing? Do you think the wolverine listing is warranted?

I think we're living in a time and age where a lot wildlife habitats just getting chopped up, and wolverines need a really big home range. And there were links in Wyoming and they just kind of blinked out and nobody ever noticed. So I don't know a ton about wolverines, but I think you probably gotta do everything you can to protect their habitat at this point, you think, so, yeah, and I you know, they just have such a huge home range and this was probably for the south extent

Yeah, I think that they're using two they use two hundred and fifty.

Square miles five hundred five hundred square that's wild, it's more. But same thing with links, you know. They they went really far south. And I had a friend that was a trapper and he'd always say, it's not like the Canadians are excited every time a bobcat crosses into Canada.

You know, a good point.

It's just we have a different mentality because they're coming south.

Yeah, that's a good point.

What do you think about wolverines?

Man? Uh, I think that they I think that we lack any kind of historic reference. So when someone goes and looks and they think that there's a low number of wolverines that no one's ever looked at it in a sophisticated sense before. One way you could look at the research they did is you'd say, man, there's wolvernes all over the place, right because they go out and do the they hang the carcasses and do the trail camp stuff and catch hairs.

Yeah I actually did that one, did you?

And so you'd look and be like wow. Like one interpretation, you'd be like, huh, that's cool. There's a lot of wolverines out there because no one knew. But instead you take that you you realize there aren't many, but you don't know how many there ever were, right, and then you point to an area, you know, you point to an area and cannon they had seen a decline, but it's not the same kind of area. You're on the southern edge, and you just go like, there aren't many,

Sure that's probably saving habitat.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like it's like, we want to save habitat, which I totally understand. We want to save habitat, we want to slow certain development. The way to do that is to do the wolverine and get the wolverine listed. But then the wolverine will get listed and it'll wind up being that you'll see that you can't go and snow and beyond certain areas, and you can't trap in certain areas. And you'd be like, but but running a snowmobil and trapping aren't have it. Don't do habitat destruction.

Yeah, Steve still collecting his thoughts on this subject.

You know, back to the point I made earlier about links linking out in Wyoming, there's a chance that part of that was because of snowmobiles and and what that does is creates a path for coyotes to go kill snowshoe hairs, which obviously links are dependent on. Got it, And so you know, it doesn't seem like snowmobiling has an impact, but it.

May, you know, one of the weirdest ones of those God.

I don't want to be like a making make me sound very green here. That's great.

Listen that that's that's that's great for me. I mean, uh, you know, I like it's a it's good things to beerious about. Yeah, uh, think about this. One time we spent a lot of time years ago on when there was still some caribou that were living in the Idaho Panhandle. Yeah, and the efforts to try to save those caribou in the in the Selkirk Range, and they would come into Idaho Panhandle. Sure, right now there's no caribou in the lower forty.

Eight Yeah, super sad.

When they looked at that. An interesting thing was that they were seeing so much wolf predation on caribou, and it was like, why wasn't there, Like, that's nothing new. You've had wolves on the landscape right in BC. The caribou there, why wasn't it. It was like white tailed deer numbers, like like certain certain timber harvest practices created a lot of white tailed deer and elk and moose habitat.

Yeah, I think the corequence of events, the correlations probably when snowmobiles got souped up. I'd be curious if that was like the years when when those animal's behavior started to change.

Got it when high marking became a thing.

Yeah, because when I was growing up, you know, you were about a foot off the ground and that thing didn't go very fast. Yeah, but now you can, you can go anywhere with a snowmobile.

Yeah. I picked up a wolverine on a trail camera last year.

Yeah, and that's cool.

I felt like I was I felt like I was real excited. I sent it to everybody.

It was like trapping, Yeah, yeah, it was like trapping to get one.

Yeah on a camera.

No, We've had some game fish guys get some on cameras, but it's really rare. And when they were doing that population estimate, you know, it was I want to say, not more than five in the whole state, And they put a lot of effort into trying to identify wolverines. Something that was really cool, though, is they had a wolverine that had a white arm with a black spot,

They knew about how many and Wyoming.

Well through all the you know, I think the population estenate is probably twenty Is it that low?

Is that low? Yeah?

She's really God I might be miss speaking twenty to fifty one hundred, No more than.

We got a lot better to tabitat though. Here. Yeah, in the northwest part of the states.

So how far away was she she said she was She had been caught in the northern part of Elstone. Do you know where she was then reidentified?

How far away?

Fish hawks? Probably eighty miles away? Wow, twenty one and twenty two.

Wyoming game and fish set approximately twenty four wolverinesh.

Look at this guy.

It's been a while since I thought about that.

Man. It makes my cameras things seem even cooler.

You know who you know who? Osborne Russell is sure man.

He calls them common.

Yeah, and he talks about him in by Salt Lake, So yeah.

There's a lot of he calls them common.

There's a lot of carkajew references in the Mountain Man journals.

Ye know that oral history stuff does because I would not call them common.

Right, So there's gotta be more than there is now.

Yeah, Osborne Russell, we covered this very We're working on a thing called the Mountain Men. Yeah, sure, part of our American History series. And the other thing that you just wouldn't believe is, uh, the number of big horns. Oh yeah in the early eighteen hundreds.

Yeah, like not elk, right.

Big horns. Hundreds, like hundreds of big horns.

I've talked horns, yeah, big horns and deer. I've talked to Larry Todd about this, and there's only two Indian camps in Wyoming that have elk parts in them. So what I don't understand is there's a really big elk migration that comes from Yellowstone and it goes to south of Kody, and you know, I imagine it's been going on for thousands of years. But you think maybe there weren't that many elk back then, or you know, it's more buffalo than elk.

And yeah, Osborne Russell would run into people who were like sheep specialists.

Sheep eaters, sheep. Yeah, we have a bunch of artifacts around us that were sheep eater artifacts. They're they're part of the Shoshown tribe. But we just learned.

That's why I scratched it.

I asked, I actually asked as a person.

Yea, well I've never known, only preferred. Yeah, that's the river that flows through Cody.

That's yeah, that's that's what got Yeah, you're sitting in Okay.

Well he would know the rivers and the places go by Shoshone, but the people go by Shoshone is sort.

Of what he was. He was a rapp a hole. Yeah, but he lives with Yeah, lives. Yeah, that's true.

The conclusion we collectively arrived at.

Have you ever seen the bows that those sheep eaters make?

No? But I read Osborne Russell's description of the bows.

Yeah, they're pretty cool. There's a guy named Bob Lucas that there's a video of him making one. But they take a big horn, sheep horn, and they reverse the curl and then they glue it and tie it together and it's basically a recurved bow.

They steam it, reverse it right yep.

Uh.

Osborne Russell figures very heavily into our into the thing we're working on because he did such.

A good job of documenting stuff.

Yeah, such a phenomenal job of making a journal. Uh. Tell me about your guide in business? Who do you guide for?

I've guided for a bunch of different outfitters, to be honest, and I took this season pretty much off because I just had a kid. But I've worked for Yellowstone Country Outfitters, three oh seven Outfitters, ran Crick Outfitters, Livingstone Outfitters. So I've got to see a lot of country.

And your specialty these horseback trips.

Yeah, everything's horseback, horseback and mule sawbucks or deckers sawbuck guy. Yeah, I've never understood that though. Montana guys. Yeah, I can't take a toothbrush if they don't man yet.

You know.

Yeah, I've always thought the same thing.

Yeah, we always laugh at Sawbucks. Yeah, you'll have to teach me, so all right, Yeah, trade seems pretty easy. So there's two style of pack saddles. One is what you call sawbook, which is seems self explanatory. You hang paniards and then you have a lash rope where you

Yeah, no, that's accurate.

I don't know what you don't know.

My theory is decker like when you lash down at decker saddle, say with a YETI cool, And then you can crow's foot it to really lash it down. You can bump into a lot more trees and have it stays stay set. Compared to Sawbucks, addles might move around a little bit more or get loose.

I don't know.

I've never some pretty steep country.

Well steep maybe how thick is it?

It's pretty thick. Well, it sounds like.

I guess whatever style floats your boat.

I know that you can pack real awkward loads with deckers. They're a lot more versatile.

Yeah, we would pack raft frames sixteen foot raft rames them on the uphill side.

Okay, yeah, we just don't take that stuff. So yeah, very awkward?

Are you mostly deer? Mostly elk?

I've done it all sheep, mountain goat deer elk, not grizzly bear, but everything else. Uh no, never have a guated black bears. Actually kind of got burned out on the bear thing, so.

Oh, messing with bears like a person gets a job to ice cream shop, then.

I don't like ice cream no more, exactly exactly the same reason I don't eat Mexican FID.

And you're and you're looking for your ear between careers.

Now you know I'm doing construction, but I'm definitely open to doing something that benefits wildlife. I don't want the best thing that I've done for wildlife to be catching and killing bears.

So what drove you to do? You mind saying why did you leave the state agency in Wyoming fishing game.

I was just really personally conflicted with some of the management decisions that were being made. You know, So there were a lot of reasons I was. I was super burnout. If I had to give one more bear safety talk, I was gonna suck start a forty four? God what or bear spray?

What would be at what would be an area of management? Like, what would be like an area of management that you would find conflict. You don't need to tell me the exact conflict, but when you say that, what do you mean? What do you mean?

What do you mean? Like?

Do you mean the way they sat harvest objectives?

Oh?

The way they where I had conflict? Or was it like administrative issues? You know?

Yeah, it was leadership and it I just didn't feel like relocation and removal decisions were really consistent.

So god, oh on the bear question, yeah, it's like how you're handling individual bears.

Yeah, yeah, you know, I'd had a certain standard with my old boss, and I just felt like it wasn't the same.

Do you is my last question for you? Do you give me your personal take? I like, like came in so hot and heavy on delisting. What's your personal take? On delisting.

Hmmm. I think it's the best thing to keep states into managing bears, which is probably the best thing for the people on the landscape. And I also think hunting is a positive because it creates its advocates for wildlife, creates advocates for bears. People right now say there's too many bears on the landscape, but as soon as you start hunting them, they'll be like, I don't know where all the big bears have gone. These guys are hunting too many. It's a non residence.

Yeah, it'll just be some other boogeyman.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

Man. So, but they continue to expand. And a big issue that the court see is that genetic connectivity between the GYE and the NCDE, and right now they're only thirty six miles apart. And I think that whether you delist or not, I think they eventually make that connectivity. But there was a bear that showed up in the Big Horns two years ago actually, and you know that bear was removed ethanized right away. And I think they're going to continue to expand whether you try to contain them or not.

Oh, was that a containment decision?

Social acceptance, you know, but we've caught and killed a lot of bears over the years, and you're just trying to contain them into the absorcos. This year, they'll hit seventy bears have died in the Elstone ecosystem, and probably forty of those will be management removals. And you got everything from bears getting killed in irrigation canals, there were bears electrocuted. There's bears that get hit by vehicles, like three ninety nine obviously, so.

Seventy to one calendar year.

Yeah, I think it'll be a record year this year.

Montana's at twenty eight right now.

I don't think it's over yet. There's still bears out.

One of the uh one of the arguments I heard from when I talked about I was joking and I half joking about Montana chickening out on the bear hunt. But one of the things they brought up is they had no They felt that their quota would get hit by non hunting purposes and if they did a hunt.

This is kind of like the logic, right, Yeah.

If they did a hunt and killed a couple bears, they would burn up their quota and then they wouldn't be able to do bear management on problem bears because they would have already hit their human Cause quota.

Doesn't sound unreasonable.

Fee feels more across that bridge when you come to it.

Yeah, I think again, it's what you what the number you believe is in the ecosystem. And the reason Wyoming was going to be so high is because twelve of those bears were going to be outside the demographic monitoring area, so they weren't even counted towards the population.

Got it, got.

It, you know. And the DMA is about twenty thousand square miles and bear distribution right now is about fifty thousand square miles.

Oh, it's a grizzly coming to a neighborhood near you.

Yeah. So everywhere I would go, people go, there's kids in the neighborhood. You got to get this bear out of here, you know. And then one lady called me and she goes, there's old people in this neighborhood. You got to get this bear out of here. I'm like, Oh, there's no appropriate age to live with a bear.

There's two things that are going to happen. I like to joke about golfers and Montana is uniquely created a golfer Gophers. No, I believe that someday Montana will have a golfer get mall about golfing, oh in Whitefish.

Yeah, probably at Meadow Lake Resort, Columbia Fall the big scot they.

Called one on a golf course down the bitter.

Yeah, we will have. It'll be like it'll be I hope he doesn't get it bad. If he gets a bad I'll feel bad. But I I uh, it'll be an interesting day when we have a golfer get malb digging through the rough looking.

It's probably not gonna be a good golfer because he's gonna be sticking to the fairways.

And yeah, he's gonna be down to the dick. He's gonna be down to the creek bottom looking for his golf ball.

Another good reason to work on your backswing.

We're gonna have a golfer, get Mall, and that's going to change public opinion. And then for whatever reason, like we have a little.

Mountain range right here in town Bridgers, Uh, you know, not right here.

I mean it's way bigger than that. But it toes off like this, you know, toes off into town and man, there's grizzlies right.

Across the highway, I know, thirty six miles.

And it's like, at some point in time, this is we have this real popular hiking trail called the m Yeah, it's not out of the it's not out of it's like a reasonable thing that someone's gonna get scratch on the m Hill. I feel like that'll impact public opinion when a golf forgets it. Yeah.

I mean there is in Missoula the Rattlesnake Wilderness right there. You know, you can take a city bus to it, and they had a sow and cubs that set up in one of the first gulches there. That's like a really popular mountain biking area. But I remember going to an event and there's a bear biologist there talking about grizzlies coming into the Missoula area, and he's like, you know, they're in Gold Creek, they're down on the golf courses

I should say, I don't want people to think I'm bringing that up like a golfer getting scratched. I'm not bringing this up as a thing that I'm worried about, and I don't think it's a negative. I mean, I'm not the golfer get scratched. I'm not saying I want, I don't want. I think I'd love it if we had bears. I'd like if there's grizzlies all over town, like go to Anchorage. Yeah for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like them. Yeah, I'm not an anti bear guy whatsoever. Right,

As soon as you get mauled, people's attitude sure changes.

I love them. I just want it to go. I want to be that there's a bunch of bears, and I want it to be that there's there's a state managed and there's a tag draw. That's what I want.

Yeah, everybody thinks about their self interest, right, especially me. Yeah, I think it's the story that you that you portray into the future. Here how people paint bears. So three ninety nine is a great example, Like you could paint her as a bear that mould people, or you could paint her as the biggest advocate for bears in the mm hmm in the world. So yeah, future bears is up to the public.

Really. Yeah, and my you know, you mentioned like everybody wants what their own self interest is. I should clarify that. Uh, I'm not gonna draw a Grizzly bear tag. I live in a state that one had they done, I don't know that. I orn't even put in for the tag. Yeah, uh we didn't do it. If we did one, you're not gonna draw it. I mean, what are the odds you're gonna draw it? You know. It's like I've been applying for big horn sheep tag for decades, haven't drawn one yet.

I a lot.

No, not not like, yeah, you get you're not gonna draw, Like the draws are gonna be slim. So it's not like it's not like I feel that this is my pathway. Yeah, I mean I hunt the last every year. This isn't my like, I'm not pursuing this as because it's my personal pathway to getting a Grizzly. It's like it's not gonna happen. I'm not going to get a grizzly in Montana. I'm not gonna get a grizzy in Idahol. I'm not

This guy's put in.

You know what I'll do right now? You know what I'm gonna do right now now, I'm gonna tell you something. Right now, I'm gonna tell you something right now, just because you said that, I promise I won't put in. Okay, for how long ever, I won't.

Put it in.

I won't put in.

It's a true advocate.

And you go scroll the records and see if you ever see me put in, I won't put in.

I got friends I'll call.

I'm not going to put it. I said one time before, like to talk about in drilling an ant war. Yeah, And people are like, oh yeah, just because you hunt up there all the time. I'm like, okay, if I could sign a contract that said they won't drill an war but I can't ever go there, I would sign.

The contract right me too, I'm not going there.

Yeah, it's like okay, fine, I need to go there, just whatever. That's fine. And if I had to sign a contract, we'll dlist and turn over to State management and create a hunting season tomorrow, but you have to agree that you'll never apply for a tag. I'd be like, okay, cool, that's not what it is for me.

I think the real question here is can you get bears off the list? Can you have state management without people continuing to sue and and tear down the ESA, or do you have to change the ESA in order to get animals delisted, and I think that would be horrible if if you don't get bears off the list.

You know, That's why my advice to people who support the ESA is to stop effing around with the essay, what weaponizing it, because you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna do You're gonna do to the essay what they did to the spot at owl. Like the spot at Owl used to be an owl, yeah, and then it became a symbol of overreach. Right, you're gonna now create You're gonna be like you have here. You sit like let's say you were like Joey ESA, Right, you're like the

The reason I brought up that bear in the Big Horns is that's in the DPS and that's unoccupied habitat. So you know, in theory, the ESA calls for bears moving into that suitable habitat.

But they mapped out when they listed them. They mapped out recovery objectives and they hit recovery objectives twenty some years ago.

Yeah that's true.

Yeah, Okay, So why bother, why bother having an Endangered Species Act? Why bother making recovery objectives if it's just bullshit? Yeah, if you don't mean it.

Yeah, it erodes public trust, no doubt about it.

Two percent of the things that go on the ESA come off because of recovery. Okay, things will come off because they realize it wasn't warranted. Things will come off because they'll go extinct. Two percent of the things that go on the ESA come off because recovery. Here, you have a recovered thing. Why is it not celebrated?

Right?

They didn't bitch Like eagles came off, no problem, peregrine fault. But this one they just got to hold it tight to their chest, yep. Because it's not about the ESSA.

It's a money maker, that's what it is.

Yeah. So forget me saying I'm coming at it from a perspective of one hundred. I'm coming at it from a perspective of someone that wants to get on with UH to like salvage the ESA and not make it that it just is a thing of derision.

Glad I bolstered your argument.

No, thank you cut all that out, feel so I can just start saying that like I thought of it. Well man, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me appreciate it. It's good to meet you guys.

Is there anything that I that you wish you got to talk about that I asked about.

I meant to talk about snaring bears.

That's something I didn't talk tell me about that.

So another way we catch them is with foot snares, and you use what's called an aldrewe spring, and you put the spring and a snare loop and you dig a hole and then you recreate the surfaces though it's just ground, and you try to get a bear to step in that. And that's a fun part of trapping.

So how do you get him step in there? Hanging a bait?

A lot of times you have a cubby set and you're trying to direct them into your set, but you're putting sticks, and bears don't like to step on sticks and hurt their feet, so you can kind of control their foot movement with those.

When you're doing that, so he actually thinks he's putting his foot on the ground and his foot breaks through the ground.

Yeah, and it hits this Yeah, it's a pit trap, but it hits this trigger and that trigger flings a spring and that pulls that snare cable tight. And the snare cable just has a little bracket that only slides one way, you know. And you caught a bear.

And can you is he too messed up? Or can you release him? Oh?

Yeah, no, you you release those bears.

He's gotta be pissed.

Do you get him on video when you do that? I got some sounds like a fun visual mm hmm.

Got some pictures somewhere, I think. But he's pissed a lot of times they're trying to run off and they hit the end of that snare cable and they roll over. And sometimes they are pissed and they try to charge you.

Yep, in regular trap.

And you call that blocking, Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. A bobcat trapper was explaining one time that people would use blocking for bobcats, but they don't realize this. Bobcats want to stand on little things, so they'd put little rocks to block, or put a log to block, But he wants to be on that. Yeah, so this guy, you know, you know to sycamore, you know, a sycamore ball. They don't live around here, but it's like that little

Yeah, whose ear tag is this?

Well, dude, thanks thanks for coming out, man, I appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me, and good luck on your job hunt. Thanks appreciate that name.

Name what line of work you want, because maybe someoneill call you and give you a job.

Land conservation I think could be up my alley. I think that would be beneficial to wildlife. So should I throw out my email. Can I do that?

They you can throw out your email if you want a bajillion people messaging you, or they can email loss Yeah yeah that's.

Mine Wor they can also take through.

His own job.

Yep, that's true.

My email is just Dusty dot Lassiter L A S S E T E R ten at Gmail. Looking for work, looking for work. I got a great job. I have a great boss, but I still want to do something that benefits wildlife.

I got a construction project I might lay out in front of you.

To I can handle it.

It's in grizzly country.

Yeah, I'm a mediocre carpenter.

But that's what that's kind. I'm looking for.

More of a painter.

All right, man, thanks so much than.

The fingers are told so cold that they burn. Were standing in the creek in our Burney.

Just for me in a warm bomb. And then back to.

The pros chasing cotton tail High. I was just ten, but High got to join his Carol protested Grandpa's firm.

I've had him shooting since he was me. High. He sees tayd him.

Then an apro close with the ball on the wind hot home tray and bring it in her round moved up ahead, just into the lane where case colored Steve has put two on the ground. Morning turn high and he was singing, came about to spill as a shot shell off Lou at its ord home, and I couldn't have off. We're in in fingers on the ema, lips turning blue.

Ever, at the end.

Of Novegeber, the memories all showver me, bitter sleep, goness, early morn, cotton tail hunting, afternoon targets, esteemed dinner feeds, forty hot people with cousins, and of those who have half forgotten, and all all harried, rarely so happy.

House spoke first in me in the.

Bond that was away back in my you. I watched it all changed through the heat. It's time we roll both bedrock.

And bone and old age wilts. Even the most pierced.

Grandpa we lost in the cold of Dember Carol. Few turns before, how bout farm when they couldn't remember. Nothing's the same anymore, Born God.

Leave the old home lost.

It shee You can hear the wind a whistle at too. She creaks, and she bones and all over chrown. But we'll get her looking brand new.

Here at the end.

Of November, memories all show over me bitter sweet, go his early morn cotton sail, hunting after new targets and skins, feeds, forty hot people, dozins, and of those who have half forgotten, brand all harriet, rarely so happy. Their housefold burst in and fed in the pond, swear ris up.

A few kids on my own, maybe one day grandson to.

How want the same hells with the hand on each shoulder open maybe week kick.

Up, few ran over. They feel this place.

Every at the end of November. Memory and all show over media, bitter sweet.

As early morn, cant and tale afternoons.

Targets speak, two feeds, forty hot people, cousins and of coles who have half forgotten, and all harried, rarely so happy. House foolhursted and made in the part