Ep. 623: What Happened to the Bobwhite Quail?

Steven Rinella https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork talks with Ron Kendall https://www.depts.ttu.edu/entx/Department/Personnel/Faculty/Ron_Kendall.php, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/, Cory Calkins https://www.instagram.com/cman_calkins/?hl=en, Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en, and Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en. Topics discussed: More on cowboy hats in airports; spearfishing in Montana; explaining environmental toxicology; the treats to the Bobwhite quail; the boll weevil; coveys of quail; buzz bombs; the art of wing shooting; fire ants; Operation Idiopathic Decline; eye worms; mating inside the eye; caecal worms; surpassing the cycle; Quail Guard https://quailguard.com; and more. Outro song "Hunters and Hounds" by Allen Wayne Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:58Steven Rinella?

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• 2:27Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. I'm not in the plumbing or appliance business, so I can share this hot tip for listeners

• 3:07Steven Rinella?

  that happen to be in plumbing and appliance, in particular, the intersection of plumbing and appliance. This came to me, literally, it came into me in a dream. In a dream, I was staying in a hotel, and I was standing in the shower in the hotel and realized that there was one of those little espresso machines in there, in the shower. Are you sure it wasn't body wash? No. No. I was astounded. In the dream, I was blown away. You could go, like, you're standing there showering, and there's like a thing in the hotel, and it had these little cups.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  They should invent that.

• 3:41Steven Rinella?

  And it's like, and you had a shot of espresso in the shower.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  Save yourself a little time in the morning.

• 3:47Steven Rinella?

  Came to me in a dream.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  All right. Some companies probably gonna start, or hotel chains are gonna start doing that.

• 3:54Steven Rinella?

  Listen, man, I know. And I'm just throwing it out there because I'm not in a position to capitalize on it. I'd have to move into plumbing, appliances.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Coffee business.

• 4:03Steven Rinella?

  Coffee business, hotel contracting, I mean, come on. Man's only got, man's only got so much time. Joined today by Dr. Ron Kendall, professor of toxicology.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:17Steven Rinella?

  At Texas State University. This is gonna be our first ever, there's two firsts.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Texas Tech.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  What did I say?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Texas State.

• 4:26Steven Rinella?

  I did? Is there such a thing?

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  I'm at Texas Tech.

• 4:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay. But is there a Texas State?

• 4:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  There's so many. Yeah.

• 4:35Steven Rinella?

  Huh. Sorry about that.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  No problem.

• 4:37Steven Rinella?

  Texas Tech, uh, which I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say is better than Texas State.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  I agree.

• 4:44Steven Rinella?

  Texas Tech, and there's, there's multiple firsts here because this is our first ever episode. I don't know how we've missed this in all the, the billion years we've been making the show. This is the first ever episode where we focused on the plight of the bob white quail.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Not only that, uh, the other first is, um, Dr. Kendall has, and, and people might hear this and they might not be overwhelmed by it, but just hear us out. We're gonna explain why. The first ever FDA approved vaccine for wild birds. Now, this is coming at a time when vaccines are exceedingly divisive in American culture. You know, everybody arguing about the COVID vaccine all the time. Do you still get in trouble for talking about this?

• 5:31Steven Rinella?

  They still like ban you from YouTube for saying it's controversial?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Hopefully that era is over.

• 5:35Steven Rinella?

  So there's like, oh, the, you know, the vaccines have been in the news, but here we have a case of the first ever FDA approved vaccine for wild birds. And we're gonna talk about, uh, that in the context of what in the hell has happened to all of the quail?

• 5:52Steven Rinella?

  Everywhere.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 5:54Steven Rinella?

  I mean, a whole culture, in, in some states, like the entire culture of quail hunting has vanished in, in a lifetime.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  That's true.

• 6:05Steven Rinella?

  My friends in Texas, my buddy Brad in Texas, they have, they have a, a, a big family property and they have the quail. They still have the quail hunting trucks. All the art is quail hunting art.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Did you guys have any around when you were a kid in Michigan?

• 6:22Steven Rinella?

  You had to go a little bit south, southern Illinois, not a little bit.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  My dad and my, like, my friends' dads used to talk about how they used to quail hunt in Pennsylvania and they're just like, they were all gone by the time I was hunting.

• 6:33Steven Rinella?

  When I was still in college, so in the nineties, we would go every winter over Christmas break and hunt quail in Southern Illinois. They ain't there.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Right. Yep.

• 6:46Steven Rinella?

  Brad's place, Eturia, you go in, all the art, it's quail hunting art. They, they like are not, they don't hunt quail.

• 6:57Steven Rinella?

  It ceased to be a thing.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Where, where did they used to be?

• 7:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, we're gonna talk about all that in a minute. First, we're gonna talk about cowboy hats.

• 7:07Steven Rinella?

  We're getting into all that. So much listener feedback on my observation that, that I was, like, I was saying that I had a rather indefe- you know, perhaps an indefensible position. Dr. Kendall, I'll be curious to get your opinion on this. Where I was saying, if you're not livestock adjacent, you have no business running around in a cowboy hat. And I equated it to that if I ran around in a police uniform, if I dressed up like a cop,

• 7:35Steven Rinella?

  people would, that would be odd.

• 7:38Steven Rinella?

  Right? People would be like, where's he get off dressing up like a cop?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  I think you're reaching.

• 7:43Steven Rinella?

  But you can dress up like a cowboy

• 7:47Steven Rinella?

  without repercussion.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I mean, you get mad at like, like, I don't know, some rock star when they wear a cowboy hat?

• 7:55Speaker 06

  A police, a police uniform designates a certain amount of like authority that they can.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but I think of a cowboy as having more authority than a cop.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  You're viewing it as an occupational, like, uh, uniform type thing versus like a fashion thing?

• 8:08Steven Rinella?

  I'm just saying, think of a world, think of a world in which you could just run around in a police uniform. Right? It'd be, it'd chaos. But why is it okay that you can run around in a cowboy suit?

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Cause it doesn't cause chaos.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Cowboy suit.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Cowboy uniform and a cowboy hat. I mean, I feel like you need one more piece of attire. A duster. If you have a cowboy hat and a duster on, then you're pushing.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  That elevates it.

• 8:32Steven Rinella?

  You know, you know, the, you know, the American Prairie Reserve, the movement in that area against the APR, against the American Prairie Reserve is like, and even the, even the head of the American Prairie Reserve acknowledges the genius of, save the cowboy, stop APR. Right? Like a marketing, however you feel. I personally am like, like, uh, like, you know.

• 8:55Steven Rinella?

  Willing seller, willing buyer, they're buying land that's for sale and as you know, sort of a foundational American principle is that when you buy land, you can do what you want with it. And so if the APR is buying land that's currently for sale and choosing to look at it or whatever, it's their business. I don't know.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  True.

• 9:18Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't mean you got love, but I mean, it's like, it's kind of like an American principle, you know, you buy, if you bought property and said, you know what, I decided on my property, I don't want any fences. It's like, why is that so insulting to people?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  It gets a little uncomfortable when we think about in, in Texas, remember that one spot in Texas and that one place in Georgia where there are monkey farms?

• 9:42Steven Rinella?

  Well, you're right. You're right.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  That's when, you know, then you're like that slippery.

• 9:46Steven Rinella?

  I know, but I'm, see, I'm, I'm, I'm doing like devil's advocacy and I'm trying to make a much broader point. So scrap the APR thing. What was I even talking about that for?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Save the cowboy.

• 9:56Steven Rinella?

  That's right. People that are opposed to it say like, it's a brilliant bit of marketing. Save the cowboy, stop the APR. So I view it like my, I'm trying to save the American cowboy. The integrity of the American cowboy, meaning what if I see a guy, I'm like, that there is a real cowboy. I'll say to my kids, that there is a cowboy. Now, I don't know, I could be getting duped.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Could be.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  So you should have to have like a, a carrying card to be a real cowboy.

• 10:26Steven Rinella?

  We just had some people in from the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes and they have to carry a, they have to, they have to carry what they were calling their Indian card?

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 10:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, sure. Dude Ranch Hands and Stolen Cowboy Valor. This generated some, Crin pulled some good feedback from it. Guy says, I was just listening to Steve's rant on episode 614 about a fake ranch hand at the airport and the prevalence of people wearing cowboy hats. He goes on, I understand that Steve feels like most people he sees, he has seen wearing a cowboy hat lately have no business wearing one. As a US Marine Corps veteran.

• 11:04Steven Rinella?

  I fully understand his point of view. There are a lot of dipshits that buy surplus military uni- I didn't know this was a thing.

• 11:13Steven Rinella?

  There are a lot of dipshits that buy surplus military uniforms and pretend to be service members, veterans for the attention, instead of growing a pair and actually joining the armed forces. However, as someone who did serve, I am not bothered in the slightest by those- here he uses a term I have never encountered.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  It's an interesting and colorful one.

• 11:36Steven Rinella?

  So that term,

• 11:39Steven Rinella?

  which I've never encountered, it combines the word knuckle with a euphemism for fornicator.

• 11:50Steven Rinella?

  Ninety-nine percent of them are just- he goes on- ninety-nine percent of them are just attention-seeking fools who mean no harm, pose no harm, and rarely fool anyone worth fooling. The most they will ever achieve is a few moments of stolen valor.

• 12:09Steven Rinella?

  He's speaking not about the military uniform. I think he's speaking about stolen valor, like is wearing a cowboy hat when you're not in the livestock business is that stolen valor?

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Not quite. So funny. I love this guy.

• 12:25Steven Rinella?

  I love it. Stolen valor. He goes on, "But even though I understand Steve's misgivings about wannabe cowboys, his contempt is misplaced. It's a hat. People like different types of hats.

• 12:38Steven Rinella?

  It's their right to express themselves freely, and I will fully defend anyone exercising that right. Even the right school, even the night school rejects that dress up as service members or cops."

• 12:50Speaker 04

  That's a little harsh on the night school.

• 12:51Steven Rinella?

  Long story short, everyone can tell the difference between a real cop, cowboy, veteran, etc., and the wannabes. Additionally, it's kinda weird that Steve is so bent out of shape over the cultural appropriation of cowboys. Let the clowns be clowns.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Love you, William.

• 13:09Steven Rinella?

  Another guy. This is in reference to episode 614. Quote, I'm quoting him here. Steve was complaining about people in cowboy hats. As much as I agree with his opinion on this, Steve needs a little reminder that these wannabe cowboy hipsters are currently keeping the beaver pelt market alive and well. I've acknowledged this again and again. Every time I bring it up, I acknowledge this. He goes on to say, "Well, I may think these people look like idiots. As long as my beaver pelts keep selling, they can play dress up all they want."

• 13:40Steven Rinella?

  Another one called Cowboy Hats on Liberals.

• 13:44Steven Rinella?

  Dear Meat Eater Crew, Steve again got to talking about his disdain for folks wearing cowboy hats and other western wear who don't work in a livestock adjacent industry. I think his point can fundamentally be distilled into the perspective that cowboy hats and boots are use specific. And if you don't work in that industry, then the need for their use doesn't exist. But I think Steve should consider a broader user group. Many people go on trail rides or visit dude ranches on vacation. So they may well have a legitimate use for cowboy hats and cowboy boots.

• 14:22Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  You can ride a horse with a baseball hat on.

• 14:24Steven Rinella?

  Dude, the fact that you would need a cowboy hat to go to a dude ranch.

• 14:29Speaker 06

  That's the dress up he's talking, he's like referring to, right?

• 14:32Speaker 04

  No, he says legitimate use.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, but maybe you want a wider brimmed hat. Keeps the sun off. Keeps the sun off, you know.

• 14:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay, but let's say you were out golfing all that day. The sun is still shining.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, it'd be just as appropriate on a golf course.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  That's true. Great on a golf course.

• 14:50Steven Rinella?

  Why is it that when you're out in the sun and there's a horse by you, you suddenly need a higher level of neck protect? Do you know what I mean? Like if they were out digging ditches all day.

• 15:01Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't have anything to do with anything.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  It seems like the cowboy hat is just the superior hat.

• 15:06Steven Rinella?

  I had.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  It's better at doing its job than a cap.

• 15:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm trying to give airspace to the opposing viewpoint here, but I'll tell you this. I had exposure for a number of years to a dude ranch through circumstances I'll not get into. But I had some, I would have, I would be, I, a number of times spent a little bit of time at a dude ranch. Um, and oddly, the, the people that worked there were the most cowboy dressing up people on the planet. But they were all rich kids. They were all rich boarding school kids. And their parents would go to the dude ranch. Okay, rich kids from out east would, they'd grow up going to the dude ranch and playing cowboy. Then they get older and they get a little rebellious.

• 15:51Steven Rinella?

  And then they go to work at the place for a while as sort of like this little act of rebellion. And they would dress up like seventies cowboys. So everybody that works there dresses like a cowboy from the seventies. Everybody that works there.

• 16:08Steven Rinella?

  I, I don't know. Like the Marlboro Man? Like, yeah, yeah, like, um.

• 16:17Steven Rinella?

  Silk scarf? Yep. If you go and watch Ranch O-Delux, they all dress like Ranch O-Delux.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Bell bottoming.

• 16:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and in, in like, yeah, like seventies.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  Like, uh, like Reynolds and, um, what was the Trans Am movie?

• 16:33Speaker 03

  The jeans are tighter than the ass.

• 16:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, stuff like, like, yeah, you know, when you.

• 16:42Steven Rinella?

  And, and it, there's like, it's hard to express it. There's a little bit of like, at this dude ranch too. There's a little bit of like, a little sexy mixed in. Right?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Yep. That seems right.

• 16:54Steven Rinella?

  Um, he goes on.

• 16:59Steven Rinella?

  Did I get into, uh, uh, yeah, anyways, he says, he, he, here he's attacking my viewpoint. It's no different than wearing a cowboy or no more different than dressing like a policeman. He says, the name is the same is not true for a police outfit. The public generally can't go on a ride along and dress like cops as part of their vacation. It's a good valid point, and it's probably illegal to impersonate a police officer.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  It is, it's not probably.

• 17:26Steven Rinella?

  I think cowboy hats and boots are more similar to motorcycle jackets and boots. They serve a real purpose when you are riding, but it's also okay to wear them when you are not riding. Same with hiking boots and pants or the scholarly apparel that Randall might wear, such as a tweed blazer with elbow patches. That means that I totally agree that spurs in the airport are a bit much. He goes on, a few years back, I made plans to go trail riding for the first time. I wanted a cowboy hat, but there aren't any western wear stores near me in New Jersey.

• 18:04Steven Rinella?

  Even though John Stetson, this is a little thing I didn't know. Even though he goes on, even though John Stetson is from New Jersey. So I ordered a Stetson hat off Amazon. It came in a plastic bag, flat as a pancake.

• 18:20Steven Rinella?

  I processed the return and the new one also came flat as a pancake. And Amazon told me to just keep the old one. I did that five more times and ended up with seven Stetsons.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 18:34Steven Rinella?

  All flat. Then COVID hit and I never went trail riding.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  I think maybe he wasn't getting legit Stetsons from his Amazon.

• 18:44Steven Rinella?

  He says he's been wearing it gardening instead.

• 18:50Speaker 06

  Corinne, did, did you label this cowboy hats on liberals or was that, was that their thing?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  That was his thing.

• 18:56Speaker 06

  Cause I would argue that the, the tourists wearing cowboy hats is mostly from like conservatives from Orange County who move up here because they're tired of liberal California and they're like, I'm gonna wear my cowboy hat now, like those kind of folks.

• 19:06Steven Rinella?

  Like I've had enough of the bullshit.

• 19:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:09Steven Rinella?

  I'm going to Montana and get a cowboy hat.

• 19:11Speaker 06

  Hello fellow cowboys, how are, how do you do?

• 19:14Steven Rinella?

  Last one. Is this the last one? Last one.

• 19:20Steven Rinella?

  Airport cowboy hats. He begins his note with salutations.

• 19:26Steven Rinella?

  I couldn't help but think about Steve's disdain for people dressing as Cowboys in the airport and wonder what the difference is between that and anyone wearing a baseball jersey to a baseball game. I'm going to my kids, tonight, I'm going to the, there's a thing for my kids debate, debate club.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Oh, who's in debate?

• 19:48Steven Rinella?

  Jimmy.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 19:50Steven Rinella?

  This guy's not invited. Okay, so he's wanting to compare, okay, it's not like the fan is going there to pinch hit or step on the mound because the entire bullpen was somehow injured, but rather to support who they're rooting for. Chances are, people in a Stetson and Spurs are not cheering on their home team on the range, but would it be fair to say that maybe they're such big fans of the Western lifestyle that they choose to portray themselves in that fashion? I don't believe the two situations are exact replicas of one another, meaning it's an imperfect analogy, but they seem hand in hand.

• 20:33Steven Rinella?

  Sports fans who waste their time and money dressing like overpaid, whiny athletes is a close enough comparison in my less than humble opinion.

• 20:43Speaker 06

  I disagree.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 06

  Also, athletes taking a stray, what's going on here?

• 20:53Speaker 03

  I think, I think that the one toward the end is a good point.

• 20:59Steven Rinella?

  It's a great point, it's almost too obvious.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Right here.

• 21:02Steven Rinella?

  He goes on to say, as for Steve's aversion for cowboy hats that aren't in a hands, that aren't in livestock adjacency, he goes on, he says, I wonder how the non-hunting public view camo worn anywhere but the woods? No.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  No, camos become...

• 21:19Steven Rinella?

  Not the same. I don't think you should wear it if you don't, like, I would question wearing it if you're not in an outdoor adjacency lifestyle, like, snowboarders, that annoys me, and I could pick that up as my next thing that annoys me.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:37Steven Rinella?

  I'm shopping around.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  I gotta know, though, is a small part of this based in the fact, like, that you feel like you just can't pull off a cowboy hat yourself?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  We've seen Steve in a cowboy hat, I think he looked swell.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Well.

• 21:55Steven Rinella?

  I'll return again to Ronnie Bame.

• 21:59Steven Rinella?

  So two things Ronnie Bame told me.

• 22:02Steven Rinella?

  Uh, never wear a hat that says hello before you do.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  And I wear a fur hat, but I'm a traveler. And, uh, and, uh, what was his other one?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Personality has more personality.

• 22:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and likewise, he says this, he says, um, never wear a hat that has more personality than you do.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  This should be a shirt. It should be a podcast inspired meat eater shirt.

• 22:30Steven Rinella?

  Never wear a hat that has.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  With a cowboy hat with that, or like, you know, raccoon hat and a, yeah.

• 22:37Steven Rinella?

  Hey, did you, did you, did you eliminate the need for Brody to talk about, oh, no, Brody, are you ready?

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Oh, are we jumping to spearing?

• 22:45Steven Rinella?

  Just very quickly.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Um, let me scroll back up there, it's still at the top.

• 22:48Steven Rinella?

  Well, I thought you, I thought you were researching it.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  I did, a little bit, um.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  We got a, a letter from someone here in Montana, just wanted to make sure that all interested parties were aware that amendment to the Montana fishing regulations had ju- has just been proposed that would open the western, western district. Montana's divided in three fishing districts.

• 23:10Steven Rinella?

  East, central, west.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  Um, open the western district up to spearfishing for northern pike, several members of the crew are major proponents of spearfishing. He's just trying to like, he, he supports this thing, he likes the idea. Um, I'm not sure if this thing will get approved or not, but the thing is, is a lot of western Montana's waters are already open to spearfishing for northern pike. Like where there's pike, it's generally a lot of them. You can already go spearfish them.

• 23:43Steven Rinella?

  Um, not all of them.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Not all, but a lot of them, because there's, they have pike in a lot of places, they'd rather not have them, but they're not going anywhere, but it's basically like a free for all on them where they are, like you were saying, the sealy swan, um, the clear water. There's a small lake outside of, uh,

• 24:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, sealy swan and clear water are the same thing, but yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there are already places where you can do that. Um, I don't have a problem with it, like, I think it'd be great.

• 24:12Steven Rinella?

  I think it'll probably pass because they're trying to slow down the spread of northerns.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Yep, yep.

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  I call them Northeast. When I was a kid, like my county, I lived in Twin Town, but it was a Muskegon County. But there was a, there was a wealthy neighborhood called North Muskegon and everyone that didn't live in North Muskegon hated.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Oh, I see.

• 24:28Steven Rinella?

  Like class angst, you know? And we called them Northeast.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Gotcha.

• 24:33Steven Rinella?

  Um, everybody hated them, except them.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's places where you can shoot pike with rifles. What's the big deal with, with spearing them?

• 24:40Steven Rinella?

  Where can you shoot a pike with a rifle?

• 24:42Speaker 04

  I think there's still a seat, there may, it may have been ended, but at the time, like in Vermont, you could shoot them with rifles. Some places in, in the north, like Vermont had a.

• 24:52Steven Rinella?

  God, that seems like it encouraged some hazardous behavior, man.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  They, they may have ended it, but.

• 24:58Steven Rinella?

  Like taking shots at a shallow angle over the neighbor's house or something?

• 25:01Speaker 04

  You shot at a fish or two in your life.

• 25:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent, man.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Little off topic, but I grew up in Whitefish and had a schoolmate acquaintance, kid that was like two grades older than me die spearfishing in Whitefish Lake. He punctured a electric wire under the water.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Shocking.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Super sad. Yeah, shocking.

• 25:22Steven Rinella?

  Through the ice spear, spearing, not spearfishing.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  No, he was underwater in the summer, swimming around, looking for carp, I believe. And, uh,

• 25:30Steven Rinella?

  And he hit what?

• 25:31Speaker 05

  A wire. A wire. Yeah, electric wire. I believe it was a

• 25:34Steven Rinella?

  To a dock?

• 25:35Speaker 05

  220 volt to a water pump that was

• 25:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, my God.

• 25:38Speaker 05

  Probably watering somebody's lawn. Yeah. He never came up and his friend that realized he never came up dove in after him and when he touched him to release him, he got electrocuted and almost died too. But he didn't. I never heard what ended up happening if there was a lawsuit or whatever.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I want to jump one, one more thing about this spearfishing thing. You know how spearfishing walleye is legal in like Lake, is it Lake Michigan?

• 26:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, it's legal on, it's, it's, it's legal north of Thunder Bay on the Lake Huron side.

• 26:10Steven Rinella?

  And it's no, it's legal south of Thunder Bay on Lake Huron and it's legal south of Grand Haven on Lake Michigan side.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  And the rod and reel guys get all bent out of shape about it.

• 26:21Steven Rinella?

  Well, they don't have any reason to be.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  I know.

• 26:23Steven Rinella?

  Because what they did, they made a special license so they know how many spear fishing certificates are being sold. And all spear fishermen have to submit a report and they're going to be quite surprised at how few.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 26:36Steven Rinella?

  Walleye dogs are getting killed.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 26:38Steven Rinella?

  Relative to rod and reel guys. And I don't think it is that contentious.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:42Steven Rinella?

  It's a non thing. It's a non thing.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  That, I mean, there, when I was doing my research there at a, and, and something I found was that there'd be.

• 26:52Steven Rinella?

  That's the fear.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Some conflict.

• 26:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they made it, they went in and made it provisional.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 26:56Steven Rinella?

  Subject to revisiting and it's, it's a non issue.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:00Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's a non issue. But that's even different because there you're talking about a native fish. Like you could always spear trash fish. I don't, I don't like to use that term, but.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Rough fish.

• 27:09Steven Rinella?

  Right. Yeah. Non game.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, non game.

• 27:12Steven Rinella?

  I, I take that back. Phil edited me out saying that.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 27:15Steven Rinella?

  Make it, make it so I go boop.

• 27:18Steven Rinella?

  Non game.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 27:21Steven Rinella?

  You'd always spear a non game and they're trying to open up like, like walleye northees, um.

• 27:29Steven Rinella?

  It might just be like primarily walleye.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  And there, and Montana's weird too, because in, they have like in some places in the state. Game fish are game fish. Certain species of game fish are game fish. And then you go somewhere else in the state.

• 27:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  And that species is not managed as a game fish, like yellow perch. There's places where there's no limit then in Canyon Ferry, you can only keep 10.

• 27:51Steven Rinella?

  Which makes them a game fish.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:52Steven Rinella?

  They magically become a game fish.

• 27:53Speaker 04

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• 29:35Steven Rinella?

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• 30:21Steven Rinella?

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• 30:29Steven Rinella?

  All right, we're going to talk about Quail. Yeah. Everybody ready?

• 30:34Steven Rinella?

  Um, can you explain toxicology, Dr. Kendall? I think of drunk people.

• 30:39Speaker 05

  Okay, I can. First of all, Steve, I'm glad to, glad to be here and listen to this interesting conversation.

• 30:46Steven Rinella?

  What's your take on it, on the cowboy hat deal? Like, if you were a dictator of the world?

• 30:52Speaker 05

  Well, I think you got something there. I come from West Texas and we have true cowboys there.

• 30:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay, not as good as ours, but...

• 30:58Speaker 05

  And generally speaking, we see true cowboys dressed as cowboys with cowboy hats associated with livestock or some agricultural industry. I, in fact, have a cowboy hat.

• 31:12Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Because I have a ranch with cows, okay?

• 31:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, there you go.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  So, that's the real, that's the real deal. You got your card.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  I knew it was a good episode to talk about this.

• 31:21Steven Rinella?

  He's got a cowboy card.

• 31:22Speaker 05

  So, I got my cowboy card and I sold and bought a lot of cattle, believe it or not. But, an environmental toxicologist is...

• 31:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, environmental toxicologist.

• 31:33Speaker 05

  Environmental toxicologist is an individual studying the, the transport fate and effects of chemicals and drugs on wildlife and human health. How it affects reproduction, well-being, and your health, including cancer. So, that's what I do, and I've done it all over the world. I've traveled the world in my work and have been involved with the, the formation of what we call the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry that just celebrated its 45th annual meeting, bringing in people from all over the world, this year to Fort Worth, Texas. And that's my 45th meeting.

• 32:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 32:16Speaker 05

  I was a charter member.

• 32:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, great.

• 32:18Speaker 05

  So, I've been involved a long time in this field. In fact, even in my high school and in my college days, working with insect toxicologists that were developing chemicals to kill insects that affected cotton. Well, the question...

• 32:36Steven Rinella?

  The boll weevil.

• 32:37Speaker 05

  The boll weevil. And so, uh...

• 32:39Steven Rinella?

  I wouldn't know one if I saw one.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  Well, I know what they look like. And, uh, but anyway, I got exposed to this kind of thinking a long time ago because at that point, I was just a teenager working in a lab. And at that time, people didn't really think about what those chemicals were doing to our environment and to our fish and wildlife resources and to our health. Those were the days that kids would drive behind a truck spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes and they'd just ride into fog. So, I mean, we just didn't understand that. So, um, what, what I've been involved with is really

• 33:23Speaker 05

  a very challenging, interesting field, but also a sobering field because on a global basis, we are dramatically impacting our planet. And it concerns me with the loss of biodiversity and the amount of chemicals and chemical transport that now we're identifying even in remote areas of the Arctic and in the, uh, the rainforest and so on. But, um, as we were talking earlier, uh, Steve, you were mentioning what happened to the quail? Um, and you know, I was, um, uh, Corinne and I were talking when I came in. She said, "Where are you from? Texas?" And I said, "No, I actually grew up in Florence, South

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Carolina." It was not far from Myrtle Beach. It's called the Coastal Plain of South Carolina. And, um, I grew up in the country. Um, and, uh, and I was lucky to have a grandfather that mentored me to the outdoors. He gave me a lot of my environmental ethic. And he was taking me quail hunting. I guess I was six or seven years old and would walk around behind him as he would quail hunt. I didn't have a gun, but I was just so interested. And he had a fine bird hunting dog, uh, a Llewellyn setter. And it used to be so interesting to me to watch him quail hunt. And he was a very good shot. So by the time I got to

• 34:45Speaker 05

  be 12 years old, my grandfather actually would let me use his fine bird dog and I started to quail hunt. And, uh, I can remember getting my first quail. Now, when I was a kid... In South Carolina, I actually hunted in a five mile radius of my house. I knew, I knew that territory. I walked it. I walked it and walked it. And I had a map. And my map identified quail coves. And in the fall.

• 35:16Steven Rinella?

  Help me understand what that means.

• 35:18Speaker 05

  For, I'm gonna explain, Steve.

• 35:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  Um, what a covey is, is.

• 35:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no, I mean the map. You're gonna get to that too?

• 35:25Speaker 05

  I'm gonna get to the map.

• 35:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, great, great, great.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Uh, because, um.

• 35:28Steven Rinella?

  So I was, I need to see one of these maps.

• 35:30Speaker 05

  Well, that map was, uh, like priceless to me because it identified where the coves were. Okay, it's where I found a covey. And a covey of quail in the fall of the year, back when I was a kid, maybe fifteen or twenty quail, twenty-five quail in a group. And they, um, they, uh, roost on the ground together in a circle each night. They feed together and they, they, this is for protection and also for, um, thermal regulation. Well, um, the bird dog, the hunting dog, and I have five Llewellyn setters today. But those dogs learn how to trail that scent and they point the covey.

• 36:13Speaker 05

  Okay, maybe fifteen, twenty yards away, ten yards. And then you walk in front of the dog and those, those, when those quail come up as a covey, that's pretty, pretty sporty shooting because most people, uh, they get so emotional when that big covey comes up and you got twenty buzz bombs taking off, they, they, they can't focus. So it's a real art form. You gotta pick one out. You gotta pick one out and you gotta stay on him. So it's a real art form of wing shooting, okay? And this map, I was a, a kid, loved the outdoors and loved my fishing and, and my, my, my, it was my quail hunting.

• 36:53Speaker 05

  And so I had this map and I had generated of all the, the, the covey haunts that I could, I could, I knew where I could go and find three or four coves in a two hour, uh, period, based on that particular terrain. So, you know, I, my interest in quail goes back to the very beginning. And what's so. So concerning now is that I could literally walk out my back door sometime where I grew up and there'd be a covey of quail walking across the backyard.

• 37:26Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  Okay, and that.

• 37:27Steven Rinella?

  When you were, when you were a kid.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  When I was a kid.

• 37:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  Now, in that five mile radius of where I grew up, you might be lucky to find one covey. Where when I was 12, 13, 14 years old, there'd be 50, 60, 80 coveys. Okay. Wow. So the impact has been dramatic. Now, I'm, I'm real fortunate. My, my quail hunting buddies from a kid, from 12 years old, we still hunt together. We still bird hunt together. They're both medical doctors in South Carolina. And, uh, and so they, they tell me, I mean, basically wild quail hunting as we knew it as kids is gone. Unless you're spending massive amount of money to manage a ranch or something.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  So, so we've seen this happening across most of the wild bob white quail hunting range.

• 38:23Steven Rinella?

  Do you mind laying out that range for folks?

• 38:25Speaker 05

  Yes, um, the wild.

• 38:27Steven Rinella?

  I guess if you, just to, just to clarify my question. Pick some point, I don't know, like some, uh, it could be 1950, it could be 1492. I don't know, like, like at some point, where were they? You know?

• 38:43Speaker 05

  Um, the wild quail, wild bob white is, um, uh, a historically valuable game bird. And we often call them the canary of the prairie. They're good indicator species of grass, grassland birds. In fact, the bob white is among the most declining bird in America today. It's amazing. And, uh, so, so, um, the bob white, looking back in time, probably had huntable populations in up to 25 states.

• 39:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 39:16Speaker 05

  Through the southeast, out into Texas, up into, um, Iowa, you know, Kansas and so on. So when we look at it now. Some of the best quail hunting left in America is in West Texas and Southern Texas. But it's West Texas is where I've done a lot of my research. And we call it the Alamo of wild quail hunting left in North America for Bob White Quail. And so, you know, it's really an interesting thing to look at as we're losing this biodiversity. Okay. And because the wild quail, people love them in Texas and there's so much interest in

• 39:59Speaker 05

  preserving and conserving them, not just hunting them. But they are just an important indicator species of our grassland birds. And so, I originally came to Texas, Corinne, you were asking me, I originally came to Texas in 1997 to found an institute called the Institute of Environmental and Human Health. Okay. And I was also a founding chairman of the Department of Environmental Toxicology, where we train doctoral and master students in now the field of environmental toxicology. When I was a graduate student, we didn't have those degrees. Okay. So this is an important degree now.

• 40:41Speaker 05

  And the last 12 years, after moving out as director and chair, I founded the Wildlife Toxicology Laboratory. And that's where we have worked extensively with the United States Food and Drug Administration and to develop a treatment for a disease in our wild quail. Let me back up a little bit. As we look at agriculture and habitat impacts to our wild quail populations, that's very significant. And for the listeners, habitat means where quail live, where they occupy to reproduce and survive the winter and breathe in the spring and the summer.

• 41:26Speaker 05

  So we've seen increase in predator populations like hawks. Okay. We can't shoot a wild hawk anymore. So they're all protected. Well, a lot of them feed on quail, including the Cooper's hawk, which is the most significant aerial predator to the wild quail. And so we've seen changes in agriculture, of course, heavy agricultural chemical use. Okay. That exposes quail.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  And so on. So I look at it as a multitude of variables that have come together to suppress our wild quail.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Can I ask you just a timeline question? Like, are we seeing the decline increase more 20 years ago, 50 years ago?

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Like, what's, you know, if we were to graph chart that, what are we looking at across the timeline?

• 42:21Speaker 05

  Well, a lot of huntable populations have already been lost, say, in the Carolinas and Virginia and so on. But as we even look at Texas for the last, say, go back to the 70s to now, you're seeing a general decline, okay? You have bumps of increases followed by crashes, all right? And that's, I want to get, I'm going to get to that in just a minute. So, but if you look at the curve, over time, the curve is generally going down about 3% or 4% a year, all right?

• 42:55Steven Rinella?

  And that, that curve pitched off at around when? In the 70s?

• 42:59Speaker 05

  Approximately late 60s, 70s, okay? Because when I was hunting quail in, in the late 60s and early 70s, it was unbelievable. It's, okay? And I'm talking about, you could go out in an afternoon, find 10 or 15 coves of wild quail, okay? In an afternoon. It was nothing back then. Now, people come and they go quail hunting, just a few years ago, even in Texas, and I, I'd heard maybe they'd find one cove and hunt a whole weekend, all right? So that's not very good quail hunting. And when my buddies from South Carolina come

• 43:37Speaker 05

  to Texas, their standard is at least 20 coves a day, okay? Hunting a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon. And generally, I could provide that, but only in, in specific areas. And what, when we first started looking at the whole quail question,

• 44:00Speaker 05

  It was largely precipitated by a major crash of our wild quail back in 2010. And in West Texas. And on some of the finest habitat that you could have, a place where quail live. I mean, some of these ranches were superior. There was adequate rainfall, the cover looked great. We were seeing lots of broods of little baby quail. So everybody said, wow, I mean, we're going to have an unbelievable year.

• 44:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, everything looked good.

• 44:32Speaker 05

  Everything looked good. Well, by the time we got to October, November, nobody could find a quail. I mean, they were gone. And on one of the best ranches you could find, it's a picture book quail hunting ranch. They didn't hunt for five years. Five years. And they, and they had before that had some of the finest quail hunting that you could have ever imagined. It took five years to recover that population, even in a good zone of West Texas. So this, this generated a large research initiative funded by Sportsman Steve in Texas.

• 45:17Speaker 05

  Park City's Quail Coalition, the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation, and so on. Sportsman. And they, they said, we have got to figure out when we have this kind of habitat and perfect conditions, climate, and so on, for that particular year in 2010, what the heck happened to our quail? They were literally gone. And our data suggested that we're not talking about losing some of them. On some of the ranches we were looking at, we're talking losing 90%, all right? And so this began a multi-university research initiative to look at environmental contaminants,

• 46:01Speaker 05

  pesticides, viruses, bacteria, and so on.

• 46:06Steven Rinella?

  Was, was the fire ant in the mix? And if, if not, can you hit on that? I, I hear that all the time.

• 46:12Speaker 05

  Well, I know a lot about the fire ant. You're going to got me off track there, but I'll address it.

• 46:18Steven Rinella?

  Well, no, I just thought like the whole what happened, when I have this conversation with people who are not as, not authorities like you are. In the mix is this like fire ants.

• 46:28Speaker 05

  Well.

• 46:28Steven Rinella?

  Kill all the babies.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  Believe it or not, for my master's degree at Clemson University, I studied the fire ants, Solenopsis invicta. And, uh, and, uh, I know a lot about them. And, uh, and we were at that time testing an organochlorine pesticide called Myrex. That was utilized to be sprayed from an airplane in a corn cob grit bait. That the ants would pick up and take into the mound and kill the queen, okay? But it was an organochlorine like DDT. So we ultimately couldn't use that anymore. And that's a whole nother story. Maybe we can do another podcast on organochlorine pesticides.

• 47:12Steven Rinella?

  I'd love to.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  I'm serious.

• 47:13Steven Rinella?

  I'm serious.

• 47:14Speaker 05

  And, uh, so, but, but, but in my opinion, they are part of the mix, but they didn't wipe out our quail. Okay? They just didn't. And I'll tell you.

• 47:23Steven Rinella?

  And the argument is, just so I'm clear on it, because I might be wrong about this. They, uh, when the, when the, when the egg hatches, they, they bite the, the hatchling and kill it?

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Uh, it's possible.

• 47:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:36Speaker 05

  But I, I can still remember, uh, I guess I was about 16 years old. I was quail hunting near, um, my home and I, uh, this area, this field burned and there were lots of quail in this field, like four or five coveys. All right? And there were fire ant mounds all over the place. And I looked at it and I said, wow, this is a good bit of fire ant mounds here and their quail here. So the fire ant, in my opinion, does not necessarily wipe out the quail.

• 48:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 05

  Uh, they may have some impacts on, on when the hatchlings hatch.

• 48:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 05

  Uh, and so on.

• 48:12Steven Rinella?

  But it's not this 90% business.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  No, it's not.

• 48:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 05

  The big gun. It's not the silver bullet.

• 48:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 05

  And, uh, but what I'm gonna tell you is I think we've identified one of the silver bullets that are really hitting our wild quail. And so, um, so I, I, I talked about this, uh, big project called Operation Idiopathic Decline. Because nobody knew what was the cause.

• 48:36Steven Rinella?

  What, what, tell me that word.

• 48:37Speaker 05

  It was called.

• 48:38Steven Rinella?

  No idiopathic.

• 48:39Speaker 05

  Idiopathic.

• 48:40Steven Rinella?

  Remind me?

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Because nobody could, when, when a doctor does an, an operation idiopathic evaluation, they don't know what's wrong with you. And so.

• 48:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  So with the quail, this, this, this terminology was coined, um, with these foundations coming together, funding all of this multidisciplinary research. And, um, and what emerged, and what's been a really undervalued area in wildlife conservation are diseases, okay? And so this has been one of the big unstudied areas that, you know, I, I, I, I, I became a parasitologist and I never even thought I would engage that. So we, um, so with this O I D, Operation Idiopathic Decline, big research program,

• 49:33Speaker 05

  what emerged in Texas, particularly in western Texas, was the occurrence of parasitic infections. And there were two parasites that we identified in our wild quail. And one was the eye worm, Oxyspyrura petrali, the eye worm. What is an eye worm? It's a worm that has a sophisticated mouth part and it locates in the eye of a quail and it feeds on tissues and, and, and so on in the rear of the eye generally and including the heart, what we call the hardarian gland, which is important for immune function and tear production.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  Nevertheless, um, this eye worm, um, is located in the eye and they're quite large. Um, they'll, a female eye worm adult will stretch across a penny, okay?

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 50:28Speaker 05

  And if you extrapolated that eye worm in that little quail.

• 50:33Speaker 05

  To your eye, that eye worm would be the size of a toothpick.

• 50:37Steven Rinella?

  How were they picking this worm up?

• 50:38Speaker 05

  Okay, good question. Um, we've, we have completely defined the life cycle and published this. Um, Steve, the reader, uh, the listeners here can go to my website at wildlifetoxicologylab.org. And everything I'm talking about, we've published in the world's scientific literature. Okay, so the, we, we, we have pursued this step by step by step, and I'll get to the FDA work in a little bit.

• 51:08Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 51:08Speaker 05

  That was a decade of work.

• 51:10Steven Rinella?

  Take your time.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  But, um, but the, the eye worm, um, is a, a, a pretty sophisticated creature. Um, they have a very sophisticated mouth where they can attach and feed, but.

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

  Are they native?

• 51:25Speaker 05

  Um, they've been around a long time.

• 51:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:29Speaker 05

  We, we're not completely sure of their tot- a total biological history, but they are 96% related to the Central African eye worm in the human called Loa Loa.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  And that worm in a human can damage the eye, can result in, in blindness, actually can penetrate the brain. Okay, so that eye worm in a quail is highly related to a pathological infection even in the human being. Okay?

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Is the quail eye their cuisine of choice?

• 52:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Or do we see them?

• 52:10Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  In other bird species?

• 52:12Speaker 05

  I'll get to that, Corinne. Lots of good questions here. Um, the, uh, the, uh, it's a fascinating life history and, um, but where the, the quail basically will release eye worm eggs in its droppings. Okay, as it's in a field feeding. And crickets and grasshoppers come along and eat the droppings and they, they ingest the egg. The egg hatches in the cricket gut. Or the grasshopper. Hmm. And it develops in into what we call the infective L3 larvae. Okay, so there's it's a larvae. Mm hmm. So the quail comes along and grabs that cricket.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  Believe it or not, that that larvae can exit the exoskeleton of the cricket. And migrate up the esophagus into the nasal sinus into the eye of the quail.

• 53:11Steven Rinella?

  Coming out of the quail's crop.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 53:13Steven Rinella?

  Or gizzard or something.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  And the crop in 10 minutes, that's all. And what we've. This is like aliens. 10 minutes.

• 53:21Steven Rinella?

  The quail eats that cricket.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 53:24Steven Rinella?

  And the cricket's got the larvae in its gut.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:27Steven Rinella?

  And that son of a bitch comes out. Shoots up into his nasal capacity or cavity, gets in his eyeball.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  You can't believe it, but it's true in 10 minutes. In 10 minutes.

• 53:37Steven Rinella?

  How does he even, that's so weird, because how does he even know to make a break for it?

• 53:41Speaker 05

  It's a lot of things about biology we don't fully understand.

• 53:44Steven Rinella?

  Sure, you know what I mean?

• 53:45Speaker 05

  But the only thing I know is, number one, um, the infection carried by a given cricket may be more than one one infective larvae. So one cricket could be 10, 10 eye worms.

• 53:58Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 53:59Speaker 05

  Okay, and then once that worm gets in the quail, what we've learned now is, um, it pretty much is going to be there till the quail dies. They're long-lived, very long-lived, and they actually mate, the male and female mate in the eye. Mm. And they.

• 54:17Steven Rinella?

  Sick bastard, man.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  They produce eggs. We, uh, we have, uh, the listeners can go to my website and see pictures, but the female eye worm is loaded with eggs. They're egg-producing machine. Hmm. And so, so basically, um, they release the eggs, they're, they're swallowed, they go into the elementary.

• 54:39Steven Rinella?

  Starts all over.

• 54:40Speaker 05

  Starts all over. And so, and what, what is so amazing, and we were first ones to discover this, is, is you can go from a relatively clean quail population, maybe with 10% infection.

• 54:55Speaker 05

  To a month or six weeks later, you have 95% of your birds infected with eye worms. Okay, so it happens very fast. The epidemiology is extremely interesting.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  Is that because they're a bird that travels in tight little packs?

• 55:14Speaker 05

  Or? We think that precipitates it.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Because, you know, when they are with coveys, they do, they do, they are exposed to each other every day. Now, in the spring, they break up and pair off. Okay? And so that's when they're reproducing. But we're seeing that the infection with the eye worm can literally emerge into a zoonotic event fast. And so I, I, I as an environmental toxicologist studying this, first I said, is it plausible that we could go from a ranch to a county of infection in a matter of a month or two? The answer is yes. It can, it travels fast.

• 55:58Speaker 06

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• 56:28Steven Rinella?

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• 57:12Steven Rinella?

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• 57:54Speaker 04

  How do the quails end up dying? What kills them?

• 57:57Speaker 05

  Okay, wow, you guys are aggressive.

• 58:03Speaker 05

  Well, what we're seeing is we have, we've had FDA demonstration ranches where we've been testing the medicated feed I invented, okay? And the testimonials are amazing because one man and wife live on their ranch, and they used to, they wear my phone out calling me about quail flying into their windows and house and killing themselves. Okay?

• 58:38Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 58:38Speaker 05

  Okay, because it affects vision. And so, once we started using the medicated feed on this particular ranch, right at four years ago, not one quail has flown into that house.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Oh, it's driving them blind.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what we, yeah, so.

• 58:57Speaker 04

  So they couldn't feed the.

• 58:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. And what you got to understand, well, Steve, I'm a quail hunter.

• 59:06Speaker 04

  I gather.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  I'm an outdoorsman. I'm a rancher, and I'm a scientist. Okay? So I kind of bring it all together. So I'm not just in some lab. Pontificating.

• 59:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:20Speaker 05

  I actually understand quail, their biology, their behavior and so on. And so, um, I've seen Cooper's hawks go after quail. When a quail leaves the ground flying.

• 59:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  They gotta be 99% on the go or that Cooper's hawk's probably gonna catch them. It's unbelievable dynamic.

• 59:44Steven Rinella?

  That's why he's hauling ass like that.

• 59:46Speaker 05

  You got it. And so, uh, and so what I'm trying to say is, uh, quail have gotta be Olympians, athletes every day. So anything that suppresses their energy or affects their keenness of sight and all, um, it's, it puts them at, at a, a disadvantage. And we know this now because what we're seeing with our medicated feed, we just had a major scientific paper come out at the International Journal of Parasitology, Parasites and Wildlife. It's on my website, people can look. But what we've been able to see is we've been able to increase, um, our quail survivability with

• 1:00:27Speaker 05

  the use of the medicated feed up to 40% annually, okay? Which most people estimate less than 10% will make it to the next year.

• 1:00:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:00:37Speaker 05

  Uh-uh. We're seeing dramatic increase in survivability and a 300% increase in the quail population compared to untreated sites in the same area. So the point is, is we know these parasitic infections now, we've got the evidence that they are impairing survivability of our wild quail.

• 1:00:59Steven Rinella?

  Can you, can you touch on that second parasite?

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  Yes. The second one that, that we discovered and, and published a lot of papers on now is called the seagull worm. And it, uh, it lives in the secom of a wild quail. The secom is, um, Assisting the quail in digesting all the seeds it's eating, okay?

• 1:01:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:19Speaker 05

  The seagull worm lives and feeds there. And we've seen seagull worm infections.

• 1:01:24Steven Rinella?

  What is that thing, the seagull? I'm not familiar.

• 1:01:26Speaker 05

  It's just part of the digestive tract.

• 1:01:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:30Speaker 05

  Associated with the small intestines.

• 1:01:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  Okay, but, but again, it's just, it's, it's a, an area that is, is secreting certain digestive enzymes, particularly for fiber digestion.

• 1:01:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  All right, but the sea, these seagull worms can build up to large quantities in the quail. Now, Corinne, you asked what the eye worm was. The seagull worm is more than 90% related to the roundworm or the ascarid in your dog.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  It's essentially an ascarid. And I saw your two dogs earlier today. I bet you, you worm, deworm your dogs regularly.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Uh, they're due to be dewormed soon.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  Well.

• 1:02:17Steven Rinella?

  She means to.

• 1:02:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I tell you, uh, these seagull worms can build up, we found 1,700 in one quail.

• 1:02:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  And the poor quail.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  What did it look like on the outside?

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  Well, the poor quail, um, you know, they have a well-developed breast muscle. Cause when they come off the ground, they explode and they're moving 50 miles an hour in just a few seconds. Okay, uh, a dog pointed this bird and the dog caught it.

• 1:02:46Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  The bird couldn't fly.

• 1:02:48Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  And so they brought it to us and it has 1,700 seagull worms.

• 1:02:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  So, I mean, and, and this particular group was reporting what we call feather piles of, of kills, of quail kills on the ground. Uh, the predators were really hitting them hard. They were very infected with seagull worms. So, we think the seagull worm is about as important as the eye worm. Okay, now, um, we've.

• 1:03:16Speaker 05

  Learn something from our brethren in Scotland and the United Kingdom, where they hunt the red grouse, very important game bird over there. And the red grouse was suffering from dramatic population declines on given years. And research showed that the red grouse suffered from a worm in their, um, um, a cecum as well, okay? It was a cecum worm. And it, it, it caused the birds not to be able to fly as fast because they reduced energy from aerial predators.

• 1:03:53Speaker 05

  And believe it or not, it caused the female grouse setting the eggs to emit, emit a smell that the foxes could key in on.

• 1:04:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  And they were destroying all the nest. So, um, so the behavior of the red grouse by the scientific team in the UK was studied. And, uh, you know, the, the red grouse is eating, uh, um, you know, a lot of fiber. So they have to go get grit every day.

• 1:04:28Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  Okay. That's part of their behavior. And so, um, um, the, the Scottish scientists identified where the grit piles were, where the red grouse would go. And they said, if we could simulate a grit pile and put a drug in it, maybe the grouse would eat it. Well, they did. And they were able to knock out these infections or suppress them. And, and the grouse were not experiencing these kind of population crashes anymore. So, and I know this, know this team and I've, uh, been on, on a program with them both at a, um, at a quail seminar. But, but anyway, so we, we, we had evidence that the UK and Scotland could do this, but

• 1:05:13Speaker 05

  the United States Food and Drug Administration doesn't register, um, drug treatments for wild animals. Okay?

• 1:05:21Steven Rinella?

  Can I, can I stop you for a couple of seconds?

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Steven Rinella?

  I want, I want to get into this.

• 1:05:25Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:05:25Steven Rinella?

  I got a couple of backup, I got backup and a couple of things.

• 1:05:27Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:05:29Steven Rinella?

  I never associated, I never thought about high fiber with grit. Does a, does a hawk, okay, does a red-tailed hawk, does he need grit? Does he ever go get grit?

• 1:05:40Speaker 05

  He's mainly a meat eater.

• 1:05:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  Uh, to my knowledge, red-tailed hawks do not go get grit. I've never seen one.

• 1:05:48Steven Rinella?

  Do they have a gizzard, though? They gotta have a gizzard, right?

• 1:05:52Steven Rinella?

  Or does the gizzard only function if it has a grit, has grit in it?

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  Uh, the latter, okay.

• 1:05:57Steven Rinella?

  So the gizzard is a grit contraption?

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  The gizzard is part of, of species of birds that are eating grains, seeds. The gizzard is a grinding machine, so to speak. And it requires abrasive substrate like rocks grit, okay? So, um, so these red grouse in, in Scotland are, are eating a lot of fiber and they have to go to these grit piles every day, every day.

• 1:06:25Steven Rinella?

  You know, uh, my kids, the reason I'm asking about this, my kids have these pet pigeons.

• 1:06:29Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:31Steven Rinella?

  They, they use a lot of grit and what they, they do is they get all their grit from the shingles on the roof.

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, I believe it.

• 1:06:39Steven Rinella?

  That could be a toxicology problem, right?

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  That could be a toxicology problem. You got that right, yeah.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  Um, before you jump into like how you got the drug out there.

• 1:06:48Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  You were doing all your research on quail in West Texas. Did you find that those parasites were a problem with quail in other parts of the country also?

• 1:06:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, South Carolina.

• 1:07:00Speaker 05

  Yes, well, what, uh, th- this has been very research intensive and, and as far as, what I'm telling you now is we had absolutely no clue about this back in 2012, okay? When we first opened the book and said, wh- wh- wh- where do we go with this thing? And so, um, so we started looking across the border in New Mexico and we actually found it in the blue quail, the scale quail, all right? So there is some interface there and, um, believe it or not, and we've published a paper on this. We've seen it in the prairie chicken, all right? So they are the same genus and species, uh, as in the prairie chicken.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  And we've now, I've got a graduate student working on this. We now see it in several species of songbirds, the eye worm, not the seagull worm, the eye worm. So this thing, um,

• 1:07:58Speaker 05

  Could be continental. We've just had samples submitted to us from Montana. And sharp-tailed grouse.

• 1:08:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  And the gray partridge.

• 1:08:09Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:08:09Speaker 05

  You got it. Here. It's in Montana. And I'm telling you, an eye worm is dangerous. They are dangerous in the eye of a bird.

• 1:08:19Steven Rinella?

  And that could be what, that could be those, those same species of worms, the eye and seek them? Is that what you're saying, right?

• 1:08:26Speaker 05

  Seek them, yes.

• 1:08:26Steven Rinella?

  That those worms could be in, in, in Bob White Quail in Kentucky, they could be in Bob White Quail in South Carolina.

• 1:08:33Speaker 05

  Yes. And then we're, this thing, this whole thing is expanding now. And we've had so many people reaching out to us because

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  wildlife disease investigation and wildlife management is just pretty much been ignored. Okay? And people just think that if you've got great habitat and good rainfall, you'll, you'll just have quail.

• 1:09:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 05

  Well, that's not true. That's kinda true. In certain years you will, but I take it back to 2010 on one of the top ranches for quail management in the state of Texas, won all the awards. He lost all his quail.

• 1:09:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 05

  All right? So that hypothesis of we got a good habitat and some rainfall, we're gonna have a lot of quail. That didn't necessarily work. And so, but what is really awesome? Is that since we introduced the medicated feed on that particular ranch, he hasn't seen a crash in years. And that's another thing. We've, we've got several of these FDA-approved demonstration ranches. And we've been sustaining huntable quail populations while the neighbors aren't hunting.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  You ought to give the neighbors some of that stuff.

• 1:09:54Speaker 05

  Well, I kinda, you can't imagine what I had to go through even to get a ranch approved for a demonstration site.

• 1:10:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, let's, let's jump into that. Talk about the FDA. Is there reluctance that they don't do that? Is there reluctance that, that, that by approving wildlife drugs, there's a Pandora's box and unforeseen consequences?

• 1:10:15Speaker 05

  Well,

• 1:10:17Speaker 05

  First of all, I've had a lot of experience at EPA being the past chairman of the Scientific Advisory Panel for implementation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Redenticide Act, FIFRA. I know a lot about EPA regulatory mandates. I did not know what I was getting into with the United States Food and Drug Administration. They are very tough at evaluating registration of drugs. I started in approximately 2013, 14, developing preliminary data and communication with the

• 1:11:01Speaker 05

  FDA about my interest in this whole parasitic disease issue and a treatment. And I, we had developed a dialogue and they said, "It seems to make sense." And historically, FDA, they just don't register drugs for the natural habitat, okay? So basically, what we got done, and I'm gonna tell you what we got done, it's not a vaccine. It's a medicated feed drug treatment that is the first medicated feed treatment FDA's

• 1:11:42Speaker 05

  ever registered for a wildlife species in the natural habitat that will be commercially available, okay? It's first, and they worked with me for many years to get that done. The product now is called Quail Guard. But backing up, when we got started, it was in approximately 2015. Hey, I don't understand, I'm not a drug company. I'm just a professor at a university. And so, I submitted these, all these materials, and I thought I had some pretty good, pretty interesting data that I knew about a wild quail. I knew about their behavior, because I have a ranch and I love my quail.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  And so, we ultimately figured out, we could get them to come into an enclosure with some openings and feed.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  Out of a simulated chicken trough.

• 1:12:41Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  A wild quail covey will do that. And it took us a long time to figure that out. And, uh.

• 1:12:49Steven Rinella?

  Why do they need to do that rather than you just scattering it out?

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  Because FDA didn't want just scattering it out at that time. They wanted us to target the wild quail.

• 1:12:59Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:12:59Speaker 05

  And I'd like to.

• 1:13:00Steven Rinella?

  This was still in the testing phase.

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  It was still in the testing phase.

• 1:13:03Steven Rinella?

  They didn't want everything running around eating it.

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  And so it was my son, Ronnie Kendall, that helped me figure this out with what size enclosures would these wild quail come into? We started out, Steve, with a dog kennel, eight by eight, eight foot by eight foot. And we had holes in it and we baited the quail in so they would come in, the covey would, and feed out of a trough. And we could offer the medicated feed.

• 1:13:29Steven Rinella?

  Like a crab trap.

• 1:13:30Speaker 05

  Like a trap.

• 1:13:31Steven Rinella?

  It's got little openings in it.

• 1:13:32Speaker 05

  And Ronnie, um, kept working and we went down to six feet by six feet. Then we went to four feet by four feet. And now he's got a technology called Quail Safe. And it's a third the size of your table here. It's, you could put it in the back of your truck. And, and it's amazing how the quail will come in and feed and we can target the wild quail.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  But are they over medicating themselves if they're eating too much feed?

• 1:14:00Speaker 05

  No, we had to go, um, when, um, uh, y'all are interesting. I mean, I think you, I think you find this interesting.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  I love this stuff.

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  But, uh, but Corinne, we started out, I had to figure out, could I even treat a bird in the wild, in the natural habitat? FDA wanted to know that. How would we do this? And so I submitted all this data. And in, um, September of 2015, I was invited to FDA headquarters for formal meetings and, uh.

• 1:14:33Steven Rinella?

  Can I, I got a question about leading up to that. At first, do you just find the address online and write like, "Dear FDA"?

• 1:14:43Speaker 05

  Kinda. It started out-

• 1:14:45Steven Rinella?

  Like, "I have an intense interest in quail."

• 1:14:47Speaker 05

  It started out, we did a lot of research about who may be willing to engage us on this.

• 1:14:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so you were trying to find someone within-

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it was the Office of Minor Use and Minor Species. And I said, "That looked to me, that they might be interested."

• 1:15:08Steven Rinella?

  That's gotta be the right address.

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I mean, this was like, you know, just pull up your boots and go do it. You know, I had worked with the EPA extensively, but not with FDA. And so, I was brought to this meeting, and it wasn't a day of meetings, it was a week.

• 1:15:26Steven Rinella?

  This is when you finally got their attention?

• 1:15:28Speaker 05

  Well, I had their attention then. And so, my sponsoring office told me to be prepared for a 20-minute seminar. And to show them what we were going to do. Okay, so I had all these meetings during this week. And on the final day, on Friday morning, I was told that we're gonna have a meeting starting first thing, and you're gonna walk into a big room of scientists. And they're gonna talk to you about this. And from this meeting, they will either give you a thumbs up, that we will go ahead for a registration pursuit, or they'll give you a thumbs down.

• 1:16:10Speaker 05

  And so, when they opened those two doors, there were close to 70 people in that room.

• 1:16:16Steven Rinella?

  No, really?

• 1:16:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:16:18Steven Rinella?

  From what disciplines?

• 1:16:19Speaker 05

  Environmental science, toxicology, statistics, immunology. They had, it was like a whole room, and I'll never forget it.

• 1:16:31Steven Rinella?

  Just, they can just attack your stuff from any angle.

• 1:16:34Speaker 05

  From any angle, and so, I mean, I had to swallow pretty deep. And I sat down at the table with my sponsoring office, the director, and my project officer, who was terrific. And they both just leaned over, and they just said, "Get up there and just tell them what you want to do." And I literally, I went to the front of the room, they were all very attentive. And I gave a 20 minute seminar.

• 1:17:01Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:01Speaker 05

  And I showed them the wild quail. I showed them, um, you know, what these worms look like. I showed them the dog kennel and the quail. I had videos of the quail coming in. I explained how we we could develop a feed, the quail would eat it. And and we had early evidence that we could kill the parasites. And, you know, that was a three hour meeting.

• 1:17:28Steven Rinella?

  Not 20 minutes.

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  Not 20 minutes. When I got through with my presentation, we they began to ask me questions, very respectful questions. And, um, and about, you know, about how to how they would do this and whatever. And, um, I answered the questions. I didn't try to, you know, I just, I was as straight as I could be. And, uh, and so the sponsoring office took me back after. It was it was lunchtime then. And the director then, she since has retired, but she said, she said, that went really well. There wasn't one condescending comment, not one, in three hours. And they could have ripped me apart. There was, I, I, I, there were so many statisticians on the left wall.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  I mean, it was like a dozen, 10 of them. The statisticians could have just gone into that. And the toxicologists, the the human food safety division people were there. And they were all just discussing the all the components I was gonna have to deal with. Uh, Corinne, I was gonna have to determine safety. I was gonna have to Oh, for sure. To determine environmental issues. I was gonna have to determine, um, how quickly the drug would remove itself from the body of the quail if a human ate it. Uh, so so I had to, I had to, you know, they they they were all talking. And so, um,

• 1:18:54Speaker 05

  And so that was September. It took about till December and I got a letter through my sponsoring office and they said, Dr. Kendall, here's what you're going to have to do. And when I read that letter, I took a deep breath and says, wow, that's massive amount of work. Massive.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  Well, maybe I missed this, but were they at all interested in you qualifying the value of having quail on the ground?

• 1:19:21Speaker 05

  They didn't, they didn't debate it. They, I, I, I explained it.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Speaker 05

  And I, they got it.

• 1:19:27Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:19:27Speaker 05

  They got it. And, and, and not only is a Bob White quail, the canary of the prairie, so to speak, as an indicator species, they're a big time economic bird. Um, people come from all over the world to hunt wild quail in Texas. And, um, there's a big real estate firm in Lovett, Texas, where I'm from, and they, they sell big ranches, you know? And I, I gave a talk at a sportsman's group and one of the owners of that company stood up and he said, what he's saying is the truth. He's, he, he said, if you've got a lot of wild quail on your property, I can probably sell it faster than if you had an oil well.

• 1:20:11Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm dead serious. He said it right in front of the whole, whole crowd. This wild quail, this wild quail thing is a big deal.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

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• 1:20:49Steven Rinella?

  Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's, it's not a holiday. Okay. The, the best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan. Everything else around and on X hunts rut calendar does this for you and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area. So you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life. So use the rut calendar within on X hunt to make the most

• 1:21:34Steven Rinella?

  of the whitetail rut this fall. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have weather tech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do out with the junky factory carpet mats in with weather tech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you got weather tech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some weather tech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig

• 1:22:16Steven Rinella?

  nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weather tech.com for your holiday shopping today. What about, what about human? What'd you find out about human safety? Like I shoot a quail.

• 1:22:34Steven Rinella?

  That's got a, you know, he's got a mouthful of this stuff and I go clean out his gizzard and I eat his gizzard and I eat his, his breast meat and his thighs. What happens to me? Well, am I, am I dewormed?

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  You're good. You're good. Um, we, uh, all of this was exploratory and it drew every bit of experience I had, but, um, we started investigating the drug phendezol and, um, it's, it's been, it's been used on, on a variety of, of domestic animals and so on. Excuse me. But, um, we had to come up with an effective concentration and, um, what FDA made me do once I, I had some early testing I'd done with phendezol. And we, we saw it was pretty safe and it, we knew it would kill those worms. And so we had to run at the request of FDA. You understand everything is so formal with FDA.

• 1:23:33Speaker 05

  You have to have a good laboratory practice certification for your lab. Sure. So I had to have what we call the GLP officer. So they come in and evaluate you and check your data. And everything we did was under strict protocols approved by FDA. So you just can't imagine.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  Lot of our reports would be massive, like maybe a thousand pages of data. They check everything. They don't just skip around. They check everything. And so it was quite a process. Like we had to do safety and we had to triple the estimated dose and triple the timeframe of exposure to look for any pathological issues.

• 1:24:21Steven Rinella?

  Or to check the extremes.

• 1:24:22Speaker 05

  Check the extremes. And there were none. We ran this a very nice experiment on all of that. What was really cool, Steve, one of my students, PhD students, was terrific chemist. And it's very sophisticated chemistry to look not only at the parent drug, but the, what we call the metabolites, okay? The breakdown drug products. So FDA gave us, we had to develop techniques to look at the liver of the quail and see how the breakdown products were clearing the liver and so on. This is all published. And but it took us forever to get the drug validation down.

• 1:25:06Speaker 05

  And it required a lot of collaboration with our school of pharmacy up at Amarillo, Texas. They had the right instrument and were willing to work with us. So we had GLP certify that lab. And but we got, you know, we got it done. But what we showed is the drug clears within hours after the birds are removed. Okay? So FDA now has designated, you don't even need a day of drug clearance. It clears within hours. So it's very, very safe to the birds and it clears very quickly.

• 1:25:45Steven Rinella?

  So you could get... You would get a feeder, let's say, assuming you're not going to broadcast the seed.

• 1:25:54Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:25:55Steven Rinella?

  You could get a feeder and run a regular old feed in it. But you don't need to have treated.

• 1:25:59Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:26:00Steven Rinella?

  Get the quail where you got, you got a bunch of these out and your coves are using them. And then on treatment time, you come in and put the treated feed in. Let it cycle for whatever amount of time and then shut the thing down or continue back to just regular feed inside there.

• 1:26:17Speaker 05

  Steve, that's terrific. That's exactly what we do.

• 1:26:20Steven Rinella?

  Hear that, Brody?

• 1:26:21Speaker 05

  So.

• 1:26:21Steven Rinella?

  Kicking ass.

• 1:26:22Speaker 05

  You guys are awesome.

• 1:26:24Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna start to drug up.

• 1:26:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so we do assist the quail with, with a fortified feed with, without the medication.

• 1:26:34Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:26:35Speaker 05

  And.

• 1:26:36Steven Rinella?

  To get them coming to that.

• 1:26:37Speaker 05

  To get them coming. But what's cool is my son Ronnie, we have this, this technology called Quail Safe. And, but he's developed an electronic Bob White quail call of their covey call.

• 1:26:52Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:26:53Speaker 05

  Okay. Now I could do that for you.

• 1:26:55Steven Rinella?

  Please.

• 1:27:00Steven Rinella?

  I've heard better quail.

• 1:27:01Speaker 05

  Oh, my mouth's really dry. I gotta get, I gotta get.

• 1:27:06Steven Rinella?

  That's good though.

• 1:27:07Speaker 05

  But that's kinda what it sounds like, and I'm sure.

• 1:27:10Steven Rinella?

  And he puts that out by the feeder.

• 1:27:11Speaker 05

  It's an electronic call and believe it or not, when these coves hear that, they'll come from hundreds of yards away. And you can, when you, when they know that feed is there, they come by and check it once in a while.

• 1:27:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  It's amazing. That's their behavioral ecology that we understood. The critical component of the covey call and they will come from so far to investigate that. And then once they find that feed, you know, that's like a free lunch. And, and this does not domesticate them whatsoever. These are wild birds. And we can attest to that by, you know, when we hunt, I mean, these things, I know what a wild quail looks like when we hunt them. And so, so it's, it's really worked beautifully. The electronic call gives it so much more pull of the birds. And like I said, once.

• 1:28:09Speaker 05

  Once the the coveys start using it, then the summer comes, then early fall, and the hen brings the brood in, the little birds. Okay, and they learn to eat the four to five feed, not the medicated feed yet, although it's fine for the little birds. It doesn't hurt them. Okay, it's very, very safe. But once those, they learn, then the little birds learn that that that's a resource for them.

• 1:28:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Speaker 05

  Particularly during drought, okay, when maybe seed production is very low. And and and so we we're looking at all of these dimensions now. And so what's what's kind of pretty awesome is once you get set up to treat, and like one of our ranches is 2,000 acres. And I've got students working out there, so we've got some pretty good estimates on the number of birds. But once you're set up to treat with the cost of Quail Guard, you may be approximately able to treat for a dollar an acre a year.

• 1:29:20Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:20Speaker 05

  $2,000.

• 1:29:22Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:29:22Speaker 05

  Instead of.

• 1:29:23Steven Rinella?

  So what's that come out of? How much per for a pound of that feed?

• 1:29:27Speaker 05

  I think it sells for, the Quail Guard organization, I think it's $50 for a 50-pound bag, so a dollar.

• 1:29:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:29:34Speaker 04

  You mentioned wild birds, and there's a lot of places where people are just going and shooting planted, like farm-raised quail. Are are the those operations at all interested in using this stuff, or they're just putting birds out? They're not too concerned, they're gonna get shot, they're gonna get eaten by whatever? They're not worried about treating those birds?

• 1:29:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, a lot of, my buddies back in South Carolina, they call them box birds.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:04Speaker 05

  You go, you go to a breeder and you buy 25 in a box, and you go put the box out under a bush and the birds walk out and you home. Now, that's kind of what quail hunting is to South Carolina now.

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:16Speaker 05

  Compared to us, all wild coveys. We're talking about wild quail.

• 1:30:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Speaker 05

  And a, a, a, a, a pen bird that's released into the wild has a very low chance of survival. And you can't imagine, this is another real value of, of our ranch and, um, and you, you, when you have a ranch and you live with your quail, you learn a lot. But that hen is teaching that brood so much on alarm calls and, I mean, she'll make a certain call and they'll all just freeze. And, and all, they don't learn that in a pen, okay? And so, survival is critical for a quail because literally everything wants to eat them. Hawks and raccoons or snakes, raccoons are terrible on the nest and, and, and so on.

• 1:31:04Speaker 05

  So, a quail, a quail to survive has to be an athlete.

• 1:31:09Steven Rinella?

  You know, that, that, they, they found that same thing when they were trying to do reestablish wild turkey populations. For a long time, they were taking box birds.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:31:18Steven Rinella?

  And cutting them loose and it just never worked.

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  It never worked.

• 1:31:21Steven Rinella?

  Cause they didn't, they didn't have the survival instinct, they didn't have, it wasn't appreciated like what level of education they're getting from the hen. And when they finally found success, they found success by catching wild birds and moving wild birds.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:31:34Steven Rinella?

  And then they had that, I got, I always think of it as they had the right level of paranoia.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:40Steven Rinella?

  To live.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  Another thing too, um, we just had a, a second paper just, just come out in the International Journal of Parasitology. It's on our we- our website for, um, Facebook. Um, but, uh, we did a study on the same ranch. It's a massive ranch, um, um, and we were able to get three six-mile transects where we did a test. And this was the early stages of getting ready to test the efficacy of the drug treatment for the FDA. So I was getting ready for that and they, but what, what, what was really cool, what's reported in this paper is that we had six miles separated by two miles.

• 1:32:25Speaker 05

  And six miles separated by two miles, all on the same ranch, okay?

• 1:32:29Steven Rinella?

  It's a big place.

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  Big place.

• 1:32:31Steven Rinella?

  Anybody hunting that place?

• 1:32:33Speaker 05

  And, uh, but what was really interesting, we, we had, um, feeder systems out there. We had the birds coming. Now, uh, one of the transects, we did nothing and we had ra- uh, radio collars on birds. So we knew where they were going.

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:32:49Speaker 05

  We were using radio telemetry and they weren't flipping across transects. They were located on those transects, but we had one transect with nothing. The second transect, we had, um, just the fortified feed, all right?

• 1:33:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:06Speaker 05

  It was a good, a good quail feed. And then on the third transect, we introduced the, the medication, the drug. And so we did two years of treatment. In that two years, that drug treatment had a 300% increase in wild quail. 300% and there was no difference between doing nothing and introducing the fortified feed.

• 1:33:34Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  That was not significantly different. We were surprised, but when you introduced that drug.

• 1:33:39Steven Rinella?

  I would've thought it'd be good, better, or bad, better, best.

• 1:33:43Speaker 05

  Well, you know, the data's the data, but it could be on a given year, might, uh, uh, might be. I do think helping the birds, particularly in drought years is critical. I, I do, but on the given years, we were working on this particular ranch. What we saw is it wasn't just the feed, it was the drug. And then when you introduced that drug, we literally had a population explosion.

• 1:34:08Steven Rinella?

  So do most places, if, if you go South Carolina, we talked about Texas, whatever.

• 1:34:17Steven Rinella?

  Do most places have enough birds left that, that bringing in the medicated feed, bringing in the medicine is gonna be enough? Cause it seems to me that there, that it would need to be paired with.

• 1:34:33Steven Rinella?

  Some translocation of birds. Because like, like, like, how, you can go put all the medicated feed in the world out, but there's no birds to find it. There's no birds to find it.

• 1:34:42Speaker 04

  Or good habitat.

• 1:34:44Speaker 05

  Well, that's, those are, those are great points and there are attempts now to reintroduce quail into East Texas. You know, Texas used to have quail all over the state and they, they have kept retreating west. And you pretty much, you gotta get the abalene before you start getting into quail again. It's amazing. So they're trying to reintroduce quail into East Texas. And I don't know where all of this is going, Steve, except my data tells me with hard information that we've been able to sustain sustainable, huntable

• 1:35:24Speaker 05

  populations on our demonstrate FDA approved demonstration ranches while the neighbors weren't hunting. And that's a fact. We're writing that paper up right now.

• 1:35:35Steven Rinella?

  I mean, the neighbors weren't hunting because there was no quail to hunt.

• 1:35:38Speaker 05

  They just didn't have the quail. And, and so I, I think those are, those are real acid test, you know, and because what our whole goal has been is, is sustainable, huntable populations because as I explained on my website, that, um, you know, the, it was the sportsman that funded all of this. It wasn't a federal grant. It was the sportsman. And they cared about the quail.

• 1:36:07Steven Rinella?

  Paid for the turkey work.

• 1:36:08Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:36:09Steven Rinella?

  Then people wind up criticizing sportsmen to be like, oh, you just want to save them so you can hunt them. And you're like, you know what? That's partially true. It's not all the way true, but it's partially true.

• 1:36:19Speaker 05

  Well, quail hunting is kind of a, a religion in Texas and that the, the Park City's Quail Coalition has a banquet every March and they, they'll have a thousand people there for raising money for quail. And they, they can raise maybe a couple of million dollars that night. There's so much interest in this.

• 1:36:42Speaker 05

  And I want to put things in perspective to how important quail hunting is in Texas. I gave a talk five, six years ago with a Scottish scientist that had done a lot of work on the red grouse in Scotland. Now, in hunting the red grouse in Scotland, they're hunting on the moors and, you know, the grouse are driven. And you have, you have a stand and you got a guy loading the gun for you. You're shooting so much.

• 1:37:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Speaker 05

  You have a, you have a loader that hands you the gun and you may stay in a castle or something. So I, I, I'm serious. I've, I've never done this. I want to do it before I die, but um, I, I've heard it's pretty, pretty elite, you know? And I was talking to this scientist that had done a lot of work with the red grouse and, and um, a graduate student and I were having lunch with him. And I said, you know, I just always thought that was amazing. And, and I said, it's gotta be the pinnacle of, of wing shooting, wild bird wing shooting in the world. He said, oh, no, no. He said, it's your West Texas quail hunting that we, over in Scotland, look, look at, you know, you're out with a Jeep and got fine bird dogs and pointing these wild bob

• 1:37:58Speaker 05

  white quail and.

• 1:37:59Steven Rinella?

  Staying in a regular house.

• 1:38:01Speaker 05

  Staying in a regular house. And you know, it, that just staggered me cause I, I said, you know, you're telling the truth. And uh, my uh, my good friend, Rick Snipes, uh, he has a ranch in West Texas and, and uh, Snipes Ranch. And we did a lot of the early work on, on, on his ranch, but he calls it the pageantry of the hunt. And it's a lot to it, getting the dogs ready, uh, loading the Jeep with the bird dogs and uh, you. Putting your cowboy hat on. He doesn't wear a cowboy hat, but he's got a seat sitting out in front of the Jeep, you know, off the ground. I mean, it's cool looking. Yep.

• 1:38:42Speaker 05

  And so it's a lot, lot going on there. It's very colorful and dogs were pointing and, and cuppies are getting up. So it's quite a spectacle to be honest. And we were recently on Sportsman's Classic TV with Mr. Dorsey. You might know that. He came and quail hunted with us and we did a great story and we had Rick leading the hunt, sitting in front of the Jeep. So, but it's a lot of pageantry to it. So I look back to my, this scientist and talking about that and they, it just really hit me hard. Like it's right here

• 1:39:24Speaker 05

  in my backyard that what they are looking at is probably some of the best in the world.

• 1:39:31Steven Rinella?

  The pinnacle, yeah.

• 1:39:32Speaker 05

  It's the pinnacle. And Steve, you may want to come quail hunt with us.

• 1:39:36Steven Rinella?

  I'm getting excited about it now.

• 1:39:37Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 1:39:38Steven Rinella?

  The main thing I'm, the main thing I'm turning in the back of my head is how my buddy, how my buddy Brad can get on this program. Now, I know you, you, you put it out using the feeder.

• 1:39:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Steven Rinella?

  Will that be the, like if, if, if a landowner, rancher, concerned party wants to buy, wants to try this on their place? Is it, is it prescribed? Like you have to do it such and such way or else you're in violation of the law? Or do you anticipate there'll be people buying a sack of this stuff and just putting it in the seed spreader and driving down the road and see what happens?

• 1:40:23Speaker 05

  Good point. The FDA label said is recommended to use strategic feeders, recommended.

• 1:40:30Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:40:31Steven Rinella?

  Cause once someone buys it.

• 1:40:32Speaker 05

  So I can see other uses. But again,

• 1:40:38Speaker 05

  Looking at it, um, they, the FDA label, they did not make it totally restrictive, no.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Speaker 05

  They, they just recommended it and, um, cause I, I can just see a lot of value, maybe, maybe in a pellet form in the future. Uh, the quail will accept the pellet form. The, um, the feed is a, is a crumble now and it's highly palatable. When we shift, when we go to the medicated feed, um, the quail have, they, they accept it immediately. We've, we've determined all of this with video evidence.

• 1:41:13Steven Rinella?

  So how do you get, how does someone, like, someone wants to apply this?

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:20Steven Rinella?

  And, and try it. Where do they go? How do they begin? I mean, do they, they're not buying it all on Amazon, I don't imagine.

• 1:41:27Speaker 05

  No, um, my, my son has an organization called Quail Safe and it's, uh, it's got, it's got all this information on it. QuailSafe.com. Um, um, we've been working with Bryant Mills in Alado, Texas. They've been terrific. They, they are, they manufacture the feed.

• 1:41:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:47Speaker 05

  They, they do a beautiful job. Um, the feed is incredibly nutritious. We have the science on that.

• 1:41:54Steven Rinella?

  And any, anybody can buy it.

• 1:41:56Speaker 05

  Anybody can buy it. That's what I'm, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:41:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58Speaker 05

  If, this is why this made US history. This is the first medicated feed article to be registered for a wildlife species in the natural habitat to be commercially available. So this made history. And, uh, and what I'm proud of, like I said, Corinne, earlier, we weren't a drug company. Mm-hmm. Okay. This was a, uh, eight years of working with FDA and then another couple of years of preliminary data. So we did it with graduate students and graduate students don't stay but a few years. So we had to go through multiple graduate students.

• 1:42:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Speaker 05

  And I had some amazing students that, well, you can look at my website and see how many publications we've got. One of my, um, past graduate students through her doctoral work got 20 peer-reviewed scientific publications from her doctoral work. That's a lot.

• 1:42:58Steven Rinella?

  Off this project?

• 1:42:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Speaker 04

  Have you had any interest from, uh? Like state game agencies?

• 1:43:04Speaker 03

  Gonna ask.

• 1:43:05Speaker 04

  Using this stuff?

• 1:43:06Speaker 05

  Um, ye- yes.

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  Because one of the challenges with it is it's like, it's a very targeted solution for a like widespread problem like like, like you said, like you fixed the quail problem on one ranch and the neighbors didn't have any quail.

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a good, good point.

• 1:43:28Speaker 05

  This is an evolving process. It, it was evolving at FDA. It's evolving in terms of engagement with management agencies and so on. Traditionally, state management agencies are habitat, habitat, habitat, habitat. And as I told you earlier.

• 1:43:50Steven Rinella?

  Which I usually applaud.

• 1:43:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm all into habitat. But, but habitat's not all of it. And, and so when I lost quail and my good friends lost their quail on Superior Quail Habitat, that, that, the years I told you. I started saying, uh-uh, it's more than habitat. And I, as a scientist, said, there's something driving this and it's something driving these crashes. And what's cool, like I said, when we've been treating these properties, we haven't seen the crashes. We've been having sustained huntable populations.

• 1:44:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, how, but, but for, how long has it been available for?

• 1:44:35Speaker 05

  Uh, it was registered May 23rd, 2024. That's just, just now.

• 1:44:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 05

  And so.

• 1:44:42Steven Rinella?

  So you just don't, there, there are, there's not, you're not yet in a position where you've got a hundred land managers who've gone out and you, you haven't yet got a hundred land managers to go out, take the equipment, apply it on their property, you give it time to work. Like you just, you just don't know where this is going to head right now.

• 1:45:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, and what we found out, it, it takes about three years, okay?

• 1:45:07Speaker 05

  In, into your second year, you, in the right conditions, you can see a real pop in numbers. And we, we report that in this paper that's just come out.

• 1:45:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got, I, I can see the time because you gotta do it. You gotta acclimate them. You gotta get the kibis coming. You gotta acclimate them to the feed.

• 1:45:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:45:27Speaker 05

  So it takes, you just can't go throw the feed out there and say, oh, man, I'm gonna have a bunch of quail this fall. It doesn't work that way. It just doesn't work that way. It's a process. And you got, you know, and Ronnie, my son Ronnie, he, he has a website that explains all of this. He's got beautiful videos and whatever. It's called quailsafe.com. And, and there is a strategy and, and you need, um, you need to know how to place these, uh, these, um, instruments to deliver the feed, um, how to, how to manage them. It's almost, I mean, once you put them out and get the quail coming, it's pretty much, this, you're done.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

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• 1:46:35Steven Rinella?

  Timeout in the field is not free. Okay? Every time you go out in the woods, there's a trade-off happening. Like you leave work early, you miss your kid's game, whatever. You forego some family gathering. If that applies to you, what you gotta do is you gotta learn how to spend the right time out in the woods, the right time in the tree. And OnX Hunt's Deer Movement Forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet based on real conditions, so you're not missing a kid's game or burning paid time off on a day that's not going to produce. The Deer Movement Forecast means missing fewer of the moments that matter, whether in the stand or back at home. Try it today in OnX Hunt. I'll tell you one thing that binds together.

• 1:47:16Steven Rinella?

  All of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house, they all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a

• 1:47:59Steven Rinella?

  set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. Once you deworm a quail, how long is he dewormed for?

• 1:48:10Speaker 05

  Got a student working on that. They will be reinfected the next year, probably. What we've learned, though, Steve, is on our demonstration ranches, and we have another scientific paper on this, we are suppressing the cycle.

• 1:48:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that was my next question.

• 1:48:27Speaker 05

  In other words, the percentage of insects carrying the infected larvae is significantly reduced going into a multi-year medicated feed treatment.

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, you said they'll be reinfected next year, but like, a one-year-old quail is ancient, right?

• 1:48:45Speaker 05

  Well, that's what a lot of people think, but it's not necessarily the truth.

• 1:48:49Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:48:49Speaker 05

  And we have data to prove this now. One of my outstanding PhD students that just finished this spring, he had a four-year project on a ranch and really intensively monitored them. And what he found compared to an untreated area in the same county, close, was he was seeing a 40% survivability to the next year versus a 10%, okay?

• 1:49:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:18Speaker 05

  So, and so, and no wonder, when he would do his fall covey counts, it was phenomenal. Now, what does that mean? Well, the teams go out and right at first light, they'll listen for these covey calls. And at a given point, you hear the coveys express themselves with a location call at sunrise. And you count those calls.

• 1:49:45Speaker 05

  Well, if you hear five, that's pretty good. Um, if you hear eight, that's terrific. If you hear 10 plus, like you're here, you're standing here and you're hearing that call. Um, that's outstanding. He was hearing 15 to 18. You got me?

• 1:50:09Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:09Speaker 05

  Significant numbers. So, we are excited about that because we are enhancing quail survivability and sustainability.

• 1:50:22Speaker 04

  Is that the key to, to like maintaining numbers is to have ca- birds carry over to their second year?

• 1:50:28Speaker 05

  Exactly. The most valuable quail on your property is that hen that is able to carry over to the next year and be ready to breed or to nest in March, April? And she's, she could actually give you 50 birds. She could, she could nest three times in a, in a summer. You see what I mean?

• 1:50:51Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:50:51Speaker 05

  So you want to carry that hen over if you can. And so, uh, so this is what we're seeing. We're seeing the evidence of this. And the way I look at this, um, you know, you don't really get it until your buddies that were your teenager hunting partners say there aren't any quail left in our old haunts in South Carolina. They're gone. And I said, I said to myself, man, that, that's the real deal. And this happened across most of the wild bobwhite quail range now. And so can it happen in Texas? You better believe it can happen. And so what we're doing and, and the way I look at it is, you know, any, I'm, I'm in this

• 1:51:35Speaker 05

  for conservation and, uh, I, I, I don't shoot many quail anymore. Uh, they, they my buddies. And, uh, so, so, but I love my quail hunting and, uh, and I love my bird dogs. And, uh, it's such a beautiful thing to watch a fine dog cover the landscape and work a cubby of quail and just the finesse of it and how intelligent they are. So. There's a film some of your viewers might want to look at. It's called TheBobWhite.com. That's TheBobWhite.com. And it tells, my son produced it with a team from Nashville. And it's won some awards.

• 1:52:18Speaker 05

  And, uh, but it tells that story of the, the, the issue of the quail and how important they are as an indicator of your ranch health and of your conservation ethic. And, and so, so we take this pretty serious. And the family has all dedicated itself to this work over many, many years. So, you know, um, um, my wife, Colleen, has been counting quail with me for years. And I just wanted to share something with you too. Um, we, we drive around on the ranch. And when we get up a covey of quail, um, when Ronnie was a little boy, he grew up out on that ranch and, and I get excited over every covey I see.

• 1:53:03Speaker 05

  You know, I count them and want to see if they're young birds or older birds, but every covey I saw, I always get excited. And I'll never forget, one day he looked at me, he's in the, in the Jeep. And he said, Dad, why do you get excited over every covey of quail you see? He said, we got quail all over the place. I said, because we may not have them one day. And we lost them in South Carolina and we could lose them here. And so now, when he drives around, he gets excited over every covey he sees because he values it now. He understands that, you know, so many people don't have them, even in West Texas.

• 1:53:43Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  I've got a question about, uh, quail numbers on public lands. Cause I, I see this so far as a, uh, like a private land solution. And I know this maybe kind of piggybacks off what you were asking if there's state game agencies interested in this.

• 1:54:04Steven Rinella?

  I mean, there's no way they're not going to be if it's, if it winds up being effective.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 1:54:09Steven Rinella?

  There's no way they're not going to be interested in it.

• 1:54:11Speaker 03

  But then if you've got, if on public lands, you have these feeders and then with the issue of toxicology.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  You know, are there studies underway of what quail guard on the land has on other species? Who knows? Not that, you know?

• 1:54:30Speaker 05

  Well, and good question, Corinne. I appreciate your insight.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  Honestly, it was Ryan Callahan's question that I'm asking him to have.

• 1:54:39Speaker 05

  What we've seen in 10 years of field work,

• 1:54:48Speaker 05

  and massive amount of observation, video data, and so on, we're not seeing non-targeted, we are not seeing non-target species effects, okay? And what we know as well, if you utilize quail-safe technology on a property, you're targeting the quail, pretty much. And so, so again, we do,

• 1:55:18Speaker 05

  when we were doing all of these tests, like our efficacy studies for FDA, whatever, we would do circular investigations around any treatment area to see any evidence.

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  Like soil health type stuff as well?

• 1:55:32Speaker 05

  So, so again, it's, you know, and the rate at what we're using is pretty low. And so, I feel really good about it, and I'm sure going to use it. And so, I look at it, and to me is, I want to help the wild Bob White. I don't want to lose him. And so, and I'm looking at this, we're starting to look at songbirds, too. And I think we may be needing to investigate songbirds, because we've already got the evidence. It's in songbirds.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  Are there, are there groups of individuals or other, I don't know? Are there, are there people who are against the idea of administer, not administering, but offering drugs to wild animals? As, as the thing that, you know, you can, you can bring this out further to, who knows?

• 1:56:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, is there an organized, is there an organized opposition effort?

• 1:56:38Speaker 05

  I haven't, not run into that.

• 1:56:42Speaker 03

  You know, like, would we end up, would we end up, you know, having?

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  You know, drug companies make

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  all kinds of things to, you know, hoof rot, E H, you know, would we?

• 1:56:57Steven Rinella?

  The minute they find something for hoof rot, I can guarantee you that someone's gonna be going through this process on it.

• 1:57:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:57:02Speaker 05

  Um, I'd say for the, for the most part,

• 1:57:10Speaker 05

  I, I haven't seen major opposition. I've seen mainly

• 1:57:16Speaker 05

  amazement and fascination that we can help a species like this. And the way I see it,

• 1:57:25Speaker 05

  we are experiencing a lot of climatic variation that's, I mean, we had 116 degree temperatures last summer in West Texas. We're not the Mojave Desert. So, we're seeing a lot more plus hundred degree days, 112, 114. And it, it, you look at all these variables and you, you, you think about the stress organisms are having to deal with in, in, in a climate that may be, uh, may be changing. I'm not gonna debate that right now, but I'm gonna say

• 1:58:05Speaker 05

  when it's 116 degrees out there and you're quail nesting on the ground, that ground's probably 200 degrees. So, uh, anything we can do to help that quail survive those extremes, that's what I'm looking at. And at the same time, the, this past winter, it's five degrees with snow on the ground. We can go to those extremes. And by the way, Steve, that's where quail safe becomes critical. Those quail will bore down through the snow. You have, we got the videos. They wanna get in there and eat. And because they can't get to the feed on the ground with the snow.

• 1:58:41Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:58:42Speaker 05

  So if you go to that website, you'll see, um, you'll see the quail, they get them a little tunnel to go in and feed.

• 1:58:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:49Speaker 05

  And, and anything we can do, I'm looking at it as a conservationist and, and anything we can do to help sustain those populations.

• 1:59:01Speaker 03

  I think it's just an interesting question when we think about, you know, making drugs available for, for animals as, you know, beyond the habitat question, right? Isn't this, I don't- Isn't there something out there for wild sheep? And so this is the second drug for a wild animal?

• 1:59:20Steven Rinella?

  Not something you can go, a private person can go buy.

• 1:59:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, it was, it was for sheep, but that was an agency. That wasn't publicly available.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  I'm ignorant to all of that.

• 1:59:30Speaker 05

  No, that's why this was so unique. And they used the trough that the sheep came in, uh, bighorn sheep came and ate out of, and they offered them a drug for lung, lungworm. But that was agency driven.

• 1:59:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  So what, what I'm saying, and I was, I was very proud that FDA worked with me on this because this was the first time that a wildlife species was, uh, was, was a drug register for wildlife species in their native habitat that was going to be made commercially available.

• 2:00:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:03Speaker 05

  Not an agency.

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  I see.

• 2:00:04Speaker 05

  So, so that's what made it, the journey so complicated. Um, and, uh, and, and to be honest, FDA was very difficult. They held us to the same standards as the drug companies. And they don't work with universities very much. Because, um, I, I'm, I met with a drug company with their vice president of research, and they said to do something like this for a new registration for a new species, they budget 10 years. Okay? So universities turn over so much in 10 years and the students come and go. You know what I mean? Whereas the drug company, they got a whole lot of people that can work on this.

• 2:00:47Speaker 05

  So, so FDA wasn't really used to working with professors. But, um, they did work with me. I had a, an assigned project officer that stayed with me the whole way through. And she was wonderful. And, um, and so, um, and then I had to deal with all these different entities within the agency.

• 2:01:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:09Speaker 05

  With all the components I've been talking about. So this thing's been really rigorously evaluated. And, and they made it real clear, we're not, we're going to hold you to the same standards we hold drug companies. You're going to have to do everything we told you to do, and that's it. So I, I was kind of proud that we did it in eight years instead of 10. But my sponsors thought it was forever and oh man, they, it was rough Steve. But they all thought we should just be able to get done next year. You know, I was explaining, listen, like on some of these projects are massive amount of data.

• 2:01:51Speaker 05

  Okay. And, and the FDA, when I turn a project in, they would get six months to look at it. Six months. Oh, wow. And then if they had any questions and you had to redo anything and you had to resubmit it, they'd get six more months.

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness.

• 2:02:08Speaker 05

  So, I mean, it, it would drive me crazy. I, I tell you, you notice my, I, my hair wasn't this gray in 2012. And I'm telling you, it's, it was, it was, it was toughest thing I've ever done. But I, you know, I had great students, a great team. Uh, I want to acknowledge my assistant, Tammy Hendrix, who was terrific. Been with me for 25 years and she stood right by me through the whole.

• 2:02:40Speaker 03

  What color is her hair?

• 2:02:41Speaker 05

  Uh, she's not, no, she's, she's still younger. But some days I'd walk into her office and just shaking my head. She said, don't worry, we're gonna get through it one day. So, we actually had a party in Fort Worth, um, associated with the, that scientific meeting I mentioned earlier in the, in the, in the, um, podcast. Drug party. Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. So, I had some of my past students, current students and, and Tammy and, and, uh, we just really had a great time finally getting through that. But I, I've just had wonderful people and wonderful students and very thankful about

• 2:03:24Speaker 05

  that and thankful the family's help. And like I said, uh, my son, uh, I'd have never, uh, we started off with, with Quail Safe. I, when I, I had to find some way I could show the FDA, we could get those quail to come in to, to some, some kind of.

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  System where we could, we could target them and uh, and so like I said, uh, uh, you'll, you'll find the website quailsafe.com is fascinating.

• 2:03:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I want to congratulate you on the whole thing, but before we wrap though, tell people like what's, what's the best single place they can go to, to see what's going on and, and figure out if it's right for their property and is, is to go to quailsafe.com?

• 2:04:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would go to quailsafe.com.

• 2:04:15Steven Rinella?

  You can buy all, you can buy all the stuff you need there.

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:19Steven Rinella?

  Excellent, man. I appreciate it. Uh, again, Dr. Ron Kendall, professor of toxicology, Texas Tech University. Go to quailsafe.com to check out the work. Also, can you name the two foundations you've been working with?

• 2:04:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, the two foundations, um, Park City's Quail Coalition, they have, um, a nice website and, uh, and the Rhode Island Plains Quail Research Foundation. Time for? I'm not going to eat any more chocolate covered grasshoppers, that's for sure. (laughing)

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  I remember the nights when I was seventeen, me and them dogs would lay down by the creek. Feed them off a burlot and a little gin thing. They'll ball on the track and they'll chop when the trees. At the base of the ridge where we cut out, I'd sit on the tailgate and wait for a sound. Levi and Clyde had their nose to the ground. We're the last of our kind, we were hunters

• 2:05:38Speaker 04

  and hounds. Up from the shores and out in fields, down through the holler, back up through.

• 2:05:50Speaker 04

  Lord save my soul and he'll lead me to see what these old hounds have put up this tree.

• 2:06:02Speaker 04

  Well now hunters and hounds ain't but a few left around. They've cut all the timber and the old timers died out. The moon's shining bright and the leaves on the ground.

• 2:06:19Speaker 04

  We're the last of our kind, we were hunters and hounds.

• 2:06:27Speaker 04

  They had a jar full of tobacco and a shirt pocket a lid. I remember saying that an old man once said, "Hunt them when you can and keep them good fed. Sun lost is lost and run over is dead." Well now hunters and hounds ain't but a few left around. They've cut most of the timber and the old timers died out. The moon's shining bright and the leaves on the ground.

• 2:07:02Speaker 04

  We're the last of our kind, we were hunters and hounds.

• 2:07:22Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house, they all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set.

• 2:08:08Steven Rinella?

  Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today.

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• 2:09:13Steven Rinella?

  Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday, okay? The best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan everything else around. And OnX Hunt's rut calendar does this for you, and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area, so you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life,

• 2:09:54Steven Rinella?

  so use the rut calendar within OnX Hunt to make the most of the whitetail rut this fall.

• 2:10:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.