Ep. 877: Does Predator Management Actually Work?

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Mike Bodenchuk https://www.instagram.com/mike.bodenchuk/. Topics discussed: Predator-prey dynamics; predator impact and wildlife management from a strategic removal perspective; predator snails; predation rates impacted by nearly a dozen factors; how coyote management is ineffective if not time-targeted after breeding pairs mate; controlling wolves by controlling pack size; how recreational hunting is absolutely insufficient at managing the wild hog population, but hunters shooting young sows can still be helpful; linear habitats; and more. 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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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:52Speaker 02

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  We're the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:01Steven Rinella?

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• 2:26Steven Rinella?

  All right. Joined today by Mike Bodenczek, a professional wildlife biologist, 45 years professional experience in private state and federal government services. Now you recently retired from AFIS.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 2:38Steven Rinella?

  Animal, plant and health inspection services.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  That's right. Yep.

• 2:41Steven Rinella?

  And you spent how many years doing that?

• 2:43Speaker 04

  I've been 34 years with AFIS. I've spent about 10 in the private sector and four with state government before that.

• 2:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And currently work as a private consulting wildlife biologist.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 2:55Steven Rinella?

  But your area of expertise, and this is how you were recommended to us by many people, not only wildlife capture, but you spent your whole career in predator prey interactions, predator management, invasive species management.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  You bet. AFIS does a lot of predator control around the state or predator predation control, actually. We don't control numbers as much as we do the ones that are actually killing.

• 3:19Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  But I've done that really my whole career.

• 3:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But besides when you were a DJ?

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that was a long time.

• 3:27Steven Rinella?

  What was up with that?

• 3:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, in high school, I had a, I had a job. I think they just needed somebody who could read and talk and I could do both. So.

• 3:35Steven Rinella?

  So you were a DJ?

• 3:36Speaker 04

  I was a DJ for a couple of years.

• 3:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What state you grew up in?

• 3:39Speaker 04

  New Mexico. I lived in New Mexico for quite a while and moved around the country after that.

• 3:44Steven Rinella?

  So as a kid, you cut your teeth like hunting and trapping?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I did actually. Growing up, I got to hunt deer back when we had a lot of deer, right? In New Mexico in the seventies, there was a lot of deer and, and I got to do that. I started trapping when I was 11 years old. So.

• 4:01Steven Rinella?

  What year did that have been?

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Oh, man. 68.

• 4:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  So, yeah. So I've been trapping for a long time.

• 4:09Steven Rinella?

  And then you eventually got into that kind of work, professional?

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, when I went to college, that's all I wanted to do was, was become a wildlife biologist. I wanted to work outdoors. And, and that's.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  When I graduated college, uh, jobs with game department were on, uh, on a hiring freeze and a job came open with the predator control program in New Mexico. So I started with that outfit. After four years, I was guiding hunters on the side and, and went into the private sector guiding and managing ranches in Texas.

• 4:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Uh, doing some consulting work down in Old Mexico in Sonora. So.

• 4:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you did?

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. There was a center for desert ecology. We built a zoo down there in Armasilo and moved some animals into it. Uh, captured pronghorn in San Luis Potosi. Did a lot of, a lot of work in Mexico over the years. Um, after my kids were born, I decided maybe I needed a job that had health insurance. So.

• 5:02Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  I came back to government work in Mississippi as a beaver trapper and then South Dakota. Spent 13 years in Utah, mostly predator management. Uh, the deer herds crashed there in 1992, 93.

• 5:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  And I moved in there just after that. So we started doing predator control for domestic sheep protection, but also for mule deer, pronghorn protection, bighorn sheep restoration. And that's how I got this deep into it, studying predator prey relationships.

• 5:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Let, let me hit you with one, um, that I wasn't expecting to ask you about, but I was just reading about it yesterday. Um, have you spent much time working in Alaska?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  I've been up to Alaska several times, but never, never, you know, a month at a time, just.

• 5:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Couple of weeks here and there.

• 5:45Steven Rinella?

  There's a little, there's, there's a, you know, but there's a constantly a bruin in Alaska about predator management around coyote stuff. But I was reading about, um, some conflict and some lawsuits around doing bear control to try to reestablish a caribou herd that had gone through like a 94% decline.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. That is, it is a worldwide phenomenon. Um, I was a invited speaker at the first European trapping conference.

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  And they were saying, look, our endangered wolves are eating our endangered reindeer.

• 6:24Steven Rinella?

  I put you in a pickle.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  What do we do with that? Yeah. Um, I'm, I'm working with a group in Alberta that's trying to, to standardize predation management to protect wildlife. That, that deal in Alaska is a long brewing, uh, controversy going way back, but, but predators can put prey in a predator pit. When, when the prey drop off because environmental conditions. And the predators don't drop off.

• 6:49Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  That's when we have a predator pit and that's what they're trying to reverse. In Alaska, it's interesting because it gets to their constitution. They have to actually support subsistence use.

• 7:00Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  And so i- it's a real tussle between our, well, are you eating caribou or can you eat a bear?

• 7:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got it, got it.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  But, but in those areas, they are doing bear removals and some wolf removals to protect caribou, especially at calving time. The bears are hard on them and it's working, right? We've seen some of those caribou herds, the mulch at the herds up about 25%.

• 7:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about. That was one that had the 94% decline and now it's kind of coming out of it. And there's a naturally cyclical element to it, but I think you could probably take, you could probably take the bottoms. You can probably round the bottoms off with, with control.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Or, or, or decrease the, the timeline, right?

• 7:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  In Wyoming, pronghorn will die in a severe winter. We, we know that. That's the limiting factor is winter. But do we want to wait seven years for them to come back up or do we want to bump them up in two or three years? You know, that's when we're talking about predation management on wildlife.

• 7:53Steven Rinella?

  Yep, yep. Well, what, what predator have you spent the most time on in your career?

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Uh, without a doubt, coyotes, right? I, I actually trapped coyotes and hunted coyotes for fur when I was in college, back when college was cheap and fur was valuable.

• 8:07Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  And, and I spent most of my time around coyote management and all the rest, but I spent a lot of time with mountain lions. Uh, I did postgraduate work on mountain lions in New Mexico, um, and had hounds for 30 years. So I've, I've spent a lot of time on lion work.

• 8:22Steven Rinella?

  You know, you just mentioned college being when college was different amounts of money. I always tell people this, this is no joke, man. When I, I got out of high school, I didn't think I was going to go to college. I got kicked around going in the army and then like decided to go to college. And I remember we had a community college. We called it 13th grade. And I went down there and I'm, I'm not kidding you, man. I went down there and wrote a check. For $600 at like a cashier window.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:50Steven Rinella?

  To pay my tuition.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I.

• 8:52Steven Rinella?

  My tuition was $600 for a semester and I like scratched out a check. So now my wife's all talking about put our kids going to college, knowing how expensive it is. I'm like, well, 600 bucks.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:03Steven Rinella?

  A semester.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  I sold a Bobcat in, in the spring of 79 for 300 bucks and walked across campus with that check and paid off the last of that semester's bill.

• 9:17Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's, those days are gone now.

• 9:22Steven Rinella?

  You know, on coyotes, man, here's a conversation I have with people all the time is, uh,

• 9:29Steven Rinella?

  you get a guy, you know, you get a well-meaning landowner, right? Farm manager, ranch manager, the farmer himself, the ranch manager, the rancher himself, whatever. And they have the idea that like, uh, they want to help their deer population out. They want to increase their turkey population or whatever. And they'll occasionally in November, shoot a coyote. Right? Cause they're thinking like, well, you know, trying to help out.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  That helped, yeah.

• 9:55Steven Rinella?

  Or you'll say to a farmer, you'd be like, oh, you know, I was out there. We saw a couple coyotes. You didn't shoot them?

• 10:04Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:05Steven Rinella?

  And you have this conversation where you're like, like, listen, man, I don't have any problem with you doing whatever you want to do, but that doesn't matter. Right? Like, like th- th- this kind of stuff is so, it's, it's like timing and intensity dependent.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 10:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Can you explain that a little bit from a professional perspective of when, like, how do people kind of view predator control and what does predator control look like when it's done in a professional sense?

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Sure. And it's, it is very, very complicated. I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole, but it's a deep rabbit hole.

• 10:47Steven Rinella?

  Sure, man. That's why I'm asking about it.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Predators impact prey in one of two different ways. The first one is how many get eaten, right? And that's what we'd studied for 50 years.

• 10:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  How many deer fawns get eaten by coyotes?

• 11:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  How many deer, adult deer get eaten by mountain lions?

• 11:06Speaker 04

  And, and no kidding, decades of research, the very first wildlife monograph is about the Peant's Basin and they followed deer, radio collar deer, followed them around.

• 11:16Steven Rinella?

  Where is this?

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Peant's Basin, northwest Colorado.

• 11:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  And if a deer starved to death, they said, see, it's habitat related. And if a deer was killed by coyotes, they said, see, it's, it's predation.

• 11:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  And that's what we understood about predator management or predator impacts for a long time. Really, when we started putting wolves in Yellowstone, we started looking at other predation impacts and, and the secondary impacts of predation are behavioral changes in those prey animals to avoid predation.

• 11:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  So wolves didn't eat elk on the northern deer herd, or northern elk herd, near as much as they changed their behavior. Instead of them being out in the meadows getting all the grass they want, they're now standing on the slopes where they can escape predation, but they're starving to death in what we used to consider a mild winter.

• 12:09Steven Rinella?

  I got it.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  And that secondary impact is probably as important as the primary impact.

• 12:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  So shooting a coyote in the fall, is that gonna help anything? If secondary impacts are what's knocking those numbers down, then maybe, very small maybe.

• 12:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  If primary impacts are there, there's absolutely no impact whatsoever. Coyotes get replaced. They're very resilient as a species and they can, they can come back from, from any kind of pressure, up to 65% removal, you'll have them back within a single year.

• 12:44Steven Rinella?

  65% removal.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  65% removal, yeah. They bounce back in a single breeding season.

• 12:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  And, and this is, this is neat research stuff. Researchers like aquatic systems to look at predation because they can't leave, right? Fish can't get up and walk out.

• 13:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  And so there's been a couple of studies where they had. You know, a lake with algae eating fish out in it. And the fish were evenly distributed in the lake and they ate the algae and they kept algae blooms from occurring. And they put in just a couple of predatory fish in that system. And all the algae eaters go to the thick cover and that open water now doesn't have any algae eaters in it.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  Are you kidding me?

• 13:28Speaker 04

  And you have an algae bloom. And, and think about that. If you understand food pyramids and all the rest, that's the basis of life being directed by a predator species.

• 13:37Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Cause they can't do what they want no more.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  They can't, they can't safely go out there.

• 13:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  They change their behavior and it changes the ecosystem. In another experiment, and I love this one, they had snails in an aquarium with, with growing plants. And the snails will feed up and down the stalk of that plant, including the terminal bud at the tip of the plant. They eat it. And they keep the plants cropped back.

• 14:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  They didn't introduce snail predators. They introduced the smell of snail predators. They had snail predators in another aquarium. They circulated that water over there.

• 14:10Steven Rinella?

  Really? What, what's a snail predator?

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Some other kind of fish.

• 14:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  That'll crunch the shells. And those snails retreated to the basal clump of the plant and the plants grew up and choked out the system.

• 14:22Steven Rinella?

  Cause they can smell those sons of bitches in there.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  They can smell them. I may not be giving snails enough credit for their thought process.

• 14:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  But that's an evolutionary thing, right? It's.

• 14:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because they didn't watch their body get munched by.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 14:35Steven Rinella?

  By a fish, really.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  That was it. That's, that's evolution. And that's the, that's the yin and yang of predation, right? It shapes the predator, it shapes the prey.

• 14:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  But when things get out of whack, when people interfere, then, then predators can have an impact on them.

• 14:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  Um, another fascinating deal, there, when I was in Utah, they asked me to, to identify why predators have an impact and what would we do to manage that impact? And, and I started looking at mountain lions and deer and mountain lions kill deer. That's their job. That's how they evolved. Deer evolved feeding mountain lions. That, that's, that's the relationship.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  But mountain lions kill bucks in greater percentage than their percentage in the population. If bucks are 20% of a population, it might be 30%, 35% of what lions kill. And the reasons for that are multiple, but bucks are solitary, bucks move more, so they're easier to detect. They don't get in big groups, so it's, you know, they don't have a defense of, of a lot of eyes.

• 15:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because you would think, just on that point, I, I've seen that before.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:43Steven Rinella?

  And heard that before, but you would think in some ways, um, the fact that it's for much of the year, it's armed with antlers. You would think in some ways that would offset that, and maybe it does, maybe it'd be, maybe if they didn't have, if they didn't have antlers, it'd be even worse. But you'd see in some ways, I, I feel like, I'm surprised that doesn't turn a cat off.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, it doesn't turn a cat off.

• 16:08Steven Rinella?

  They just don't care.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  They're, they're pretty adept at grabbing them over the shoulders and, and biting where they need to bite, you know.

• 16:16Steven Rinella?

  You don't need the antlers or?

• 16:17Speaker 04

  No, I've seen him kill adult bull elk.

• 16:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  You know, with antlers.

• 16:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  So, mountain lions though will kill does and fawns in relative abundance to each other. And, and so if there's a hundred fawns.

• 16:31Steven Rinella?

  Explain that again?

• 16:32Speaker 04

  They kill does and fawns in relative abundance to each other. So you take the buck mortality out of it.

• 16:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  If you got a hundred fawns per hundred does, which we never have.

• 16:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Half of what a lion kills is going to be fawns and half will be does.

• 16:46Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 16:47Speaker 04

  If, if you had that ratio.

• 16:49Steven Rinella?

  They don't care, right? Because you don't know what's in his head, but that's what you see.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  That's, it's just availability. It's, they're equally vulnerable to predation.

• 16:58Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  It's just whatever, whatever he comes on, the closest one to the bushes, right?

• 17:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  What we found out though, is that when. Predator, or when, when fawn numbers are down, lion mortality is additive to other mortality. They're killing breeding age does, and that can drive a population down.

• 17:19Steven Rinella?

  Explain that to me again, I got, I got confused there.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  The, the model that I had to-

• 17:24Steven Rinella?

  When deer numbers are down?

• 17:25Speaker 04

  When, when fawn numbers are down, when you get below 50 fawns per 100 does-

• 17:30Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  What a lion's killing is two thirds of what the non-bucks are adult breeding age does.

• 17:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Only one third is fawns. If they're killing fawns, it doesn't have an impact on the population. You still got some that are coming up to be breeding age.

• 17:44Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  If they're killing breeding age does, you can see the whole population depressed because they're the ones that are, that are feeding in, you know, young into the system.

• 17:53Steven Rinella?

  Like that's when it's having like a sort of a greater population level impact.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Right. When we modeled this in Utah, the official lion population was about 3,000, based on densities and all the rest. The official deer population was 300,000, or about one lion for every 100 deer. When fawn ratios got below 50 fawns per 100 does, the population was declining because lions were killing does.

• 18:19Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Lions aren't nearly as abundant on the landscape as coyotes. The reason the fawn ratios were low was because coyotes were eating the fawns.

• 18:29Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  So when we started doing predator management in the Book Cliffs, in the Henry Mountains, we went in there after the coyotes. We tried to get our fawn numbers up above 50 fawns per 100 does. We get above 60, 70 fawns per 100 does, the lions can eat whatever they want to eat and you don't notice the difference.

• 18:46Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  So you got two predators working on the same population, but they're hitting different levels of, of the, the population. One's eating fawns and the other's eating adult does. It can depress that population as well.

• 19:00Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  So there's, there's all kinds of factors. We identified 18 factors that affect predation rates.

• 19:07Steven Rinella?

  Give me some more.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Um, linear habitat.

• 19:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  So a predator, a single predator walking a dike can find every duck nest if they have to nest on the edge of that dike.

• 19:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because this is in our notes. This, this linear, I'd never heard this concept before.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. So what's more linear than a beach?

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  A beach. Sea turtles have to lay their eggs on the beach.

• 19:30Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  And one coyote, one sounder of feral hogs walking that beach can find a hundred percent of the nest.

• 19:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Which also gets to what do you do about it? You can remove 90% of the coyotes.

• 19:43Steven Rinella?

  But one.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Still lose all the nests. If you've got linear habitat, it's, it's, you gotta be really, really intensive.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Other factors like herd size and age, right? When wolves were killing elk in Yellowstone. The average age of the elk that were being shot by hunters, cow elk, was about five. But the average age that the wolves were eating was like 11. That's because they're at the back of the herd. The 11 year olds are the slower ones at the back of the herds. That's the one the wolves.

• 20:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you're kidding me.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Targeting and pulling down. So they're not equally distributing that predation effort over the whole population.

• 20:20Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  You can lose some 11 year olds. You, you start losing your five year olds and your population's going to decline because that's the reproductive capacity of that herd right there.

• 20:29Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  It's, it's a fascinating, fascinating, uh, picture. Some of the, some of the factors involve the predators. Coyotes, you, you probably know this, but coyotes don't breed till their second year.

• 20:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  So right out on the landscape, you've got the current year's pups, which are like 50% of the population numerically.

• 20:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  You've got the last year's coyotes.

• 20:56Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  The yearlings that are out there, transient coyotes between territories, trying to stay out of everybody's way and not get attacked by the territorial coyotes. Territorial coyotes are like 20% of the population, two year olds and up.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Those coyotes are the ones that are doing most of the killing of wildlife.

• 21:17Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Those are the coyotes. Yeah, you've got a four-year-old pair that's been on that territory for three breeding seasons. Um, they're gonna know where to go hunt fawns. They're the ones that are the most active at killing.

• 21:29Steven Rinella?

  Just so they got, they got the most experience.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  They've got the most experience and they're feeding pups.

• 21:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  In experiments with livestock predation, when, when you remove the pups from the equation, the adult coyotes quit killing within two days.

• 21:42Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  It's provisioning those pups. And when you think about it, coyote pups are born right around April 15th. Deer fawns hit the ground the end of June, first of July. Those pups gotta eat meat. Those coyotes are killing as fast as they can to provision their pups.

• 21:59Steven Rinella?

  You know, I gotta, uh, just keep your train of thought.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:02Steven Rinella?

  But, uh, the idea of buddy mine who's a songwriter.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  He says, hey, I got a coyote question for you. And I don't know where he's, I don't even know. He didn't even, I didn't even ask him if this has to do with something he's writing, but he, he happens to be a songwriter and he happens to have called me and asked me this question with no explanation of why he was asking, but he said, do you ever see? And I didn't, I didn't have a great answer for him. I could just tell him anecdotally, or I could just tell my opinion on it, theory on it. But he said, do you ever see a coyote? Take a step to dispatch something?

• 22:38Steven Rinella?

  Or do they just kinda like grab it and start eating it? She's talking about, why do you see him walking around with a rabbit that's still looking around? You know what I mean? Like some things, if you think of like a terrier, right? When you, if a terrier grabs something, he knows what he's doing.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:55Steven Rinella?

  A lion, like a terrier sinks his teeth into the neck. You actually see him seed his teeth into the neck.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:01Steven Rinella?

  And shake it.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 23:02Steven Rinella?

  Right? A lion is like, a, a lion is thinking, I'm gonna kill this thing.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 23:08Steven Rinella?

  And I know how to kill it. And I know where, you know, like I know what I'm gonna do and top priority is it's gonna die.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:13Steven Rinella?

  But a coyote just seems to not be. In dispatching something.

• 23:20Steven Rinella?

  And for his sake, what's the answer?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Coyotes, coyotes do kill them. They're, they're, they're a coursing predator.

• 23:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Mostly they're, and this is another fascinating part about it. Mostly they're a coursing predator. They chase down their game and when they grab it, they're grabbing it with their mouth. They don't have thumbs that they're not like a lion that's got claws. So they grab it with their mouth. Once they have it in their mouth, they're kind of done. They don't have to kill it right away.

• 23:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  In fact, they're not going to kill it till they're ready to eat it sometimes.

• 23:54Steven Rinella?

  So, so it is like, it's not their instinct. So just right away, make it dead.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  No, uh-uh. They, they're, they're gonna grab it. They're gonna pack it off, you know, with, with baby lambs. They'll, they'll shake them once, maybe bite the top of the head, but they're, they're moving food is what they're doing. If the food's still alive, if they're taking it back to a, to a den, the, the pups will kill it.

• 24:17Steven Rinella?

  He'll get around to killing it later. Okay.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Red foxes can't do that, right? Everything that a red fox eats is, is small. And so when they grab it, it dies and they take it back and red foxes will cache their food around a den. Coyotes don't. They just go back and either puke it up if, if that's, if they ate meat or just drop it and the pups will tear it into it.

• 24:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  But it's, it's, it's a difference just in size and in what they're trying to do at the time.

• 24:45Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  In the wintertime, when they grab something, they'll eat it right away.

• 24:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  In the summertime, they may be packing it back to the den site and that's what they're trying to do.

• 24:54Steven Rinella?

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• 25:37Steven Rinella?

  We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault. Doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put weather tech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liner. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com. I travel quite a bit and when I'm home, it's very easy to stay on a rigid food routine and eat the right kinds of food at the right time. But when you're on the road, it's hard to stay in your routine and like diet can really start to fall apart. I've seen it and that's why I like Athletic Greens.

• 26:20Steven Rinella?

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• 27:05Steven Rinella?

  Visit drinkag1.com slash meat eater and get an AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro welcome kit. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash meat eater. Grab yours now. What do you guys see when you look at, uh, with coyotes? With fawn predation versus adult, let's just stick to whitetail deer for a minute.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:33Steven Rinella?

  Like, like what do you see when you look at, um, and maybe I'm wrong.

• 27:40Steven Rinella?

  But it seem, if I had to take a guess at it, just from what I've picked up, and there's so much false information about this floating around out there and so much myth and legend. But like that, in the north, they run in bigger groups and they'll kill deer. In the south, they don't, they don't seem to kill adult deer as much. Like, what, what of that is true and not true?

• 28:00Speaker 04

  So, we talked about the 18 factors, and one of those other factors is alternative prey.

• 28:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  I lived in Mississippi for two years, and trapped beavers down there, and, and worked on some coyote problems when I was there. And I never called a coyote in Mississippi with a rabbit call. I could howl them up, and they'd come out.

• 28:19Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  But I never called one with a rabbit call. And I think the answer is, they don't know what rabbits are. They're living in such a food-rich environment in Mississippi, in Mississippi Delta, they can eat grapes, they can eat persimmons, they can eat all this other food, that they're not hunting rabbits in that thick, thick forest that grows in the south. I talked about them being a coursing predator, not in Mississippi, not in South Texas. I wondered for my whole career, until I moved back to Texas, how you can have six coyotes per square mile and still have whitetail deer in South Texas.

• 28:58Steven Rinella?

  Well, they sure can do a rabbit in South Texas.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, they do. But coyotes in South Texas are more of, like a, ecologically more like a fox. They're a pounce predator. They go up and down the cinderos, and, and if a rabbit squirts out, they grab it, a cotton rat, they'll pounce on that.

• 29:15Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  And if a deer wants to get away from a coyote, all they have to do is turn left and go out through the, through the brush, and the coyote can't see them anymore.

• 29:24Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  So, we've got whitetails in South Texas, but the coyotes are... Twenty pound coyotes and they pounce. We've got all that other alternative prey.

• 29:34Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  So, at your issue, you know, what else is going on out there? Are the packs larger because they have to hunt, because they have to hunt deer?

• 29:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Whereas elsewhere, the packs are kind of smaller because they're eating cotton rats and they're eating jackrabbits. And, and that's only a meal for one.

• 29:55Steven Rinella?

  And you feel that that's true?

• 29:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, we.

• 29:58Steven Rinella?

  They don't need, like, if they have tons of stuff, they don't need to pack up?

• 30:01Speaker 04

  They don't need to pack up. Their territories get smaller. They tolerate more overlapping territory.

• 30:07Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  The, the, we've got territories in South Texas where we've got radio collars on coyotes, three hundred acres.

• 30:13Steven Rinella?

  Is that right? Spent his whole life on three hundred acres?

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:16Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, fascinating. And, and other coyotes right on top of them.

• 30:23Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Because everything they need is on that three hundred acres.

• 30:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  So they.

• 30:28Steven Rinella?

  And they don't, they're more lenient about other ones coming in because there's enough food.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  There's enough food.

• 30:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Another coyote territory thing, but I'm, I'm going down different.

• 30:38Steven Rinella?

  No, no, man, this, this is great.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  In the sixties, there was a coyote study with VHF collars and they, they mapped out where the coyote territories were based on all the locations. And, and they had, had a, a picture of what that looked like.

• 30:52Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  In the, whatever the decade, we're, we're calling it after two thousand, the forty years later.

• 30:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 04

  They went in there with GPS collars and did the same study. And the territories were the same size. But fascinating to me, they had the same boundaries.

• 31:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 31:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, they didn't shift over when one coyote pair disappeared. Another coyote pair would pick it up and whatever they were seeing out there on the landscape, they maintained the same boundaries. Forty years, that's twenty coyote generations.

• 31:24Steven Rinella?

  Now, I wonder like. There's no way to answer this probably, but picture that you had somehow magically were able to pull them all out. Okay.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 31:35Steven Rinella?

  Like the shake of a wand and they're all out. And then you replace them with totally different ones. Then I wonder would they find those same, do you mean?

• 31:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:46Steven Rinella?

  Like, is the territory thing inherited or is there, is there some logic to it that a coyote understands that we don't understand?

• 31:51Speaker 04

  Coyote sees the, the landscape differently and, and.

• 31:55Steven Rinella?

  Cause we tend to think of like fence lines.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, fence lines and roads.

• 31:58Steven Rinella?

  Cause we'll always be talking about, oh, he came off the neighbor's place.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:01Steven Rinella?

  As though the deer has some comprehension. Do you know what I mean? Like as though like he's like.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:05Steven Rinella?

  I'm going over to the neighbor's place now.

• 32:09Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's just like the way we like view, you know, isn't how they see it, isn't how they experience it.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  We talked some about not only the pack size, but individual animal size, right? They, they get larger as they go north, you know, away from the equator or south away from the equator. But their prey also decides their individual size some. I've been working with wolves in, in Michigan, Minnesota and, and wolves that eat moose are considerably larger than wolves that eat whitetail deer.

• 32:41Steven Rinella?

  In the same place?

• 32:42Speaker 04

  In the same place.

• 32:43Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Just a few miles apart. 15 miles apart.

• 32:48Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding me?

• 32:49Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 32:51Steven Rinella?

  Huh. So what are you doing with wolves up there?

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Radio collars. We're handling wolves, putting radio collars on them.

• 32:56Steven Rinella?

  How you catching them?

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Foot hold traps.

• 32:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What trap do you use?

• 33:01Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm using MB 750.

• 33:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  On, on wolves, the Alaskan with a bigger, bigger offset.

• 33:07Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. We had another wolf researcher on and I asked her that question. She said MB 752.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a good stout trap. It's gotta have.

• 33:17Steven Rinella?

  I use it for beers.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Back foot.

• 33:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. But

• 33:23Steven Rinella?

  And you're out, like you just, like walk me through going out and catching a wolf in Michigan? Like, what are you doing?

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Well, um, we're working in wilderness area.

• 33:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  So we're doing this out of a backpack.

• 33:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  You don't pack 12 of those traps on your back and go for a walk, you know? Take four or five of them out there and, um, there are traditional places where they walk. But if I'm, if I don't have fresh sign, I'm not setting a trap. I, you're just wasting a lot of time setting, hoping that something's going to come by here.

• 33:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Um, because we're putting radio collars on, we're running those traps every day.

• 33:58Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  So you can only have so many traps out in a day and still get to that wolf before noon and get him processed and out of the trap.

• 34:06Steven Rinella?

  How many sets do you guys run when you're doing that?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Um, a dozen, 15.

• 34:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  You know?

• 34:12Steven Rinella?

  And then you get it?

• 34:13Speaker 04

  We get the wolf.

• 34:14Steven Rinella?

  You call the biologist or whoever, are you working it up yourself?

• 34:17Speaker 04

  We're working it up ourselves.

• 34:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  It's a team effort. I mean, just carrying trapping equipment plus the equipment to work the wolf up. It's, it's usually a two, three person team.

• 34:25Steven Rinella?

  What month are you doing this in?

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Um, May, usually. We, we'll be doing some late this month and

• 34:34Steven Rinella?

  You'll be up there this month?

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, the end of this month and first part of June still.

• 34:37Steven Rinella?

  And what are you finding with those collars? Are you analyzing the data too, or are you just collecting it?

• 34:41Speaker 04

  I get to see it, but, but we've got other biologists that are analyzing the data. They've got territories, they make some pretty good extraterritorial movements. They'll go over here and try and poach a girlfriend or come back. We caught a, a pair of wolves one night. It was a male and a female, three-year-old male and two-year-old female.

• 34:58Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  And, and I felt like they were pack mates. We put collars on both of them and as soon as we turned them loose, they split. And one went back to another pack's territory. He was a member of that pack and he was over there trying to poach a girlfriend.

• 35:12Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding me, really? So it just happened?

• 35:14Speaker 04

  We just happened to catch him on date night, yeah.

• 35:17Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 35:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was fascinating. I'd have never guessed that if we didn't put the collars on him.

• 35:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What are you seeing that nowadays with, uh, I remember cutting my first wolf track in Michigan's Upper Peninsula a long time ago.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:28Steven Rinella?

  But what, what are they seeing nowadays with those populations there?

• 35:32Speaker 04

  I think they're kind of stable. I mean, they, they, they've filled up all the available habitat and the deer numbers are kind of low. So there's not a lot of groceries left. You don't see, I think every breeding pair is still having a litter, but you don't see a lot of young wolves coming up. They're

• 35:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  Cup.

• 35:49Steven Rinella?

  Like they've filled in?

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, they've filled in.

• 35:52Steven Rinella?

  You know? Here's the thing I'd like to talk to you about about predator prey relationships. So you might you may be familiar with this story where you're familiar with the Hudson Bay Company.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so Hudson Bay Company, I think it was like the oldest corporation, you know, dissolved now, right? But you know, for a while, it was like the oldest corporation out there. Just for for listener sake, what used to happen is like like in Canada. And this would happen in the in in a minor way in the US, but Canada, they would give these sort of charters or commissions to company, basically corporate charters.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 36:28Steven Rinella?

  And they would say, you have exclusive authority to conduct the fur trade in such and such region. And Hudson Bay Company, and they had all these different names over time, but Hudson Bay Company was was they had the they had a monopoly to conduct the fur trade and everything that flowed in Hudson Bay.

• 36:49Steven Rinella?

  And they kept meticulous records. So you're familiar with like that that snowshoe hairs follow this up down cycle of seven to 10 years, seven years. There's all these different debates about what drives it like.

• 37:05Steven Rinella?

  It seems to be like I think the consensus nowadays what drives it is plant toxins. That that as plants get over consumed, they produce more toxins, they produce more toxins. The rabbits lay off and so it drives these rabbits into this cycle. Hudson Bay Company kept such accurate records that they could go back through time and track the link cycle and see that the link cycle follows the snowshoe hair cycle.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:34Steven Rinella?

  And you see like how many links are coming through their trading posts.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:39Steven Rinella?

  Right. And they look and it's like it spikes and goes down and spikes and goes down, kind of in line with rabbits.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:46Steven Rinella?

  But or hairs. But here's my question. How long is the delay? I think a lot of people would look and say, well, predator management doesn't.

• 37:58Steven Rinella?

  They would look like predator man management doesn't matter because if all the deer are dead. Right. If there's no deer left, then the predators will die.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  That's what I was taught when I went to college in the seventies.

• 38:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Prey drives the predator numbers and, and, and we were shown those very graphs, those very data. There's another famous study, uh, Paul Arrington did with muskrats and mink.

• 38:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  When, when muskrats go up.

• 38:27Steven Rinella?

  Not familiar with that one.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Mink numbers go up and muskrats crash, mink numbers crash.

• 38:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but they can't be, those lines aren't traveling like this.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  They're, they're about a year behind.

• 38:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay, that, that's what I said, there has to be a delay.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  And, and, and it has to do with kitten survival for lynx.

• 38:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  So the, the kitten numbers survive in the upswing and kitten numbers don't survive in the downswing.

• 38:51Steven Rinella?

  They just starve to death.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  And dispersal. If you look at non-target lynx take in Idaho, for example, they're catching lynx out in the deserts where there aren't any lynx, in bobcat sets. When you have a snowshoe hare crash and the lynx have to disperse, they leave.

• 39:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  So it's not always dying.

• 39:12Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  And that's what we were all taught and that, that actually works in a single predator, single prey system.

• 39:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  I don't get to work in those systems. I've got coyotes, I got mountain lions, I got all kinds of predators.

• 39:26Steven Rinella?

  So single predator, single prey, let's take like, um, uh, just to help you understand what we're saying. We've, we've talked about this on past shows, like Isle Royale.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:34Steven Rinella?

  In, in Lake Superior is this kind of famous example of.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:37Steven Rinella?

  It's like, you basically, there's moose and there's wolves.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  And beaver.

• 39:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Oh, okay.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  You got beaver, but only half the year, right? They're under ice the rest of the year.

• 39:45Steven Rinella?

  So, so that's not even single predator.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  They whack the heck out of beavers too.

• 39:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  So beavers are a favorite food of wolves.

• 39:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, so continue that thought though, like that, that the situations where you don't have single prey, single predator.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  So, so in the, the famous lion study that Hornocker did in Idaho, the, the, the lions didn't kill elk.

• 40:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Cause there weren't many elk back then. There were hundreds and hundreds of deer and, and almost no elk.

• 40:14Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Now that in to- total systems change, there's very few deer and a lot of elk and the elk are buffering the lions to where the lions can still find something to eat. And keep the deer numbers low.

• 40:29Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  In a study on the spider ranch in northern Arizona, lions killed deer when the deer herd crashed in a drought. The lions didn't cause the crash.

• 40:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  But a couple of years of no fawn survival and the deer herd's way down, lions just switched over to cattle.

• 40:46Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  All the lions on the study area that weren't killing cattle when there were a lot of deer, switched to cattle, every, every single one. And so the lion numbers didn't go down.

• 40:57Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  So that's, that's the actual system, right? It, it, that we're worried about is, is when predators have multiple prey and they can pick on the one that's depressed.

• 41:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Enough to keep them in that predator pit. That's when we have to get, step in and, and remove them. Um, and, and it's, it's gotta be very specific, right? You go out there and kill a bunch of yearling coyotes and not deal with the, the pair that's raising those pups, you haven't done a darn thing.

• 41:26Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  I'll go one further. We do a lot of predator management around pronghorn.

• 41:31Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Very well documented. If you've got pronghorn herd that might have 25 fawns per 100 does, if you do predator coyote removal, effective coyote removal, you can get up to about 50 fawns. You could about double that fawn survival. I- if you do it well. One state insisted that we do that work at the first of May.

• 41:55Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  Wi- because that's when the, the fawns start dropping in May. So they only wanted coyotes removed in May. Well, if you go out there with an airplane, you go out there with a predator call and you start looking for coyotes in, in May, you're gonna find male coyotes that are provisioning pups. The females right there tied to the den.

• 42:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  If you get, if she's in the hole with those pups and, and you're out there killing males, you have no impact whatsoever.

• 42:20Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  You gotta get the, the reproduction. The time to get those is before she has the pup. And if you can remove her, another coyote will take her place, but they won't have pups in that territory that year. That'll be a safe zone for pronghorns to fawn.

• 42:36Steven Rinella?

  My buddy does that work for an imperiled pronghorn population.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:41Steven Rinella?

  And he goes down to his camp. I feel like he's in his camps. There's, there's like the peak day when they drop fawns.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:47Steven Rinella?

  I feel like he's in his camp six weeks.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:50Steven Rinella?

  Prior, six weeks post, something like that, some schedule like that.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  Like, well, in advance, you know?

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, you, that's, that's a time. I, I'd like to see it. We did aerial removals on deer fawning range between January and March.

• 43:05Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  And removing it, especially here in the mountains, um, coyotes that live above 7,000 foot in January are the territory holders. The juveniles migrate down with the groceries, but you'll find coyotes at the top of the mountain that time of year.

• 43:21Steven Rinella?

  But why, why are they up there, though?

• 43:23Speaker 04

  They can't afford to leave. If they leave, somebody else is going to take their place.

• 43:27Steven Rinella?

  You think so?

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Oh, I've seen it, man.

• 43:29Steven Rinella?

  I've seen that so much where you'd be up so high and like the snow's crusted.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:34Steven Rinella?

  And you're like, why? What are they doing?

• 43:35Speaker 04

  They're digging down to old kills. They're, they're, I don't know, eating juniper berry. I, I have no idea, but about 7,000 foot and above, it's all territorial coyotes. So you go up there in January, February, March, territory bonds are established.

• 43:50Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  The, the pair bonds are there. You get fresh snow. You can track down two coyotes. You kill those two coyotes and livestock losses that year are cut in half.

• 44:00Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Fawn losses are cut way down. Other coyotes will take their place. But those coyotes aren't provisioning pups. There won't be any pups born in that territory that year.

• 44:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  And you're, you're golden. If you did it in November, there'd be another pair of coyotes in there by, by January and you'd still have pups. So the timing is critical to when you get that. The coyotes you remove are critical. It's, it's literally got to be the adult female.

• 44:27Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  If you can get her out of there before she whelps, you've got a pretty clear sale in all, all through fawning season. But if you kill the male and leave her feeding those pups, she's going to kill just as bad as if they were both.

• 44:41Steven Rinella?

  Is that right? Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:42Steven Rinella?

  What, what do you see? Uh, do you ever see a situation where, let's say you have like good high deer numbers?

• 44:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So if you have a long historical trend, um, and you kind of know like what, what? You have data over decades and you know like what low looks like for deer outnumbers. Say whitetail deer, you know what low looks like, you know what high looks like and you're plugging along in good, stable country. In those cases, do you generally feel like there's no, there's no point in doing predator removal?

• 45:16Speaker 04

  Yep, I absolutely do. You've got to be at some relationship to carrying capacity. And carrying capacity changes over the years, right? I mean, things dry out, you get a fire and you have to reshuffle the whole deck because you don't know what the carrying, the right carrying capacity is.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  And this is an aside, but agencies have to decide every year, where are we going to spend our money? Are we going to spend it on habitat work? Are we going to spend it on predator control? And, and the world, according to Mike, you do habitat work all the time. You, you do habitat work for next year, for five years down the road. If you're pushing junipers to, to create more browse for deer, you still got to do that. You do predator management if you have unused habitat today.

• 46:04Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  If you're below carrying capacity. When we did this in Utah, we had a three step process to decide if a predator plan was necessary. If we were 50% of our herd objective or less

• 46:21Speaker 04

  and had 50 fawns per 100 does or fewer and had a three-year stable to declining trend, then that would be a unit that we would consider for predator management.

• 46:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  If you had an increasing trend, but you still met the first two, you could let it go. You could see if they'd get there on their own. You would put your resources someplace else, but if it met all three of those tests, then it's time to do some predation management.

• 46:49Steven Rinella?

  What, what cases in your career have you seen where?

• 46:54Steven Rinella?

  Like I, I mentioned earlier, Buddy Mine is working on a pronghorn deal. I mean, they have like, he, he's working, I don't want to.

• 47:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:01Steven Rinella?

  I don't want.

• 47:03Steven Rinella?

  I just didn't ask him if I could talk about, you know, I don't know how much he wants yapping about this, but um, he's in an area where the numbers are exceptionally low.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:12Steven Rinella?

  Right? So he's doing work timed removals in hopes of lifting them up. How often in your career have you seen where you had um, where nothing was working?

• 47:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And you're seeing like a desert bighorn population collapsing, you're seeing a mule deer population collapsing, whatever. And you come in and do the work and then you see immediate benefits from predator removal?

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Immediate's a little bit-

• 47:40Steven Rinella?

  Do you ever do it where you come in and you do predator removal and you realize it was something different? Like it, it, it doesn't move the needle?

• 47:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, it can be something different and predators aren't the only limiting factor out there. We talk about limiting factor like it's a single issue, but everything else is working on them at the same time.

• 47:59Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  When we start predator management for, let's say pronghorn or mule deer whitetail, I, I told the agencies, I'm, I'm not going to do it for less than three years. The fawns I save in year one won't contribute their own fawns until year three.

• 48:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  They get bred as yearlings and they drop it the beginning of, on their second birthday, if you will.

• 48:23Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  So, so we've got to, to, to see any kind of moving the needle. It takes at least three years with a species like that.

• 48:32Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  We see it a little bit quicker in waterfowl.

• 48:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 48:36Speaker 04

  You know, the, the Bear River Refuge in, in Utah, used to produce 80,000 ducklings.

• 48:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  Most of the flyways cinnamon teal came out of that particular system and, and they had a flood in the eighties that completely put the refuge underwater.

• 48:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  When they came back, they, when the floodwaters receded, they built dykes. Again, that linear habitat to control the water to prevent the refuge from flooding. But all the nesting habitat became dykes.

• 49:08Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  At the same time, raccoons and red foxes came in. Neither of those were native predators in that system.

• 49:14Steven Rinella?

  What caused those to come in like that?

• 49:16Speaker 04

  I think people moved the raccoons for hunting purposes. People brought them in to chase them with hounds.

• 49:22Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 49:23Speaker 04

  The, the red fox actually-

• 49:24Steven Rinella?

  I know that hounds are pigs, but I know, I didn't know that hounds are raccoons.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  That's how we got rabies in the Northeast. It was Florida coons being moved up there.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  The, the red fox, you could actually watch their march across, across the landscape.

• 49:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  Um, in fact, there's a, Aldo Leopold wrote a book called Game Survey.

• 49:44Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  He's, he dedicates several pages in that book to red foxes displacing native gray foxes. And he's got maps and years and, and all the rest. So it's, it's been going on since the forties, but red foxes just naturally migrated across the continent and got into those systems.

• 50:02Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  But they produced nothing for two decades. After that, they were producing nothing. They were doing predator studies. We had high raccoon abundance, high red fox abundance. We radio collared stuff and, and, and watched them. And when we started removing the predators, the duck numbers came up.

• 50:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  But ducks have like an 80% fidelity to the site they were born at.

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  So we went 20 years without producing any ducks. What are the chances we're going to go from zero to 80,000 in one year?

• 50:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  None.

• 50:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  We had to have some ducks that were raised there come back and start raising their own ducks. And so it's, it's a long-term process.

• 50:42Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  If you're saving sea turtles, what are you doing, man? It, it might take 50 years before you actually see the sea turtle population rebound. Cause, cause they gotta be 20 years old to breed in the first place.

• 50:56Steven Rinella?

  Have you ever worked on sea turtles?

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. We did feral hog removals for sea turtles and.

• 51:00Steven Rinella?

  What'd that look like?

• 51:01Speaker 04

  Um, again, sea turtles nest in May.

• 51:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  You kill hogs, they'll still swim out to the islands or get to the beaches. We, we would go in there at the end of April and aerial gun as many feral hogs as we could on the, that had access to those beaches.

• 51:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  And it's kinda easy in a saltwater ecosystem, cause the pigs have to drink fresh water. You know where the fresh water is, you can go get all the pigs around that.

• 51:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  But, but hogs would reinvest the, the island by the next year.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  But all we had to do was give it 45 days worth of protection.

• 51:39Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  And those, those little eggs would hatch and make their way out to the sea.

• 51:45Steven Rinella?

  That seems to me like the one predator control project you could work on where you're not going to get sued. By like Center for Biological Diversity or something because they're all going to agree that sea turtles are cute.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  And hogs are awful.

• 51:57Steven Rinella?

  And they're probably going to agree that hogs are bad.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:59Steven Rinella?

  But any other thing, they're like, no, no, no, no.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  I went to Australia and did some work with dingoes down there and they said, you know, their controversies aren't should we do it? Their controversies are how do we do it humanely?

• 52:10Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  You know, their, their red foxes are invasive and their impact in the native hairs are invasive. Feral hogs are invasive. Nobody talks about should we?

• 52:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  It's just the arguments over, uh, do we use poison?

• 52:23Steven Rinella?

  Well, they had that little problem where they had school kids out getting house cats and that caused like a little bit of a stir.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  That's an image, but yeah, the cat people are a little crazy.

• 52:32Steven Rinella?

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• 53:17Steven Rinella?

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• 54:01Steven Rinella?

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• 54:32Speaker 05

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• 54:48Steven Rinella?

  Sea turtle work?

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:49Steven Rinella?

  So what was the sea turtle?

• 54:52Speaker 04

  There's a Kemp's ridley sea turtle that's being restored in Texas. And so, but there's work done in Florida for green sea turtles. And it's, again, raccoons, it's coyotes, it's, it's feral hogs.

• 55:06Steven Rinella?

  Now I know what I was gonna ask you about. It seems, I hesitate to use the word fashion.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:12Steven Rinella?

  But it seems fashionable right now. Like, I wish my buddy Yanni was here because he's, he's all up in this right now. There's a lot of awareness right now where guys that want turkeys on the ground, more turkeys, are real hip to like reducing raccoon numbers.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:29Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:30Steven Rinella?

  And I've paid attention to this because if you look at when fur prices are high, okay, so let's say you go back to 78 to 82.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:43Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 55:45Steven Rinella?

  There is, there is a remarkable difference between raccoon abundance, like if I go back to the county, the counties where I grew up, raccoon abundance in like 84, 1984, 1986, I mean, you'd get excited if you found a raccoon den tree. Because everybody is running raccoons because they're valuable. Everybody's running with dogs and everybody's trapping them. Because you're trapping in those days, dollars, like $20 raccoons, $30 raccoons, $40 raccoons. There were no raccoons.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:20Steven Rinella?

  And you go, I shouldn't say there were no, but it was like competitive to get them. You go there now, man. I mean, it's nothing but raccoons.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:28Steven Rinella?

  It's just like the roads are littered with raccoons, there's raccoons all over because those fur prices, people aren't out getting them. And so it seems like more and more guys now are interested in trying to go out and put all kinds of coon cuffs out to bring coon numbers down. Um, to help their wild turkeys. That's what they feel like they're doing. Are they being impactful?

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Sure, they are. If they, if they do it on a big enough scale. So, so we looked at, uh, not to, not to leave turkeys, we'll come back to it, but we looked at pheasants.

• 56:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  In Utah. And pheasants are farm field birds, right? They're not living in the sagebrush in Utah. They're down in the valley bottoms. And we had two different project areas, one in northern Utah, one in southern Utah. And southern Utah, we went from sagebrush on the east to sagebrush on the west and just picked the valley floor.

• 57:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  Had some natural choke points where, where roads or rivers came in where we could kind of say, this, this area is a study unit, 16, 17 square miles.

• 57:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, where you could sort of block it off with some kind of natural feature.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  And after the first year, we, we, we mapped where we, we caught all our animals. We did track abundance and all the rest. And after the first year, we would get red foxes still back in the center of the area, but raccoons and skunks were all on the edges. They, they were coming in from that, the, the boundaries. And so we made a difference. We doubled pheasant abundance in those areas, in those treatment areas, compared to the no treatment areas. We had four sites.

• 58:00Steven Rinella?

  By going after.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Foxes, raccoons and skunks.

• 58:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:07Speaker 04

  Those were our three nest predators.

• 58:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  And foxes would eat the adults as well. We did the same study in northern Utah, but our, our study areas were on section lines, four square miles.

• 58:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  And we had six, three no treatments, three treatments. We kind of staggered them like a checkerboard. And if you understand four square miles, it's two by two. The center of that unit's only one mile from the edge.

• 58:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  And we did not change the pheasant numbers there. And when you looked at our catch per unit effort, our number of raccoons killed per hundred trap nights, it was the same at the end of the project as it was at the beginning. We would kill a raccoon and another one show up for the funeral, right?

• 58:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:51Speaker 04

  It, it, that's, it's good coon habitat. Coons aren't territorial. You can have as many coons in an area as you've got groceries.

• 58:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Skunks aren't territorial. So if it's good habitat, we had, you have to work bigger than that. When the fur was valuable, trappers were all over the place. There was competition, like you say, not just for, for the animals, but for the space to go get them. And on a landscape basis, it made a difference.

• 59:18Steven Rinella?

  So if my buddy Yanni is doing raccoon work on 40 acres.

• 59:26Speaker 04

  He might help one nest.

• 59:27Steven Rinella?

  Cause it's just, it's just, they're coming from everywhere and they're finding a way

• 59:33Speaker 04

  They're coming from everywhere and he'll probably remove as much at the end as he does at the beginning.

• 59:38Steven Rinella?

  So, so tell me again, like what is the center of the circle? Like what, what, what is the, what is the radius of the circle need to look like? Meaning if you're trying to like restore turkeys in, in the, the, if, okay, there's a 40 acre area. You had a 40 acre area of great turkey habitat. You got roost trees. You got nesting cover. You got food. Um, what is the radius need to look like in your mind before you're starting to alleviate pressure at the center of the circle?

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  So if we're talking about Rio Grande turkeys and they're in the valley, I, I, I would do the valley and I would, I'd want to have seven, 10 miles of valley that you would be working up and down because the turkeys are going to pick their own habitat.

• 1:00:25Steven Rinella?

  7, 10 miles.

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. That might be a meaningful management area.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Forty acres isn't gonna get it.

• 1:00:32Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  Um, and, and this, this is, I mean, to me, again, this is fascinating stuff. What scale do you have to be at to be effective? A coyote territory may impact a few deer, but the deer also select where they're gonna go fawn. The turkeys select where they're gonna go nest, based on the abundance of predators or that secondary risk we had. One of the PhD studies that was done on, on ducks at Bear River Refuge, they built predator exposure, forty acre exposure.

• 1:01:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  And outside the exposure where the predators were going, they had no nesting. Inside the exposure, they had a nest for every two acres. The ducks really picked that spot. But the goofy thing was, it's fenced. It's, it's a fenced exposure. They would still try to dig underneath the fence.

• 1:01:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  So we had to kill predators that were digging under the fences. We killed more predators per acre protected there than we did out on the outside. We're still, we're still finning the outside predators.

• 1:01:41Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  But, but the, the cost in predators was higher, simply because it attracted the animals. They picked their nesting site. And that's what might be working for Yanni. We, we biologists do studies like dummy nest, right? You put out a

• 1:01:59Steven Rinella?

  Not familiar.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  A bunch of eggs. You put out, you make a fake nest, and then monitor it with a camera, go back and see if it gets attacked. And, you know, did, did ravens get it or did coyotes?

• 1:02:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, just see like who, who's doing what?

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, that ain't how a turkey does it. A turkey lays an egg today and walks away.

• 1:02:17Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  And tomorrow she comes back and puts another egg beside it, and she walks away. And she comes back a third day, and if a predator got those two eggs, she's gotta go find a new place to nest. She doesn't just keep putting them in the same place.

• 1:02:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  And so her body's gonna tell her when she's had enough. But she may do that four or five times if nest predators are getting those eggs while she, before she even starts incubating.

• 1:02:45Steven Rinella?

  I got it. I didn't know this about them. It totally makes sense. And I know that, that habit of, that they don't incubate until they get their whole nest.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Until they get the whole clutch.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  I never knew that she would abandon.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  She, she'll abandon that site. And so nest site selection is important. Quail are a big thing in Texas, right? South Texas. Bob white quail have to have their nest within 10 feet of bare ground because those chicks are an inch tall when they're born. They can't walk through the thick grass. They, they, they lead them out into the open where they, they grab grasshoppers as baby chicks. They, they don't feed them. They, they have to feed themselves. Um, well, if that hen gets bumped by coyotes, I don't think coyotes eat enough quail to make a difference at all. But if she gets bumped by coyotes, if her eggs are disappearing when she's trying to, to build that clutch, then she's going to select less

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  attractive sites for nest success, just because of that secondary predator impact.

• 1:03:41Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  And so when we talk about coyote control for quail, it's, they don't eat enough to make it worthwhile. Well, maybe if the nest site selection is being affected and the secondary effects. If you're doing that, you also got to do raccoon control. You got to do gray fox control because if you kill all the coyotes, these other predators may start showing up.

• 1:04:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  So, so you do total predation management if you're trying to do quail nest protection in Texas.

• 1:04:06Steven Rinella?

  Um, some time ago, over a year ago, we had a researcher on about quail.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Steven Rinella?

  About just, just the, the general, I don't know, shittiness of the nation's quail population right now.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:04:22Steven Rinella?

  I mean, there are bright spots, but there's far more, there's far more dark spots than bright spots. You got. States that have more restrictions on quail hunting. You got states that used to be good at quail hunting and now it's not. You got guys that grew up with great quail hunting. Now there's no quail, right? This story is just all over the Bob White quail's territory. We had a researcher on from Texas.

• 1:04:46Steven Rinella?

  And he'd been working on, um, he'd been working on a FDA approved.

• 1:04:54Steven Rinella?

  Failing to think of the right word, man, like, uh, what would you call like a, a, a, a treatment for a parasite?

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Right, eye worms.

• 1:05:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, eye worm. That's right. Okay, so he was working on a medicated feed.

• 1:05:07Steven Rinella?

  And there was some superlative around it, if I remember right. It was the first time the FDA had approved. A medicated feed you could put out for a while.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Parasites, yeah.

• 1:05:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, an anti parasite.

• 1:05:20Steven Rinella?

  And he had found in some areas that this was, you could have a positive impact. Okay? Now this upset, this upset all kinds of quail people. Cause in, in their minds, like habitat, habitat, habitat. Remember you said like Mike's rule, always habitat? And they were insulted. Or put off, but by the idea that anyone would have the audacity to talk about anything other than habitat when it comes to quail.

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:49Steven Rinella?

  Cause anything else is a Band-Aid.

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:51Steven Rinella?

  Right? So on the quail question.

• 1:05:57Steven Rinella?

  If you look across the Bob White quail's territory.

• 1:06:02Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that predation is, if it's death by a thousand cuts, is predation one of those cuts on Bob White quail?

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  I think nest predation in, in many cases and the secondary predation impacts.

• 1:06:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  I managed a ranch in Texas when I was in the private sector for quail.

• 1:06:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  And we removed all the nest predators. We removed house cats. We removed bobcats. We, we, everything. And we got quail to one to two acres. Wild Bob Whites. You could flush 20 coveys in a, in a morning. You know, it was a good deal.

• 1:06:39Steven Rinella?

  Were you doing the parasite treatment too?

• 1:06:40Speaker 04

  No, no, we didn't. I don't think we had them at that time. I never noticed eye worms in any of the birds that we harvested.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  But it, it, it, we had good habitat too, right?

• 1:06:53Steven Rinella?

  Yup.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  It was the predator.

• 1:06:55Steven Rinella?

  You had empty good habitat?

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  We had empty good habitat. I don't know that I could have got them any higher than two, one to two acres.

• 1:07:02Steven Rinella?

  When you're saying one to two acres, what do you mean?

• 1:07:03Speaker 04

  One bird to every two acres of habitat on the ranch.

• 1:07:07Steven Rinella?

  So what's that come out to like covey per acre?

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Uh, a, a covey of birds might use 10 acres.

• 1:07:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  And we had some places where we had overlap in coveys.

• 1:07:18Steven Rinella?

  Yup.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  And there's, there's some interesting stuff about covey fidelity. We had birds that would leave this covey and go join this one and back and forth.

• 1:07:25Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. No, they're, they're not all the same all the time.

• 1:07:28Steven Rinella?

  Like they'd get sick of their bodies and go join a new covey?

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you look at some of the research that's done on that, it looks like a wiring diagram for an old Toyota radio.

• 1:07:36Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Wires going everywhere. This bird went over here for three days and then came over here and.

• 1:07:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You picture it being like, you don't picture.

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  An intact unit.

• 1:07:45Steven Rinella?

  Cruising around, no?

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  No. If they're, if they're dense on the landscape, there's a lot of that shuffling that goes on.

• 1:07:51Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, that, that's you, I think that secondary impacts are affecting that. We did predator removals to protect sage grouse in Utah.

• 1:08:03Steven Rinella?

  Yup.

• 1:08:03Speaker 04

  And what we found was sage grouse would start nesting in what we used to consider shitty habitat. Just, they would start going out into grasses in black sage, which is short sage and do just fine out there in the absence of mammalian predators.

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

  But what we know about sage grouse is in the presence of predators, they have to have this tall sage and they have to have this and that. And, and, and of course we've got a huge number of ravens in the west, right?

• 1:08:31Steven Rinella?

  Yup.

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  So, so that's a, that's a changing factor. But, but when you do that, that work, they'll start picking their own nest sites based on what's good.

• 1:08:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Speaker 04

  We see that with turkeys too. I want to come back to turkeys. Turkeys will pick their nest site based on the presence or absence of predators. We did a nest, a dummy nest study.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  But we did it the way a turkey does. We went and put cameras out, let the wildlife get used to the cameras, then went out and put one egg in front of it.

• 1:09:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  And came back the next day and put a second egg. And we even went so far as, as to use a golf ball retriever to place the eggs. So we weren't leaving tracks in and out to this nest to help them.

• 1:09:13Steven Rinella?

  I'm with you, yep.

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  Um, we had 15 nests. We studied them for 15 days, putting the, the eggs in one day at, one at a time. And we only had one nest survive that without getting predated.

• 1:09:25Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  One of the 15. The rest of them got whacked. Some of them got whacked multiple days, you know?

• 1:09:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  So the turkey would quit and go somewhere else and then quit that place and go somewhere else. And so the abundance of predators may not be killing turkeys, but they're affecting their nest site selection. And that doesn't always favor the chick survival.

• 1:09:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep. You've done a lot of work on wild hogs?

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I was considered a predator expert for a long time. Now I'm a hog expert and that's not a promotion. I'm going the wrong direction.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  You're hog expert?

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay, let me ask you a super like wide, general question. Are we at a point in this country where hogs have gotten where they're gonna get?

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:10:10Steven Rinella?

  You think so?

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  I, I mean, there is vacant habitat there. Somebody moved them in a truck. Yeah, they would, they would, they could set up shop. But, but we've eliminated hogs, the government has eliminated hogs in a number of states where they had new populations. We've got some resolve to keep them out of those places and we're never gonna eliminate them in some states. Texas is one of those. California, we're never gonna eliminate them there.

• 1:10:37Steven Rinella?

  What did you make of in the north and they're talking about, uh, did you follow this story in the north? Like this whole, like, this whole Canadian super hog deal?

• 1:10:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I knew the guy who, who coined that term.

• 1:10:47Steven Rinella?

  What, what, what, tell, tell everybody what that was. It sounded like bullshit to me.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  There are hogs that can winter in Canada and I, I can't winter in Canada and I'd have a house around me. So I don't know how they do it.

• 1:10:58Steven Rinella?

  But here's the deal about that. Like, just, just for, I mean, I'm gonna tell you something you already know. I mean, if you go look at, if you go just Google up images of hogs in Siberia, there's endless images of hogs walking around in deep snow.

• 1:11:12Speaker 04

  And that's what Canada has. Canada had an experiment for a number of years where they brought in pure Eurasian wild boar.

• 1:11:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  As a farm animal to be raised in that environment where they can't raise our domestic strains of pigs.

• 1:11:27Steven Rinella?

  So that's what they were doing. They were trying to expand agricultural.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  They were.

• 1:11:32Steven Rinella?

  Production, yeah.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  But the market collapsed on that.

• 1:11:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:35Speaker 04

  And so a lot of those pigs are just releases from the farms. They're highly genetically linked to Eurasian pigs.

• 1:11:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  And, and that's the super pig part, right? They can survive in that environment. They'll make snow caves and stuff like that. And, and they, they do well. Eurasian pigs only breed once a year.

• 1:11:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  Eurasian pigs have smaller litters.

• 1:11:58Steven Rinella?

  So Eurasian, like the Eurasian pigs on native habitats. So when you're talking about a pig.

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  In year.

• 1:12:03Steven Rinella?

  In his endemic range.

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:12:05Steven Rinella?

  He breeds once a year.

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:12:07Steven Rinella?

  Like a deer.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:12:08Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  And, and that's probably, you know, again evolutionary, right?

• 1:12:13Steven Rinella?

  They don't want to, they don't want to drop young in the middle of the winter.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  That's right. If they did, they, they didn't survive. And so those pigs didn't breed.

• 1:12:19Steven Rinella?

  So they, they learned to drop in one food. Yeah. The drop in one food was abundant.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  Right. The, uh, the wild hog that we have in, in the U S is, is a mixture of Eurasian blood and domestic strains and, and what we call heritage breeds. Back, back when, uh, uh, Hatfields and McCoys were, were feuding with each other. That was over actually a pig.

• 1:12:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  And they turned them loose. They ear notched them. They'd turn them loose and then they'd gather them in the fall. When they could smoke the meat, smoke the bacon and, and preserve it.

• 1:12:52Steven Rinella?

  You hear the war of the pig? I think it was called the war of the pig out on San Juan Island?

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:12:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Same thing.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Steven Rinella?

  Some dude shot, I can't remember the details.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  Shot somebody else's pig?

• 1:13:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like people had pigs running around.

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Steven Rinella?

  And they kind of, there was an understanding who owned what or whatever and.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Steven Rinella?

  Some American shot some Brit's pig or a Brit shot an American's pig. Now a big fuss broke out.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, and, and, and so our pigs, we see in, in the wild in Texas at least, we see three litters every two years. About a seven month interval between litters. And we see upwards of six pigs per litter in those litters. So you could see the difference between Canada's pig problem and our pig problem is mathematically. That's why they haven't caught up to us yet. But Canada has learned their lessons. I've been on podcasts and, and meetings with Canadians and, and they say, we, we don't want to be Texas. We, we want to get on top of our pigs early on. So.

• 1:13:48Steven Rinella?

  One of your former colleagues, some, we both know Parker Hall.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay. I remember I, I was putting a similar question to Parker Hall about pigs and pig management. And he had an interesting perspective. He, he, he, he told me, and tell me if you disagree or disagree with this, but the way he put it to me is, he said, if it was up to the pig, right, the whole country's pig territory.

• 1:14:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Steven Rinella?

  But he said, but in, in a lot of areas, we're just able to get them.

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:14:19Steven Rinella?

  You know, a lot of it's like, if they were there, they would be vulnerable to people getting them, to finding them. Right? Like meaning in, in open, like in more open country without certain attributes. And so if you have an outbreak, there are areas where it's possible to, to, to, to go and take care of an outbreak. And that could be messing up some of his perspective. And he said, in some places, the terrain vegetation is such that you just can't get them.

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. And there's, there's public resolve, right? I mean, you've got to actually have the will to get them.

• 1:14:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  When the government had the, what we called the farm bill program, there's a feral, a wild pig eradication control pilot project. It was created by the last farm bill. They said, show us some demonstration areas where we, we can really make a difference.

• 1:15:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  And in Texas, we said, yeah, we think we could do this. We had one area right up on the Oklahoma border and Oklahoma had a site on the other side. So we're working on them from both sides of the Red River. And even with a free program, even with with all the the damage that pigs do to agriculture, only about thirty percent of the land was signed up.

• 1:15:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  So there are landowners who want to keep their hogs.

• 1:15:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:15:33Speaker 04

  And and if unless we're gonna say there's a foreign animal disease and we're gonna come on your land, whether you like it or not, we're never gonna eradicate pigs in those areas.

• 1:15:44Steven Rinella?

  This a hobby of mine, a hobby of mine is to ask landowners that I know that complain about pigs or that let us hunt pigs or whatever.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Steven Rinella?

  I'm always like, if you could, again, if you could wave a magic wand and have all the pigs be gone forever, would you do it? And I don't think I've met anyone who has yet said to me, I would waive it. The the thing is usually, I just wish there weren't as many.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's it. And and I I worked in Texas the first time when I was in the private sector. There are about a million pigs in Texas. When I when I came back, there was about three million pigs in Texas, and the difference is remarkable.

• 1:16:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  You know, if we could get them back to a million, we could we could tolerate the damage that they do, we could manage those numbers.

• 1:16:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  At three million, the the pig bomb has gone off. It's it's it's a critical mass.

• 1:16:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but something weird culturally has happened. There there's I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty in Texas around pigs, meaning there there's an industry now. There's there's like a hog hunting industry.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:16:54Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:16:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Steven Rinella?

  I think that there are a lot of people in Texas that are sort of that are justifying behaviors, motivating behaviors around pig removal, but they're rooting for the pigs.

• 1:17:06Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:17:07Steven Rinella?

  Because they've built an economy around the pigs.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  They're cropping them. Those helicopter operators will come in there and tell the landowner, we're we're helping you. But they're selling the seat at fifteen hundred dollars an hour. They got to have enough pigs to justify that guy sitting in that seat. So they're not coming back there next week to shoot them again. They're going somewhere else and doing it.

• 1:17:25Steven Rinella?

  And so but but it's the but the the narrative to the to the would be hog hunter going down to Texas is, oh, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that because they're overpopulated and we're there to help. But then you look at the guy. Guys running the outfits. I'm like, this guy doesn't want the pigs gone. This is, he's built a whole business around pigs.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  So the guy with the cornfield wants the pigs gone.

• 1:17:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 04

  And he doesn't have the habitat where the pigs are living. The habitat's over here on his neighbor and they're coming out of a canyon or they're coming out of a swamp and hitting the corn and then going back.

• 1:17:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 04

  That guy's selling hunts.

• 1:17:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  This guy has the damage.

• 1:18:01Steven Rinella?

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• 1:18:44Steven Rinella?

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• 1:19:58Steven Rinella?

  Another thing I remember learning about pigs, and maybe you know if this is still happening. Not as you'd see now and then a state would would

• 1:20:08Steven Rinella?

  seemingly counter intuitively.

• 1:20:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:20:11Steven Rinella?

  A state would come in and say, no pig hunting. Pig hunting is not allowed.

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:17Steven Rinella?

  Right. No one's allowed to hunt pigs. And he'd be like, well, why would they not want them to hunt the pigs if there's, because wouldn't it be a good idea to hunt the pigs? Because you don't want the pigs. But what they're finding is pig hunting is motivating people to bring pigs home. They have such a hell of a good time in Texas. That when they go back to Missouri, they like throw a couple of hogs in the truck. And that was the area of spread.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  Tennessee's got really good data. They've always had a hog season on the eastern side in the Appalachian Mountains.

• 1:20:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

  When they opened it up statewide, populations started popping up everywhere.

• 1:20:53Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  When they closed it on the western side of the state, those populations disappeared. People were moving hogs for that. I, I, I gotta preface my next statement with this. I'm a hunter.

• 1:21:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  First and foremost, that's at the core of who I am.

• 1:21:09Steven Rinella?

  Good to meet you.

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  That's, I'm a hunter. My wife was a taxidermist. Her whole, she, she made a living that way. I was an outfitter for 10 years, full time. My first born child is named Hunter.

• 1:21:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay, that can backfire.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Hunting has never capped a, a wild pig population anywhere in the world.

• 1:21:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:21:30Speaker 04

  They can outproduce bullets.

• 1:21:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 1:21:34Speaker 04

  So, so anybody who kills a pig is a friend of mine. But if you get to the kind of damage that we see in Texas, the kind of ecological train wreck, one thing hitting another, hitting another. There's got to be some level of control.

• 1:21:48Steven Rinella?

  Like recreational hunting is not going to dig you out of that hole.

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  And, and, and we can't barbecue our way out of the problem, right? We've got, we've got a big problem down there. It takes a concerted effort. You have to sign up multiple landowners and work at the same time. They can make a difference, but it's, it, it, it's the problem gets big.

• 1:22:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  Banning hunting, Kansas has done it. Missouri went through quite a bit, even in

• 1:22:14Steven Rinella?

  Like banning hog hunting.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  Banning hog hunting.

• 1:22:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  Is to reduce the incentive to go move pigs. And that's, that's what they're trying to do. I'm not a fan of bounties for pigs. But Alberta's got a bounty on pigs and they're using it as a way to gather data on where they are.

• 1:22:31Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  If there wasn't a bounty, then nobody would report the pigs and they'd start to get up. So somebody's going to shoot one of those hundred dollar pigs and, and now we know where that.

• 1:22:40Steven Rinella?

  You got a little pocket maybe.

• 1:22:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 04

  So there's, there's all kinds of approaches, whether you're a high density state or a low density state. And we've killed all the pigs in Washington, like three different times.

• 1:22:51Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  We killed them all. Somebody went and got them again and brought them back. And they went to the same source because the genetics match.

• 1:22:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, those genetic, those maps that show source areas.

• 1:23:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03Steven Rinella?

  That the area, I think the area around, I can't remember if it was around Dallas or around Austin.

• 1:23:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Steven Rinella?

  Seems to land a lot of pigs in certain places around the country. And there's a couple of other little hotspots where you can tell like where guys are sourcing them.

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:23:17Steven Rinella?

  And bumping them.

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:23:18Steven Rinella?

  Out of state.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, both genetics and disease wise too, right?

• 1:23:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you track the diseases.

• 1:23:22Speaker 04

  Hogs have got pseudorabies and we find Texas pigs being moved to Arizona, being moved to Colorado.

• 1:23:28Steven Rinella?

  Cause they carry that rabies with them.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  Pseudorabies, yeah.

• 1:23:30Steven Rinella?

  Got it. What, I don't understand pseudorabies.

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  Pseudorabies is the, the technical name, it's, or the, the common name, Ojuski's disease. It's a virus, it's a herpes virus that pigs have.

• 1:23:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  So once they get it, they've always got it the rest of their life.

• 1:23:43Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:23:43Speaker 04

  They got antibodies to it. But they shed that virus for like a 10 to 15 day period after they contract it. Build up the antibodies. It's fatal to piglets under three weeks of age. It's a, it'll cause abortions in Sows.

• 1:24:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  Um, but adult pigs, even, even little pigs will get over it. It's fatal to dogs.

• 1:24:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  We have hunting dogs that, that encounter pigs that are shedding the virus that die from the disease. It's, it could be fatal to wildlife.

• 1:24:13Steven Rinella?

  You want to talk about public will? Start killing off people's dogs, there'd be public will.

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, no, there's some dog owners, even hog dog owners who now don't like pigs because that was their favorite dog.

• 1:24:25Steven Rinella?

  I got a friend in, in Los Angeles, she lives in like LA, LA.

• 1:24:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Steven Rinella?

  And, uh, she's always sending me like, the other day she sends me a picture where she's got her shoes outside her door. You know, but she sends me a picture of just one shoe outside her door and out in her yard is a chewed up shoe. I'm like, are you sure? A coyote? She sends me pictures. I mean, she's, no dude, these coyotes are all over. And she says, you should come out here and trap coyotes. And I said, man, I feel like that'd be a good way to get killed. Trap coyotes in LA. And she goes, no, because people like their pets.

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Steven Rinella?

  More than they like. She says, it's flipped. It's flipped where now that I feel the threat to their pets.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Steven Rinella?

  So she said, all that goodwill to coyotes is kind of going out the window.

• 1:25:07Speaker 04

  Well, and, and I, I worked a case with the Salt Lake Police Department. They, they were working with the Denver Police Department. They thought there were some serial cat mutilators.

• 1:25:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  That were, that were, you know, cutting cats in half and the, the, the skin was cut with a sharp deal. And it was a year long investigation and they, they finally came and asked me, what do you think? And I said, well, that, that, they showed me a picture. She said, what, what killed this? I said, well, that cat doesn't have a liver or lungs and it's been fed on by a bird. They said, how do you know? Well, see where, where the, the fur's removed. They took me to a veterinarian's office where we thawed out a cat and I said, it's going to be crunched on the brisket, not on the back. And why? Well, when a cat gets attacked by a coyote, they roll over on their back and try to scratch the face. Sure enough, had puncture marks.

• 1:25:57Speaker 04

  They, over a year, they were looking for some satanic cats mutilators and it was coyotes doing it the whole time.

• 1:26:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Steven Rinella?

  I got three areas, three more areas I want to ask you about.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 1:26:11Steven Rinella?

  Cattle mutilations.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Steven Rinella?

  You know, you don't spend much time on it. I want to ask you about sort of the, what maybe is a myth, but like sort of the old like, the old kind of westerns and stuff where there was a specific wolf, a specific grizzly, a specific lion. It's wreaking havoc through the county.

• 1:26:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:26:32Steven Rinella?

  And then lastly, a little bit of a philosophical question, but let's start with, uh, let's start with the, the, the myth or not of the individual animal.

• 1:26:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:26:45Steven Rinella?

  Right. How often do you see that?

• 1:26:48Speaker 04

  Not often anymore.

• 1:26:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:26:50Speaker 04

  But when we were in the business of eradicating wolves, those last wolves were very, very hard to get.

• 1:26:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  And they became somewhat mythical. They, they, you know, they brought in multiple people after them. Uh, I went to Australia in 2003 and worked on dingoes down there.

• 1:27:07Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  And they took me to one place and they said, this dingo's been killing sheep for two years.

• 1:27:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  And the way they trap is they, they bring their dogs with them. They didn't have any commercial lure. And so the dog would go over and pee on a, a, a rock and scratch at it.

• 1:27:21Steven Rinella?

  And make the set.

• 1:27:22Speaker 04

  And they put a set right there. And they said, this, every time we set traps, the thing moves out and goes somewhere else.

• 1:27:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:27:28Speaker 04

  And so, and I looked at it and said, God, this is an old male. They said he's 80 kilometers from the next known dingo. We're inside the fence, you know? And he's 80 kilometers from the next known dingo, but we can't get him. He's legendary. I said, well, it's an old male and your dog's coming in here and peeing on that rock is, is, is a territorial challenge. He's leaving because of that.

• 1:27:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  They said, okay, wise guy. Well, what, what is going on? What, what would you do? And I, I couldn't think of it right off. I, I, I don't know what you feed a dingo in Australia. Grind up a kangaroo. Do, give him food, something.

• 1:28:05Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:28:06Speaker 04

  But it, it came to me at night, all canines like horse hoof. If you ever run a ferrier, get some horse hoof and take it home to your dog. They go crazy.

• 1:28:13Steven Rinella?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:28:15Speaker 04

  So take some horse hoof, get it wet, make a little paste out of it and, and put it in a dirt hole. They caught him the next time he came by.

• 1:28:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:28:23Speaker 04

  Instead of using a territorial marker, they were using, they, they used something else and, and they caught him right away. And he was an old male.

• 1:28:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Speaker 04

  Those old legendary animals are kinda like that, right? An old wolf that's just traveling the country, looking for females. And if you go in there and you give them a cow to eat, they're not gonna eat the cow. They're, they're looking for another female or they've been kicked out of a territory. They're a hundred miles away from another wolf pack.

• 1:28:49Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  And they're afraid of their own shadow. So they're, they're particularly hard to catch.

• 1:28:55Steven Rinella?

  Do you ever see a situation where, when you, you have those like the mythic animal and he's got a name or whatever, you know? Um, and no one can catch him and everyone blames every livestock death on the same animal?

• 1:29:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Steven Rinella?

  Do you see, do you ever see those real differences in behavior? Meaning that, let's say you're working a, there's a desert bighorn recovery project going on somewhere? And you're, you're losing desert big horns. Does it ever wind up being that it's like, oh, cat?

• 1:29:24Speaker 04

  Without a question.

• 1:29:25Steven Rinella?

  Like, oh, lion is doing that?

• 1:29:26Speaker 04

  Without question.

• 1:29:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  Uh, the individual behavior is, is the hardest thing to account for. We put, uh, California big horns on the Stansbury Mountains in Utah. And there weren't many lions there. They'd had a pretty aggressive season, but we knew there was a tom up there that we knew there was a female up there looking at the tracks. Put radios on every bighorn and, and we had kind of a three strike and you're out rule. Or two strikes in 30 days and you're out.

• 1:29:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:29:54Speaker 04

  And the tom killed almost immediately, within the first week. He killed a ewe and we could tell it was him where the sheep died. The, the, he, he was gone for about five days. He came back and killed another one. That's two strikes in 30 days. We started after him. He actually got a third sheep before we could catch him.

• 1:30:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:30:15Speaker 04

  And the day we caught him with the hounds, he was traveling with a female.

• 1:30:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  Side by side. I think he bred her that day because she had a litter afterwards. Um, but that lion we removed after three kills in like 14 days. She lived in the middle of those sheep and for the rest of the collar life, she never killed a big one.

• 1:30:37Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  And, and she's raising kittens. She's got high nutritional requirements.

• 1:30:41Steven Rinella?

  And she had the physical capability.

• 1:30:43Speaker 04

  The physical capabilities.

• 1:30:44Steven Rinella?

  Cause she killed a cow elk because she wanted to.

• 1:30:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And just the individual behavior, that Tom.

• 1:30:50Steven Rinella?

  God, that's fascinating, man.

• 1:30:50Speaker 04

  Knew where to go find a snack. Every time he got hungry, he'd go get a lion or go get a bighorn. Um, but we also see the opposite, right? For the, in those lone wolf deals, you know, this wolf's been killing here for 20 years. I bet he hadn't.

• 1:31:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:31:05Speaker 04

  They don't live that long, right?

• 1:31:07Steven Rinella?

  That's what's funny, but that's kind of what I was getting at with the mythical animal too, is you see these. Me and my, me and my buddy Brody, we've looked at some of these narratives, you know, where there's like this old bear, you know, old E frame or whatever.

• 1:31:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Steven Rinella?

  And it'd be that, that for 40 years, he terrorized this valley, you know, and it's like, I, I don't feel that that's the same bear.

• 1:31:26Speaker 04

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:31:27Steven Rinella?

  You know, he'd been, he'd been, that, that might be his grandson, right?

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Steven Rinella?

  Uh, okay. I wanted to ask you about that. Oh, cattle mutilations. You were talking, but the reason I brought that up is you were talking about having people come to you with dead animals.

• 1:31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:31:40Steven Rinella?

  And, and they're like, hey, what happened here? Right? And there's some forensics, you know, it'd be like.

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  A lot, yeah.

• 1:31:46Steven Rinella?

  Was it drug up under a bush and buried? What was eaten? How did the animal, you know, where did the predator enter the animal? What did it go after first? All that kind of stuff.

• 1:31:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:31:55Steven Rinella?

  Can tell a tale, right? Do you, when, when people come up with these, these inexplicable carcasses, uh, where they, they're like, you know, you, you get a rancher and he's like, I never seen anything like this, you know, and it was cut this way or whatever. Have you ever seen, um, have you ever seen carcasses? Where, and, and I don't want to get, I, I don't want to get in like, I'm not in any way inviting if you don't want to have like a paranormal conversation. I'm generally annoyed by the paranormal world, but have you ever seen carcasses where you're just like, I have no idea what would have done that?

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, the, the ones that I have been called to, we could explain.

• 1:32:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:32:35Speaker 04

  Um, and, and it's usually a, a multi-pronged explanation, right? This cow was killed by lightning and fed on by a bear.

• 1:32:45Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:32:45Speaker 04

  And so there's two different things going on and, and you're not getting the same signal that, you, you know, there's,

• 1:32:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Speaker 04

  there's that, but there are things in cattle mutilations that I read about that I've not seen. Like the tongue missing.

• 1:32:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  Just the tongue missing. You, you know, rigor mortis sets in pretty fast.

• 1:33:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that jaw's locked.

• 1:33:04Speaker 04

  Hard to get in that. How did that happen? I, I don't know that I can explain that, but that's not what I've seen.

• 1:33:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Speaker 04

  Um, I investigated a, a suspected wolf kill right on the Utah Wyoming border and a cow. And that cow had hemorrhaging right above her hocks.

• 1:33:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:22Speaker 04

  Yearling, uh, heifer come off the mountain and big hole in it. And, and, and when we skinned the cow, that's the only bruising that we found. I think the darn thing was killed by team ropers.

• 1:33:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you're kidding me.

• 1:33:39Speaker 04

  You know, and some cowboy was out there practicing and,

• 1:33:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:33:43Speaker 04

  jerked her down too hard or something, but there was, there was just no other bruising.

• 1:33:48Steven Rinella?

  When you were saying like hemorrhaging there, I didn't know if you meant like bit up. You mean just under skin bleeding?

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  Skin bleeding.

• 1:33:54Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:33:54Speaker 04

  But it, it was in a straight line on both legs at the same point.

• 1:33:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  What the hell, man?

• 1:33:59Steven Rinella?

  Someone having some.

• 1:33:59Speaker 04

  Somebody's going, oh, it wasn't me, but.

• 1:34:01Steven Rinella?

  Someone having some fun and got a little rough.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:04Steven Rinella?

  No kidding.

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  That, so there's, there's, you know, everything I've seen, I've been able to explain is, is multiple.

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  Uh, most cases, multiple explanations, you know, carrying fed on its carrying, but killed by something else.

• 1:34:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  Lightning kills are the hardest ones to explain because there'll be four of them dead under a tree.

• 1:34:25Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You know, earlier I mentioned to you something, uh, I, I made a joke about if you're doing wild hog work for sea turtles.

• 1:34:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:35Steven Rinella?

  You're gonna have, you're gonna have a high level of buy-in.

• 1:34:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:34:39Steven Rinella?

  Public buy-in.

• 1:34:39Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:34:40Steven Rinella?

  You know, because people, I don't want to use the word fetishize. I'm not thinking the right word, but, but there's, you know, there's strong public sentiment about turtles.

• 1:34:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:34:50Steven Rinella?

  Sea turtles, right? Like people being like, oh, I don't want to use a drinking straw because of it might get a sea turtle. People are very aware of sea turtle issues. And then pigs are easy to vilify. So if you're doing hog removal to save endangered sea turtles, you're going to find like high public acceptance, not universal, but high public acceptance. I would say in other cases where you have, um, you know, an imperiled or an ESA protected species and you're doing predator work, you have not as much as sea turtle work, but you're still going to have a high level of acceptance, you know? Um, for me personally,

• 1:35:29Steven Rinella?

  people will say, well, you're just killing coyotes. So you can have more antelope to hunt. And I'm like, my response to that is,

• 1:35:45Steven Rinella?

  yes, there's more to it, but yes, I'm, I'm okay with that. Right? I'm okay with that.

• 1:35:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Steven Rinella?

  Um, I'm okay with the idea that if we have a big game species that people like to hunt, rely on, has cultural value, and if it's going down and you can do predator work to help recover it and bring the numbers back up, because there's a strong social interest in having high numbers and you're not having long-term negative population impacts on the predator, in my mind, I'm like, yes, guilty as charged. Like I, I don't think that that is bad.

• 1:36:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:25Steven Rinella?

  A negative thing to do. What has been your view on that? Like through your career? If, if you're doing endangered turtles, do you feel more invigorated around the work? You know, than you would in, in helping a guy out that wants more deer? Like, how have you generally looked at it throughout your career?

• 1:36:41Speaker 04

  Um, somebody once famously said, if public opinion was all that mattered, California would have nothing but predators and North Dakota wouldn't have any.

• 1:36:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  Public opinion is just part of the equation. You gotta have the social license to do what you do.

• 1:36:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  Beyond that, though, I'm looking at it in the context of habitat.

• 1:37:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:03Speaker 04

  So if there is available habitat and if we as a group through our game department say we want 10,000 deer on the Manti skyline, then we should work towards getting 10,000 deer on the Manti skyline.

• 1:37:16Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:16Speaker 04

  That, that's an objective that's set through a public process and all the rest.

• 1:37:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 04

  I've had people in Texas ask me to protect their deer and their ranch is overgrazed and they're feeding deer to keep them alive.

• 1:37:29Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  And that's not the problem, right?

• 1:37:32Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  Protecting their deer might be the reason it's so overgrazed or they got a browse line.

• 1:37:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Speaker 04

  And so i- if it's in the context of the habitat and if we have the social license, our game department has said, we want this, or, or we have a landlord who's conscientious about meeting their objectives, absolutely.

• 1:37:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:52Speaker 04

  We should be deciding what that looks like and then moving towards that goal. We had a, um, internal parasite wipe out the pronghorn in West Texas.

• 1:38:04Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:04Speaker 04

  They had to do transplants to bring them back in. And the first couple of years of transplants were horrible because the predators were eating all the, the fawns.

• 1:38:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Speaker 04

  We went in there and started removing those fawns, uh, removing those predators.

• 1:38:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:18Speaker 04

  Bobcats actually were a big predator on, on pronghorn.

• 1:38:21Steven Rinella?

  Is that right? That's hard to picture.

• 1:38:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, out in the flats, but they're pretty good at it. Um. And once we did that, we got the herds back up. We talked about when do you start predator management? You've got to have a exit strategy too. When do you stop? If we do it for five years and we haven't moved the needle, maybe we'll go somewhere else.

• 1:38:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41Speaker 04

  If we've done it and we get to where we're 80% of carrying capacity or 80% of our objective, then maybe we can leave that herd alone and go somewhere else. So you've got to have an exit strategy for this too. And that's, that's, you know, should be done in the planning process. We'll do this for this long or until we see these results.

• 1:39:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And you're, um, you're, you work in the private sector now?

• 1:39:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yep.

• 1:39:06Steven Rinella?

  And who are your clients?

• 1:39:08Speaker 04

  So I'm working on a research project with Safari Club Foundation right now. We're putting radio collars on lines and putting cameras out in West Texas, trying, South Texas as well. Trying to get a handle on, on lion populations, you know, the research-

• 1:39:22Steven Rinella?

  Descriptive, like what's out there?

• 1:39:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, distribution and abundance, basically. Um, lions in South Texas are fascinating. They, they just use the riverine corridors.

• 1:39:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:39:32Speaker 04

  So I'm, I'm going to pick a number and I'm, I guarantee it's wrong, but we might only have a hundred lions in South Texas. But we may only have habitat for a hundred lions in South Texas. They're very limited in their distribution.

• 1:39:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:39:46Speaker 04

  And habitat fragmentation is more of a risk than hunting or anything else. Oil fields and power lines, everything tends to disrupt some of that. Uh, landowners selling big ranches into smaller ranches. That's a problem. Um, I'm working with the outfitters association in Canadian province to try and get some of the predator management back into their wildlife management scheme, whether it's stuff that the outfitters themselves are doing as individual outfitters, you know, they've got, they've got regulated territories. Not everybody can go to the same place. So this outfitter can say, hey, look, I want, I want more elk. I want to reduce my wolves. Well, what does that look like?

• 1:40:27Speaker 04

  Just again, shoot one in November or are you actually going to go out there and target the pack? So, so we're building some, some strategies there. I'm working for some individual landowners in Texas that, that have got- Mostly high fence properties and the predators are impacting their genetic selection. These guys are farming deer essentially.

• 1:40:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they're farming deer.

• 1:40:51Speaker 04

  They're outside, they're inside the fence, but they're, they're, they're free roaming inside the fence, but they've invested in the genetics.

• 1:40:59Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:59Speaker 04

  And that's, that's a little different than just the capacity. We, we still crop that herd pretty heavily. We got 80, 90 fawns per 100 does. You better be shooting a lot of does this fall because we can't feed that many deer on the landscape. But we're protecting the genetics and letting them decide rather than the coyotes decide which fawns to, to get, so.

• 1:41:19Steven Rinella?

  How do, how do people find you?

• 1:41:22Speaker 04

  Uh, word of mouth a lot. I mean, I, I had a, a pretty good following when I was with USDA. A lot of landowners know who I am. So I, I work with Texas Farm Bureau and sheep and goat raisers on, on some of that. So some of those landowners already know me.

• 1:41:36Steven Rinella?

  So if there was some dude, some landowner somewhere and he wanted to talk to you about a problem he had, or if he, trying to figure out if he has a problem, he'd just type in Mike Bodenchuk and he'd find you?

• 1:41:45Speaker 04

  He probably would, yeah. There's, there's a lot there on the, not all of those flattering either. The, the animal rights activists know how to find you too.

• 1:41:53Steven Rinella?

  They got your name?

• 1:41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Steven Rinella?

  Well, man, I sure appreciate you coming on and talking about all this stuff.

• 1:41:58Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. No, predators are, are, are my life's work and, and understanding how it works is probably important. You know, a lot of sportsmen want to do something, but what you do is, is critical.

• 1:42:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I think that's all fascinating. Yeah. I'd like to have you back on in the future.

• 1:42:12Speaker 04

  Good, yeah.

• 1:42:12Steven Rinella?

  Just, you gotta keep a little run and tab of stuff to talk about. When you get up to six or seven, let me know.

• 1:42:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:42:18Steven Rinella?

  All right, all right. Mike Bodenchuk, Michael Bodenchuk, what do you go by?

• 1:42:21Speaker 04

  Mike, Mike.

• 1:42:22Steven Rinella?

  Mike, Mike Bodenchuk, thanks, man.

• 1:42:23Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:42:24Steven Rinella?

  Great.

• 1:42:51Steven Rinella?

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