Ep. 838: How To Translate Animal Language

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with naturalist, writer, and sculptor George Bumann https://www.georgebumann.com/gb/, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylore, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: George's book, Eavesdropping On Animals https://www.georgebumann.com/gb/eavesdropping-on-animals/; Animal vocalizations; subscribe to the new Bear Grease YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/bearhuntingmagazine; laws on game retrieval; just how pungent skunk odor really is; stay tuned for MeatEater TV's new "12 in 26" hunt series https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterTV, starting with Jani's Manitoba bear episode; how absurd it is that guys called better than turkeys themselves; what various raven calls mean; how the birds gossip about everything; wolf howling and squirrel chirping translations; all the animals are talking about and know you; silence as the most important alarm that exists; The 2026 Yellowstone Summit https://www.yellowstonesummit.com/; 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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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Steven Rinella?

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• 1:14Steven Rinella?

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• 1:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:51Speaker 04

  We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 1:54Steven Rinella?

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• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  Today, we're joined by, uh, what did I say? Joined? Joined by George Buman, who's a sculptor, a bronze artist. He's a naturalist, but here's the main deal for our, for our purposes here. He's an animal language and animal intelligence expert. Teaches courses on the intelligence of animals. Will go to, does, does things in Yellowstone National Park, uh, leads seminars there of helping people understand what they're hearing, what they're seeing about how animals do their business. He's got a new book called Eavesdropping on Animals. What we can learn from wildlife conversations. Um, we're gonna dive in on all that, but just as a little tickler.

• 3:01Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with, you don't even need to say a word. Okay, now listen, listen, this is, this is George Buman. No Brody Verify.

• 3:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:12Steven Rinella?

  No diaphragm in his mouth.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  Nope, no animals in the studio.

• 3:16Steven Rinella?

  No animals in the studio. We have some bronze, Pete, we have a bronze piece. We have like the makings of a bronze piece in the studio. So that turkey right there, tap that turkey so people realize that's not, okay, that's not, that turkey is not making this noise. Okay, hit us with, okay. Hit, hit us with the, hit us with some turkey vocalizations. No, no, this is just, just flat out, okay?

• 3:42Speaker 05

  All right.

• 3:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay, hit us with some coyotes way off.

• 4:06Steven Rinella?

  You got a good wolf howl?

• 4:08Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:11Steven Rinella?

  Let's hear a wolf.

• 4:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh dude. Can you do a good elk way off bugle? Yanni does a good bugle, but his Yanni's bugle is miles away.

• 4:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, mine might be miles away.

• 4:32Steven Rinella?

  Him with a good mile, way off elk.

• 4:44Steven Rinella?

  That's a lot closer than Yanni's.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 4:45Steven Rinella?

  Yanni's is like, you can't even tell if you heard it or not.

• 4:47Speaker 06

  Right. We're wondering.

• 4:49Steven Rinella?

  You got any good magpie vocalizations? Ravens, anything?

• 4:54Speaker 06

  Ravens, for sure.

• 4:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 06

  They're one of my favorites. They've got a lot of, lot of range, a lot of meaning there.

• 5:06Steven Rinella?

  Let me, yeah, well, I want to talk a bunch about those guys because, man, they make some crazy ass noises and it can't be just them making noises for no reason.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  Oh, no. No, no, no.

• 5:14Steven Rinella?

  Uh, okay, here's a real challenging one. Just, just tell me if you can't do it. I wish I could. Can you, like, this test your whistling skills? Can you hit a black, can you do a black cap chickadee?

• 5:25Speaker 06

  Hmm, not to my satisfaction. Yeah, they're, they're starting to do it now, too.

• 5:32Speaker 06

  Not good.

• 5:32Steven Rinella?

  Nah, nah, that's a tough one. But you know what? How good it works, though?

• 5:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:35Steven Rinella?

  Because people that can do it can bring them in like crazy. Well, that's pretty good.

• 5:40Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 5:43Steven Rinella?

  Damn.

• 5:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:45Steven Rinella?

  All right, all right, we're gonna get it off. And now that, but what like, like, here's the main thing I want, one of the main things I want to talk to you about when we get to, I gotta do a couple of announcements. Is not just the noises, but like,

• 5:59Steven Rinella?

  there's the what, like, what they're talking about.

• 6:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, it means stuff.

• 6:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 06

  It can show you things you would never, ever have found before.

• 6:07Steven Rinella?

  They obviously mean stuff, but like,

• 6:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:09Steven Rinella?

  because they're not doing it for fun.

• 6:11Speaker 06

  No.

• 6:12Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it might be fun, but they're not, you know what I mean?

• 6:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what it all means. One of the main, the first thing, just so you know what's gonna come, one of the first things I'm gonna ask you about is, um, you know, a pine scrolls pissed off noise or whatever his noise is?

• 6:26Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I can't do it real good, but there's a ton of meaning in that.

• 6:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 06

  Ton, yeah.

• 6:33Steven Rinella?

  You know, he's pissed at his buddy.

• 6:35Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 6:36Steven Rinella?

  He's pissed at you.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  This to the bobcat. Yeah.

• 6:42Steven Rinella?

  Uh, okay, uh, real quick. So there's a new YouTube, the Bear Grease YouTube channel is becoming its own thing. Little behind the scenes thing here. Clay, Clay started a YouTube channel a million years ago and it was like the Bear Journal or cause when Clay owned Bear Hunting Magazine, he had, it had a YouTube channel. So it's always been kind of lurking around there. That YouTube channel is going to stay like that's Clay's baby, but Clay and Bear Nukem are going to build out the Bear Grease YouTube channel. So all about them making them little bows out of sticks, hunting content, mule content, cooking stuff. Okay. And they're also launching their own Instagram page around Bear Grease.

• 7:24Steven Rinella?

  Um, and I'll tell you, we haven't even gotten into, I might be the first guy to ever mention this.

• 7:32Steven Rinella?

  Clay's book that's coming out in a long time from now is exceptionally good.

• 7:37Steven Rinella?

  Right. It's good. I mean, I've only read the first five chapters. It's, it's a book. It's a, it's a book. It's like a history of the black bear. It is good. Um, including a large chapter on the circumpolar bear culture.

• 7:54Steven Rinella?

  I don't know if I can, I'm allowed to, yeah, why not? Clay just, it's, he's turning his book in right now. The circumpolar bear culture is crazy because there's like a latitude band all around the continent. So it touches North America, Europe, Asia.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  All around the northern hemisphere.

• 8:12Steven Rinella?

  It's, yeah, it's a band of latitudes, a northern, northern latitudes.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 8:18Steven Rinella?

  All around the globe. And if you think about the human diaspora, like how people spread around the world, these are people that split. There's people within this that split apart way long ago. Like, meaning if you imagine, like imagine as humans, like humans are kind of in

• 8:39Steven Rinella?

  the Middle East, humans are in Africa, you know, humans are up in Spain, wherever. And, and eventually some of them come around and wind up in Siberia and some come around and wind up in northern Europe. Now by this point, they haven't been hanging out together for tens of thousands of years. Right? But.

• 9:00Steven Rinella?

  You look at their religious structures and sort of like spiritual understandings of bears and you have this circumpolar bear culture where people that wouldn't have no interaction with each other develop or no interaction with each other for thousands and thousands of years, develop the same sort of religious understandings of bears.

• 9:23Steven Rinella?

  And how bears fit into their culture and the shamanistic aspects and like motivations that are assigned to bears and you cannot explain it.

• 9:33Steven Rinella?

  How some dude in Siberia, some dude in North America, some dude in Europe have the same concept.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 9:41Steven Rinella?

  Of like how you treat a bear. When you hunt for a bear, what are your obligations to the bear? That you definitely don't want a bear to see you once it's dead. So if you kill a bear, you approach it from behind. Like these dudes are on the same trip all over the, do you know what I'm saying?

• 9:56Speaker 06

  Wild.

• 9:57Steven Rinella?

  No, it's so weird, man. Um, I hope he's not pissed that I'm bringing that up.

• 10:04Speaker 06

  Does he have the bear mother story in there? Is that, that one that goes all over northern hemisphere?

• 10:09Steven Rinella?

  If it's all over, it's in there. He's got every damn thing in there.

• 10:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:12Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 10:13Speaker 06

  That's neat.

• 10:14Steven Rinella?

  No, it's a super cool book. Available a long time from now. So the Bear Grease YouTube channel be run by Bear and Clay Newcomb.

• 10:23Steven Rinella?

  Um, yeah. Oh, February 11th, two days before I turn 52. Very auspicious day. Uh, corrections.

• 10:39Steven Rinella?

  Here's a great correction. We're gonna start a thing where you win a prize for, you know, we're trying to like in an age of disinformation.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:47Steven Rinella?

  Shady information.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:49Steven Rinella?

  We're trying to, um, we're gonna have a weekly prize.

• 10:55Steven Rinella?

  Called correction of the week.

• 10:57Speaker 06

  For the biggest fib.

• 10:58Steven Rinella?

  So, no, rewarding people who catch us being wrong.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Uh, that's a good thing.

• 11:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, check this out. For instance, their dad made a comment, and that was, this is me talking about stuff I didn't know well.

• 11:11Steven Rinella?

  He even has the thirty seven minute mark at episode eight twenty six. What was that episode called?

• 11:17Speaker 07

  Um.

• 11:18Steven Rinella?

  Skunk smells are first. No, that wasn't it.

• 11:21Speaker 07

  Uh, how skunks can ruin a marriage.

• 11:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay. I said, oh, to my defense, I'm still, this is still a correction. To my defense, I said, I don't think that a human, operating word here being, I said, I, on the subject of skunks and skunk essence. I said, I don't think that a human can make.

• 11:50Steven Rinella?

  Then I didn't finish quite, then I, okay. I said, I don't think that a human could make, I don't think in a lab you could make as pugnacious or resilient of an odor in a laboratory.

• 12:06Steven Rinella?

  Guy wrote in. He's like, you're way wrong.

• 12:12Steven Rinella?

  They can't, humans can and have, and he gets into some of these odors. While the skunk odor is due to theles, mercaptains, sulfur containing compounds, he says. There are other compounds, both synthesized and isolated in laboratories that smell much worse.

• 12:32Speaker 06

  I like this one.

• 12:33Steven Rinella?

  Cadaver. They have a lab based odor called cadaverine.

• 12:39Steven Rinella?

  Which is a lab produced odor of decaying flesh.

• 12:46Steven Rinella?

  They have pyridine, putrescine. And what he regards to be the worst smell of all time, thiocitrate. A odor so potent it causes nausea, vomiting and unconsciousness. There was a lab leak.

• 13:07Steven Rinella?

  There was a lab leak in Germany where they had, they had a lab leak of thiocyanate in Germany and for a half mile radius around the lab. People reported nausea, vomiting and unconsciousness from a leak. Powerful. And what do they use that for usually? I don't know why. I don't know how they justify their work. Geez. I don't know how they, that's a great question. This would be one of those things we talk about ridiculous, maybe when you're like hacking on science, be like the dumb stuff they spent money on. Right. Making bad smells. Yeah, what's the point? All right, so I stay corrected. That's a good correction right there, man.

• 13:52Steven Rinella?

  I said, this is the kind of correction. What, what would be the prize when you get correction of the week? It's gotta be something good, but it's gotta be like, we have a lot of it.

• 13:59Speaker 07

  We're gonna, maybe this-

• 14:00Steven Rinella?

  We gotta have fifty-two of them.

• 14:02Speaker 07

  Maybe this will excite people more. Um, so we will have a segment sponsored by Tacovas. Tacovas is-

• 14:12Steven Rinella?

  Well, they're gonna do the correction of the week.

• 14:14Speaker 07

  They are sponsoring-

• 14:15Steven Rinella?

  And you get a pair of shit kickers?

• 14:16Speaker 07

  Correction of the week and we will choose the winning correction of the week for, we'll do this for about a month at first to see and the correction of the week winner gets a pair of Tacovas.

• 14:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so we're gonna start out, you get a pair of shit kickers and then, but we'll come up with something comparable every time.

• 14:36Speaker 07

  Sure, yep.

• 14:37Steven Rinella?

  That's phenomenal.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  So send in your, your corrections.

• 14:42Steven Rinella?

  This would be, this would be a great, this would be a great one. I say, and again, I said, think, I say, you can't make something worse than that in the lab. Guys are like, yeah, you can. Here's another correction. He calls it a correction by omission, but I'd like to correct him.

• 14:59Steven Rinella?

  It's not a correction by omission. It's just a correction. So I don't think he'd win.

• 15:05Steven Rinella?

  Because like, he's saying, hey, here's a correction by omission. And then when I tell you the correction, you realize it's not a correction. It's just a correction.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 15:14Steven Rinella?

  He's just trying to soup it up. I said, we were talking about retrieval laws. We're talking about that in different states.

• 15:23Steven Rinella?

  You have these different governing laws about whether you can go and get retrieved game. Okay, so picture that you're sitting there. Uh, you're sitting there and you, you, you, you shoot a duck, you know, ducks flying overhead. And you shoot a duck and, and all of a sudden he like sails off and plump lands over on the neighbor's place. States clarify, all states have clarified, like, what are, what are you allowed to do? Some states, you can just flat out go get it. Um, there's a state where you can leave your gun behind and go fetch it. And there are states like the one I'm sitting in right now. You have no right or authority to go fetch it.

• 16:09Steven Rinella?

  You'd have to go take it up with the landowner and be like, listen, man, I sailed a duck over on your place. Can I go grab it? And as terrible as it sounds, I mean, I, I'm totally like, I, I, I'm like totally fine with that rule.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 16:21Steven Rinella?

  But I would like to think that most landowners would, would,

• 16:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  when approached facilitate the recovery. I understand. I'm not condemning the rules. I understand that there are situations where someone could set up in a way where they just basically know that that's going to be the outcome.

• 16:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it could be abused for sure, especially with big game, I feel like.

• 16:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, where you're hunting in a spot where yours is, if you're sitting there going like, well, yeah, I know it's going to run on the neighbor's place, but I'm allowed to go get it. So that doesn't matter like that. That's probably, that could be potentially problematic. He points out, so I say in, in South Dakota, how it's legal to retrieve upland game such as pheasants without landowner permission. Okay.

• 17:12Steven Rinella?

  But you gotta be unarmed. We clarified that.

• 17:14Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 17:14Steven Rinella?

  Meaning you hit a pheasant, you hit a pheasant, he sails off on the neighbor's place in South Dakota. You lean your shotgun, whatever, set your shotgun down, you run over and fetch it. He pointed out, and he says that it was correction by omission. He points out, you can't do that with big game. Isn't that weird?

• 17:33Speaker 05

  Strange. Yeah. But I think it might, because South Dakota has that rule where you can hunt in the ditch alongside roads.

• 17:40Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  It's like a right of way.

• 17:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  So I think a lot of those birds that get shot end up 10 yards on to, you know, where you're not permitted to go.

• 17:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they're doing it because of the rule that you can ditch hunt.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I, that's what I think.

• 17:57Steven Rinella?

  You know, but you can't, yeah, so just you can't, you can't, you can chase a pheasant, but you can't chase a deer.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  But if a buck sprung up out of that ditch.

• 18:05Steven Rinella?

  And you are allowed to have your dog run over and fetch it. But check this out. Let's say your dog runs over to fetch it. Flushes a pheasant. This is what this guy's saying. If he's wrong, send in a correction and he'll have to give you a prize.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 18:20Steven Rinella?

  For correcting him. Um.

• 18:25Steven Rinella?

  If your dog runs over onto a, let's say you're hunting, you're ditch hunting.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 18:32Steven Rinella?

  And your dog runs onto some dude's place and flushes a bird off that dude's place. And that bird then flies over you on the right of way, you can't shoot the bird.

• 18:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 18:44Steven Rinella?

  Because your dog can go retrieve, but he can't go hunt.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 18:50Steven Rinella?

  And that's basically having a dog with a shotgun.

• 18:58Steven Rinella?

  Here's another skunk story. That was a bad segue.

• 19:05Steven Rinella?

  This guy says this, this last week I had been skinning a skunk that caught a coyote trap. I wasn't really paying attention when I accidentally poked a hole in its scent gland after realizing the terrible crime. Oh, we're done with corrections now, right? Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  This is, yeah, this is just a story.

• 19:20Steven Rinella?

  This is a story. Okay. After realizing the terrible crime I had just committed, I put the skunk outside to let things air out. So he was skinning the inside.

• 19:31Steven Rinella?

  An hour later, the cops showed up, well, local police showed up at my house. To inform me that there was a terrible smell coming from my house. To the point that the local middle school had to go into lockdown. Because they thought kids were smoking massive amounts of weed. He used the word marijuana.

• 19:54Steven Rinella?

  They even had the fire department come to the school to test the air for toxins.

• 20:01Steven Rinella?

  Now, my whole town has been talking about me and referring to me as skunk boy.

• 20:11Steven Rinella?

  I don't think the smell was that bad, but I'm not sure what to do because I make a homemade skunk-based lure that I use to catch all my predators. Do I, oh, here it goes into a question. This becomes like a, like a.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  Advice.

• 20:23Steven Rinella?

  Advice. This is becoming an advice column. Do I stop making it and risk being less successful? He's load, he's, he's leading the witness.

• 20:34Steven Rinella?

  He, he asks, he asks, do I stop making it? And risk being less successful on the trap line? Or do I keep making it in secret and hope there isn't another incident? I think that there is a middle ground.

• 20:51Steven Rinella?

  Hunter Gregory. See, here's the evidence that naming your kid Hunter doesn't backfire.

• 20:56Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 20:56Steven Rinella?

  His name's Hunter. Didn't backfire.

• 21:00Steven Rinella?

  No one names their kid Fisherman.

• 21:02Speaker 05

  Angler.

• 21:03Speaker 07

  Angler?

• 21:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  They probably do that. I don't know. I've never heard it.

• 21:08Steven Rinella?

  No one names their kid Sports Person.

• 21:11Steven Rinella?

  Outdoors Person. His name's Hunter. Didn't backfire. Obviously, he's, obviously, he's like neck deep in the disciplines. Um, he's from, uh. I'm not gonna give his last name.

• 21:27Steven Rinella?

  I think you gotta take this whole operation elsewhere.

• 21:32Steven Rinella?

  If it depends, you have the right, well.

• 21:37Steven Rinella?

  What's that machine? We want to get the founder of this machine on?

• 21:41Speaker 07

  Oh, the uh.

• 21:41Steven Rinella?

  Nasal radar, right nasal radar. We're calling it radar, but the nasal, there's a machine that they use that quantifies bad smells. You know about this?

• 21:50Speaker 05

  No.

• 21:51Steven Rinella?

  Called the nasal radar. I was saying nasal radar, but I was misreading it. That's a correction. The nasal radar. It's like when you get a, oh nasal ranger. Okay, nasal ranger. When you get a smell complaint.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  Like some dude skinning skunks. It's so subjective.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:11Steven Rinella?

  Right? It's like, well.

• 22:12Speaker 05

  It might not bother you at all.

• 22:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like the lady over there thinks it smells too bad. The guy over here, he doesn't think it smells that bad. So it doesn't smell that bad. The nasal ranger is a machine that you put on your nose. It looks like an elk bugle with, with contraptions coming off it.

• 22:30Steven Rinella?

  Can you pull this up, Phil? Just so people can see.

• 22:32Speaker 07

  If Corinne sends it to me, I can. Yeah.

• 22:34Steven Rinella?

  You don't have a little computer over there?

• 22:36Speaker 05

  And what's it do it?

• 22:37Speaker 07

  I do, but I, I don't have a picture. I guess I could just Google it.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  It tells you how bad you think it should smell?

• 22:42Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no. The nasal ranger, I watched this whole video about it.

• 22:46Speaker 07

  This looks insane. Okay, yeah.

• 22:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay, like, let's say someone's like, dude, the hog farm next to my place is killing me. It smells so bad. And he winds up being like, well, according to who? The nasal ranger, you, you, it looks like an elk bugle that hooks to your nose. There's a little nose cup. But it's got filters and shit coming off it. Okay? You go out there and there's a meter that shows like what it, it, okay, right there. It looks like if a cop was.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:18Steven Rinella?

  Clocking you.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  Nasal radar.

• 23:20Steven Rinella?

  You would think that if you saw this, you would think a cop is smelling how fast your car is going. Okay?

• 23:28Speaker 07

  There's a whole article in the New York Times from a few years ago about the founder.

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  I'm obsessed with these things.

• 23:33Speaker 05

  But what is it like?

• 23:34Steven Rinella?

  I'm getting to that, but I want to tell you, like, I want one so bad. Because I want to be able to use it in arguments with my wife.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, be like, see, it's not so bad.

• 23:43Steven Rinella?

  When she sends me one of her, like, twice a year, I can't live like this. Okay.

• 23:49Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, we can, we can invest in one, just like we did the Warner Bratzler Sheer Force. They're less expensive. Scientific. Oh, way less expensive.

• 23:58Steven Rinella?

  Like, we bought that, and I don't know, maybe we spent too much money on that thing for how much we needed it.

• 24:05Speaker 07

  We're gonna keep trying to get our money's worth.

• 24:09Speaker 04

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• 24:38Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. 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 got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

• 25:18Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. 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.

• 26:02Steven Rinella?

  I've seen it and that's why I like Athletic Greens. Now AG1 is already the standard for daily foundational nutrition. AG1 Pro is what's next. It's built for people who don't want to stop there. Creatine, CAHMB, advanced gut lining support. On top of everything AG1 Next Gen already delivers, you can get it in travel packs. One travel pack, 10 to 12 ounces of cold water every morning. If you're already taking creatine separately, AG1 Pro simplifies your stack. One thing in the morning covers more than your current routine might for less than a dollar more per serving. AG1 Pro supports protein synthesis, helps reduce protein breakdown and supports muscle

• 26:46Steven Rinella?

  recovery and consistent training performance. Visit drinkag1.com/meateater and get an AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit. Again, that's drinkag1.com/meateater. Grab yours now. Okay, here's my, here's my wife. My wife has this to say to me.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  She's gonna have a lot more to say to you after you put this in a podcast.

• 27:16Steven Rinella?

  My wife says this.

• 27:17Speaker 07

  I think it's $2,000, by the way.

• 27:20Steven Rinella?

  It's 2,000 bucks.

• 27:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 27:22Steven Rinella?

  Little background on my wife. My wife has always worked. She worked all through having babies. She's taking time off of work. And then she now she's like, now that she doesn't have babies, she's not working. She doesn't know what people do with themselves. So it's great. She started trying. She's like, I'm gonna try to learn how to play tennis. Totally great. Started baking.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 27:44Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I am at tennis and can't figure out why my ankles are so itchy. I have small itchy bumps on both ankles. If you brought fleas into our house because of the things you trapped, you need to figure that out now, like before work. I am not going to live like this.

• 28:04Speaker 07

  I love you, Katie.

• 28:07Steven Rinella?

  Right? I get these all the time. A lot of times they have to do with offensive orders. And if I had a nasal ranger,

• 28:15Steven Rinella?

  I would be able to be like, well, let's check.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  You could avoid confrontation.

• 28:20Steven Rinella?

  I would be like, let's see, is it offensive or not? Let's take the subjectivity out of it.

• 28:25Speaker 07

  We'd need to make content out of it.

• 28:27Steven Rinella?

  Well, let's measure.

• 28:28Speaker 07

  I'm gonna talk to your CFO about getting.

• 28:30Speaker 05

  The subjectivity is the hard part, man.

• 28:32Steven Rinella?

  That's what the nasal ranger.

• 28:33Speaker 06

  I think it might end up backfiring on you. So you can, you can put any kind of ranger on that you want.

• 28:38Steven Rinella?

  I'll be like, well, you know what? It's actually not offensive. Cause I hit it with the nasal ranger and it's within, it's within.

• 28:44Speaker 06

  Acceptable limits.

• 28:46Steven Rinella?

  It's within acceptable. So now the nasal ranger, you hook it to your nose. And so let's say someone's like, comes to you with a, they're complaining about how something smells. And they go, just smell.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 28:57Steven Rinella?

  Well, people don't breathe that way.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 29:00Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's not fair. You don't, no one comes around going.

• 29:06Speaker 05

  Not, not, just last week I was, uh, I'd already boiled this coyote skull for Hayden.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Um, but it need a little touch up. There were some things that were still hanging on there.

• 29:18Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  And my wife left. I was like, I'm just gonna do it on the stove.

• 29:22Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Hundred percent.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  I didn't smell a thing. But when she got back.

• 29:27Steven Rinella?

  She smelled it.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I was just like, it smells a little like boiling meat. That's all.

• 29:32Steven Rinella?

  Exactly.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  Did you ever do cold water maceration to clean up skulls? Ooh.

• 29:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  We'd clean out the whole university building that way.

• 29:40Steven Rinella?

  That's, that is its own kind of, that is a crazy odor.

• 29:44Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 29:45Steven Rinella?

  The nasal ranger, you put it up to your nose and it, there's a little meter that shows that you're inhaling normally. So you can't go in and not breathe.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 29:56Steven Rinella?

  And say like, I don't smell nothing because you're not breathing. And you can't go in and over smell.

• 30:03Steven Rinella?

  It, it makes it that you're hitting like a baseline, normal breathing. And it's got these contraptions on it that are sucking in the air. And it's throwing out a calibrated offensive measurement. So you can apply a number to when something reeks.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 30:24Steven Rinella?

  So let's say someone in the summer, some guy hits deer and it's out by your house or whatever, and it's crawling maggots. And someone's like, my God, that smells. Imagine if you could just go, yeah, it's a five.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 30:35Steven Rinella?

  And apply a number to a thing that is just entirely subjective.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  I have a feeling that with fifty years of a life lived, you know, breaking down animals, smelling everything there is to smell, I have a feeling that the nasal ranger will skew towards the gen pop. And probably, I think it'll, I think everything you are completely deadened to will read as offensive to most people.

• 30:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's why I need a nasal ranger.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  I'm saying, I'm saying with a nasal ranger.

• 31:03Speaker 05

  You can tweak the settings a little bit. So it's like, yeah, so it comes out in your favor.

• 31:08Steven Rinella?

  Oh yeah, like hack into the software or whatever to make it like not, cause yeah, cause what if it backfires and my, and your wife's like, no dude.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  This is as high as it goes.

• 31:17Steven Rinella?

  It's an eleven.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 31:18Steven Rinella?

  It's an eleven.

• 31:20Speaker 05

  You're like, that's not.

• 31:21Steven Rinella?

  Anyway, so this guy making this lure and I understand. But I don't know why in the world you're making that next to the school. It's like, I feel like you have a right to do it, but take the operation elsewhere.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, he did puncture the gland, which I'm sure made it

• 31:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, well, he

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Hundred times worse.

• 31:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so he probably knows if he's making this lure, he knows that you go down to Murdochs. And you go into the veterinarian care aisle. And you get one of them large gauge. Hypodermic needles. I mean, the kind of needle you can look through the son of a bitch, you know what I mean? You get one of those heavy gauge veterinarian needles that they use to inject cattle with. Put that into there and

• 32:06Steven Rinella?

  suck that smell out elsewhere.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 32:08Steven Rinella?

  Not at home. Then you mix it in with your Vaseline or your petroleum jelly, whatever you're putting into it. So you got a skunk base paste. Elsewhere. Out in the woods.

• 32:20Steven Rinella?

  Here's another tip you might want to know about, and I, I was turned on to this one. It works very well. Get yourself a big sack kitty litter.

• 32:29Steven Rinella?

  Get yourself one of those small action packers or whatever you want to use. I don't care.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  This tub.

• 32:33Steven Rinella?

  Five gallon bucket, whatever. Fill it with kitty litter. Once you make your lure.

• 32:39Steven Rinella?

  Deep six it in that cat litter.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  Deep six the lure in there.

• 32:45Steven Rinella?

  Store it encased.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  I got you.

• 32:49Steven Rinella?

  Store it in a, in a container.

• 32:53Steven Rinella?

  Deep down in kitty litter.

• 32:57Steven Rinella?

  For your offensive odors.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  That won't escape that.

• 33:01Steven Rinella?

  No, and when I get a nasal range, I'll prove it.

• 33:05Steven Rinella?

  I'll prove it. We'll take a draw off some skunk, then we'll put it down in a bottle and kitty lure and take a draw off it and you won't, that nasal range is not going to pick it up.

• 33:16Steven Rinella?

  Another guy wrote in about skunks. He's in the nuisance wildlife removal business. They deal with a lot of skunks in the spring and summer. You can picture this skunk gets in your house, living under your porch. Someone gets upset.

• 33:29Steven Rinella?

  They, they catch them in covered cage traps. And they kill them within a CO2 chamber for euthanasia.

• 33:43Steven Rinella?

  Do you guys remember, we were talking earlier, do you remember during the pandemic when they had to,

• 33:50Steven Rinella?

  like in Northern Europe, they had to kill all those hundreds of thousands of mink?

• 33:54Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 33:57Steven Rinella?

  Um, which they pelt, you know, they pelted those all out?

• 34:00Speaker 05

  They did.

• 34:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I thought that it would like make mink prices skyrocket because they killed all the ranch mink or whatever. But someone's like, that all went to market.

• 34:10Steven Rinella?

  Anyhow, what I didn't realize, they got these little gas powered rigs they drive around in on those mink farms. And there's a box on the rig and it's harvesting its own CO2. So like you're driving this little golf cart around and it's harvesting its own emissions to euthan-

• 34:25Speaker 05

  Oh, I got you. Yeah, yeah.

• 34:27Steven Rinella?

  The whole thing sounds just like not a good line of work.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:31Steven Rinella?

  Like a tough business to be in.

• 34:34Steven Rinella?

  That's how they do that. They're killing them like that. So this dude is saying when they get like a problem skunk, they euthanize it with CO2. Well anyways, and then they throw them in a freezer, which I don't get. But they had a guy in there. And he says, I'll put it delicately and say he lacked attention to detail. He pulls a skunk out of the CO2 chamber too early.

• 34:58Steven Rinella?

  And places it into a freezer. A half hour later, a different guy comes along and opens the freezer and there's a skunk.

• 35:06Speaker 05

  Bam.

• 35:07Steven Rinella?

  Fine. No.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 35:09Steven Rinella?

  Shut the freezer real quick.

• 35:11Speaker 05

  I got you.

• 35:12Steven Rinella?

  Makes a plan on how he's going to deal with this, but then the skunk is waiting for him. The next time he opens the freezer, flop.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 35:21Steven Rinella?

  Nailed him.

• 35:24Steven Rinella?

  He says, you can't get that smell out of that freezer.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

• 35:33Steven Rinella?

  Last thing, oh, so you do want to say this? You're back to wanting to say this?

• 35:36Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 35:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 35:39Steven Rinella?

  Uh. One more launch. We got a thing coming out called 12 and 26. So that means in 2026, we're going to release, uh, like 12 outdoor films. Each episode showcases a hunt from a different meat eater, meat eater crew member. The first episode features Yanni's archery black bear hunt in Manitoba, which is out now. So stay tuned for more and check out these hunt episodes of 12 and 26 series. All right.

• 36:07Steven Rinella?

  George.

• 36:09Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with.

• 36:12Steven Rinella?

  Let's, I don't know, I want to get into the animal communication stuff here. And I want to talk about bronze sculptures, but I want to dive into the animal communication stuff here. If you could think about from your career and in your study of animals.

• 36:27Steven Rinella?

  What, and let's, let's keep to what lives around here. What animal do you think lives around here has the, or not, doesn't need to be around here? What American animal that people would be familiar with? What in your, who in your mind has the greatest vocabulary?

• 36:44Steven Rinella?

  Land critters.

• 36:48Speaker 06

  You know, probably the one that's been studied that way most. And. It's probably because it's only, because that's the one that's been studied that I detail is prairie dogs.

• 37:00Steven Rinella?

  They have a.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  Incredible vocabulary that goes down to the level of, there's a guy walking through the colony with a green shirt on and he's tall.

• 37:11Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  Yep. He's walking fast. He's walking slow. It's another guy. He's got a red shirt on. Or a yellow shirt. There's a badger. There's a hawk. Hawks flying fast.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  On and on and on. Yeah, this guy called.

• 37:30Steven Rinella?

  On what?

• 37:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, they went down to the level of saying, you know, it, it, in a, at a certain level, they needed to analyze it with computers because you just can't hear prairie dog. At that level.

• 37:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  So they slow it down. You can see all the bumps and blips on the, in the spectrogram on the computer. And these differences are parsing out with their experimental design. Here, and they even went to the level of, let's put something in there they've never seen.

• 38:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  So what they did is they basically put a cardboard cutout. Or maybe it's plywood, painted it black. Put it on wire and strung it through, moved it through, pulled it through the colony. They came up with a new word, something they'd never heard him say before. They put it away.

• 38:20Speaker 06

  Instead of an oval, like the first one, they put out a square. They say something different. They pull it back out a little while later. They use the same word for the oval.

• 38:30Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 38:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, and that's probably.

• 38:33Steven Rinella?

  It is all like permutations of that, what we would just, when we hear, it's just an alarm call.

• 38:37Speaker 06

  It's just like, like, all right, I'm not getting much out of that. But when you start listening with like, a lot of this stuff. You're like, oh, there is a little difference there. And if you could listen with the ears of a ground squirrel, or a pocket gopher, or any of these things. You might hear it too. But some of those, they can, like the researchers, it was so funny, they were so accurate. That they had different vocalization for dog versus coyote.

• 39:09Steven Rinella?

  No, really?

• 39:11Speaker 06

  So they're sitting there and the researchers can hear this difference and they're hanging out and this this prairie dog says, ah, there's a coyote coming. And clearly the researchers can see it's a dog and they're like, ha, they messed up this time. It's like one example. And it gets closer and it's a coyote. They're like, what the heck?

• 39:31Steven Rinella?

  Hold on, say that to me again, no?

• 39:32Speaker 06

  So they identified this thing, right? It was a coyote. They gave the coyote alarm. But the researchers, not knowing their language real well.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  Well, they knew the language enough to say, hey, they're alarming for coyote. Through their eyes, they're seeing what they think is a dog.

• 39:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so the research is like, oh, it's a domestic dog.

• 39:52Speaker 06

  It's a domestic dog, it looks like a coyote, they just messed up. And it gets closer and like, it's not a gun. It's a coyote.

• 40:02Speaker 06

  So that stuff is actually everywhere, isn't, but prairie dogs have been best studied that way. Their vocabulary, they even say that they're they have these sound bites that are like, um, phonemes, they're basically like, buh, duh, at, you know, sound fragments that we recombine into making words and sentences, paragraphs.

• 40:23Speaker 06

  They have sounds that function the same way.

• 40:27Speaker 06

  So they can recombine these sounds to say, dog, coyote, hawk, badger, guy.

• 40:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 06

  Short guy, tall guy, coming through the colony.

• 40:39Steven Rinella?

  I was reading this thing a long ago. It's like one of the dirtiest tricks I've ever heard in science.

• 40:46Steven Rinella?

  I don't know where they were doing it. Where, I don't know, where, where's the verbate monkey live? A verbate monkey?

• 40:52Speaker 06

  Verbates are, um, African.

• 40:54Steven Rinella?

  It's in Africa, okay.

• 40:57Steven Rinella?

  They were looking at the vocabulary of verbate monkeys. And they were getting this idea that they had, and it might be more nuanced than this, but they're like, there's a thing that says threat from above. Okay. And it'd be like certain avian predators.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:14Steven Rinella?

  And they had a noise that they realized it meant, um, threat on the ground. And they thought specifically it was about leopards. That's what it was.

• 41:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:22Steven Rinella?

  Leopards. So. They. Would record these verbate monkeys making these vocalizations.

• 41:35Steven Rinella?

  And you could play it and get the response, meaning if there's a threat on the ground, everyone goes into a tree. If there's a threat from the air, the troop all seeks overhead protection.

• 41:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:47Steven Rinella?

  Then they recorded a monkey.

• 41:51Steven Rinella?

  They recorded his.

• 41:54Steven Rinella?

  Threat call.

• 41:56Steven Rinella?

  And they would play it and everyone would respond. But they eventually burned the guy out where he became the boy who cries wolf.

• 42:05Speaker 06

  Poor guy.

• 42:06Steven Rinella?

  And they burned him out where they're like, he always does that. And he's wrong. To the point where if he did vocalize. They would ignore it because they're like, that dude makes that noise all the time. Cause they had been playing it to everybody and they burned the dude out on it.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 42:24Steven Rinella?

  But this is like. What you're talking about is way more, I mean, like way more than, hey, on the ground, hey, in the air.

• 42:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's like.

• 42:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  At deer camp with the kids. Like when you and I walk through the prairie dog town, those things are like, eh. But when they see Jimmy, they're like, holy shit.

• 42:43Steven Rinella?

  They probably do.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  And he's got a gun. He's got a gun again.

• 42:46Steven Rinella?

  It's that one kid.

• 42:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's, I think you're referring to that Chaney and Saifart did a lot of that work in Amboselli National Park, where they're looking at those verbets. And yeah, they had a different call for something in the air. Those Marshall eagles, I think they were. They had a different one for leopards and they had a different one for snakes.

• 43:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I remember that now.

• 43:08Speaker 06

  Yep. And, um, yeah, then there's, that's a toughie with these animal vocalizations like, how do you know? You don't speak that language. So they have these really clunky, sometimes really, you know, mean ways of figuring out, all right, at least it's this level. This is what they're meaning.

• 43:29Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  But in between, like, for me, I listen to a ton of ravens. I just fascinated by ravens and the stuff they say just blows me away. They've got accents, they've got dialects, they've got stuff you can't even imagine.

• 43:42Steven Rinella?

  At what point did you first start getting interested in, in the, just like the vocalizations of animals?

• 43:48Speaker 06

  Well, I grew up like you guys did. I hunted and fished and trapped for, you know, a lot of my youth because that was, you know, the culture I grew up in. So I grew up learning to call turkeys and ducks and deer and, um, but like, it wasn't enough for me. Just me being me. I was like, I want to know more. You know, what are they doing outside of hunting season? What do they say when this happens? What are they doing when nobody else is watching? And, um, you didn't watch birds. Like, nobody, I didn't know anybody that watched birds until I went to college and they're like, oh yeah, we're going birding. Really?

• 44:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, my old man, he had an interesting bird taxonomy, like as a, as a hunter, you know, it was like, there's this huge chunk of birds that were Tweety birds.

• 44:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What it basically meant like, the ones like, like outside of my, there's intensely interested in game birds. There was a handful of other birds that catch my interest, but then there are the Tweety birds.

• 44:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Our friend has a system, uh, he has, it's arts and narts for hawks. Arts are a red tail.

• 44:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  Narts are not a red tail. I'm like, Jason, not, you know, it takes red tails to get a couple of years under their belt before they get a red tail. He's like, god damn it. It's like, that throws the whole damn system off.

• 45:08Steven Rinella?

  I was reading in, I think it was in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, where, I think it was in that book, where he's talking about Inuit's map drawing.

• 45:19Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 45:20Steven Rinella?

  This is early, like, he was relating of early, like, early contact with certain Inuit hunter groups, and they would draw maps, and they wouldn't do the, the maps would be to the scale of

• 45:32Steven Rinella?

  interest.

• 45:33Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 45:34Steven Rinella?

  So if they're mapping an island, and there's a bay where they hunt ducks, when you draw the map, the island gets really small, because they don't do, it doesn't matter, and the bay occu, is the map.

• 45:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:48Steven Rinella?

  And it's kind of like, here's the part on something, here's the part of interest, and then I'll just kind of rough in something to suggest the rest of it.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 45:59Steven Rinella?

  Right? And I feel like with a lot of wildlife stuff, it's like elk, right? The bugle. You know? Because it's useful in hunting, and you can probably hunt elk a whole life and never be like, what really is going on with that thing?

• 46:18Speaker 06

  That's the kind of stuff that, yeah. Right.

• 46:21Steven Rinella?

  You know, like, it works or don't work?

• 46:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:24Steven Rinella?

  But it's kind of, you, you sort of have a, like, we'll, we'll map it from a hunter's perspective, we'll map its vocalization pattern, and it'll only go as far as what I need to know to satisfy my, like, base plan.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  You're not really interested in what you might be saying to them, right?

• 46:43Steven Rinella?

  It works or don't work?

• 46:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 06

  Right, and that's to human nature, like, we're, we're simplifying machines. That's what our brains are designed for, is after sensory stuff, like, problem solving, figuring out what those patterns are, you know, what does that mean? And I only pay attention to the stuff that affects me, that, you know, but. When you start paying attention to what affects them, then the world opens up.

• 47:08Steven Rinella?

  What was the first, what was the first animal? Was it turkeys? Like, what was the first animal you kind of dove into? And started realizing you were finding out things that maybe other people didn't know?

• 47:16Speaker 06

  Well, I was obsessed with turkeys.

• 47:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:18Speaker 06

  Like I was, like, my career was gonna be making turkey calls, going around calling contests.

• 47:23Steven Rinella?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 47:24Speaker 06

  Upstate New York.

• 47:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  And they just re-colonized that area. So I was taking every spare minute. You could only hunt till noon, but I was going out before school. Every day during the season, the, this is a funny one. The, the disciplinarian principal, the, the vice principal, when my folks were in that school, had retired by this point, and I called well enough that he's like, can you come with me? You know, skip school.

• 47:50Speaker 06

  Come with me out on, on Monday and Tuesday. My mom's like, hell no! Frank Dunham wants you to skip, this vice principal wants you to skip school so you can turkey call for him. I'm like, damn, huh? It's like, that's legit right? Hell no!

• 48:05Speaker 05

  Were you, uh, mouth calling back? Like, no, no call? Or were you using calls?

• 48:09Speaker 06

  I was doing, I was building wing bone calls, I was building slate calls, box calls, using my voice, I was doing all of it. You know? And, um, but it was interesting, cause sort of like we're talking about, in that hunting scene, you know, there was a, there's a core palette of sounds that you use.

• 48:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 06

  And they do the job. But I hit a certain point, and it was actually, when I went to my first calling contest, I'm like, wait a minute. This is what the guy, there's a guy behind that curtain over there, and he's like, telling me if I sound like a turkey. There's no turkeys in this contest. And there's certainly no turkeys behind the curtain saying, yeah, that sounds like a turkey. You know, so I was like-

• 48:48Steven Rinella?

  That's a great point, man.

• 48:49Speaker 06

  I was like, mm, mm. What, you know? And, and there was even, I found an article when I was working on the book, this guy, who was a judge. He said, you know, if you hear a lot of, um- Really bad calling. You know, it's, it's a wild turkey. If you look, a lot of really good calling, it's a guy, you know? Turkeys make a lot of mistakes and I'm like, wait a minute. Dude, mistakes? I think it costs them. It costs them. You make a sound, the predator's got a bead on you, right? You make a sound, it costs energy to make the sound. Like, they're not doing it for no reason. Just because we don't know the reason doesn't mean it doesn't have one.

• 49:33Steven Rinella?

  I, I, but there's the, I get the point.

• 49:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:36Steven Rinella?

  There's, no, no, like, the point would be this. There's, there's a, there's a YouTube video I love. And it's a hen, like a wild ass hen in the woods, and she has the most raucous, bad, uh, box call yelp. Which she stands there and does 27 times in a row.

• 50:00Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:01Steven Rinella?

  27 times in a row. If you heard that, there's no way. You'd be like, that's a hen. You'd be like, that is some 12 ass year old kid.

• 50:14Steven Rinella?

  With his dad's box call and he's just gonna stand on that ridge and do that.

• 50:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:19Steven Rinella?

  I would 100% say that that's what that was. I'd be like, ah, some kid up there. It's a hen standing there 27 times in a row.

• 50:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:28Steven Rinella?

  So that, like, but, it, it, so like, if you could interview her, you'd be like, home, are you doing this on accident? Is this all a mistake? She would probably tell you, no, no, um, what I'm doing is I'm.

• 50:44Speaker 06

  You should have seen the last time I did this.

• 50:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 06

  You know what happened?

• 50:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but like, I don't know, like, what is she doing? You know, what is she doing?

• 50:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, how much variability is in there that's acceptable for purpose X? Like, you're doing a lost call. It does go on 20 plus notes, but like, within there.

• 51:05Speaker 06

  How much stuff's coded in there beyond I'm lost or where the heck are you? That's where they're fine with some of these new studies on songbirds and stuff because they hear differently than us. They're hearing into these sounds, stuff that hey, either happens way too fast or is in frequency ranges that we don't register real well. So it's like, it almost seems in some cases like the size of the animal and their metabolism, their pace of life is coded to their communication. So like there was a study where they actually took sperm whale clicks.

• 51:42Steven Rinella?

  I don't understand what that means.

• 51:43Speaker 06

  Let me explain. So like sperm whales, huge animal.

• 51:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 06

  Communicating these clicks, travel real well underwater. And somebody had the bright idea, you know, they're trying to figure out what the heck these things mean, you know, when are they using this and this? And they've since found out a whole bunch, but somebody had the bright idea to go in and delete all the spaces in between the clicks. And low and behold, it sounds like a songbird. Like you hear all the rising and falling of this, you know, we're used to listening to humans. Birds, they're communicating so fast, but maybe those smaller animals, their pace of life, their metabolism, whatever it is that makes them them, they're able to, in essence, from our perspective, slow down

• 52:28Speaker 06

  that sound of the winter wren or the magnolia warbler and hear into little tweaks of individual notes, let's say, and get more information out of that.

• 52:41Speaker 04

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• 53:10Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard It is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household. If you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. 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 WeatherTech in there. You're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy.

• 53:54Steven Rinella?

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• 54:38Steven Rinella?

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• 55:23Steven Rinella?

  That's helixsleep.com/meateater for 20% off site-wide. Helixsleep.com/meateater.

• 55:32Steven Rinella?

  I remember some, I was reading somewhere where some guy's saying like, when you go to like, you're gonna, you see a fly and you're just gonna smack them. Do you know what I mean? That to the fly, he might be like, in a minute, I'm gonna move. Because there's this thing coming toward me. Do you know, like his trip? His like trip through life is just, the perception is so different than what we think. So we think we're going, wow, you know, and he's like, no, it's going.

• 56:08Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 56:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so yeah, man, like when a bird is just going ape shit crazy.

• 56:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like what?

• 56:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:17Steven Rinella?

  Something else might be like, oh, he's saying all kinds of.

• 56:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, it just, there was a great essay written in the 1930s, I think, there is early 40s about, the title is what it's like to be a bat.

• 56:33Speaker 06

  And the clue, you know, even if we could take the best AI and all these models and figure out their language and speak the same language, we still wouldn't have a clue what they're talking about. You know this when you go to a different country, or even if they're speaking English,

• 56:47Speaker 06

  there's culture, there's that culture behind and underneath all that language that when you make a joke among friends, like everybody knows in that group, what the hell you're talking about. But even if we could know that language for a bat, for a bird, it takes being able to hear like a bat.

• 57:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 06

  Breathe like a bat, you know, all these things that contribute to them being what they are, that factors into how they interpret what they hear and say.

• 57:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like we've long, I mean, like forever have known that there are decibels, the animals communicate in that we flat out don't hear. So it's like, sort of, start with that, like 100, there's things we don't hear that we know we don't hear.

• 57:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:26Steven Rinella?

  There's research about the way birds perceive, you know, there's so much iridescence in birds. There's probably something in their eye. When they see iridescence, it just reads fundamentally different than what we see when we see iridescence.

• 57:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 57:40Steven Rinella?

  We, they, they take it in.

• 57:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 57:42Steven Rinella?

  And the idea that there are, like you're saying, that when you're at a turkey calling contest, what we're going, when we're saying, man, that sounds a lot like a turkey. Could be tons of gibberish to a turkey.

• 57:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, a great example is like when I, when I do a hen yelp, I found over years, I wouldn't get the same responses if I used a box collar or a slate. And I, the only thing I could come to is that it sounded good to me, but there was things in my call, maybe it's missing frequencies or something that made it sound plastic or fake or, or some, just that didn't get the same response. I'd literally just go to a box call.

• 58:31Speaker 06

  You know, you got instant response. It's like, what's up with that?

• 58:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Speaker 06

  You know, is it, you know, certain frequencies, like high frequency drops off real fast. So over distance, you know, whether it's an elk call or what have you, you're generally picking up the low frequency sounds that travel better. But when you're right up close to something like, holy cow, you hear that elk bugle right next to the car. If you're in Yellowstone or something, you're like, whoa.

• 58:57Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 58:57Speaker 06

  I'm missing a ton of stuff.

• 58:59Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot more going on in there than.

• 59:01Speaker 06

  What, you know, what are they hearing? You know, they, you know, like a lot of the canines, wolves, coyotes, they can hear, you know, Dave Meach found that in open terrain, uh, wolves can hear up to 10 miles in open terrain.

• 59:15Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 59:15Speaker 06

  And max, I think for me, unless wind conditions and other things are going on, the max is about three miles for me.

• 59:23Speaker 06

  So this is where often with students and stuff, I'm like, look, you can't ever hear that. You won't ever smell that. Not even with the nose ranger.

• 59:34Speaker 06

  You just can't do this stuff.

• 59:39Speaker 06

  But if you start watching these animals closer, you're like, hey, wait.

• 59:45Speaker 06

  All of a sudden, they're starting to gather up their face in one direction and then they howl.

• 59:52Speaker 06

  Hmm. Instantly, you know, okay, I'm looking at half of this story. The other half of the book is, I've had this happen, you know, friends with radios, they're six miles away. Yeah. Yeah, we got the, uh, I got Wolf Pack, they're howling to the east, you know? Yeah, I'm watching the Druids, yeah, they're. Listening to the west. And they're going back and forth, having a conversation for hour, two hours. We can't hear anything but the individuals standing in front of us.

• 1:00:21Speaker 06

  So there's so many animals doing stuff like this that we're like getting these fragments, thinking that we know what's going on. And when they're having conversations over space and in terrain that we don't even know are happening.

• 1:00:34Steven Rinella?

  You know, um, we'll move away from turkeys in a minute, but.

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

  Cool bird.

• 1:00:41Steven Rinella?

  You've obviously been super close to hens. Like all the, like, I don't know what, I don't know, I can't think like, at what distance you become aware of it, but they're always making noises.

• 1:00:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, those little noises you wouldn't hear from a hundred yards away, but at 10 yards, you can hear it, you know? Yeah.

• 1:00:58Steven Rinella?

  What, uh, let, let's, this, I'm taking it in the wrong direction. Let's not talk about the ones people aren't familiar with. Let's just take like, let me ask some real simple, do you feel that a gobble is just a gobble? Or do you feel that there are, there are different gobbles that mean different things?

• 1:01:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think there are different gobbles and I, I had thought for years that gobble is just a gobble. And a young Tom makes not as good a gobble.

• 1:01:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's the idea, right? He sucks at it.

• 1:01:33Speaker 06

  He just sucks, he hasn't learned how to do it.

• 1:01:35Steven Rinella?

  Cause he aspires to one day be like.

• 1:01:39Speaker 06

  Exactly, just blow your hair back.

• 1:01:43Steven Rinella?

  But in fact, he's working on it.

• 1:01:45Speaker 06

  It was a grad school, I was talking with a friend who's, you know, he's really sharp on bird behavior and, and all things, you know, research wise and, and scientific question answering kind of wise. And, um, he, he turned my mind on it. And I thought for years, you know, a young Tom, you know, full on gobbler. He looks like a big, full, long, and then you hear a Jake.

• 1:02:11Speaker 06

  You know, it's like, it just chunked up and didn't sound right. He's, he's like, no, you gotta understand they're gobbling in context to who's around them.

• 1:02:24Speaker 06

  And then I started noticing, son of a gun, he's right. If it was just that Jake, had many times where that Jake would actually give a full on gobble. Because he was by himself, he didn't know the big guy was over that ridge and hauling ass over to kick his butt.

• 1:02:41Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  So he could say whatever he wanted to, and of course he wants to sound like the big guy in campus, right? And I'm like, son of a gun. Then I started seeing in the field, I'm like, a gobble isn't a gobble, maybe.

• 1:02:53Steven Rinella?

  It's like a subservient gobble.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. I know, I'd love to, you know, correct me and, and add to it if, if listeners have listened for this kind of stuff more. I'd love to learn more about that because I, you know, my turkey days are a little further back than some other stuff. But it's fascinating, but just to think of that.

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

  If you could read into a gobble and be like, oh, that gobble, he's like, I'm coming now. That gobble, he's like, nah, I heard y'all maybe come over later.

• 1:03:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, you get the double gobble, you're like, oh, he's really liking that call, you know, triple gobble. You're like, he's come, he's gotta be coming.

• 1:03:24Steven Rinella?

  Do you think he's loving the call when he hears a double gobble?

• 1:03:28Speaker 06

  That always to me seemed like a, a good barometer to how excited they were.

• 1:03:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, they gobble off the roost and they hit the ground and gobble, you know, and kind of gobble along. But once you get them fired up, man, they're, they're double, triple gobbling.

• 1:03:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

  Repeatedly. And you're like, get ready, get ready, get ready, here they come, you know? So, you know, if you look at it, the more I started looking at it from the turkey's perspective, the more I started understanding from my human perspective.

• 1:03:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, you say, you think about, uh, do you spend more time on crows or on ravens?

• 1:04:05Speaker 06

  We just have more ravens around home, so I spend more time listening to them.

• 1:04:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay. The other day, it wasn't too long ago, I was watching one and he just seems to be like, from my perspective, he seems to be just wasting energy. He's flying along, just raising hell.

• 1:04:22Steven Rinella?

  Just making racket.

• 1:04:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Steven Rinella?

  At a high, way up.

• 1:04:29Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:29Steven Rinella?

  And I'm like, he's, he's not with anybody. He's just like making racket. Like, what, give me, give me some insight into what, like what they're capable of conveying.

• 1:04:38Speaker 06

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:04:40Steven Rinella?

  And there's gotta be something like, I found something to eat. Like, that's pretty clear, right?

• 1:04:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's stuff that it'll blow your doors off. And I, you know, I've only scratched the surface. I've found stuff that researchers haven't found. I've corroborated for myself, things that they've found that, yeah, that, that holds here too.

• 1:04:59Speaker 06

  And it's, to me, it's always about starting into these conversations, listening to what's most common. You pick the most common thing close to you and pick the most common thing it says.

• 1:05:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:09Speaker 06

  So it's like, I only have pigeons around. Great. Awesome. Use pigeons. Because the lessons you learn through the pigeons actually are going to apply to the red squirrel, the raven.

• 1:05:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:20Speaker 06

  The coyote, all those kind of other things. Cause you start sensitizing your own nervous system to it. And so when we were living in the park, I purposely, I'd finished my graduate work. I was like done with academia. I did not want to read another scientific paper. And in that case, I just wanted the ravens to teach me. It took longer, but I learned a lot more. So the, the most common thing they were saying was.

• 1:05:48Steven Rinella?

  Yep. They like saying that.

• 1:05:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. And like on a loop, you're like.

• 1:05:53Steven Rinella?

  To a human, it means I'm a raven.

• 1:05:56Speaker 06

  Well, it took me the longest time to realize the ones that were doing that were the ones that were right next to our cabin.

• 1:06:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  And it was two. It was the resident pair. I'm like, oh, this is their song. This is their territorial call that they use to keep the riffraff out. Their largest songbird in the world, even though it's not melodic, that's their no trespassing sign.

• 1:06:22Steven Rinella?

  They're the largest songbird in the world?

• 1:06:24Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yep, common ravens. And so I was like, cool.

• 1:06:29Steven Rinella?

  The least melodic?

• 1:06:31Speaker 06

  You're right.

• 1:06:32Steven Rinella?

  Largest songbird.

• 1:06:33Speaker 06

  But they're coding a bunch.

• 1:06:35Steven Rinella?

  But you could like, so that's funny because I never thought about that classification. They'd be classified as a songbird.

• 1:06:40Speaker 06

  They are.

• 1:06:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're in the passerine order, which is the all the perching birds.

• 1:06:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:45Speaker 06

  Corvidae family, you know, which is jays, crows, jackdaws, magpies, stuff. But that, that gave me a hook. I was like, okay, I, I think I know what that three note thing is now. And then the key, and I always stress this to folks, is start listening for where it varies.

• 1:07:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  So there's one day I was out and, you know, the ravens are out there.

• 1:07:06Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with the, hit me with the hymn sitting on a post being like, this is where I hang out. This is my song.

• 1:07:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is my turf.

• 1:07:12Steven Rinella?

  Just tell me, give me the noise.

• 1:07:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  Right. And in this kind of group, you know, your listeners like making animal sounds is cool. Like in pop culture, like you meet somebody at a dinner party and they're speaking to one person in Korean and one person in Italian and another person in French and you're like, dude, who is this guy? You know, we see that as sophistication, you know, it's like, he must have had all this, you know, worldly experience, but you make an animal sound and they're like, ah, you know, like, you know, so I was trying to preface, I'm like, no, that betrays our bias against animals as stupid and under us.

• 1:07:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Speaker 06

  You need to start seeing them as those creatures that look into the ultraviolet, as those creatures that hear in ultrasonic and subsonic sounds, and those creatures that smell at parts per trillion, like they best us in so many ways.

• 1:08:04Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:05Speaker 06

  So listen from that perspective when I make animal noises.

• 1:08:11Speaker 06

  Because it's a crowd pleaser, but the, the value in there is starting to get people to listen beyond, okay, that common call.

• 1:08:24Speaker 06

  Just counting, there's more notes and it's faster. And I discovered that this simple thing alone was happening when the tourists pulled out on the pullout in the road, right below the corral fence and popped out the bag of Cheetos.

• 1:08:41Speaker 06

  Like they see food, they know it's in their territory. I'm gonna get it if anybody is and you sure as hell better not come in here and think you're gonna steal it from me. So like that extra energy and repeated notes was almost like a more emphatic, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. Hmm, right?

• 1:08:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 06

  You know, we'd walk into an area, you know, as a group to go sit down and listen and watch. And just us being there, those ravens would jump off their perches and start flying over doing that.

• 1:09:14Speaker 06

  Like-

• 1:09:15Steven Rinella?

  But they're not talking to you, they're talking to other ravens. Like whatever's going on here is in our turf, we're on it. If food comes out of this-

• 1:09:23Speaker 06

  That's what it seems like.

• 1:09:24Speaker 05

  I got a question for you. So that was a situation where there's people involved and they recognize that that's potential food source. Would you hear that, did you ever hear that same noise like when they were like out in the back country when there was a carcass around or something?

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  That's an awesome question, Brody, cuz that, I've seen that. So it's corroborated that mine, mine, mine, mine, like the one I think of most is there was a spot in Slough Creek. Um, big flats, this bison had died, had been dead for a long time, pretty much eaten up. But the resident ravens, every time another raven came within like half a mile, they were up in the car count.

• 1:10:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  And if not flying over toward them to perch and give them another cussing-

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 06

  From within the turf. So it's both.

• 1:10:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Steven Rinella?

  What, what is they, like, what are they doing vocally around? Like, we, we know all these sounds, like, go back turkeys for a minute. We know all these sounds that in our human understanding, we've kinda got it, like, these are sounds of courtship. Okay? The same way we might look at an elk, you can be like, that's a sound of courtship.

• 1:10:33Steven Rinella?

  What like, when you hear a raven, you're just hearing raven noises you don't understand. What is a, what are they doing in the breeding season? Like, what kind of things does a raven want to communicate in the breeding season? What would be the equivalent of how we, at least how we perceive to be a gobbler going through the woods gobbling? You know, trying to draw hens in?

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's, it's different for a reason because they're just socially different.

• 1:11:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:00Speaker 06

  You know, turkeys are flock creatures, you know, toms are hanging out together, but the hens and the polts are hanging out together. They mix and mingle in places. Ravens are very much territorial with, you know, kind of a slew of travelers and non-residents filtering in and around through there. Except times when somebody kills a bison out our way, or an elk. And those big food sources become big attractions. We know now from the research in the park that some of these birds are coming from Bozeman.

• 1:11:30Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:11:30Speaker 06

  Flying to my house and Gardner and Yellowstone.

• 1:11:33Steven Rinella?

  Over a carcass.

• 1:11:34Speaker 06

  To feed on carcasses during the bison hunt.

• 1:11:37Speaker 05

  Cause word spreads down the valley?

• 1:11:39Speaker 06

  Somehow, yes.

• 1:11:41Speaker 05

  That's wild.

• 1:11:42Steven Rinella?

  You know what, man, you know what, like, we were hunting an area with, with my kids. We were hunting an area this year where like, there's a lot, there's a big cow elk harvest. In a certain area, pretty annually. I was even commenting to my kids, like, I'm like, these things know what goes on here. And they're like in town for it. I didn't know they were in town from far away. I meant, I thought they were in town from like the other side of the valley or something.

• 1:12:12Speaker 06

  That's what I used to think. No way in hell, these suckers are traveling 20 to 30 miles in the morning. So you think of a Yellowstone bird, you're like, oh, that's a big wilderness bird. They just hang out in the park. No, they come up, they're either feeding at the dump in Gardner or West Yellowstone or out Cody. Flying back at midday. They're commuting, literally commuting in the morning off to a food source, flying back in the day to maintain their territory.

• 1:12:38Steven Rinella?

  Potentially 30 miles away.

• 1:12:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that's daily, you know, saying nothing of these seasonal things.

• 1:12:43Steven Rinella?

  Have their own place they would regard as their hangout, their house.

• 1:12:46Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:47Steven Rinella?

  Their territory.

• 1:12:47Speaker 06

  So to get back to that, the call that I learned next in sequence with ravens was this.

• 1:13:00Speaker 06

  And before I even saw them, I knew that they were moving, right? That's the sound they make when somebody's violated the no-fly zone in their turf.

• 1:13:09Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  So, they have to be back there on their territory to hold that space for them. So, when the turf season rolls back around and everybody's got frozen pizza and baloney sandwiches, like, they don't have to do any fighting and border control. They're good to go because everybody knows that's their turf. But we're at, to close the loop on the mating season stuff, like, I think a lot of these big food source locations end up being like the bar. The dating scene for ravens. And so, you'll see them displaying, they aren't vocalizing as much that we can hear. If you're close and you hang out at the dump for the ravens, like I do sometimes, and not

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  for the trash, you hear all these crazy, soft sounds that probably, I don't know if we'll ever figure out what they mean. You know, like

• 1:14:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 06

  You've probably heard those, like, a water drop and stuff, and they use them in context of getting to know each other. And you can tell at times when they display, they're not fanning like a turkey, but they'll puff their throat, they'll kind of hold their beak up. You've probably seen this, especially around a, like, a gut pile or something where the birds converge. Look real close because in the, in a general sense, when you see those birds that kind of drop their wings a little bit, they're puffing up, they drop their flank feathers, those are your resident birds. Those are the territorial ones who own that space, so to speak. The others are interlopers.

• 1:14:39Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:39Speaker 06

  And they'll be trying to run them off. In fact, when I did start reading back into the literature on ravens, it confirmed what I had seen in Yellowstone, where, uh, what Baron Heinrich, one of the world's leading authorities on ravens, had found near his cabin in Maine, was this dead moose.

• 1:14:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 06

  One dead moose, and one raven finds it. It lands and gives this call.

• 1:15:07Speaker 06

  And ravens come out of the woodwork and start feeding on it with it. And he's like, that makes no sense, right? You, you like make a, a beautiful barbecue dinner for you and your family. Before you eat, you have the high school football team come over and dine first.

• 1:15:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Speaker 06

  Like bi- biologically, behaviorally, like that didn't make sense until he started studying them and marking them. And what he figured out was the ones doing that were younger ones and non-territorial birds. And that call, which is a great way, if you ever injure an animal or you got a downed animal on a train, you can't track them on, you gotta listen to the ravens. Because that call, "ha!" doesn't mean food in a generic sense, any food. It means meat.

• 1:15:55Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:15:56Speaker 06

  So that bird is calling out to avoid being persecuted by the residents who own that turf. So if that bird who found the moose was caught by the residents, it'd be run out and it wouldn't get any food. But by going, "ha!" it brings in an overwhelming number of other ravens and everybody ends up getting some.

• 1:16:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:19Speaker 06

  That it makes sense.

• 1:16:21Steven Rinella?

  I can think of an analog that a friend of mine was accidentally trespassing and found a mammoth jaw. So he had to go over and say, "Sir, I was accidentally trespassing on you." And lo and behold, I found a mammoth jaw. What are we gonna do about this?

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  And at that point, he called in all his buddies to stand around him to make sure he got the right answer.

• 1:16:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause he's like, he's like that raven. He's like, dude, like, I know I'm on your place. It's a big elk.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  Let me help you out.

• 1:17:00Steven Rinella?

  I just would like to know what happens with the thing and just try to be part of this, you know, admitting that I'm on your place.

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  And what I'm gonna do is call in a bunch of my buddies to help me pack it out. There you go.

• 1:17:16Steven Rinella?

  No way.

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• 1:17:46Steven Rinella?

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• 1:19:13Steven Rinella?

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• 1:19:54Steven Rinella?

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• 1:20:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with the meat call again.

• 1:20:10Speaker 06

  So let me qualify it. It sounds very similar to what young birds do. When they're still on the nest and they're fledging. So if you've ever had a raven or a crow nest near your place, they know they never shut up like they just talk, talk. And a lot of that is

• 1:20:30Speaker 06

  which just grates on your nerves and it's supposed to because in essence, what they're saying is mom, mom.

• 1:20:38Speaker 06

  Mom, hey mom, right? So if you see an adult bird and the way you tell on a lot of birds and certainly for Corvids is if you see them call. Pick up your binocs and look in their mouth.

• 1:20:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:20:55Speaker 06

  If the lining of the mouth is black, it's an adult. It's three years or older. We can't age them beyond that. We just know that after about two years, the mouth lining is all black. If it's a red, pink, it's a juvenile.

• 1:21:10Speaker 06

  So if you hear a juvenile going off like that in August or September, you're like, yeah. Stupid kids trying to get the parents to still feed them. But if it's a black mouthed adult doing that, you want to start looking. You want to start looking for the magpies going in and out. You want to start seeing if that there's a coyote coming over the hill. Oh, you know, it's just the corroborating evidence that there's something there that you're missing that the eyes in the sky picked up.

• 1:21:36Steven Rinella?

  And do the noise again.

• 1:21:39Speaker 06

  You don't have to hear it once. Like I've had guide friends that are like, hey, there's a new bison in Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. That's it. Don't tell me anymore. I'll go in the park and I'll hang out. I'll go to a real good viewpoint, prominent point, and I'll close my eyes. And I'll listen for the first time I hear that call. And often, because we often bias our other senses sometimes, I'll point in the direction I think it is, then that'll open my eyes. And there it is, almost without fail.

• 1:22:07Steven Rinella?

  Cause he's making that racket.

• 1:22:09Speaker 06

  He's making that racket because it found the food and it's calling in buddies to make sure the residents don't run them out.

• 1:22:17Speaker 06

  You can, that's one of the best ways to find that bear.

• 1:22:20Steven Rinella?

  Also, I got mixed up about what he's saying. Or what you're, he's being like, if I go down by myself,

• 1:22:31Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna get harassed and run off.

• 1:22:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Steven Rinella?

  So he's basically calling in.

• 1:22:36Speaker 06

  Reinforcements.

• 1:22:38Steven Rinella?

  So they can go in and feed and they're not, and they got enough people there where it's not gonna be.

• 1:22:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like a smokescreen.

• 1:22:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Speaker 06

  Feathered smokescreen to give them the opportunity to sneak in there without getting beat up. And you'll hear it too, like, there's an awesome reference. Um, you ever read any of Richard Nelson's ethnography work from Alaska? In, uh, Prayers to Raven, there's a passage in there. It's awesome. And there's like a one sentence description in there that I just like, oh, I just wanna know what he's talking about there. He said, when the native hunters, the Gwich'wun, find a fresh bear track in the snow, they hide and they make the calls of a raven to draw the bear in. And I'm like,

• 1:23:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:23:21Speaker 06

  What is that call? Like, and then he just keeps going. I'm like, no, you know, come back to it. There's two possibilities. One is that non-territorial bird saying.

• 1:23:33Speaker 06

  Right? That's possible. The other one, which I think is probably more likely is the squabbling calls you hear when ravens are on the ground at a carcass fighting.

• 1:23:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh, and they're all duking it out.

• 1:23:45Speaker 06

  Duking it out, tolling you.

• 1:23:50Speaker 06

  That, like, we got a good deal going here.

• 1:23:53Steven Rinella?

  That's interesting, man. You'd go in and get a bunch of guys that could do that and start making that noise and see what shows up.

• 1:23:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know how effective it was, but it's effective enough, apparently, in their culture that they're, it's a known thing.

• 1:24:04Steven Rinella?

  One of my favorite things in, in Make, Make Prayers to the Raven, one of my favorite things that he learns from those guys he's hanging out with is, you know, they'd like to den dig bears.

• 1:24:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Steven Rinella?

  And, um, their take is like, man, anybody can, you know, because we'd look at that like, you know, most people look at that like a cowardly act, you know, unsportsmanlike. Their take is like, man, anybody can shoot a bear walking around. Go climb in there and drag them out of there.

• 1:24:29Speaker 06

  Right. And the old days, they're doing it with a lance.

• 1:24:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Speaker 06

  They let the bear charge them.

• 1:24:34Steven Rinella?

  You know, go climb in there and drag them out and tell me about how easy it is.

• 1:24:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. Wussy.

• 1:24:42Steven Rinella?

  That's a good book. Yeah, that's, he spends a lot of time on, I mean, obviously, like, that, that thing of like the significance of that bird, which is probably in some way motivated by it's, it's just incredible intelligence.

• 1:24:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I could totally see, like, people will often ask questions like, you know, the wolves around, you know, are they leading wolves to kills? And so far as we can see, no. Like, there might be one or two instances in the last thirty years where somebody can say, I'm pretty sure the ravens were maybe goaded those wolves over. A friend of mine was watching a brown bear.

• 1:25:16Steven Rinella?

  Tap into the carcass or something like?

• 1:25:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, or, you know, here's a weak animal, or, you know, there's a carcass, you know, come over here, yeah, woo, right here. You know, it's more they're just like parasites to the wolves. They're just taking advantage of the wolves' kill. I've seen times where wolves will be feeding on the back end of a, an old, we're out bull elk and the ravens are literally in the antlers, like, waiting their turn. Come on, man. Give us, give us a little space here.

• 1:25:40Steven Rinella?

  But you don't see that there's like a legitimate, like, hey, come quick, this thing's wounded.

• 1:25:44Speaker 06

  No, but like the northern cultures all over the globe were like, yeah, that's how we find the caribou. And I think a lot of those signals are as much behavioral.

• 1:25:58Speaker 06

  Like, for instance, because we live on the edge of the national forest right of north of the park, there's a lot of hunting that goes on. And I can go out for a walk with a dog and I'm like, uh, somebody killed something over by the travertine two miles away. Just by the continual unidirectional flight of every single raven going that way. So I think a lot of those early cultures probably were not just picking up on sound, but they were picking up on directional flight, flight altitude. Um, if you see air back, you know, acrobatics in the air, they probably, you're close. There's a certain, I don't know, number of hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters that you'll see ravens chasing each other,

• 1:26:40Speaker 06

  trying to get food away from each other. And you know, like, so you know, you see that, you're like, oh, we're within a couple hundred yards of, of that food source.

• 1:26:48Steven Rinella?

  I was in, I was in Tanzania this summer and the trackers use the what oxpeckers do in the morning. It's, it's like, it's diagnostic. I mean, they don't look at like, oh, maybe,

• 1:27:04Steven Rinella?

  maybe there's something over there that it's going to.

• 1:27:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Steven Rinella?

  They're like, he's up in the morning. When he flies out, he already knows.

• 1:27:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Steven Rinella?

  He knows where they're at. The buffalo.

• 1:27:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Steven Rinella?

  Like, he knows where they are, because he was with them before or whatever, and he's going there.

• 1:27:22Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:27:22Steven Rinella?

  You know? And so, yeah, in that way.

• 1:27:24Speaker 06

  And those messages come from all over.

• 1:27:26Steven Rinella?

  They might not go there because of whatever factors, but they're like, at daybreak, when six of them go

• 1:27:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Steven Rinella?

  And disappear down somewhere, like, that's not for something else.

• 1:27:38Speaker 06

  And bugs, you know, shoot bugs, do that, you know, you probably read Boyd Vardy's, you know, Lion Tracker's Guide to Life or something like that. One of his mentors was finding, found a lion kill from watching the flies.

• 1:27:50Steven Rinella?

  No, really?

• 1:27:51Speaker 06

  Same deal. You know, I interviewed a guy from the book and he didn't, it didn't end up making it into the final cut, but he and his buddy hunted a lot in California, really rocky ground. You know, the first time it happened, they, he shot a buck, it ran off somewhere, could kind of see, you know, ran out of blood, didn't know, just kind of gave up almost, sitting on this, this hill or next to this trail and started seeing, he called them meat bees, you know, ill jackets that you're trying to avoid if you're processing game from getting stung. Ill jackets. Keep going up this trail.

• 1:28:27Speaker 06

  So he followed him and he's used that for years thereafter to find down game.

• 1:28:33Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:28:34Speaker 06

  In places he couldn't track.

• 1:28:35Steven Rinella?

  You know, Tom Petty, late Tom Petty, he once said, uh, one of his songs, he says, I can track a single bee to its hive.

• 1:28:43Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:28:43Steven Rinella?

  Which is like how they used to find.

• 1:28:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:45Steven Rinella?

  Standing there.

• 1:28:46Speaker 06

  Swarms and.

• 1:28:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you stand there, wait till one goes by, see as far as it went, go there, stand there, wait for the other one to go by. You can find your buck like that, man.

• 1:28:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56Steven Rinella?

  Badass.

• 1:28:57Speaker 06

  You can. And it's, it's all, that's to me, and I don't hunt anymore. And, and that's a whole different conversation, but just paying attention and trying to see the world through these other creatures eyes. You start picking that stuff up a lot more. And this is what our ancestors, all of our ancestors knew this animal language stuff in far better detail than I do. Like a friend of mine's hung out with the San people in the Kalahari.

• 1:29:24Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:25Speaker 06

  They are unfreaking believable in interpreting non-human communication. And the ones who are the best, you would think are the hunters. He's like, no, actually it's the women. The women are out in the bush digging roots. They've got kids with them. They got old people with them. All these people that are very vulnerable if the hyenas or leopard or the lions come through. So they are ultra peaked. And he went out with them one day and they're digging away and these women's just spread out. You're like, dude, that's not safe, right? From our perspective, hundreds of yards between these different women with the children, digging roots and things like that.

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  And, um, he'd walk up to any of them. Where are the closest lions? Without even stopping, they point.

• 1:30:12Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:13Speaker 06

  How far? About this far. Walk to another one. Hey, where are the closest lions? They point. Go around, visit multiple women doing this just effortlessly as part of their day. They're absorbing this information as they go. And in that particular case, they went over a couple of hours later in a, in a vehicle, there's the fresh lion tracks.

• 1:30:36Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:30:38Speaker 06

  And even on down of really specific stuff, like he told me this story, they were, they were in this, um.

• 1:30:46Speaker 06

  It was a small plot of forest and they hang out there in the day because it gets really, really hot. And they said to them, the, the white guys, the, the tourists, do not leave this patch of forest. There's mambas out here, there's cobras, there's hyenas, you know, the whole laundry list. But one of the guys with them there was one of his students in, in animal language, bird language. And this student of his comes over, he says, hey, I know we're not supposed to leave, but I'm hearing this bird do something that I think might be talking about a snake. Can you come listen to it? So he goes over there with him at the edge of this little patch of, of trees and he's like, yeah, I think you're right, but you know, we're not going to go out there. Let's, but let's go get the one

• 1:31:26Speaker 06

  white guy, he's got a gun. We'll check it out. So he comes over, the three of them walk out and he's like, yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think it's, I think it's a snake, but let's go get Isikwa. You know, this, this native guy, his name literally translates into cobra. He'll know.

• 1:31:43Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:44Speaker 06

  So Isikwa comes, the four of them then walk within, I don't know, say 60, 80 yards. And he's like, yep, there it is. It's a, it's a black mamba. Don't go over there.

• 1:31:55Speaker 06

  So my friend says to his student, who originally found this whole deal, he's like, now watch this. They go back into the trees and there's like five women sitting around making beads with ostrich egg shells. And they're just talking, kids are playing around, people are working on tanning hides, you know, just usual stuff of a community. So they stand there patient and finally there's a break in the conversation and the translator says, you want to ask the question? So my friend says, yeah, do you ladies hear any alarms right now? And in unison, all five of them point over their shoulder to what is hundreds of yards away, says, there's a mamba over there. Don't go over there.

• 1:32:39Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:41Speaker 06

  So not only through their regular routine, were they hearing it, they also knew exactly what it meant. Have not even seen it with all this other noise and stuff going on like that's the level that not just native Africans, not just native Amazonians, like our ancestors knew that. And it's like so cool that we're discovering it now. It's like, no, it's neat, but this is really old and it was used because it was so useful. It was retained because dinner was on the hoof and you needed to know it was in there before you even went in there to just limit the chaos that that life brings at you. So, and for me, it's like I was guiding a ton, you know, it's like people are paying

• 1:33:26Speaker 06

  you to find the bear. Well, huh. Well, if there's anybody on a carcass that's out there, it's probably going to be a bear.

• 1:33:36Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:33:37Speaker 06

  You know, so you gotta listen to the raven. You gotta watch the duck. So I don't, I don't want to see a wolf, you know, somebody like, I don't care. You gotta watch everything here because everything has a response and a relationship with everything else. And the more you pay attention to that, the more you're going to see all those connections start on just blossom. And what's even more cool is when you see the position you yourself hold.

• 1:34:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:04Speaker 06

  You're being talked about. They respond to you, Steve, different than you, Brody, different than you, Corinne. They respond or you see it in our dogs. Dog has a different bark for the UPS guy because he gives them snacks. Definitely different bark for the FedEx guy, no snacks there.

• 1:34:21Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:22Speaker 06

  Different bark for the neighbor, knows that guy pretty well. Different bark for or behaviors when one of the family comes home. So we're not in isolation of this, you know, as it's seen in the wild world, like we're doing it, our pets are doing it. It's just paying attention a little bit more so that you start seeing in the places that you want to know more.

• 1:34:43Steven Rinella?

  Our dog has a greeting for people whose house she has stayed at before.

• 1:34:48Speaker 06

  What is it?

• 1:34:49Steven Rinella?

  Just a level of like swirling around, making whiny noises.

• 1:34:53Speaker 05

  Rolling over on her back.

• 1:34:54Steven Rinella?

  That means she's been, she's like been dog sat by them.

• 1:34:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, the crazy thing is like-

• 1:34:59Steven Rinella?

  If you haven't done that, she's not gonna do it.

• 1:35:01Speaker 06

  Right? It's true. It's so true. And like, literally, three mornings ago, my wife and I are working at the dining room table. And our dog, we got a black lab, Hobbs, Hobbs starts going bananas, like ape shit. I'm like, what? He only does that level of craziness for the UPS guy, or if the neighbor's dog comes in the yard. Cause he wants to go play.

• 1:35:23Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:24Speaker 06

  Right? I'm like, what is it? And he's just like bouncing, they almost look like a coon hound, you know, it's bait, you know, treat a raccoon. Bouncing on his front feet, barking, barking, barking. And I look out the front door before I let him out. And here's a bobcat walking up the stairs from the lower yard into the upper yard.

• 1:35:40Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:40Speaker 06

  Twenty feet from the, from the door, and then just veers off and through the yard. You'd see those tracks, you're like, oh yeah, that bobcat came through in the night. Like, no dude, it was 10:30 in the morning. We were working and we would have missed it. Had Hobbs, or in other cases, we've seen lions in our yard because the magpies told us.

• 1:35:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:59Speaker 06

  You know, we had a lion with four kittens in our yard this spring and they disappeared after a while, didn't think we'd see him again. And we're sitting on the porch, my wife and I, and Jenny says, "You hear that?" I'm like, "Yeah." Magpies. Magpies, when they are social and just hanging out together, they'll go,

• 1:36:20Speaker 06

  you can hear it in different places. They're just checking in. But when it goes, they-

• 1:36:27Speaker 06

  It's like, that's what we heard. And she says, "There's something down there." I'm like, "I know." And she no more than stands up, walks less than the distance from here to Brody, looks over the railing into the lower yard, and she says, "The fucking lion." She, and because of the forewarning, had enough time, run in the house, grabbed her camera and got this killer footage of the cat walking like thirty feet from our, the corner of our deck.

• 1:36:53Steven Rinella?

  And those magpies-

• 1:36:54Speaker 06

  Quarter to three in the afternoon.

• 1:36:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:57Speaker 06

  When you'd least expect it. It's like, when your life is on the line- Like a magpie who might be whacked by a wildcat or a raven who might get whacked by an eagle. Like look to those things that their lives depend on most and then you just start seeing this this whole scene open up as that's why they're talking that way.

• 1:37:15Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:16Speaker 06

  And you're just, you're just an eavesdropper listening out. It's like, oh, whoa. Like ravens have a specific call for golden eagles. Some things seem generic, but some things are extremely specific. And this one, it can take a while. Like this one took me about five years to figure out what the heck it meant. I'd heard it. I'm like, whoa, that's different. I can't figure it out. Flying high, just making noise, right? No, no, that's what happens when there's a golden eagle.

• 1:37:47Steven Rinella?

  What does that noise like?

• 1:37:48Speaker 06

  So it's a very consistent, uniform series of notes to just go on.

• 1:38:00Speaker 06

  And it, and it's, it's serious. And I was having lunch with a guy who runs the bird programs in Yellowstone. I'm like, hey, Dave, you did your graduate work on golden eagles, right? He's like, yeah, yeah. He's like, um, do you know this raven call? I've been hearing this raven call. I'm pretty sure it's just for goldens. He's like, oh, yeah. That's exactly what we listen for to know to get the eagle traps ready because one's coming.

• 1:38:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:38:28Speaker 06

  So you hear that and you're like, oh, there's an eagle?

• 1:38:30Steven Rinella?

  Why are they tuned into goldens?

• 1:38:32Speaker 06

  They're killers.

• 1:38:33Steven Rinella?

  So goldens will kill them off of the like swipe off a carcass or whatever?

• 1:38:36Speaker 06

  I've only seen it twice myself. It happens more, but it's really infrequent.

• 1:38:41Steven Rinella?

  But he wants to, he wants to eat it.

• 1:38:43Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:38:44Speaker 06

  They're eating them.

• 1:38:44Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:38:45Speaker 06

  It's like the difference between a wolf killing a coyote versus a lion. Lion will eat you. Wolf just kills you.

• 1:38:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:54Speaker 06

  You know, so their, their level of response is different. That lion is gonna hunt you.

• 1:39:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:02Speaker 06

  That wolf is gonna opportunistically kill you because you're filching off its kill. And they know these variations. So I asked Dave, I'm like, so have you noticed a variation for bald eagles? Cause I think I have. And he's like, no, you know, he wasn't doing research on them. So he didn't. But on the spectrum of raven chasing another raven off versus raven chasing a golden eagle off, back from that golden eagle end of the spectrum is something that has a few more gaps in it, a few more bits of inflection. And it's hard because you see the value of indigenous knowledge of a landscape because I only get maybe half a dozen of these in a lifetime, some of these behaviors and

• 1:39:47Speaker 06

  calls. But if you've got a hundred other people who are listening for exactly the same thing for a couple thousand years and you're telling the stories, yeah, you see why the Bushmen are so damn good. But I've been able to call it on balds a few times. You know, you hear

• 1:40:08Speaker 06

  And I don't know if you can hear the differences in there. It's not that

• 1:40:13Speaker 06

  And it's not the raven chasing another raven.

• 1:40:18Speaker 06

  There's a little more insistence to it. There's a little more uniformity, but compared to the golden eagle, there's still more inflection. There's more spacing in there. And they're doing those things for a reason.

• 1:40:30Speaker 05

  Is all this stuff, like, are you doing all this just kind of based on memory and things you're hearing repetitively out while you're out? Or like, are you recording it all to like, listen to this stuff and get nuance out of it? Or is it just?

• 1:40:46Speaker 06

  For years, for 20 plus years, it's been me just listening in ways other people haven't been.

• 1:40:55Speaker 06

  And making some connections and missing most. Right. But what's really cool right now is my friends kind of at the center of initiating a bioacoustics project in Yellowstone, which at the most specific level is wanting to disentangle wolf language. You know, can you sense this a wolf population in a place like Colorado? Can you keep wolves out of a place by playing certain types of howls in an area to keep them on a cattle?

• 1:41:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:41:23Speaker 06

  Right? So they're doing more or less the basic research, though, which is based, you're putting out all these recorders and recording 24 by seven, 365 days a year.

• 1:41:34Speaker 06

  But you're not just getting wolves, you're getting everything. You're getting all the ravens, you're getting all the bison conversation, you're getting everything. And we've got one of them in our yard, a part of this project. So what I have now is a spreadsheet on my phone where I see a raven chase a golden eagle over. I just make them time and date stamp and a noted behavior in my phone. And now I can actually go back, because you're, you all had this, if you're trying to take a photo

• 1:42:03Speaker 06

  of something, you're trying to record something, it's over before you're done, especially these things.

• 1:42:08Speaker 06

  I only have a few data points ever, but this is But this thing's always running. It's always running. So I can now make a note and I'm like, raven being, you know, chased by this, or a raven chasing that, I can go back to the sound recordings and listen to it over and over. In its context. Totally.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

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• 1:42:57Steven Rinella?

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• 1:43:41Steven Rinella?

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• 1:44:25Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:10Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:19Speaker 06

  That's where this AI stuff is really cool on one level with wildlife acoustics and other behaviors, but you still need the field time. You still need somebody who's dyed in the wool in the field and that's all they do to interpret that data. Otherwise, it's just noise.

• 1:45:39Speaker 06

  So that's the part I really enjoy and I like, I'm really wanting to figure out. I have a strong suspicion of what the alarm coyotes use for when they encounter a cougar. It's different than when they find a wolf. Because they're bad dudes and they're gonna tell everybody about it. They want them known and they wanna avoid them. Themselves and their families. But I've only had four instances where I can verify that that coyote through snow tracking or somebody else's observations, that coyote was barking at a cougar. Mm hmm. One data point.

• 1:46:19Speaker 06

  And hope this, this bioacoustic stuff is allow us to then go in, cause like, he and I hooked up with a high school honors student. Kid wanted a project on wildlife. So we're like, great, we need to train the AI model. So we had him go listen to a bunch of stuff and accumulate enough howls to say, this is a howl. It's not an airplane. This is a howl. It's not a truck. This is a howl of a wolf, not a coyote. So that then you can let the machine listen to a year's worth of recordings without you having to sit there for a year for every single unit. And it can isolate all the, yeah. Right. And you know, there's, there's been an explosion in the amount of info out there in the research world about this kind of stuff in the last

• 1:47:02Speaker 06

  15 years. Like a friend wrote a book in, uh, came out in 2012 called What the Robin Knows by John Young. They had to, they had to scratch and dig to find any documentation that talked about any of this stuff. You know, everybody's got the app now. Like, here's the song of the robin. You know, here's the song of the Phoebe, you know, all these, what they don't tell you and they can't is what the hell that actually means. Yeah. And, uh, so there's been a lot more research in that field recently, which is just, it's pointing to the complexity that we've been ignoring as modern humans for a long darn time.

• 1:47:47Speaker 06

  And it's fun, you know, you don't need expensive equipment to engage with this stuff.

• 1:47:54Speaker 06

  You just, you don't even need binoculars. Just listen. Well, I don't have good hearing anymore. I shot too many guns or like me, you know, power tools and guns and, you know, I got compromised hearing, but it's not about what you can hear. Or can see, it's what you do with what you can hear and see. Like I noticed a friend of mine who's had a lot of the same history. We pick up on cars on dirt road a lot further off than our wives do. Right. Get the dogs. Get the dogs in, out of the road. Like, what are you talking about? There's a car coming. Yeah, there's a car coming. I don't hear it. Well, just give it a sec, you know, and there it comes. So. Each of us comes to the, to the game with a slightly different set of superpowers, if you want to put it that way. Yeah.

• 1:48:38Speaker 06

  And we're tuning into things in ways that. You aren't, or you're tuning in stuff that I don't, which is in some ways like I don't like to give a lot of instruction on this stuff because. I want to hear what you find. And if I tell you what to look for, that's all you're gonna see. You follow me? You know, so I really, it's like, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you some cool stuff to get you. Started, plant that seed, but man, I really want you to do this on your own and. Teach me. What you find. Oh yeah, the lions, you know, the coyotes do that at the lion, but it's when the lion's behaving like this. So like when that bobcat came through the yard the other day, I did get a small recording of the magpies. And it was nothing like what I would point out and say. Uh, bobcat over there.

• 1:49:23Speaker 06

  And what you start to realize is they're oftentimes. Talking about. Sure, they're talking about the animal specifically. But as well in that mix is them talking about that animal's behavior. It's intention, you might say. So when a cat is hunting. Those alarms go through the roof. They, they light up the woods, but if the cat like this one the other day, it was just kind of like. Walking through the yard, you know, drops off the retaining wall, sits down on a log in the little cops of cottonwoods. Yeah, yeah, there's a trouble, but. We're not ratting it out like crazy. You know, so in many cases you can. You can actually read into the behavior.

• 1:50:06Speaker 06

  You can read into the direction an animal's moving. Like, so when a coyote is alarming at something like us, naturally, they'll often shadow it as it progresses. So you'd be like, okay, there's a, there's a wolf over there. And it's going right to left at a trot, I think. And if we want to see it, we're gonna have to go over on the hill here where we're downwind. You can start doing these predictive things that our ancestors were using intimately because they're hunting with rocks and sticks.

• 1:50:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37Speaker 06

  You need everything. And this is one of those tools that helps you on that razor's edge of survival. It's like the, you know, the Crow Indian, you know, Crow tribal folks here, they had a, you know, Crow Fair. I don't know if you guys have been to Crow Fair, but there just, a few years ago, a Twitter with the fact this one elder was coming out of the mountains to attend. And this photographer friend of mine got to meet him. And, you know, he's very low key, asking questions. And the elder asked this friend of mine, he's like, so, you know, what do you do? I'm a photographer. He's like, oh, what do you like to photograph? You know, bears and wolves and otters and stuff like that. You want to know where every bear is, every wolf is? He's like, yeah.

• 1:51:21Speaker 06

  He's like getting his notebook out. He's like, you know, thinking he's gonna draw a map. And, you know, he's like, he says, no. He says, you listen to the birds. He says, they're like our women. They gossip about everything.

• 1:51:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Speaker 06

  You know, that's some deep wisdom right there because it's going on all the time, but we just don't give it the credit it's due.

• 1:51:45Steven Rinella?

  What, uh, what other animals that people, that people listen would know, would have a familiarity with the, with the vocabulary already?

• 1:51:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, great ones like gray squirrels.

• 1:52:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:52:00Speaker 06

  Like in North America at least, you know, gray squirrel is a great one. There in Europe, you know, they've been introduced to Europe and they're a plague over there. But again, nature doesn't care whether you're non-native or native.

• 1:52:10Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:52:11Speaker 06

  Everybody's contributions to this community conversation is equal and listened to. So gray squirrels, um, if you've spent time in the woods, you know something's coming through when you hear.

• 1:52:29Speaker 06

  Which um is in contrast to.

• 1:52:36Steven Rinella?

  Is it?

• 1:52:36Speaker 06

  Ever hear that one?

• 1:52:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:40Steven Rinella?

  But without the.

• 1:52:42Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:52:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Speaker 06

  Look up. That is typically for a threat from the air.

• 1:52:48Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:52:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Steven Rinella?

  He leaves off the couple like whatever.

• 1:52:52Speaker 06

  The chucks or chubs. But the chucks are typically something on the ground. Same with red squirrels.

• 1:53:02Steven Rinella?

  That's him on that's something on the ground.

• 1:53:04Speaker 06

  Typically on the ground. There's some dis- there's some debate in the scientific community over. What that actually means and no, it doesn't mean that it means this and we don't know. And the bottom line is the squirrels know.

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  Listen to squirrels, spend time with the squirrels, because when they go.

• 1:53:21Speaker 05

  I hate that one.

• 1:53:23Steven Rinella?

  What is that?

• 1:53:25Steven Rinella?

  Cause they got a version that just means I'm mad at another squirrel.

• 1:53:29Speaker 06

  There is that. Yeah, you can't discount that, that's for sure, like dude, get out of my mid.

• 1:53:34Steven Rinella?

  I wish I knew.

• 1:53:34Speaker 06

  I've got all the.

• 1:53:35Steven Rinella?

  Like I wish I could isolate the one. Cause I'm real interested in the one where he sees something. But then a lot of times you'd be watching him from afar and he'd be like, he's fired up because he's fired up at that squirrel.

• 1:53:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Steven Rinella?

  You know, he's not telling about some elk coming down the trail. He's like pissed at a squirrel.

• 1:53:52Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. And what's really crazy cool is not only is are most of these things. Um innate in these species, so like those vervet monkeys, they are wired from birth to yell at the leopard. Like they do.

• 1:54:07Steven Rinella?

  You think so?

• 1:54:08Speaker 06

  We know so. What they don't always have is.

• 1:54:11Steven Rinella?

  They're not learning language.

• 1:54:12Speaker 06

  Well, yes and no. What they need is refinement of how to use that. So like young ones, they've seen in those verve, it's like adults basically like cuff the kids like shut up. That is a root. It's a tree root. It's not a snake. Oh, all right. So there there are these innate tendencies, there's these innate alarms, but then there's also training. That comes with the social arrangement that that helps them refine it so that the group can agree. Right. And that's also where you end up with these dialects, you know, the ravens on Vancouver Island like, dude, they say stuff I've never heard before from here.

• 1:54:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:54:46Speaker 06

  Totally different accent in California. Oh, dude, he's on my surfboard. You know, it's like Mayners, you know, those ravens have different sounds. Same in Alaska, like you can see then it's like there are these pockets of agreed upon sound culture.

• 1:55:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:07Speaker 06

  And they're talking about things in pretty complex ways. They're talking about us too, which I don't think a lot of people realize. They're talking about us in ways that these wild communities are actually across species, not just across species, across genera, family, order of organism that are all listening to each other simultaneously. So the mink is listening to the frogs, the frogs are listening to the owl. The, you know, the owl is listening to the jet going overhead. You know, there's this, this whole hierarchy of, of order that they fall into.

• 1:55:46Steven Rinella?

  That's a great point that you're that like as much you're talking about trying to like sort, figure out what the noises make. There's all these different noises that have to mean something. It's interesting to get into like, what are other animals? So here you are, a human. Here you are, one species.

• 1:56:05Steven Rinella?

  Hearing elk bugle,

• 1:56:08Steven Rinella?

  drawing conclusions from that. But that elk is listening to a pine squirrel,

• 1:56:15Steven Rinella?

  drawing conclusions from that.

• 1:56:16Speaker 06

  None of them are in isolation. We are the ones in isolation.

• 1:56:21Steven Rinella?

  We're the ones out of the, out of the conversation.

• 1:56:23Speaker 06

  And it's not like you gotta go into a wild place to hear this. No. Like literally I'm gassing up here in Bozeman before I got here and the chickadee is pissed off at something. I didn't see what it was, but I at least knew something's going on over there. I've done enough times walk over and be like, oh, I bet nobody in this neighborhood's seen that owl. Hmm. It's been sitting there, probably lived there its whole life, years. And nobody's known that it's sitting right there.

• 1:56:50Steven Rinella?

  We had one hanging dead in that tree the other day.

• 1:56:52Speaker 06

  Did you really?

• 1:56:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:54Speaker 06

  What happened to it?

• 1:56:55Steven Rinella?

  We emailed or I texted one of the game wardens. And he said, there's so much avian influenza right now and it's hitting owls hard enough where they don't even, they're not even testing all the birds anymore.

• 1:57:05Speaker 06

  That's sad. And that's

• 1:57:07Steven Rinella?

  He was gonna come by and grab it, but he was like, he's like, there's a lot of

• 1:57:10Speaker 06

  Pretty sure of it.

• 1:57:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:12Speaker 06

  Overwhelmed.

• 1:57:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, like

• 1:57:14Speaker 06

  That's the trouble.

• 1:57:14Steven Rinella?

  There's too many to check them all right now.

• 1:57:17Speaker 06

  That's what I lament is as we see biodiversity tanking around the globe is we're losing these informants. We're losing these community members who are more than happy to welcome us in and share information with us if we slow the hell down. Like something I do with students that I've done for years is I'll take them out somewhere in the park. And I said, everybody put your phones, your watches, everything in a bag.

• 1:57:47Speaker 06

  Pull out a notepad or a piece of paper and a pencil. That's all you're allowed to have. Spread out, you know, so we'll have everybody spread out for, you know, a few yards between everybody over a, let's say an acre. And we're gonna sit for an hour, 60 minutes. That's it. 60 minutes. And then I just want you to look for any animals you see, any sounds you hear, just jot them down. And we come together at the end of that. And I keep time. And they have a crude way for them to keep rough timestamps of, of, of when we're out there so they can correlate certain things. And I'll say to them, what, um, what did you hear?

• 1:58:28Speaker 06

  Nothing, man. There was nothing for like, I don't know, I thought I heard a chickadee like maybe minute, you know, around minute 40 or when you made the signal for the fourth quarter or something like, there was nothing. And then there was stuff all over. I'm like, anybody else notice that? Like, yeah, actually the nutmeg came down the tree. I saw a coyote. Like, all these things start happening.

• 1:58:52Speaker 06

  I said, do you think us going in there screwed things up?

• 1:58:59Speaker 06

  Did they know we were coming? And you see the wheels start turning. The answer to that is absolutely yes. The same signal system that's ratting out the Cooper's hawk coming through the neighborhood or the owl perched up in the spruce is the same system that's telling everybody else about us.

• 1:59:18Speaker 05

  That's it. Super interesting from a hunting perspective because like you could be glassing some mule deer that are say a thousand yards away and you're like, they have no idea we're here, but maybe they do and they're just not worried about it yet, you know?

• 1:59:33Speaker 06

  They know the proximities. They know the priors. They know that squirrel isn't going to do that until it sees something of trouble, but they're 300, 400 yards down.

• 1:59:46Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:46Speaker 06

  If we see the coyote hauling ass up through this meadow past us, we know that trouble's gotten about another 100 yards closer. You know, that ghost buck that nobody could ever harvest, they at a very fine level at that age had to be, have to be tuning into these ultra fine details of alarm in their environment. And every species has a different threshold, you know, so towys for instance, they're out of there so fast, they're like ninjas. You just notice like they're gone. Like where the hell did they go?

• 2:00:19Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:00:20Speaker 06

  And then the sparrows, you know, pay attention and they make a couple of chip notes and then they take off, you know, and a couple of minutes later, here comes the dog has followed your trail into the woods.

• 2:00:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, when you're sneaking along thinking that the thing that's alerting stuff is you crunching leaves and then you think about, and you go, it's like, like the forest is alive with bird calls and whatever and squirrels and stuff, but you think it's like you stepped on a twig. Yeah, it's a good point. They might've been talking about you for forever, man.

• 2:00:48Speaker 06

  But turkeys, turkeys step on twigs, elk break, brant, big, big, big stuff. So like, why aren't they alarming at that? I was like so pissed as a kid, like watching these birds on my grandmother's feeder, like a woodpecker could come in and flush everybody or a jay or you know, squirrel sidles up. I walk out, everybody takes off. I'm like, I'm not bad. I'm not a bad guy. Like, come on, let's, you know, hang out, show me some stuff. And no, it's like you screw the least common denominator.

• 2:01:15Speaker 06

  As a hiker, a dog walker, a beachcomber, and you scare everybody. That's the piece we don't get is if you scare the robin,

• 2:01:24Speaker 06

  you've already been blown for everything. You scare the brown creeper. You scare the mink. You know, it's like, and then there's this beautiful, this is like gourmet level stuff where you start getting into secondary alarms. So like, as you slow down, I'll back up just a second. So that one exercise of making everybody sit for 60 seconds or 60 minutes. I'll say, how many times have each of you gone out in the woods or somewhere just wildish? And sat for 60 minutes and done nothing but pay attention? You ask that yourself, like, you know, hunters, some.

• 2:02:04Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, archery whitetail hunters.

• 2:02:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's how I learned it.

• 2:02:08Steven Rinella?

  That's when you see everything. Well, you gotta like, you gotta go sit there at like an hour in. All of a sudden like, where is all this stuff normally?

• 2:02:16Speaker 06

  Bingo.

• 2:02:17Steven Rinella?

  It's like stuff everywhere.

• 2:02:19Speaker 06

  It's normally exactly like you see after that hour. And that's what this lesson conveys them is like, I've never sat anywhere for an hour. And so the result is the reason we don't pick up on so much of this stuff is we have never ever seen the environment we live, our home, the place we think we know the best in anything other than a state of alarm and disruption.

• 2:02:41Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 2:02:42Speaker 06

  Alarm and disruption that we have created ourselves. But the beauty is as you start to pay attention to that,

• 2:02:52Speaker 06

  they recognize it in you.

• 2:02:55Speaker 06

  And it's very simple. Slow down, walk without an intention. Photographers, you know, even the photographer not hurting anything, doing anything. The behavior most people take on when they're trying to get a photo, it's predator like. Yeah. I see you, I'm focused on you, I'm, that is scary as hell to wild animals. And what's it saying is I'm gonna get you.

• 2:03:20Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:03:21Speaker 06

  I'm getting you.

• 2:03:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I like, I'm acknowledging that you're there.

• 2:03:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:03:25Steven Rinella?

  So like if you're coming up, you tell people, if you're trying to get up on a cotton tail, be like, last thing you do, don't look at it.

• 2:03:31Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:03:31Steven Rinella?

  Look at it out the corner of your eye and don't ever aim your eyeballs at it. Cause when you aim your eyeballs at it, it knows you're aiming your eyeballs at it.

• 2:03:37Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. It's that language. So,

• 2:03:42Speaker 06

  As you slow down, and as a friend calls it, I love this term, the honoring routine. You start to honor their space. You very quickly can tell what the squirrel's personal space extends to.

• 2:03:56Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:03:56Speaker 06

  You respect that, you give them a little bit of room. Ah, crap, you know, I'm just trying to get to the store like I'm not walking around every pigeon. Well, that is the barrier that's going to stop you from moving through the woods like that ghost buck. Like that lion. Do you follow me? They are paying attention to the signals in the environment and working around them and using environmental components to their advantage. So there's some places that are worthless to try to hunt until it's a south wind, right? You gotta wait till the winds right. You see certain birds and predators hunt when it's pouring down rain. Their, their survival is so narrow on that, that razor edge.

• 2:04:41Speaker 06

  And they've got this huge neighborhood watch trying to disarm them and keep them from killing their prey. And so they're doing all these different things to try to subvert the community of communication that's busting them, that's busting you, that's busting you. You step like, literally, you got two minutes usually. This is a fun one to play with. Tell a buddy to meet me at this trail intersection at 11 o'clock, let's say. Except you get in there at 10. So that means you leave your car or you know, do whatever you have to do to be sitting down by 10 and let things go back to normal.

• 2:05:21Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:05:24Speaker 06

  And then

• 2:05:24Steven Rinella?

  Which is 30 minutes, whatever, yeah.

• 2:05:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, at least.

• 2:05:27Steven Rinella?

  It's not five.

• 2:05:28Speaker 06

  It's usually more like 40 to 60 minutes. And then as you're sitting there and the birds are feeding and they're preening and they're singing, you hear the most common alarm in the woods. What is it? Silence.

• 2:05:45Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:05:47Speaker 06

  Silence is the most overlooked and most common alarm in nature that exists. So you just might think there's nobody singing over there anymore. And then you see a couple of birds like hauling ass going from the parking lot area past you.

• 2:06:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 06

  Set your watch. Two minutes.

• 2:06:11Speaker 06

  So you got two minutes to figure out, do you want to scare the tar out of your, you know, my buddy? Do you want to hide or do you want to, you know, go to somewhere else where I can watch them and screw them?

• 2:06:19Steven Rinella?

  That's a good point about the quietness, man.

• 2:06:22Speaker 06

  This is what the lion or the deer knows of you is it's got two minutes through the robins, through the sparrows to do a wide loop out, listen about your progress through all the other birds and animals. And then you've had, I know you guys, if you've spent any amount of time in the woods, you come back the same trail you went in on, you're like, "Son of a bitch, there's bear tracks right on my tracks," or wolf tracks, or coyote tracks, or the deer, you know? It's because they walk around you. They're listening and monitoring you through the animal language in the environment. So they're like, "Oh, yeah, okay, he's still going. He's going left over that ridge."

• 2:07:05Speaker 06

  And this stuff is, is of such high utility that, um, it's one fellow I mentioned in the book, interviewed him, he was training special ops crews. And, um, he had a guy he trained in bird language as well as tracking. And they had a Humvee, um, ran over IED, you know, in the road, just made a mess of this thing. And they sent him, this student of the fellow I knew, in to find the bomb layer. And he does a few loops around the Humvee site, you know, just chaos, bleeding guys, screaming guys, smoke, fire. He picks up a single set of tracks, leaving.

• 2:07:49Speaker 06

  Same set came in one way, left another. So he starts sign cutting, you know, some of you may know that term, where you're moving fast, but you're periodically rechecking that you're on the prints, okay, you broke a branch over there, you know, just trying to catch up.

• 2:08:05Speaker 06

  And he gets to a certain point where he's, this is Afghanistan, there's this wadi, this little ravine, and he hears the alarms. He's like, that guy's, he's over in there. And as he's standing there trying to figure out what to do, he starts hearing the bird alarms go up this ridge beyond the wadi. And based on what he learned, he went the opposite direction so he'd get over onto another point, get a clear view of that ridge, and ends up taking the guy out. Hmm. Never saw him up until that point, but he was clearly delineated in his movements and direction and speed even through the bird conversations. And that's the thing, he didn't know any of the birds.

• 2:08:51Speaker 06

  You don't need to know any of the birds. You learn the birds at home and the patterns you find anywhere you go are the same. They're gonna be filled by different species, but like I've heard so many people say, hey, you know, I never would have seen that mongoose when we were in Africa, but it's responding exactly the way the sparrows do at my place along the river when the mink comes through.

• 2:09:12Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:09:13Speaker 06

  The painted dogs, oh my gosh, they're like, we never would have seen them, but those birds, whatever they are, are the height off the ground, they're excited in the same way the birds are in my yard when the neighbor's dog gets loose and comes over.

• 2:09:25Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:09:27Speaker 06

  So that's, the universality of that concept is fascinating to me that we all are operating on this same level of awareness and use of sound to know what's going on, sometimes miles beyond our own sensory abilities. Like, I know there's wolves in the park, two and a half miles away, if I'm walking my dog, I hear, oh, yeah. Yeah, at this point, it's not even a if, it's just where. So I'll find that, that signal maker, the coyote or wherever, and I can just set up the scope, and from the deck of the house, you're like, oh, yep, yeah, there they are. It seems like magic to people, but it's not, it's just paying attention better people.

• 2:10:10Speaker 06

  And when you pay attention better, you get treated different. That's the real beauty to me is you start getting to know individual wild animals. And they, at the same time, they've always already known you.

• 2:10:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, it's like why certain people can be out in their yard and have stuff come into it.

• 2:10:30Speaker 06

  Absolutely. That kid is the one, when he comes to the prairie dog town, he's freaking popping our buddies off. That guy, he doesn't even care. And they remember real well, whether you've been nice, or especially if you've been naughty. So there are times, like even pigeons, let's go back to pigeons, like they remember hundreds of people. Faces. You can change your clothes and the pigeons remember you. There's some, there's study done in Paris that effect, one done in Philadelphia where they guessed that pigeons Racta might know and remember thousands of people.

• 2:11:09Speaker 06

  Remember who's a regular, who's a tourist, you know, and log all this stuff. We are being patterned all the time.

• 2:11:18Speaker 04

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• 2:11:48Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. 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 got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy.

• 2:12:33Steven Rinella?

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• 2:13:16Steven Rinella?

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• 2:13:57Steven Rinella?

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• 2:14:11Steven Rinella?

  There's probably some dude listening who's thinking, like I am, that there's probably some, like if you think about like trying to call Mallard's or something, that like...

• 2:14:24Steven Rinella?

  That there's like some code that you could crack. Do you know what I mean? Like that to a duck, when duck comes over and it's clearly looking for other ducks. And it's like, the duck's like, I know that that's not.

• 2:14:41Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, I don't get the problem. Right? There's some thing that's not right.

• 2:14:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:14:46Steven Rinella?

  You're doing something that's not right.

• 2:14:48Speaker 06

  Everybody's just bobbing siffly.

• 2:14:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's something, or like, there's something you could say.

• 2:14:55Steven Rinella?

  You know, there's something you could say that would just make it that absolutely that duck would have to come down. But you'll never, you'll never learn it, you know what I mean? You'll never learn, like, when he goes like, no, not buying it.

• 2:15:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. That speaks to another point where I don't sometimes share too much. Because what these animals offer you when you are let into their world is

• 2:15:24Speaker 06

  to see their strengths, their incredible talents.

• 2:15:27Steven Rinella?

  But also their vulnerabilities.

• 2:15:29Speaker 06

  But you see their Achilles heels too. And that, I don't, it's thrown around so cliche, but sacred, that, to me is, there's a sacredness in what they have shared to then betray that. Like, a great example, you probably know this from your bison work, is bison have this Achilles heel of following the matriarch.

• 2:15:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Speaker 06

  And those bison hunters partly annihilated them because of their allegiance to the matriarch. They don't move anywhere. I've watched them for years.

• 2:15:58Steven Rinella?

  Exploit that.

• 2:15:59Speaker 06

  Shoot her through the guts. So she can't move and everybody mills around and you just mow the rest of them down. Anybody else tries to take off and start a new course, you bust them through the guts. Everybody mills around and you, you know, in one stand, you can get a dozen or a hundred. I think there was one record of like a hundred or something, bison in one stand.

• 2:16:16Steven Rinella?

  A guy named Vic Smith got over a hundred one time.

• 2:16:20Speaker 06

  So to me, when you're let in.

• 2:16:25Speaker 06

  It's changed the way I, there are things I couldn't reconcile hunting.

• 2:16:34Speaker 06

  And part of that was-

• 2:16:36Steven Rinella?

  You mean there are, there are things about hunting you couldn't reconcile? Or there are animals that you couldn't reconcile hunting for?

• 2:16:42Speaker 06

  It was the former.

• 2:16:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:16:44Speaker 06

  Like, I didn't know what it was, but there was an honoring piece, a recognition, a sacredness that got clouded over in me trying to get that turkey, that tom, that specific tom, that buck, or something like that, that, um, I missed. I've found now. And for me, this is just me, it took me stepping away from hunting to really soak into their world on their terms.

• 2:17:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:20Speaker 06

  If you follow me, that, you know?

• 2:17:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:22Speaker 06

  And so, they share things, like, there's a, there's a mule deer doe, model mother, model mama, just, we called her Mama Deer. And she, she always brought off fawns. She was amazing. And one year, she had triplets.

• 2:17:43Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:44Speaker 06

  Actually, no, no, I think it was quadruplets, which for a mule deer almost never happens. Like, she knew where to feed, build up those reserves, could handle that many kids, and lo and behold, we start into that winter, and it's a bitch. And one by one, we start seeing those fawns not show up in the yard. And pretty soon, it's down to just one, and then, we don't even see Mama Deer. They're gone. I'm like, what the hell? And we had years with this deer. Like, we had enough understanding that I would walk with, at that time, our two black Labradors, each about 70 pounds, and I'd go get the mail, the mailbox, like, 10th of a mile up the driveway. And she'd be there grazing, you

• 2:18:29Speaker 06

  know, off a distance, but in the meantime, she might come, like, right along the driveway.

• 2:18:35Speaker 06

  And I would put my hands on the shoulders of dogs, not, they weren't even, they weren't leashed, our dogs run, but to her, this was my gesture of, it's okay, they're with me and I'm not gonna let them bother you.

• 2:18:49Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:49Speaker 06

  And there are times we could walk within 12 feet of her and the fawns. Like, I'd go sit in the yard sometimes, and she was so comfortable that she would walk between me, sitting on the edge of the retaining wall, and the edge of the decking, which was like, at most, 30 feet.

• 2:19:07Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 2:19:07Speaker 06

  She'd walk through. Like, we had an understanding. It wasn't, she wasn't my pet, I didn't, you know, but we gave each other the space and understanding of each other's boundaries. Well, that hard winter, that she disappeared, we assumed she was just gone. And lo and behold, like, mid-February, maybe early March, who shows up on our deck? A mama deer. And she's just emaciated, she had this huge patch of hair missing on her back right side, like her lumbar vertebrae, I don't know if she'd been hit by a car, you could see her ribs. And what did she do? She came up and bedded down on the welcome mat to our front door.

• 2:19:52Speaker 06

  She came up on the deck, which is, you know, like, an eight-inch step up, and she bedded down there every night for, I think it was three or four days, until she eventually went under the deck and died.

• 2:20:05Steven Rinella?

  Cause she knows nothing's gonna get her there.

• 2:20:08Speaker 06

  Exactly. She and I and our family had put in the time for her to see us as, in her worst hour, her worst time, she knew she could find refuge with that, with us.

• 2:20:26Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:27Speaker 06

  Like, to me, that was like, one of the most crushingly heartbreaking, but also beautiful things, at the same time, that we had made enough of a connection that she felt that she could live out her last hours in our company.

• 2:20:43Speaker 06

  And that I can't now look at another deer and not offer them that same capacity to reproduce what mama deer did.

• 2:20:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:53Speaker 06

  Not that I, let's say, wouldn't hunt again, but the way I would hunt and view that is, and the author Joe Hutto put it really succinctly nicely this way, it's not-

• 2:21:04Steven Rinella?

  Isn't that the dude that did all that work with turkeys?

• 2:21:06Speaker 06

  He did My Life as a Turkey, at BUC, and he wrote, he did a great film and book called Touching the Wild on these mule deer down in Landur.

• 2:21:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:15Speaker 06

  And Joe said-

• 2:21:17Steven Rinella?

  Is he still around?

• 2:21:18Speaker 06

  He is, he moved back to Florida.

• 2:21:22Speaker 06

  He, you know, I keep in touch now and then, and he's such a wealth of-

• 2:21:25Steven Rinella?

  I'd like to get that dude on the show sometime.

• 2:21:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I-

• 2:21:28Steven Rinella?

  I don't know if he does that kind of stuff.

• 2:21:29Speaker 06

  He's been some stuff going on, so I don't know how he's doing right now, but I would, he's, he, he's another one that's put in the time to see all these other facets that most of us overlook when we say, oh, look a deer.

• 2:21:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:43Speaker 06

  You know, and, and the way he sort of described what I'm, I feel is like, yeah, I'm gonna go hunt again, but now I have to reckon with the fact that it's not what I'm killing as much anymore, it's who.

• 2:22:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:00Speaker 06

  Who am I, who am I choosing to take out of this population? Is this the, the matriarch mama? Is this a fawn? A fawn that has a certain spark and talent that none of the others do, you know, like, it's, it'd be very hard for me to go into hunt the way I used to when I was younger.

• 2:22:23Speaker 06

  And when I did kill something, if I did kill something, I would, it wouldn't be with high fives anymore. You know what I mean? Like, get that big buck or something like that, it would be-

• 2:22:37Speaker 06

  You know, silence, silence with that understanding that.

• 2:22:44Steven Rinella?

  That it was a who.

• 2:22:45Speaker 06

  It was a who. Yeah. Yeah. And just every single day of our lives is enriched by paying attention to these conversations and having these individuals come in and out of our world because they are our best teachers. When you have a shit day at work and your family is pissed about something or, you know, it's like, you can always look to that, look at that, you know, that coyote over there's, it's got a broken leg, you know, and it's, it's not making excuses. It's still keeping up with the pack, be a little slower, you know, listening to nature

• 2:23:26Speaker 06

  at that level is, you start seeing issues and trends that magazines and the popular media want to make into, you know, the save the whales kind of approach where it's like top down, big stop, you know, it's like, to me, this is the ground swell of where caring for your environment's real stewardship, real conservation takes place is you, through these conversations and overhearing what matters to them, lets you into their world to know what you're doing that is harmful that you weren't even aware of, like, oh shit, I guess I shouldn't mow the grass there now because those, that's where the bunnies,

• 2:24:09Speaker 06

  that's where the, that's where the litter's coming off is that hole underneath that long grass. Okay. I won't mow there for a month more. Like, simple stuff sometimes. Don't cut down that dead tree. That's the woodpecker nest site. Or that is, that is the sentinel location for the principal players in your neighborhood wildlife.

• 2:24:32Speaker 06

  Alarm system, you take that one seemingly useless dead tree out and all these animals can't get a view now of what's coming before it's on them. And it's like, so you have a true bottom up level of appreciation and interaction that makes you a better neighbor, I think. I feel that way. I still feel like a fool. I still feel ignorant and like I'm making so many mistakes. But I feel, and I know, when you enter into those spaces with that sort of humility, nature's pretty resilient. It gives you more latitude than you would have otherwise.

• 2:25:16Speaker 06

  Like, people ask me, well, should I make animal noises when I'm out? You know, I see some deer when I'm out for a walk, or I see the fox, do I make fox noises? I'm like, no, do not. I don't imitate animals in the wild anymore. Because the reason is, I want to see them do what they naturally do. And then once you inject yourself, it's game over. It's like pulling the trigger, almost. You change the entire equation. I've been with people, we've actually killed animals through making noises and interrupting the situation. I want to see them do what they naturally do, so I have a better sense of what they have to teach me. And use your own voice.

• 2:25:56Speaker 06

  Lot of indigenous cultures will say, when we talk to the animals in our native tongue, they treat us like family. And so people are like, well, I'm only American, I speak English, and you know. Like, you speak in the most expressive language you have, and be sincere. And you'll start having experiences like, you know, the deer jump up on the morning walk with the dog, and you say, hey, wait, wait, it's us, it's us. And they stop.

• 2:26:26Speaker 06

  And they go back to grazing. They might even bed back down like that. But if you bring a friend with you to watch, uh-uh. It doesn't work because they're always responding to the lowest common denominator. You bring in somebody that's not paying attention and we give off infinite amount of micro signals. And they know whether you're paying attention or not. There's stories like horses that can do math and tell time and read calendars and stuff. And they find out they can't do that stuff. What they're doing is queuing off of their handlers at such a fine minute level that it gives the impression that another member of this, you know, another species has these capabilities when they're just, it's called the Kluger Hans effect.

• 2:27:10Speaker 06

  They're paying attention to you so well, better than most humans pay attention. It's like, how are we missing these cues? Well, your life doesn't depend on it. When it does, you start paying attention to stuff. You know, we all have that capacity like, oh, the furnace shut off. You know, look to the things that are important to us. We still have those capabilities. We just have directed them other places.

• 2:27:37Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 2:27:38Speaker 06

  Right? You're like something, there's something screwed up with that trailer. Got, pull over, pull over. We gotta check the, the chains or there's a bearing going out or, you know, it's like, we are laser focused on those kinds of details. But the power of our brain to do that can be used then to go back into the natural world like our, our, our people did in deep time.

• 2:27:58Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:59Speaker 06

  And know stuff that is magic seeming. But in ways that's really damn fulfilling. You know, when you get, it's like, I'd love to see a mountain lion at all. Like, well, we get, we get photos of them. You know, it's like, it changes the, the whole equation. You, um, you have opportunities that you wouldn't have otherwise.

• 2:28:22Steven Rinella?

  Tell me about the artwork you do real quick.

• 2:28:26Speaker 06

  You know, I always say my artwork is kind of my, um, tourist trinkets or my souvenirs from living. So every piece is not just done to make a turkey or make a bear. It's done to tell an individual's story.

• 2:28:41Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:41Speaker 06

  That I've been let in on. Some of these animals I've known for an hour or two. Some of them I've known for years. Some of them I've known for generations. And so, um,

• 2:28:55Speaker 06

  I feel that the artwork to me is the focal point to spend a ton of time figuring out what the heck that experience meant to me, if that makes sense. And it forces me to see details I would miss otherwise. And you notice that bull has a knot in his lower, you know, metatarsal. He broke that, you know, at some point. Or, oh, there's people will say, oh, that cow elk is, you know, walking across the lawn and mammoth. She's limping. No, that's actually part of the normal gait. But that one over there, she's got, she's got a tooth infection. Look close. See that little swell here? No, no, no, not the bulge, that's the masseter muscle or the buccinator muscle in her cheek.

• 2:29:39Speaker 06

  But right below that's a little, you know, it's like, it deepens further still my experience with the wild.

• 2:29:49Steven Rinella?

  So that turkey is a turkey?

• 2:29:51Speaker 06

  That's a specific one. Inspired by, I gave a couple of talks at a nature center in Utah and they had three Toms, Tom, Tommy and Thomas. And after I was done with my obligations, I just followed them around with some clay and sculpted and, you know, it's just, I was just so taken with that dexterity in their tails. Like a geisha, you know, they wave that tail back.

• 2:30:14Steven Rinella?

  Cock that thing off to the side.

• 2:30:15Speaker 06

  It's just so beautiful, you know? And when you enter into these spaces, you find that words don't really work. And I guess that's, I grew up around sculpture, tried like hell not to do it. But it came back around in a way that I could do it my way. And for me, it picks up where the words sort of trail off. You know, like that, just that curve of the Achilles on the bear or that shin bone, that line of, I always loved bones and skulls and it's like. It was a place to put it. My love of that stuff, like knowing every bone, every muscle from the inside out, then seeing the overlay of the behavior. And when they do this, how that bone articulates this way. So I don't use photos, I don't use video.

• 2:31:00Speaker 06

  I used to take a ton of that stuff. I found I didn't use it. I got a roadkill kit. I got a tackle box full of calipers and dissecting knives and rubber gloves and my own data sheets I made up, one for birds and one for mammals. So I find a moose or a grizzly bear, something's illegal to have, I can take a full set of measurements and have that archive in my studio to go back to. But more accurately, what it does for me is, you know, on an elk, I find a dead elk, I might take 50 measurements, but in stretching the tape measure or the calipers, that number of measurements guarantees I have my hands on that animal at least 100 different ways.

• 2:31:40Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:31:41Speaker 06

  So when I go to work on a sculpture, I'm working from more of a felt sense of the creature. I see just a momentary pose that a fox or a badger or an otter might do or something. I can freeze that in my mind and I can fill in all the details of what was where to make that happen.

• 2:32:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Does most of your income come from the art or from your work as a naturalist and guide?

• 2:32:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's the art, by far. Yeah, we're starting to do-

• 2:32:13Steven Rinella?

  So you're like occupationally an artist?

• 2:32:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, but when you just kind of follow your interests, you kind of start screwing up the ability to be defined. Like I love, I loved, since I was a kid, loved stone tools and ancient technology. You know, it took me 30 years then flew to Clovis Point, but like always as a kid, there was just, from the time I was young, a desire to have a felt sense of what it meant to- To make that.

• 2:32:44Steven Rinella?

  I had one tee, I was able to do it because I had it teed up for me.

• 2:32:47Speaker 06

  Did you?

• 2:32:50Speaker 06

  Cheater.

• 2:32:51Steven Rinella?

  I had everything ready. All I had to do was give it the final little flap and it was all teed up.

• 2:32:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:32:57Steven Rinella?

  I did, I did a flute, but I took a dirty way to get there.

• 2:33:00Speaker 06

  That's dirty dude. Because whoever made the preform for you will tell you the flute's nothing.

• 2:33:08Steven Rinella?

  I just had to give it the final little, the final little thump. And blew a flute off.

• 2:33:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:33:15Steven Rinella?

  And I was like, I'm done. I'm not gonna do a second.

• 2:33:18Speaker 06

  Success.

• 2:33:19Speaker 07

  He didn't break it.

• 2:33:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. But it's, you know, that sort of stuff as well. I just has always turned my crank and I find a flake of obsidian on the ground near the house or something like. I know almost exactly what that, what size and dimension that thing would have been off of. I know what direction the blow came from. I know what it was trying to do to take off that lump on whatever the preform, like just. That's always really been gratifying to me to have that bottom up, inside out kind of look at things. And the art and the educational programs, they're just kind of, you know, the veneer at the top.

• 2:33:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And then, uh, hold on, when, when is the book out and available? Right now?

• 2:34:04Speaker 06

  It is. It's available now wherever books are sold. Um, you can find them all over Amazon and, and beyond. Your local bookstores can order it through Greystone Books.

• 2:34:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay. The title is Eavesdropping on Animals: What We Can Learn from Wildlife Conversations.

• 2:34:21Steven Rinella?

  By George Buman. Um, got a foreword by John Young. Anywhere books are sold.

• 2:34:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:30Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for coming on, man.

• 2:34:32Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:34:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33Speaker 06

  Can I give one plug?

• 2:34:35Steven Rinella?

  What do you mean?

• 2:34:36Speaker 06

  For something other than the book.

• 2:34:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:34:39Speaker 06

  Something we're doing right now. It just went live. We got an online event. That's where some of our education stuff has been going.

• 2:34:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, Chris put that in the notes, sorry.

• 2:34:46Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:34:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no.

• 2:34:47Speaker 06

  That's fine.

• 2:34:47Steven Rinella?

  Go ahead.

• 2:34:49Speaker 06

  We have an event for people who love nature in Yellowstone Park called the Yellowstone Summit. And it brings together, we have this year, over thirty world expert speakers, as we have for the last five years, on Yellowstone, talking about everything from filming mountain lions, the history of beavers in the park, to population census of moose, geology, Native American history. If you are thinking of coming to the park and want some insight on what to do and think about.

• 2:35:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:35:19Speaker 06

  Join us if you're a longtime Yellowstoneer, want more deep stuff, join us. If you're from the region, there's nothing that thrills me more than running into somebody from Billings, or Butte, or Idaho Falls, or something, there's like, oh, my gosh.

• 2:35:34Speaker 05

  Is that like an ongoing thing? Or is it like a one-time?

• 2:35:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's online, so anybody with internet can get involved. Watch it anywhere in the world. It's registration just opened, so by the time this airs, registration will still be open. It goes live on February nineteenth through the twenty-second of this year. And, yeah, it's cheap. We try to make it affordable for fifteen bucks. You can get the access for forty-eight hours. To all those programs, or if you want all access, which means you can... Like, it's great because it's online.

• 2:36:10Steven Rinella?

  But there's a live component to it. You can go, or you can watch, you can get a ticket, watch online.

• 2:36:14Speaker 06

  So like Deputy Superintendent Mike Trenell of Yellowstone will be giving a park update, and you can show up and ask him questions yourself. So like, yeah, since the flood, you know, what actually is going on with the road, and things like that. We've got folks who use it for homeschool curriculum. We've got folks who use it to train their park guides. So this is a training tool for them. We've got park service people who watch it for their own training. So it's very high-level, but also has entry-level, basic stuff for anybody interested, whether they actually ever make it here or not. And just check it out at YellowstoneSummit.com.

• 2:36:49Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So YellowstoneSummit.com, and eavesdropping on animals, what we can learn from wildlife conversations with George Buman. Thanks for coming on, man.

• 2:36:58Speaker 06

  My pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 2:37:27Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. 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 WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy. At American Military

• 2:38:12Steven Rinella?

  University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow, I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow, I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation. Most of us aren't trying to become... Completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day.

• 2:38:57Steven Rinella?

  That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories. It can be from the small habits you create and how you honor your needs on a daily basis. So many of us are great at prioritizing even the smallest things for our loved ones. But what about ourselves? With thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries, BetterHelp is making therapy more accessible so more people can keep moving forward, one conversation at a time. Better is personal. Therapy should be too. Visit betterhelp.com to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com.

• 2:39:42Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.