00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kell and now Here's kel. Peyton Manning received multiple puncture wounds to the back of his neck and a fractured leg as a result of nearly being carried away by a black bear. The attempt at eating or predation incident occurred in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. It was broken up by Peyton's owner, a local pastor, who ran at the black bear in let's say, a hard blitz fashion. The medium sized black bear fell back in the pocket and fumbled Peyton Manning, which, if you haven't guessed, is a nine year old Maltese silky terrier mix a canine a dog what a twist, which oddly enough, is about the size of a football. After being dropped, Peyton did an end around the house type move and slid under a parked car while his owners, the pastor and his wife, continued to drive the bear down field. All Right, I don't know for certain that the multi silky mix named Peyton Manning is actually the size of a football, but I do know we can't pretend this is the first time Peyton has been picked off the first time he's been intercepted in his own backyard trying to use the bathroom. For sure, if I was up to date on my football, I'd be able to keep the jokes running. But we seem to be in a fourth and long situation already. Pennsylvania Fishing Game warns that black bears are fresh out of their winter dens and looking for food. Turn on the lights and make loud noises before letting your pets out at night. Bad news for light sleeping neighbors, but a real touchdown for Fido. Pennsylvania is a state known for a large black bear population. Currently, the state hosts over sixteen thousand bears, which is down from a peak of over twenty thousand individuals. Pennsylvania has black bears in almost every county and has averaged a hunter harvest of four thousand bears in the last five years. That's on average, and eight hundred and seventy five pound bear was checked in by a hunter in two thousand ten, which is the heaviest in the state, but not necessarily an anomaly, as there have been seven other bears that have weighed in over eight hundred pounds reported since in just the two thousand nineteen bear season, there was a bear checked in over eight hundred, two checked in over seven hundred and seven bears over six hundred. I'll tell you can do a lot of black bear hunting in far flung places like Alaska and British Columbia and not find bears in this weight class. Now, the biggest record book bears won't go by weight, They go by skull size, as weight fluctuates so wildly with bears between the spring and the fall. The almost US record black bear was a seven hundred pound bear with a skull that measured twenty three and three sixteenths, and the standing US hunter taken black bear at twenty three and nine sixteen. Both of those are Pennsylvania bears. The world record American black bear is listed as a skull found outside of e from Utah that skull measured twenty three and ten sixteens. The football is a game of inches, black bears is a game of sixteenths apparently. Now, how you come up with these numbers, if you're interested, is very simple and accurate. Grab a metal tape, your bear skull, and a framing level. Find a square corner in your house or garage or wherever. Place your bear skull in the corner with the point of the nose touching one wall, in the outermost edge of the occipital bone. You know that like thing, that bone that hooks around the eyeball socket. Make sure that's touching the other wall. Place your framing level in a vertical orientation against the outermost edge of the occipital bone and make sure it is level. Measure the distance between the wall and the level as close to the skull as possible. That is your width measurement. Remember that, write it down. Repeat this process for the length measurement by placing the level on the outermost point at the rear of the skull. Had these two measurements together, that's it. Now you have successfully reduced an awesome animal to a number. Your time is better spent in the kitchen rendering fat, eating the roast beef of the woods, and sharing it with others. But you know, measuring stuff is fun. This week we've got people problems, record book rams, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as This podcast is brought to you by Steel Power Equipment. It's that time of year. All sorts of nasty stuff is emerging from the eroding snow, and we'll probably get more snow, the heavy kind as soon as those branches above your yard or car get those new little baby buds on them, and they'll end up on the ground, creating more work when you just want to go after some spring gobblers or ice off hungry fish fishing. So make that clean up easy and look like a pro while you're doing it by supporting this podcast and buying steel power equipment, makers of the world's best battery and gas powered saws. Go to steal usa dot com to find a certified independent know what they're talking about steel dealer near you. As for my week, all sorts of stuff is happening. It is hired to keep track. I'm gearing up for and by the time you hear this will be in Tennessee. Hunting to your Keys with Danielle Pruett and Chef Michael Hunter, will try your best to avoid ticks, bag a few birds, and do some serious cooking. I've been dragging out the turkey gear calls Decoy's cameo. Here's a hot tip for you budget minded conscious folks. Buy one of our leafy tops and face masks. At first light. Throw that over the top of whatever clothes you currently have. They're super durable, they look better with age. You can hand them down with generations. I bring this up because I put two of these in my turkey pack and will often set one up as a makeshift ground blind, just high enough to cover my slate, call and hand movements. I'll bring more clothes than you think I would need. Tennessee is warm, but it's humid. Turkey hunting is early, which I actually loved, but you sit in the dark, motionless, sometimes for hours, and that gets cold. Sighting in shotguns is the other thing I've been doing, which, if I'm being honest, is not my favorite thing in the world. I recently gravitated to the red Dot sites last year, which, you know, the progression kind of went like no sits, you know, just the shotgun bead and then iron sights and then the fancy set up with the red Dot. Not because of missus, but because they are great for first time turkey hunters. Folks don't naturally shoot shotguns like a rifle, which is what you should do during turkey season, and this helps also because I started shooting that damned number nine t s s. It kills turkeys, it stones them, But I shaved off parts of three teeth attempting to eat my birds. With the scope, I can pattern my shotgun high and it comes close to eliminating the tooth breaking straggler pellets hitting the eating parts of the bird. The other thing I'm getting ready for is a trip with my good buddy Stephen Ronnella to do some archery hunting this spring, which means a lot of aero flinging, getting the recurve back in shape. Just replace my lucky string after a good six seasons of use. How's that for thrifty? Been tuning arrows, making sure those tuned arrows drive from knock tip through broadhead tip through the target, getting that muscle memory back. I shoot my garage daily, which is tuning myself for proper form and release, and not that making clean ethical kills isn't motivating enough. But my good buddy Steve really doesn't like the fact that I choose to shoot something less technologically advanced than a compound bow. It irks him, so I shoot even more. Next up a little housekeeping, then we'll get on with the show. The Bear Grease podcast is finally out. Clay Newcom does a fantastic job going deep on the subject of mountain lions east in the Mississippi. Check that out. Another thing I wanted to tell you is I follow all sorts of food accounts on Instagram. One of these is called Barnacle Foods. They're out of Juneo, Alaska. I started following these folks because they do all sorts of super interesting cool stuff with bull kelp. Bull kelp is a super abundant seaweed found in you know, nice cold water of Alaska. These folks are hand picking the seaweed and put it into all sorts offerings like salsa and hot sauce. It's awesome stuff. This was super intriguing to me because Old matt Ronella and I up the fish shack in southeast Alaska, pulled some bull help one time and made our own pickles out of it. You know, there's like two parts of it. There's the fronds, which is like the leafy kelp looking thing, and then there's the other part, which is called the stipe. And the stipe is like a big long cucumber with a bulb on the end of it. Kind of looking thing, right, and it's all hollow, and you just slice that thing into rings and you can make pickles out of it or grinded up like these folks do for salsas and stuff like that. One thing that they do not do, okay, is you got this beautiful bulb thing that's a natural vessel. And if you were to take that thing and pickle it and turn it into a giant pickle, you could then fill it with your favorite Caesar or bloody Mary seasoning, and then you'd have an edible glass for that adult beverage. Nobody's doing this to my knowledge, and I think it's the best idea ever. I personally like to opt for a bloody Maria, which is super tasty but super annoying to order anywhere, because I always feel like the folks that hear the more popular bloody Mary all the time, despite my asking for a bloody Maria, that I end up with vodka, which is disgusting. Get me a vodka rocks. So I'm like the annoying person who's like, yeah, I want a bloody Mary, but I want it with tequila instead of vodka. And then it's this socially awkward thing anyway, quick listener email. I work shift work. One year, I was working swing shift in the spring when beavers disperse. I live in the hills north of Fairbanks. I was almost home and I see a critter walking downhill on the road. When I realized it was a beaver, I decided that since I had a license in my pocket and it was still trapping season, i'd tried to club this critter with my tomahawk and take it home. It had other plans. Yes, this person travels with a tomahawk in their vehicle. This beave had a very well defined personal bubble. When I'd approached that threshold, it would stop, turned towards me and hiss. When I took another step, it would charge me, leaping at my shins, hissing and growling deep from its throat. We did this dance several times. I never did feel like the tomahawk I had provided the necessary reach to dispatch the ornery critter without placing my shins in unnecessary danger. In the end, it waddled on down the road. And every spring since I put a bat in my vehicles, but I haven't had the opportunity since. Thank you Temple from Fairbanks. That was an illuminating addition to the subject of beaver dispersal in the spring. Temple also writes, I still think you guys were wrong and discouraging expiration of anwar. It should happen if it can be done safely and profitably for Alaskans and Alaska. Moving on to the problematic extraction desk Piney Point, Florida, an old fertilizer plant settling pond, which apparently is called a stack, began to show signs of failing, as in bursting one of its walls. Behind this wall was some four hundred and eighty million gallons of water. Officials estimated that a catastrophic failure of this wall would have released a twenty foot tall wall of water upon the nearby residents in the potential path of this water and in the zone of mandatory evacuation declared to Easter Sunday are a mix of industrial and agricultural land, three hundred homes, a general aviation airport, and a jay il inmates were moved to other facilities, or, as was the case for over one hundred people in lock up, they moved up one floor. Roll up your pant legs, fellas it's gonna get wet. It's abratican. I have the high ground. Immediately, crews began pumping water from the stack out into Tampa Bay. The current rate is at thirty eight million gallons of water a day. The pumping started immediately when the crack was detected, but at a much slower rate. The National Guard was utilized after Governor Granto Santis declared a state of emergency and pumps were brought in by Chinook helicopter. Over two dozen pounds were operating at the peak of the operation, sending twenty three thousand, five hundred gallons of water per minute towards Tampa Bay, while the breached water that went through the fospho gypsum itself was apparently diverted and trucked to a different site in order to prevent potentially radiated by products of fospho gypsum from going into Big Piney Creek. The water, depending on the source, is contaminated to various levels, having the acidity of possibly as little as a cup of coffee. It's high and phosphorus. Phosphorus is the agricultural byproduct that can be linked on occasion to algae bloom events. You know that situation where the bloom eats all the available oxygen, causing all the fish to die. There's nitrogen and fluoride in this waste water as well. And when was the last time you said, can I get a side of fluoride with my snapper file? A? Never? Here's a quote for you. Quote. It is a big problem. The other ponds on that property, and the property in and of itself is a problem. It is a wastewater compound. We do have everyone's attention from Washington, d C. To Tallahassee down to the regional level. And here's another quote for you. Tiny Point is managed by a holding company with insufficient assets to manage an accidental spill, and that such a spill could create an overwhelming environmental impact. The state funding, according to the request, will be used to treat the water and prevent harmful phosphorus, nitrogen, and fluoride from reaching local water bodies and protection from catastrophic failure of stack contaminant and untreated discharge of phospho gypsum process water. Which gang is kind of a really long winded way of addressing anwar or any extractive industry on or near our water pebble mine whatever it may be, and whar we're talking breeding grounds primarily for a lot of our migratory birds caribou. Really, as far as I'm concerned, anywhere, stories like this make you cautious, there is a horrible track record of development and abandonment. In this case, a private company creates a mess within Manatee County in the state of Florida, then they declare bankruptcy. The residents of that county and that state are stuck with the ills until another company comes along that promises to contain and mitigate the mess, but they have to be able to make money to do so also, so they kicked the can down the road until the mess is again on the county, on the state, and now on everybody who pays taxes in the US, federal funds to the tune of two hundred million dollars will be used, in addition to what has already been spent by the Army Corps of Engineers, the e p A, and the Florida National Guard. That, in a nutshell, is why not everyone sees extract of industry as a promise of a better future. That is why every time I mentioned this, I get emails from listeners who work in minds that are doing it right. They're saying not us, because they don't want their jobs to be overshadowed by these bad actors, and they shouldn't. There are places that are providing good jobs and giving us all the stuff that we need out of the earth to you know, live comfy and cozy and run our electric vehicles. Moving on to the human trafficking desk. Sorry, just the human traffic desk. I know I didn't get to mention a lot of interesting animal facts in that last piece. I don't want you think, and I'm changing the format of the whole show, so just bear with me. A permitting system has recently gone into effecting a popular part of New York's Adirondack State Park. This spring, visitors accessing the Adirondack Mountain reserved by the Keen Valley Parking Area will need to get one of seventy available reservations. This will apply even if a hiker is not actually parking a car in the lot. People just getting dropped off or even biking to the access point will still need a permit. A couple of important details. One, if you come by bus, then your bus ticket counts as a hiking permit, so take the bus to the permits are free after all. At Airondack Park has it right there and is mission statement as lands set aside for the free use of all the people for their health and pleasure. But they're capped at seventy for that location. On one hand, the more barriers you put between people in the outdoors, the more people will just stay home. This is bad for them, but it's also bad for conservation. People need to have a relationship with nature. If they're going to go protect it, spend some economic capital or give a crap Politically, wild places have been taking absolute beating as the claustrophobia of has pushed people outside and droves out here in the West. It seems like their cars parked for miles around every trailhead, contributing to significant stress on el Kord's and other vulnerable wildlife in the Adirondacks. Local flora getting trampled under foot, an accumulation of trash park rangers, stretched thin as neo fight hikers, and hip flops and cotton t shirts get rescued during rainstorms. I do plenty of hiking and flip flops for the record. So if we don't impose some limits on people escaping into nature like this permitting system, maybe then nature might become more and more like the places people are escaping from. All of this is compounded when state budgets take a hit. New York State is now facing a fifteen billion dollar a deficit. So if visitor numbers keep climbing, how do we pay for more rangers, more trash removal, more signs and barriers around fragile landscapes. Maybe now is a good time to restart the conversation about the so called backpack tax. Just as hunters and shooters pay into conservation through the Pittman Robertson tax on guns and AMMO, and anglers pay via Dingle Johnson when they buy their fishing gear, why shouldn't hikers, birders, bikers, paddlers, rock climbers, and all the rest pay to protect the outdoors with gear purchases not specifically related to the shooting, sports or catching process. We'll call this your call to action, just a reminder pick up your crap, even if it's literal. Don't overload the trash cans. Somebody's got to pick up after you. Stay on trails and be courteous to others as you begin to explore this season. Moving on to an interesting update from the Bad Bill desk. If you remember, South Dakota Bill HBO, which would have required conservation officers to have a warrant before they could go on to private land, has been not only resurrected, but past a quick refresher. As we all know, wildlife in this country belongs to all of us, even when animals move on to land owned by just some of us, and so the professionals sworn to protect that wildlife need to have reasonable access to private ground to carry out their duty across the country. They have traditionally been able to do so through what's known as the open fields doctrine of the Worth Amendment. So back to HBO. Initially it died, I believe, in committee in the South Dakota Senate, and we all thought it was gone for good. However, with urging from Governor Christie Nolm, Senate Republican leader Gary Cammock pulled out an arcane parliamentary maneuver known as the quote smoke out to resurrect the bill. HBO was passed on March nine, and Noam signed the bill into law on March twenty nine, which means that now in South Dakota, if a conservation officer here's gunshots and see spotlights flashing a field from a piece of private property before first light on the opening day at deer season, he or she cannot go investigate those fields without first obtaining a search warrant, which severely limits their ability to bring a potential poacher or thief of our common wildlife to justice, which starts to make you feel that people with property get to play by different rules. As justification for pushing the law through, Governor no Him said an eighteen year old incident where certain landowners who had granted access to hunters revoked those privileges after a conservation officer came onto the property aggressively to check the hunter's permits. In doing so, no Him was selling HBO not as a service to landowners, but rather as essential to making sure that the average joe hunter is able to keep his or her permissions. If that is the case, would you think a provision in the South Dakota Fishing Game Handbook would have been sufficient? Or did they need a new state law that died in committee from opposition then rose like Lazarus from the dead and was fast tracked to the Governor's desk. Just to protect law abiding hunters. It's interesting as a rule, if a conservation officer comes flying into your party while you were in the act of legally hunting, that conservation officer is either a jerk or just having a bad day. It happens, and it isn't a pleasant interruption. What I see most commonly, like of the time, is they pull up to your vehicle and wait patiently for you to return when your hunt ends. And actually, here's an in between our situation for you. We got checked by a conservation officer while in the field hunting in South Dakota. He waited into a flooded farm field on private land, but only after we heard the shooting stop for the morning and we were picking up our decoys. It was a surprising but pleasant experience. We're gonna stay in the Dakotas for another story, but we're gonna go way way back seventy five million years. Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History. We're examining a collection of ancient clam shells that were discovered in my darned day South Dakota. While doing so, they noticed a pattern of very tiny holes in those shells, Where most people may have assumed that very old things get holes in them, These scientists put the shells under a microscope and documented a spiral structure to each of the holes, characteristic of the holes octopus drill through shells with their tongues in order to eat the shell fish inside, and so these holes, no whider than a strand of spaghetti, were the only evidence necessary to conclude that octopus existed in this region, and we're employing hunting strategy that we still see them used today. Scientists had documented these same holes to fifty million years ago, but there's new evidence tells us that octopus were preying on shellfish in the same way they do today at least million years before that, and in South Dakota, a place not known or famous for its smoked octopus. Because octopus have no skeletons, they have left behind almost no fossils, and so we have to rely on this kind of evidence from other species for everything we know about their origins and development. This find is also extremely cool because usually when I think of what was happening on Earth, seventy million years ago. I kind of picture a hazy, generally kind of oozy type of basic life form, type of state. Nothing nearly is advanced or aware as the octopus. But as we've discovered on the show before, octopus are unbelievably sophisticated with the brain that's distributed throughout their bodies. A recent video captured by a swimmer and geograph bay on the southwest tip of Australia shows an octopus rearing up and flinging its tentacles up and out of the water to ward off an encroaching swimmer. To think about a creature like that that's that aware scouting around for clams that long ago in South Dakota makes me very happy. Before we end this Dakota round up, let's tip her hat to the new North Dakota Big Horn Sheep record holder, twenty three year old David Suda. Applicants for an in state cheap tag have a point zero zero three six percent chance of successfully drawing the tag, so Suda absolutely busted his hump to make sure he did not let the opportunity go to waste. He and his buddies Jen's Johnson and Ryan Seal put their all into scouting, and the hard work paid off when Suda killed a two twelve pound, seven and a half year old ram on opening day. A couple of details. Not only was suited dialed in on his scouting and shooting skills, he also planned ahead and got permissions on some of the private ranch land adjacent to the public he had been scouting. Of course, that wiley ram moved on to private land once the hunter showed up, but due to his early permission scouting, Suda was able to follow right along. I'm very happy for this hunter. I'm even happier for the big horn sheep population in western North Dakota. After a couple of failed attempts to reintroduce the species to this part of their historic range, populations finally got a foothold after sheep from Montana were relocated there in two thousand six, two thousand nine, and two thousand twenty. Populations have been thriving ever since. In fact, for five of the last six years, a new state record has been set every year. Congrats, David. I have nothing against you, but I'm half hoping your record doesn't stand for too long. As though sheep keep multiplying and getting bigger and bigger. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you're loving what you're hearing on the Cow's Wee Can Review podcast, tell a friend or two, and most importantly, let me know what's going on in your neck the woods by writing in to a s k C A L. That's ask Cal at the Meat eater dot com. I'll talk to you next week. And hunting had been at the front of the L had cover