00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Col's Week in Review with Ryan cal Callahan, presented by First Light. Here's cal. If you're going to criticize the conservation community for something, it might be nimbiism. We hunters and anglers can be quick to say no to a new energy development, or a mining project or condo expansion on our favorite piece of land. But no matter how oppositional we might be, another community has beat us by a mile. Across the Atlantic, activists defeated the routing of an electrical transmission line from England to Ireland through Freshwater West Beach in Pembrokeshire. That's in Wales. Now you may be asking what are they trying to protect? Does the beach hold a fragile population of seabirds? Are there archaeological artifacts beneath the ground? No, this is where the fictional character Dobby was buried in the fictional movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That's right. The UK National Grid decided to reroute the very real Green Link Interconnector power line with the cost of five hundred eighty one million dollars, so that it won't go underneath a pile of rocks Harry Potter fans have stacked on the beach to commemorate the make believe resting place of a house Elf from a children's novel. After a project manager mentioned the route of the interconnector on an energy and industry podcast, the utility provider was flooded with protest calls. Planners created a new route for the line that passes close to a Bronze Age archaeological site that exists in reality, where real human remains are buried. I'm no Harry Potter scholar, but researching old Dobby on Wikipedia, I'm seeing that he was a pretty selfless fellow who saved Harry and the crew from a horde of death eaters. If you know any of that was real, which it is not, you know, there could be some consideration for his fictional resting place. Maybe we can use this as an example of people coming together around real things in the real world and emphasizing habitat and wilderness in the long term over the short term gains. Maybe even just go out and pick up some trash off the ground, you know, probably a little more productive than rerouting a cable around a fictional house Healthscrave, Dopey hash no Masta Dopey is a free LM. This week we've got bears, We've got the Public Lands Desk, Dog Hunting Update, NASA and what is it worth? But first, I'm going to tell you about my week. And my week was spent in the smoke of the fire season working on my public comments to submit for the wilderness review being conducted by the BLM, US Fish, Wildlife Service and National Park Service. We are not told why this review is happening, but it does provide an opportunity for us to weigh in now. Comments were due last Friday, the fourteenth, and there's a ton of speculation out out there as to why this administration is conducting the review. Here are the titles of the policies reviewed again BLM, Bureau of Land Management, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service are the agencies. The policies in question include the management of Wilderness study areas that's BLM, Considering lands with wilderness characteristics that's BLM, Management of Designated Wilderness areas BLM, Wilderness Stewardship, National Park Service and Wilderness Administration and Resource stewardship that's Fish and Wildlife Service. It's vague and with a broad deregulation agenda that the intent here is to get public comments supporting dismantling wilderness basically in the name of access. So as we've talked about many times on the show and many times here in the last six months. Access is great, but it comes in many, many forms, and we lose if we let one form of access become the definition for all access. Access is a management tool, not just in terms of where people go, but where people don't go, really efficiently and fast, right, So implications as to how we manage wildlife and keep wildlife around specifically, we had that great example on the Blue Mountains Travel Management Plan last week, and we've talked a lot when we've spoken about the ESA here. The return to grizzly bears to state management for example, which again I think is a great thing, and I would be putting in for the well regulated opportunity to hunt grizzly bears in the lower forty eight. But in order to have that well regulated, sustainable hunt, we need wilderness areas, and we need lands with wilderness characteristic sticks, inventoried road lists, wilderness study areas, so as you can imagine I weighed in on the importance of wilderness, both for me and for all of us, and for folks who think that wilderness is anti access, good news for you. There just is not very much wilderness out there. That's the capital w wilderness designation. The United States has a little over one hundred and eleven million acres of congressionally designated federal wilderness. The National Park Service manages about forty three point nine million acres across sixty one locations, US four AT Service thirty six point one million across four hundred and forty seven units, US Fish and Wildlife Service twenty point seven million acres across seventy one areas, and the Bureau of Land Management about eight point seven million acres over two hundred and twenty four sites. So that one hundred and eleven million acres is obviously not contiguous. There's little bits of wilderness spread all across the United States, and then there's a couple of big, beautiful chunks, one of which is absolutely core to grizzly bear and a bunch of other species. But that esa conversation, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Here in Montana, we would not have a sustainable huntable population of grizzly bears if the BOB lost its wilderness characteristics. And you know, we talk about this relationship between a road and trail density and just how fast people move into and out of areas and what the implications are for keeping wildlife around. So wilderness is absolutely integral to hunting in the United States. Wilderness areas create literal reservoirs of habitat and game species. They provide a completely different experience than a lot of our roaded areas and can be some of the last holdouts in terms of areas free of noxious weeds, and just a great opportunity to have something where things move a little slower and that's a good thing. So I spent years and years guiding and running around wilderness areas, and if I can do one hunting thing a year, it's a big, long backpack trip through wilderness areas, toting and the rifle around looking for big old mule deer. So we're gonna jump over to Ohio. The Public Lands Desk Federal officials have announced plans to open some two eight and forty acres of Ohio's only National forest two fracking. According to local news reports. The FEDS announced the opportunity for companies to bid on oil and gas extraction leases in Wayne National Forest on September fifteenth. As with attempts to mine the headwaters of the Boundary Waters and the recent reduction of the national monuments in Utah, this news is part of a year's long back and forth pitting the interests of executive industries against environmentalists and conservationists over how to best manage our public lands. The first Trump administration first approved an attempt to open the wine to increased fracking in twenty seventeen, but in twenty twenty a district judge blocked it on the grounds that it did not fully consider threats to the public health or environment. But a new environmental assessment released in twenty twenty five is providing grounds of the latest attempt to sell fracking leases on the National Forest. Fracking uses chemicals and high pressure to remove oil and natural gas from underground shale deposits. The practice is known to contribute to groundwater pollution and cause dangerous methane leaks. Whether it's a good fit for the wain depends on your perspective. Some folks say it could be a benefit to the local economy, while others worry about its impact wildlife habitats and existing recreational uses. Ohio based public land hunter Ricky Jackson told Field and Stream that the proposed areas for fracking leases are great habitat for white tails and turkeys and hold some of the state's last remaining populations of rough grouse. The southern half of the state has the most to out of state hunters, he added, We're inundated with hunters every year. To lose twenty eight hundred acres of habitat, that's going to be detrimental for us. The lease sale is the first step to fracking, as companies would still need to secure the appropriate permits to begin operating. Unfortunately, the public comment period has passed, but the BLM, which manages the mineral rights of the National Forest, is accepting hard copy written protests mailed to its office in Falls Church, VA. I'll go ahead and give you the address in case this doesn't sit right with you. Bureau of Land Management, Eastern State State's Office five two seven five Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, Virginia two two zero four to one. That's Falls Church, VA. Two two zero four to one. Jumping over to the prairie pothole aka the duck factory. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is considering messing with regulations that would impact what's known as drain tile setbacks. To put it simply, these tile set are part of a nineteen fifty eight amendment to the duck Stamp that allowed the Service to purchase easements conserving small wetland and pothole areas with one time payments. The easements prevent farmers from intentionally draining those wetlands, but don't keep them from cropping them if they dry up naturally. Cropping is in planning a crop well. Drain tile setbacks play a key role in preventing the draining of those wetlands, and removing or shortening them could cause serious damage to the most significant waterfowl production region for the Central and Mississippi River flyways, not to mention the fact that it would negate the money that waterfowl hunters directly contributed to those conservation efforts through duck Stamp purchases. The comment period that the Fish and Wildlife Service held on this lasted only two weeks, which didn't even give us enough time to cover it here on the podcast, the conservation groups including backhuntry Hunters and Anglers, Ducks Unlimited, Delta Waterfowl rallied hard to make the voices of sportsmen heard on this. According to the Federal Register, two hundred nineteen, four hundred and twenty eight comments were submitted, and a brief look at some of the comments shows that the vast, vast majority were submitted by conservation minded sportsmen and women across the country. So we did a good job responding to this urgent threat as a community, and we'll see what happens from here. If you have more to add to this conversation, give me a call four h six two two zero six four four one, or leave me an email at asksc al that's Ascal at themeaeater dot com. This has to do with way, hey, more than our migratory waterfowl species. We're talking migratory songbirds and raptors and big old narley mule deer bucks and pollinators. These intermittent wetlands out there on the prairie are like the biggest sources of biodiversity in life. These are willing seller, willing buyer agreements, and we're not making any more wetlands the small ones are the ones that matter arguably the most. So those big wetland complexes are are fantastic, and we need those two. But those little guys spread all over inconvenient places are where our duck's nest and then go to eat invertebrates, so absolutely crucial, and we've lost roughly eighty percent of those across the US already. So I think only one percent of folks who buy a duck stamp took the time to write a comment on this, right, I think there's roughly a million duck hunters in the US. What's the deal, gang, Take the rubber band off those bills, get in there, make some commotion for what you love, or somebody else will. Here's one that's near and dear to my heart. Tungsten. If you're anything like me, you cringe at the cost of tungsten shotgun AMMO, which I use exclusively for turkeys now. For decades, hundreds appealed lots of turkeys with a good old fashioned lad But once you've reached out a further with super dense TSS, the result are pretty fricking fantastic. Tungsten is not just useful for killing long beards, of chorus. It's also excellent for making high tech cutting and drilling tools, armour piercing artillery shells, rocket nozzles, advanced magnets, nuclear fusion reactors, electron microscopes, and even ballast for race cars. Unfortunately, not much tungsten is produced in the US, which makes US vulnerable to restrictions from countries like China and Russia. That kind of squeeze earlier this year caused a six hundred percent increase in the cost of the metal, and a single round of turkey AAMO was selling for as much as twenty two dollars. However, a one point seventy eight million ton load of tungsten was recently identified in Nevada, five times bigger than the next biggest known US deposit, which sounds like a good way to get cheap TURKYAMO. But NASA has a land withdrawal established over a large portion of the land where the tungsten is located. It seems this extremely flat Nevada desert is one of the few places that the agency can calibrate its satellite instruments. As recently as twenty twenty three, the BLM removed about seventeen square miles of this exact stretch from mining and exploration and NASA's request. I think even Turkey hunters can agree that NASA's recalibrating instruments out there is also extremely beneficial to habitat, and there's probably some quail kicking around out there, So I, for one, I'm happy to adjust to that market and keep that habitat intack. Moving on to the large cat desk, deer hunters tend to have strong opinions about mountain lions, and most of them aren't good. If you could just turn down the number of lions, you'd turn up the number of deer right well. A new study out of Washington State puts some very interesting wrinkles in that way of thinking. The study analyzed a huge amount of data from lions fitted with radio colors on the Olympic Peninsula, then crunch those numbers along with similar data on the area's blacktail deer population. Clear patterns emerged most dramatically. The study found a seventy six percent drop in car accidents involving deer in areas with high puma activity. Deer stayed away from roads and stuck to more remote areas in response to lion pressure, which keeps deer alive and front fenders straight. Further, when deer co exists with lions, they shift more of their activity to daytime to avoid the nocturnal predator. More deer movement during shooting light is definitely a good thing for hunters. That also meant that although overall car accidents went way down, accidents during the day increased slightly, notably through reduction in car deer collisions. Weren't just the results of lions reducing deer numbers. The deer were altering their behavior because they were living in fear of lions, but they were staying alive. Of course, lions prey on deer. That's how they make a living. That's not a zero sum game, and a lot of these white tails stays. There's plenty of deer to go around for both cats and hunters, and it seems like we're working together to keep those insurance premiums down, which is a good deal, a mutualistic relationship, you might say. Also, mountain lion stakes are absolutely the other white meat. Moving over to the accounting desk, time for me to give credit to the team that keeps back country hunters and anglers kicking butt In the fight to protect public land. We tend to use the same arguments again and again. We say the land is priceless. They say the land is just sitting there idle instead of generating jobs and revenue. When people outside of this world hear both sides, the anti public land argument seems to make sense well. To change up the debate, BHA commissioned an economic report to quantify the money that public lands generate and the costs that transferring them to the states or privatizing them would incur. To keep it focused, the study shows Idaho as its test case. That analysis found that federal land management brings eight hundred and thirty seven million dollars into Idaho's economy. If land were transferred to state ownership, that federal funding would be gone, and Idaho would also lose nine hundred and fifty four million dollars in economic output, over seventy four hundred jobs, and around sixty one mins billion dollars in tax revenue at the state and local level. All that in the state would have to take on all the costs of maintaining that land, most notably fighting fires, maintaining roads, managing habitat and there's no real way for the state to cover those costs. Two very similar reports found the same outcomes in Arizona and Montana. One key difference between federal and state control is that when a state faces a budget shortfall, it is often required to cover that shortfall in any way it can, and those solutions usually fall into four categories, raising taxes, cutting services, increasing development and extraction, and, most importantly for us, selling land. Here I'm quoting from the excellent article that BHA's Western Policy and Conservation manager wrote on this issue, Old Devin od. When budgets tightened, land becomes an asset and assets can be sold. This is the part of the story that rarely appears in legislative findings or campaign messaging. We need to keep beating this drum. Keeping public lands in public hands keeps money flowing into the states, keep states from being tempted or forced to sell that land. Spread the message to the people around you every opportunity you get. Good job to the team at BHA for balancing passion with facts. Okay, onto the hot topic corner. We covered dog hunting in South Carolina. That's hunting with dogs for deer, and this week Chris from South Carolina wrote in with a video of a huge turnout for a public meeting on the issue in Florence. There were trucks parked as far as the eye could see so that people could make their concerns heard and reach some better solutions. Good participation like that is inspiring. We want that in every county. But I'm kicking myself a bit that I didn't dig into this earlier. The South Carolina dn R recently held three public meetings together input on the issue, one in Florence, one in Orangeburg, and one in Walterborough. Unfortunately, the last one happened on August ten, at least a week before you're hearing this. The good news is that you can still use the online form that the scd NR has set up to gather comments. If you care about dog hunting, this is the only way you're likely to see changes happen that you care about. The online form is just a bunch of random letters, so it doesn't make sense for me to read that to you. However, this brings me to my final point. We're now going to start using the podcast show notes for each episode to include details and links for calls to action, So if you want to comment on South Carolina's dog hunting rules, scroll down on your device and you'll see a direct link there. Stay tuned in weeks to come as we put more links and info in there. One less excuse to not get involved. I'll say it again, just because you're not weighing in doesn't mean somebody else who you may not agree with won't. Your best shot is getting in there and making your opinion heard, passions and facts. Let them know where you're coming from, let them know where you're spending your cash and your time. Let them know what this stuff means to you. All Right, That's all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listen stening. Remember to write in to a s k C A L. That's Ascal at the meeater dot com or leave me a voicemail at four oh six two two zero six four four one. We love hearing from you. Gotta know what's gonna happen in your neck of the woods. We appreciate thanks again. We'll talk to you next week.