00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case underwere listening podcast. You can't predict anything, okay? Officer Bill Andre Colorado game Warden slash District Wildlife Manager slash District wildlife manager. For how many years, Brody? Has he ever written you a citation for anything? Not yet? Have you been? Have you been? Naturally just checked? I know where to what areas to avoid, you know what we're areas. But I've actually heard you better watch out because he can pop up anywhere. That's what you heard in your area. Yeah. Yeah, he's known as known to find people that are doing things they shouldn't be doing. So been You've been in the business, in the wildlife game warden business for thirty eight thirty eight years? How many more years you got in you? Not many? You're like in the evening of your I'm in the twilight of my career. Uh what year did you move out to Colorado? Nineteen seventy six to go to school, Go to school and then studied. I had a degree in fisheries in zoology from Kay and then like went right to work as a uh no I uh I took the test for the district wildlife manager job. Didn't make it the first year, so I went to Utah to be an assistant manager at a private fish hatchery. And then UH, the next year, I took the test again and got in. What was stumping you? I don't even know what the test is, but what was stumping you on the test? I don't know what really stumped me. It's a there was When I was taking it for there was ten positions. You had about six hundred and seventy seven hundred people are apply for it and go in and take a written test UM and then if you pass the written test, you went to an oral test and then you went through a physical psychological testing UM. And out of the six or seven hundred people, I didn't make the top ten the first of all. It's a narrow pool, it wasn't it was. Then he dusted off, came back the next year and got in, got in. Congratulations belatedly, but elatedly, thank you. UM. So you're a man of the law, right, and a man of the law needs to be UM needs to approach things you know objectively right. But are you still comfortable in dealing with hypothetical because there's been There's a handful of questions that have been raised to us over the years for people right in and be like, hey, what if I did this? Or what if a fella did this? And it's very hard for us to get answers. But I feel that, because you've probably been in all of these situations, that I could ask you a hypothetical and you could tell us what way you would lean on it. Can we try one? Yeah? Well, I mean I can give me an answer to a lot of them. Really, Okay, let me let me lay this one because this one just came in. The answer would be is if you use the word if, don't do it? Okay? What if I have one more drink and drive? What if I take that second shot? If if he's in there, you're telling yourself, probably shouldn't do this, okay? But can I lay someone? You bet? Because I just want to like, like, alright, a guy writes in and says this, let's say you this just we just got this email. He's and it's not even hunting season, so I'm assuming this isn't like a thing that he's now trying to figure out if what he does right or wrong. But he's saying Let's say you take a shot minutes before the end of legal shooting light. So so bouch right, you go over there and you gotta take a step and shot to finish it off. But now it's past legal shooting light, he shoots again. How would you view that? Well, it's gonna I mean, the circumstances are gonna be. It's gonna have to show me two bullet wounds, Okay, because if he shoots twice and there's only one, why am I going to believe that the second shot was it was? I just had to finish it off. So you do a little detective work. Sure, you gotta do a little detective work on it. Have you been in the situation before? Not on that exact one. I mean, we've had it on private land. The animal jumped the fence after I shot it. It was laying on the other side of the fence. I finished it off. May not have crossed the fence, but I shot across the fence to finish it off. If there isn't two bullet holes in it, he has a problem. Got If there's two bullet holes, and at least it's plausible it could have happened, and then it just depends on on how up for you feel they are, Um, are they sincere and what they're saying and what the circumstances show you when you're out there. So I mean a lot of it's give and take. Um. You know, if the person is extremely nervous, or you've had dealings with him before, or they're known to be always the one that was just a minute after shooting light, then you're like, you're not learning your learning your lesson. Maybe quit shooting twenty minutes before the end of shooting light instead of waiting till the last minute. Uh. I want to get background and ask you about if you have people in your area, Like I want to ask you what your area is, if you have people in your area that you find that you are routinely dealing with. But I want to hit you with two more hypothetical Okay, one time a guy and I was never going to get this guy an answer on this, and he was asked asking the question about Alaska. But maybe there's something in your zone. Really be able to answer this guy's question for him or provide some insight where he was saying that one time he's on he's in a piece of public ground that allows rifle hunting, okay, But he's on the border with a piece of ground that's managed in such a way that the seasons are the same, but there's no rifle hunting. You cannot discharge a firearm there. You can only hunt with archery equipment. So same season structure, same bag limit structure, but just the Land Management Agency has said no discharge of firearms on this chunk land. But he was sitting in the firearm discharged thing looking across the border, looking across this boundary at a black bear and didn't shoot. And later all of his hunting buddies were like, well, you definitely could have because you weren't discharging your firearm in the no firearm discharge area. How would you look at the situation like that? If the bullet hit the animal in the no discharge area, you killed it with a firearm. I mean, if it's not, I mean, I like it. The reason you can't you can't discharge a firearm because you can't kill something with a firearm there. So if the bullet hits it and kills it, you killed it with a firearm. It doesn't matter where you're stand doesn't matter where you're standing exactly. I like, I mean, I like to thinking. It's good thinking. I don't know that I agree with it, but I like to thinking, well, if you're standing on I mean, I don't know if I agree with it in like, um, just in terms of having like a debate. I feel like you could run circles around the idea if if the animal died from a bullet, the only way for a bullet to kill it is you discharged the firearm. Yeah, and sent that thing or sent that thing across that line. Good, all right? Last one, last hype, and this might not even be a hype, that are you allowed a corner hop in Colorado? I believe the answer is no. I'm not sure on that, but I believe it's no. That's how I've always operated in Colorado. Have you ever had to um write a citation to someone who argued, no, this idea. No, I don't totally understand the reason why it's not legal. I mean, it was a big right up in one of the magazines, this winner on it, and and I can't remember he was in Wyoming that they were doing it, but we talked about it incessantly. And no, it's like a it's like a legal black hole. Yeah, I don't understand how if you don't touch that private land, why it's not legal for you to corner hop but not an expert on it, haven't had any dealings with it. You just enforced a lie. You don't make them right. I hit you with one more. Someone is um public land and they're shooting at the animal. This is when we talked about incessantly for whatever reason. Uh, this one's on public land and they're shooting at an animal that's on public land with their bullet crosses private land. Would you ding them for having trespassed, for having their bullet trespassed across someone's land. Um? Personally, I probably would not, but I did see UM. I think it was an attorney's general opinion, but it might have just been from a district attorney, one of the local district attorneys that if you're shooting over their land, you're trespassing. Um. But it would take a lot for me to to write an actual citation. I might write him a warning. So it also depends on did he cross a corner he wasn't aware of, or was he aware that his neighbors got an eight foot fence and he was sitting in a tree and purposely shot over the eight foot fence across the guy's property to get something on the other side. So there's always circumstances you have to look at. You know that that It's like you knew better, You knew there was a reason you weren't supposed to do it, and you went to all this effort to do it, so you already knew the answer before you pull the trick. I got you. I got you. That's the thing, like from talking in the past and talking to you you now. The thing that, um that's come out when I've asked these questions is how much you're sort of when you're dealing with someone, how much you uh seem to sort of pay attention to in fact or in like like sort of the entire package of what's going on, like an individual's intent sort of how are they, how up front are they being? To what point did they self report? To what point you gotta like work at them to try to find out the full story. If I have to work at it to get the full story, lie to me, you don't have much success. I'm probably gonna write you the ticket. If you're upfront and truthful then I'll treat you the same way I mean to me. It's treat them like you want to be treated. We're all going to make mistakes in our life. Some will be an honest mistake, some will be like what if, and other ones will be I know I shouldn't do this, but I'm gonna do it anyways. And I think it's important to try to get to those little details of just how did this happen and why did it happen? All? Right? Now, well I don't know this, this might not be bad and that moving forward, But now can you not? Weve got those dates, Greff. Can you can also explain me like the breadth of your work, like like what is sort of your professional mandate in terms of what you're responsible for and where you're responsible for it? Well, we all we all have our own districts, UM, but are like today, as we talked about, I'm the on call officer for the Area eight, which goes from Aspen to Veil. So if there's any wildlife calls, UM, I get the call first. Does that overlap with the hunting units? Yes, so it's the it's the units or no, it's UM like we have that they don't. Unfortunately, the units don't really follow a normal numbering system, so we have everything from the lowest unit I believe is thirty five and we go up to four seventy one. So the way they were designed doesn't really fit in with when you look at the numbering system scattered all around. But I mean my main responsibilities within my district, which is the Upper Eagle Valley UM, but on it when you're on call, then you're responsible from here all the way to Aspen so and in hunting season, if a call comes in and nobody else is there, you're expected to be able to go handle it, whether you're the on call office or not. So with only eight guys working in the field over that big in area, there's lots of times you have to go out side your normal area and work on it. But we also have the ability to go anywhere in the state. I mean, we're UH Class one peace officer for the state of Colorado, so we can enforce any of the laws in Colorado, but we stay pretty much to the game and fish laws. So you could pull over someone for speeding, Oh yeah, without a doubt. Do you do that much? No, it's not not my expertise. I mean, I don't have a radar gun. Our direction is pretty much that if somebody is driving in such a way that they're a clear hazard and could cause severe bodily injury, then pull them over and get a state patrol or a sheriff's deputy or a town police to come out and handle it. So I want to talk more about law enforcement, But what are your other So besides law enforcement, law enforcementy other responsibility. Law enforcements used to be about a third of the time. Um. Now it depends how you classify law enforcement. When you look at the bear calls and the line calls we deal with, to a certain degree, those are law enforcement in that you may have to discharge a weapon to put the animal down, maybe right in the middle of town. So that's definitely a law enforcement situation in that part. But we always go through the discussion, Um, is it law enforcement you're responding to for human safety or is it a biological concern you're responding to that the bear or the moose is in a place it shouldn't be and it's a danger to people. How much time do you spend dealing with that now relative to in the past, with with wildlife conflict like like, particularly with bears and melt alive uh in the summer. Over fifty percent of the times bears on on the bad years, I mean on a good year, it might only be ten percent of what ten percent of your whole time in the summer. You spend fifty percent of your time in the summer dealing with bears. Yes, but last year doing what well? Last year, just in this area from Veiled Aspen, we handled over eleven hundred calls and some of those are simply calling somebody back and saying, well, yeah, I put your trash up, put your bird feeder up. Other ones you might spend two or three days on. You drag a trap over to Aspen or to Veil, you set the trap, you have to go back the next day and rebait the trap. Then if you catch the bear, the decisions made whether the bears put down or moved, and then to move it you have to go about a hundred airline miles. So once you catch a bear, if you have to move it, that's an all day deal for at least one offs or sometimes two. Now do you expect to do a lot more of that this summer? Since it's a drought year. Well, it certainly could be. I mean, the nice thing about so far this year is knock on wood. We we got through all the blossoms without a frieze or a frost. Now we could still get one as the fruit setting and lose them all, or it could get so dry that the fruit just doesn't really produce, and the acorns don't produce. So acorns and service berries and stuff like that, and choke cherries, those those are the key. So you're talking, you're talking wild fruit, wild fruit. Yeah, we mean the fruit in town and people's crab apple tree ease because they're watering it in a drought year, that's where the fruit is going to be and and the bears are going to go in there to get it. So you so you mean you could have a like a wild choke cherry failure, a wild blueberry failure, the wild acorn failure, and you can then anticipate we're gonna have trouble with bears direct correlation. So this year might not be that bad, might not be that bad. I mean, we've had we haven't had anywhere near as many problems this year as we've had in years passed in our area in the southwest, which is in a much greater droughts having some more problems than we're having right now. What's the last time someone in Colorado was killed by a black bear? I haven't heard about that in a long time. Well, the last one was about three years ago. Uh. The lady down by tell your ride that was feeding bears through a chain length fence on her porch. The bears killed her. I mean through a chain link fence. She had put a chain length fence around the deck of her porch so that she could hand feed the bears and the bears couldn't get to her. Unfortunately, the bears could get to her. Oh. I don't know how. I wasn't there, but the bears did kill her. Gotcha. Uh, when you said you have to move a bear a hundred miles, what do you mean in order to try to transplant the bear, you try to get them out of their home range. Oh, so that doesn't mean it just happens to be a hundred miles to a good place to put it. But there's a thinking that move a bear one and you'll and he's likely to not show back up where you left him, right me? But you also like, we don't take many bears in our area, um, even though we might were a hundred miles from Denver Um. Part of the reason is we have enough bear problems going on. But you have to look at another domestic sheep. There is there a campground there. If this is a bear that's been getting food from people, you don't want to dump in the middle of a campground. So we kind of try to pick the places that he's not gonna immediately cause another problem. Doesn't mean he won't pick up and move twenty miles and cause the problem the next day, but we try not to put him in a spot that's gonna cause him a real problem. What factors play in when you look and and you're trying to decide whether an animal needs be youuthanized or relocated. It's generally based on the animals um disposition where they aggressive to people. UM. Certainly, if they break into a house, if a windows open a crack and they rip that window open and come in the house, we euthanize them because of thinking then, is that that he has a proclivity to go into houses? Right, could be has for the next person, right with the next person or if you move them. Somebody in a tent has a piece of nylon between them and the bear versus a wall and a window. Just so people understand, like, it's it's well known that once a bear does that, once they're going to keep doing it. Right, they learned, they learned it, they especially if they get rewarded. It's you know, you could make an argument that, well, yeah, he pulled the window, and but he never got in the house and got any food. Somebody scared him off before. But once they get in the house and start eating out of the refrigerator or the cupboards, then it's like that that bear knows how to get food and he's probably gonna do it again. Have you ever seen video of a bear work in the outside of a house. I've seen it in person. People think like I think some people visualize that that the bear comes up and understands doors and windows initially, but they just work the whole thing, pulling, prying, biting anything they can get there, claw under right, and they just like explore that whole exterior and eventually find something that kind of gives you know, there are some bears that clearly know a door in a window from from having been through that process. Men, you watch him. They'll walk right up to a deck, right up to the sliding glass door. There's there's pictures on security cameras of bears opening a car door. Asked as you and I can, they walk up, They lift the latch and they're in the car. That quick. They figured it out. They know exactly how to open that door. They know where to go. What they don't know how to do is open the door from the inside. When the door closes on them, that's when you have the problem. Then they're in the house. Have you dealt with that? Oh? Yeah, got a bear in a home. What do you even do then, Well, the first thing you do is you try to convince the people there, if they can safely do it, is to open every door on the house, give the bear options to get out. So also, you've had calls some people who are in a house with a bear in the house, with a bear in the house, and they're calling from within the house. What are they saying after they stopped screaming, Yeah, um, they're they're just you know, bears in the house. I'm in the bedroom, I need to get out, help me. And lots of times just because where we're located, we call the local p D or the s O and say, hey, well, I mean the sheriffs department, the local police department or the shriffs department, just because they generally can be there quicker. And the big thing is open the doors to the house, give that bear away out. Um. If the people can go out a windows safely or there's another exit, then help them get out that window and we'll be there as quick as we can with it. And then if you've when when you've arrived at a house, where does a bear in a house? Yes? Do you do? You just like going there guns blazing? Are you going there trying to figure out ways to get doors open and let the thing? The first thing you do is try to get the doors open. You don't want to have to destroy the bear inside somebody's home. And then you'll just find him, like if he takes off, you'll just go find that bear, right. I mean, we generally carry a trank gun with us. UM. A lot of the officers now are carrying tasers. UM. A taser works on a bear or moose just like it does a human. Oh do you guys have tasted the bears and moose. Oh yeah, yeah, what's the due to it? The same thing he does to a person. Because I don't know what a does new person, You ought to have voluntineer taste them. Yeah, I mean it doesn't like incapacitate. It does. Yeah, as long as long as you keep pulling the trigger and put the juice to them. They're on the ground, they can't move. Really, have you hit a bear of the taser? I have not. I'm not trained in a taser, so, but tasing and well, like you see, you hear about moose is stuck in swing sets. No, oh you haven't. I've seen my kids get started. You know. There's there's quite a few videos of moose and swing sets. And it used to be you either try to get the moose walk into a yard and hooks his antler and swing, or he decides to fight with it. No, I didn't know this is the thing. Oh yeah, yeah, just well, I'll just like anything else, you know, moose or bull elk gets upset, they walk into the swing, the swing come back and hits them. They throw their head at it because something just hit them, and they end up with the rope or the chain wrapped around their antlers, so that the old way was you either try to cut it loose without in anything to it without getting stomped, or you dart it and then once it's understodation you do you remove it. The new way is that you go in with tasers and you taste the thing, and as long as you don't touch the wires going from the taser gun to the implants, you can handle the moose or cut the chain of the rope loose from them, and then once you stop tasting at the thing jumps up and runs away, and it's safer for the animal than tranquilize of it. It's safer because you don't have to well, first off, you don't have to wait. Now there would you walk up and dart it, It's going to take four or five minutes for that to take effects, so the animal can hurt itself, and then you have to depending on the tranquilizer you use, you either have a reversal or you have to wait a couple hours for the animal to wake up. So you know, it's much easier to deal with trying to move a moose out of somebody's yard or sit there with it for four or five hours and then realize when you turn it loose, it may run out in the street and get hit. It's a whole lot easier if you don't they I mean, it's not like they wake up and they have a dent of the senses about them. I mean they wake up and coming out of being sated. Yeah, I mean they wake up from the reversal fairly quickly and they can move, but it doesn't always mean they're a d percent there. And you'll see him jump up and run a little ways, and then they kind of stop and shake their head, so you don't know if they're really a UM mobile and aware of what's going on. But when he comes out of being tazed, he's back to himself. Back to himself yeah, yeah, and pissed or not pissed from what I've seen in the videos. It depends on the animal. UM But there's been a lot of times with moose and bear that I mean the bear, that they're generally not tasting the bear to immobilize it, to do anything. They're trying to taze the bear to give it a negative experience that hey, you show up here, just like hitting it with rubber buckshot every time you come up on a deck, somebody does something nasty to you. Pretty soon you're gonna start saying, I don't like to go to those places. It hurts. So it's it's not so much with the bears that were in it to immobilize them, to work on them. We're doing it more to try to give them that negative experience. What's the typical mountain lion problem, Like, what's the typical sort of pattern of of a mountain lion, you know, kind of crossing that that sort of division into into human territory. Right, It's it's pretty same as the bears. Um. Although I haven't been to any mountain lions in a home, I've been to mountain lions to sleep on people's front doors, at their sliding glass doors. For what reason they just decided to curl up there and go to sleep. I mean, I don't know the reason. Homes with pets are not even necessarily not even necessarily with pets, no livestock generally, or maybe horses and solar radiation and playing, there's probably a nice place to take an laying up on a rock, and it is a pretty lots of times they are. They're on kind of the least side, they're out of the wind and the snow, and they are right up against the base of the house. I mean we had one in Ego that crawled underneath the house trailer and we crawled underneath the house trailer with it to try to get it out, and went in the first time just to see where it was. Didn't have a dart gun and and could not get the thing to move from the corner it was in. When in the second time with two of us in a dart gun, and once we got close, it ran around us and ran out, and then we had to chase it down after that to do what we put it down. Um, it had been in town three or four times, up by the school and when we got close enough to sit, I mean we were eight feet away from this thing under the house trailer. Uh, it was emaciated. I mean it stayed away in sixty or seventy pounds. It was weighing about pods. Yeah, we're seeing quite a bit of that with with yearlings that they just don't seem to learn how to hunt or distribute that too. I don't know if it's just they got kicked out too early by the mom um and they just don't know how to hunt or or if they're injured somewhere inside. I mean sometimes when we do the knee cropsies, we don't run everything on them to be able to determine what their cause is for being in such bad shape. Usually just assume, just like people, you've got good hunters, you've got bad hunters. But you're saying you feel like you see more of it now. Well, um, the best quote was from the neighboring officer here in Eagle. He's been on thirty five years. I've been on thirty eight and in January of two thousand fifteen, we dealt with more lion calls in one month than we dealt with the thirty plus years we've each had before. You never used to get a call about a lion in town, but like there has been. I mean, there has been many things contributing to this. But do you have some like theories about it? Oh? Yeah, like lay them out? Oh you want to know what my theories are? Yeah, and and and and ivious, Like I understand that you're you're just you know, no one right as someone knew the absolute answer, Well, it would be impossible to know the absolute answer. But there has been something like some good ideas about what is going on right Well, definitely the mountain lion populations increased, and so has the human population. So you and you had you have more of e than one, you have a bigger chance for interaction. But if you look across up almost all the Western states, all of them are showing this an increase in conflicts between bears and lions and people. UM. I mean we did last year two thousand seventeen again from Veil to Aspen. I think we responded to write out a hundred mountain lion calls. Before two thousand fourteen, we didn't even bother keep track because there was so few. UM. We uh. We've increased our harvest quota on lions in most of the places, and we're usually filling those and even after filling them in two thousand sixteen, after filling the quota, UM, we had a couple areas in the Upper Eagle Valley where we were seeing people were seeing three and four lions at a time, working together, coming right up to their homes, walking around the homes, coming up on the decks. Um, probably looking for pets, pet food, UM, deer elk that we're in their net yards. Do you feel that increasing the quota does it allow like, does it allow you guys to even target the lions that are coming into town or is it two almost separate populations. I don't I don't know that it's two separate populations. But one of the problems we have is sometimes where they're coming into town, it's a really bad place to try to run them with hounds, mainly because the roads, well, the hounds get hit on the roads, or the lion decides to run back into the neighborhood. And now you get four hounds underneath somebody's crab apple tree barking at a lion in their tree, and they want to know what this guy with the guns doing on their property. Yeah, understandable. So so tough, tough in some of these places to hunt it tough. Right along Ice seventy. A lot of the problems we have are right on the edges of Ice seventy. Course, that's where the subdivisions are here. The other thing that it appears to be happening is the lions, just like the bears, have learned that a subdivision and a golf course is a pretty good place to live. Um, you know, for the airs, you got all the fruit trees that people plant for the lions. You've got pets, you've got pet foods, you've got lots of rabbits um, you got deer and elk spending an entire year living within these subdivisions. And we're talking big subdivisions, not a not a twenty acre subdivision, but something like Cordiera that's maybe a thousand acres homestead, that's eight hundred some acres. I mean, there's enough room for these animals to find a place to live and stay out of site most of the time. And then the other reason I think we get more calls is everybody has security cameras or game cameras. Everybody's got a game camera in their backyard, and the lion may have always used to walk through it, but now they've got a picture of it. Oh and you mean you see it on TV all the time that you know in Denver, they just had a picture of a month or so ago of female and three kittens jumping over a guy split rail. Flint's walking through the yards, sniffing around the bushes and then going into the neighbors. And that may have been going on for years, but nobody had that video camera out there, and they get alarmed when they see it. Some to some they're just like, well, that's really cool. They get alarmed on their cat or their dog disappears, and they get pretty upset. You know. I want to share with you a couple of perspectives that, uh, coming from folks in Washington, where I currently live, and actually not far from where I live, they just had the first mountain lion, uh human fatality from a mountain lion in ninety four years. Okay, so it's a couple mountain bikers were out riding not far from town and uh look back and there's a lion chasing them. They jumped off their bikes, use their bikes to sort of scare off the lion, rode down the trail a little bit away to get away from the area, stopped. We're kind of like, oh my god, I can't leave. It just happened, and then the lion jumped from above attacked one of the bikers. That biker got the lion off, got on his bike and fled, and then the line killed the other biker and drugged the biker up and cashed it under some brush. They had a houndsman come out. The houndsman started the track at the line there at the at the kill and tracked down and killed the lion. Um. One thing that came out of that it was interesting was the way that everyone who has sort of an agenda around mountain lions use that example to further their perspective, ranging from some people saying there must have been something wrong with the lion because there's no other way to account for how this would happen. Other people saying, no, there was nothing wrong with the lion. It's just a thing that can happen. Uh. A friend of mine who I have a couple of friends who are houndsman who do a lot of work for the States, and one of these guys had an interesting perspective on it, where he's just taking his own career. So he'd spent decades doing uh like wildlife conflict work around mountain lions as a houndsman, and he was saying when he was young, there was zero tolerance for any kind of mix up like any lion. That when anywhere near people are attempted to kill the sheep or did anything like the lion was just dead, he would get a call. He would be told kill the lion. Now he'll get calls where they're like, don't want to kill the lion. Can you run it and scare it away? Maybe a couple of times, or it's gonna be a lot of pressure on us just due to the neighborhoods. Gonna a lot of pressure on us if we have to euthanize the lion. So he feels that as acceptance for these soft encounters has increased, you're like it or not, you're gonna invite additional art encounters. The thing about his perspective is this is the first time it's happened in ninety four years. So if another hundred years goes by and then no one else gets killed by a mountainline, you'll be like that adds a lot of validity to the fact it was like a fluke, Right, If all of a sudden, now it like becomes a thing, you know, every now and then a person gets killed, I think it might lend. It might give some creedence to what his perspective is. It's just like, if we're going to be more tolerant of large predators and it amongst us, we're gonna have to learn to be more tolent with the fact you're gonna inevitably have these dangerous encounters. Does that speak to you it all, like, I mean, does that seem like something that makes sense based on your I mean different state, right, but yeah, a different state. Um. I mean, I don't know enough about Washington's lying population to talk intelligently about their side of it, but you know, I kind of subscribe to that same thing that you know it used to be. We would tell people, you know, just clean up your trash, take your bird feeders down, the bears will go away, and to a certain point they do. Um. But with what we found, with the number of droughts we're getting now and the changes in what's going on with vegetations, the lack of fire, I mean, some of the best places for them to find food is in the town, whether it's garbage or everybody plants raspberries in their backyard or service berry choke, cherries, crab apple trees. So we're kind of inviting them to come into where we are, and at the same time, we're moving out into their habitat more and more. So definitely going to increase the number of encounters. And some people are very tolerant of it. Some people the first time they show up that they don't care if you kill that bear or what you do. But just get that bear out, go put them back in the woods. It doesn't matter that, Hey, you live up against a wilderness area. You're surrounded on two sides by forest service, and one of those sides is the wilderness boundary. Where in the state do you want us to put them? But it isn't for them to be. And you get the same thing with people out on a trail that Hey, I was walking on this trail and the wilderness and this bear showed up and stared at me. You gotta do something. No, that's where I want the bear to be. You need to understand that the bears are there and you need to take the appropriate actions to keep yourself safe. But but conflicts aside. You feel that there are more like like, numerically right, there are more lions. You feel there are more lions now than the world a decade ago. Oh, without a doubt, and bears right and bears? Do you think that there's more bears because they don't get hunted in the spring anymore? I don't because we actually harvest more bears just our fall season now than we did with a spring in a fall season. It's just a general increasing population. Yeah. The big difference in bears when Tom Beck was doing his study down in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, when we would have a bad drought year like this or a failure of acorn sore berries, the thinking was, and I think it was true at that point, was the cubs that were born that year weren't going to get enough food to make it through hibernation. They would end up dying. The sows that were impregnated because bears do a delayed implantation, they wouldn't have enough fat, they wouldn't implant those embryos. So you lost this year's crop, cub crop, and you lost next year. See you losing To explain delayed implantation real quick, that the sow's impregnated in the spring, but they don't implant the embryos until fall. So in the spring the egg so when they rought in June and June okay, so the egg is fertilized and begins to form, but it's not implanted yet and the implant Martin's there's a lot of different animals that have delayed implantation. Yeah here I heard the uh yeah, you're like river rotters and handful members of the Weel family. And so the thinking like, so then she needs to be in a certain state. So the bear needs to be a certain state of physical fitness for her to allow the implantation to occur. Correct, So continue on now. So, so you lose two years of age, two classes of age class. You lose the cubs from two thousand seventeen, and you don't get any cubs in two thousand eighteen. So that's a huge hit to your population. I mean, imagine if you're going to to grade school and you lose the third and fourth grade class, you know, for the when they get ready to hit high school, that grade you winning class goom and be pretty darned small. When it comes time for them to start reproducing, there's a whole lot less of them out there to reproduce. Hard to build a population on that. And when you think how long live bears are, I mean that that's a long period that you're missing those two And if you get two that are close together, which I would think you could say two thousand twelve and two thousand and eighteen, are fairly close together. When you're talking about an animal might live twenty years, you know there's there's four age classes you lose. What we've seen different now is that the bears are coming into town. They're feeding on the trash, they're feeding on the apple trees and towns. Uh, they're going into the corn fields and the orchards and grand junction, which they never used to do in the numbers. They're doing it now. So they're picking up all these other food sources. The other food source that there seemed to be using is they're not a prose to picking up road kills off the interstate. So we have all these other food sources for them to take place of a natural food failure. And we've seen it quite often now with these in these years of natural food failures, that the following year we'll see cubs or sALS that have three cubs. So instead of having lost her cubs, she was fat enough to pull off three cubs. And we've seen the It appears the statistics don't show it as clear um, but when I started in nineteen eighty, if you saw a stile with three cubs, that was huge news. I mean, we didn't have email, but you called everybody anew and say, I just saw a stile with three cubs. Can you believe that? Um? Now we see them routinely every year. We did an episode once about a bear called the Wisconsin supersou. She had five, brought them all up to a hundred pounds. Two years later, had five more and brought them all up two hundred pounds. It's like a very successful and you know what it wanted be in that she was doing. She it seems as though she had found where the state was dumping road kill carcasses, and so just it was like tied to that, just like fitness and of great food source and was reproductive, very savvy and also in a funny way, very careless about her denning locations which just kind of layout like just in a barely covered up in a brush pile. Yeah. So we I mean we've seen that. Um. When Tom was doing his study, we didn't think the bears and the females were breeding until they were four or five. Now it appears they're breeding near earlier. Um. It appears that the litter size has gone up by maybe a half. Um. You know, seeing we haven't seen any fours yet that I have heard of. I mean Wisconsin has it, Pennsylvania has it, where they'll have sALS, they'll have four or five. So that's more common in those areas. It's more common because if you look at the food sources they have, I mean, their bears are they generally have more bears than we do per square mile. They generally have heavier bears than we do. When you look at the food source out here, um, you know, we would say a lot of the Upper Eagle Valley is not very good bear habitat because there's no oak brush above Walcott. Almost all the oak brushes down here or over in the Roaring Fork Valley, and oak brush is considered to be one of the key things. But the bears in the Upper Valley are making it on service berry and choke cherry. I mean, that's that's what they're living on. That that's their key winter survival is to get enough service berry and choke cherry. So if you put all those together, then all of a sudden, instead of have a population that might grow ten percent a year just to figure out of the air, now all of a sudden, they're growing fift of a year. I mean that's a huge jump in a population if you can add even just two or three percent growth in a year. And and that is a fact that in a lot of units around here, the number of bear tags that are that you guys issue has been increased greatly. That's just to keep up with this growing population. Yeah, it's an effort to try to keep up with your growing population. So you got so, what year was that the Colorado lost that spring season in late nineties mid nineties and now so it used to so and you just said that. I'm not questioning the clarity with what you said. It's just a surprising to me. Now even with the loss of the spring season, more black bears are killed in Colorado annually, just in the fall season alone now and there's more black bears altogether than before. We We've I'd have to look at the numbers, but we've had several years where we've harvested over a thousand bears in a year out of statewide, statewide, and when we had the spring hunt and the fall hunt with bait and hounds. Um, I don't think we ever hit a thousand. Do you find that? Um, there's some pretty good bear hunters here, like is it is it like a thing that guys get good at, or is it doesn't seem to be like something that people kind of just stumble into. Know that a lot of them have gotten very good at it, and in fact, part of the problem is some of them gotten so good at it um that now when they buy a license, they're only buying a license that they're looking for a specific bear, an extremely large bear, a certain color phase, and if they don't see it, they won't harvest to bear. And that's part of the reason we increase the tags is because we've had a number of these guys have gotten good and they've shot four or five bears and they're like, I don't know how many more I need to shoot. So unless I see something really special, I'm gonna go out and hunt them still, but I'm not gonna pull the trigger. What are the guys that are what are the really good bear hunters? What do they do? They spend most of August looking for either the choke cherry, service berry or the oak brush that. No, they don't hunt. They go out to scout. They're scouting and finding the best patches of food supplies for these bears. So they're looking for food they're looking for the food areas and then they're moving into those areas when the bears move in there. There every morning and after work with binoculars, you know, scoping out four or five different spots to see where they can see bears at and then they once they find him at night, if it's not a good opportunity there, back there the next morning or the next night, setting up closer to where the bear was. And it's usually hunting over fruit, not hunting acorn patch. No acorn is big. They hunt a lot of them over acorn, especially here in the Eagle because Brush Creek has so much acorn. So how do you know when you go into the air with a lot of acorn? How do how do you guys know? Uh? Is it pretty obvious one of the bears work in that area? Just so people are aware. The acorns were talking about a gamble o right, not like an oak tree, just a brushy very di jinky little acor size of a big one's the size of your little finger. Um and one does bear season? You're opening The fall opens on this second of September, And that was part of the initiative that was passed by a vote at the Colorado people on when it can open. One had it opened in the past, Well, we had a spring season and I think it open September. One done. It's been a long time since I had to ask that answer that question. But yeah, now, Brody, what what prevents you from being like a big time Colorado bear hunter guy? I've been looking for one for this will be like six or seven years in a row sitting water. He hasn't. He didn't know this thing at I spend time grouse hunting and then I get distracted, like looking for elk when I'm should be looking for a bear. And but do you go out because I know you like when you're big game, when you're hunting deer and elk, you're open to the idea of finding a bear. Yeah. So I'll get a tag most years, like this year, I got a tag around my house which is specific to that September bear rifle season. But as these guys have increased tag numbers, there are areas now that you can pick up a second bear tag as a B tag, like around here. So I'll get that rifle tag for September and then pick up a B tag. So I'm packing a bear tag while I'm hunting deer and elk too. But I've yet to you, yet to seal the deal on my first Colorado black bear. I'm hoping that's going to change this year because I can hunt right by my house up north. It's been like right above the house there. You saw that gam below on the hillside and service Berry up there, so we'll see. I would just take advantage of the officer Andre being here and somehow tap into his electronal, tap into his communication. He got any problem bears he need taking care of. We actually have people call us and ask us that, I believe, what's your policy on that. If it's a place they can legally hunt, we'll tell But really, I mean to what to what level of specificity? Like what would you say, throw it? Just throw one out? I mean, if I have a sheepherder losing bears, they're losing sheep to bear, I mean, I'll tell them give this person a call. You know, the sheepherder will probably you'll have to understand bask or Spanish whatever they talk um, but you know, otherwise you use hand signals and draw pictures. But most of the time they're happy to help you. I mean it's the problem on some of it is the bear was in the sheep in this drainage and two days later they're headed to another drainage. So you don't know if the bear is going to go with him or stay in that drainage. But if you know, if we have a you know, if you have a bear in town, you certainly can't put a hunter on it. And you really don't want to say, well, if you sit up on that hill just outside of town, that bear may walk up or down, because you don't want them shooting the bear and running into town. So only special circumstances of the workout. Yeah, I mean sometimes you know with the sheep, it will work out. Around the campground. Um. Some of the campgrounds have continuous problems with bears in the fall, and it's like, well, you're in the national forest, you know, stay away from the campground. UM. But certainly especially on week days after after labor days over on week days, there's hardly anybody in the campgrounds, so you just have to be the distance for service requires you're from a campground, you can set up and work that bear, you know, Speaking of sheep, like, we've had questions about predators that surplus kill. What's what's your thoughts on a bear that goes in and kills ten sheep in a night? Like what what's his motivation? Or I'm not Doctor Doolittle, like we just had people ask people love the subject. Yeah, feel that they're finding people like the idea. Okay, you can't deny that it happens, and that I'm not asking you what happened, like you can't deny that's now and then like a predator is going to go in, a bear line goes in and kills way more stuff they could ever possibly consume. And I think people look there, they want to hear about those because they're looking to answer something in their mind. I have no idea their motivation to it. Some people talk about they you know, they get started and they just get into a frenzy. They talk about the same thing with a weasel in a henhouse that they just go on a killing spirit. They're not counting, they're just doing what they're supposed to do. Yeah, I haven't found one yet that's very good at counting, so um, but yeah, they mean it just happens. So okay, we can move on from this subject. But I got one last question for you. You you you carry a service weapon? Do you so when you're going into a situation where you have a bear caught loose in someone's yard or house or whatever, Uh, do you have like a h did you carry a separate firearm for those situations? Well? We, I mean we all carry shotguns and rifles. But you know, if you're in a house, UM, you sure don't want to uh let loose a three o eight round in somebody's house, and and the shotgun can make a pretty big mess. It's it's generally if there's if we're looking for a bear that's injured somebody, you'll see us out with a rifle or a shotgun. If we're just going into a house because the bear broke into a house, you'll see a dark gun or just just our pistols that we always have on. So do you carry a dark gun too? We we don't have enough dark guns for every officer, um, but like the on call, when I'm on call, I generally pick up the dark gun. Um. We have more than one for the area. I think we have four for eight guys. So usually the on call officer picks up one so he has it with him. Um, and and otherwise that the problem is otherwise you store them sometimes in Glenwood, Carbondale or here an Eagle, And if you're up in Veil when the call comes and it's in Veil, then you gotta run back here have somebody from here bring it up to you. So usually the on call officer picks up a dart gun and has it with him. I feel like they should supply you guys with a handful of more dark guns. Well, they probably should. They're expensive little items. Yeah, yeah, they're they're they're pretty close three thousand apiece. So alright, Uh man, we have a bunch of things we wanted to ask you about, Brody asked the while we're on bears, can we just like we still hit embarrassing? Yeah? Can we just get into the other bear that may or may not be around or do you not want to get into that? Go ahead, go ahead, We're getting into this later. But we'll get into it later. I mean, yeah, okay, go ahead. Yeah. Well, we just we're hanging out with another fellow that hunts about in Colorado, and uh he seems to think that they're accomplished hunter. Yea, we accomplished hunters sin's a lot of time out there, hangs out with a lot of people to hang out. You know, there are in the woods a lot family has been here for a bazillion years. Yes, homestead. I think the simplest way to say is that is that he believes that there's a conspiracy. I feel like you're leading to this. Okay, go ahead. There were that somehow that there's were there's grizzly bears in Colorado, but they're being they're being trapped and moved back up to Wyoming, and it's being covered up. Nobody gets to hear anything about it. In this day and age of cell phones and game cameras everywhere, I don't think you could cover anything up. I mean, are there grizzly bears in Colorado? Honestly, I don't know. Um, you know, we had a wolverine come from Yellowstone. We've had our links go from here all the way back to Canada and in Alaska where they were caught. Um, we've had wolves come down from Yellowstone. Um could a grizzly bear do it? You bet? So? If somebody says it's as possible ones here, sure it's possible. We don't have any definitive proof, you know, on the wolves that showed up, they got hit by a car, one got shot, one got poisoned. We got definitive proofs wolves have made it. We got definitive proof on links and the wolverine that they made the trek Um. We just don't have any definitive proof that there's any grizzly bears in Colorado? Do you guys investigate credible reports? We look into concredit. Yeah, I'm not your invest the gates the right word, but yes, we we look into it, especially if they have a picture. I mean you'll get reports lots of time that well, this is bigger than any black bear I've ever seen, so it had to be at grizzly. Yeah, but well we've handled two. We handled a bear in Glenwood I think in two thousand and twelve that twenty four hours after it died at wage seven and thirty eight pounds in August. WHOA, Yeah, And I don't always understand the size thing, because there's plenty of two pounds hundred pound grizzlies running around them. That's the thing I don't get either, because like you know, grizzlies do get to can get to be huge, but there's like a ton of a couple hundred pound grizzlies, and there's a lot of black bears in the United States. They're way bigger than the average grizzly. Yeah, but I mean everything that people see is always much bigger than than it really is, and that's just human nature. I mean, you guys have all hunted. You've all seen ground shrinkage where you shot an animal. It's like, this is a huge buck and it's like, huh, he's sure shrunk when he hit the ground. Yeah, everybody that runs in New a lion, big old Tom, big old Tom. And if okay, so let's say they're one did turn up or whatever, wouldn't it be the case that there's no no way you guys are gonna like cover it up, Like you would have to notify US Fish and Wildlife because there's an endangered species aspect to it, correct, Like they would have to become involved in some way. I wrong, But I don't know what they have to. I mean, if all it is is a sighting. But I'm saying, like, if if there was one confirmed in Colorado, like you guys knew, but I mean, certainly if we trapped one. There's no way you would keep it quiet. I mean somebody it's you know, just like everything else on the internet. Somebody's gonna post that picture, maybe only to send it to their best friend, and their best friends gonna send it to his best friend. It's gonna leak. It's gonna leaky, and it like if they said yes they are, you know, if it was confirmed they are here. At that point, would US Fish and Wildlife have to become involved because they're an endangered species, um threaten or what? However? There could be very they'd be very interesting. Yeah, I mean Idaho just he could prove their grizzly bear hunt. So one tag. Yeah, I think it is one tag for Idaho. Yeah, so I don't know for sure what that involvement would have to be in that all right? Uh, who wants to who wants to lay out how you guys totally screwed up how you run uh tag draws in Colorado? Well you're the one that's complaining about not drawing. You lay it out, Brodie. Oh so this this you guys went to a new basically a new re online retail system and new kind of draw like licensing draw process where you do not have to pay up front for the tag during the the application process. So and you is pasted. You paid the full fee for the license before that, the whole draw application process went through. If you didn't draw, you then got refunded that money. Now it's just a three dollar application fee, no money up front, And it seems like it doesn't seem like like the application numbers have increased greatly because you're not investing up front in that. So we're just wondering, like, was there a thought process why c p W doesn't want the money up front anymore? Or is there like is there some reasoning behind the process, like just not going through the refund thing is simpler and saves time and money. And yeah, that's exactly thought. You guys made a lot of money by having all that money right hold away into bank account. Well I have thought that too, but I was told we don't. Everybody thought everybody it was like a big thing, like making millions on interest on off of all. I mean, you think about and you've got a better banker than most people. You know, you're looking at a normal bank under one percent a normal bank account. If you get a CD for saying it wasn't even being put in a bank account. It was, well, it was in a bank account. But I don't think it's creating any interest. I feel like I need to back up from it. I feel like I needed I feel like some people, some people are not gonna understand FLA what we're talking about. So in instances where you have a greater demand for tags than there are hunting tags available, so there's more people to want to go hunt elk and some mountain range than the population can support, you, AH got a limited all, right, and so you hand out opportunities through a lottery permit. Some every state handles is differently. But Colorado was a state where you sent in all the money, right, and then they do their drawing and refund you. But but how long would the how long would you be your money? A couple of months? Yea, from from May to July? Okay, So someone's like out of pocket a substantial amount of money for talking like right, especially if it's a nonresident applying for a moose, sheep or go tag. That's you know, you're putting down a couple of thousand bucks for potentially if you're applying for all three of those you're putting down six thousand bucks for a tag that you don't even know if you're gonna draw. I had heard before, not particularly not not pertaining to Colorado, but I've heard before the reason they did the pay up front thing is because states used to do the drawing and then have people be like dah, but I don't actually have the money, okay, so it messes your whole system up. So like, okay, everybody pays up front that when we know it's all paid for, and when we pick a guy or a woman, um, they're good for the expense because they already pay for the dame thing. So now what Colorado is doing right is the minute your name comes up, you get being by the computer, they run your credit card right and if you if you, they give you a couple of weeks after the licenses that that are announced, like but if but if your credit card is not good. I think this year the licenses were announced this week's so first week of June. If if you haven't paid for that thing by June, and then they go down the list. So got like, I don't understand why so many more people I've heard all kinds of or heard there's increase in the amount of people applying for non resident big game tags in Colorado. I've heard you said you used off the chart. You're still paying all the money, Like what is what was people's problem? They didn't want to be out the money for a couple of months. Well, here's the deal in Colorado. Something that we should have explained to um is that as a non resident, you couldn't do credit card for moves sheep and go. So you couldn't just have be a guy that had like a credit card with the limit of ten grain you have. She had to have sixth grade in your savings and then write out three checks to the box of piece to apply for those three So that's like even at one step hard. Yeah, it's not funny. No, I didn't realize that a couple of very stern looks when my wife would be like what, oh, I like, well, I only did sheep and moose, I didn't do all three. Yeah, my wife when I when I you know, started getting involved with my wife and we got to the point where we combined finances, which we resisted for a while, but she just got fed up with She likes to just know everything what's going on. And it was like the annual discussion we had to have about like she's like this cannot be real, and I might listen. I didn't make it up. It's not my choice. But yes, there there is a substantial sum of money scattered around in various state bank accounts, and it will all come back if I don't draw. It'd be like, well you better not draw unless you win lottery, in which case you will be out. Part of it's just this, I think, just the psychological barrier. People are just like that doesn't cost me anything. I'll apply, you know, and I'll figure it out if I get dropped. I wasn't thinking about you actually had to write a check, like you really need the money for those for those cheap moose goat tags, the rest of them not not. So what was what's the motivation? Like why I change it? Well, I had to make a better system and it yeah. I still had people that were doing paper applications. And you know, every time you use a credit card, you get charged a fee. So you're getting charged to fee to to take the person's money as the credit card, and then instead of refunding it back on the credit card, we are writing them a check. So every time you write a check, there's a cost to write a check, so that I mean there was a huge cost savings to do away with that fee, so run to draw costs money. Yes, yeah, and it just simplified the whole administrative process of it. I mean even it will as we work all the bugs. Anytime you open a new system, doesn't matter what it is that I mean, there's gonna be bugs. I mean some people were getting notified ten times that they've got a license, and they're like, did I get ten licenses? They're like, free, today is a good day. I got ten deer tags. So all they got the email ten times. I mean, there's just gonna be glitches in any new system you have, and and they just have to be worked through the fact that more people put in. And I haven't seen the numbers yet either, but I have heard that it is a significant increase in the number of people putting in. Um, the fact that more people put in it seems like, well something worked. Yeah. Well, I have three different perspectives on and they're they're competing their their contradictory one is just from a purely like what's in it for me? I remember my nine. A government teacher L de Young would always express everything in the world where he would say, like and remember, I'm only concerned with what affects al de Young, and that was like, that was how he explained the government right. He would he would discourage students from getting registered. He said, why would I want you people to vote? Why would I want to dilute my vote? So that was like so in looking at it from the L. De Young perspective, I'm bummed because now I have more competition to draw a permit, so that that's pretty selfish and I recognize that, but there's a part of my brain that holds that to be true. Part three, they're part two, And my competing perspectives on this Part two is I'm usually not resistant to they're being barriers to entry because it winds up being that the more dedicated, right, the favors the more dedicated people. Like I remember for a while in Montana you had to buy your bear license before bear season. They're thinking was they wanted to they wanted to prevent people from getting a bear and then running down and getting a tag because in the spring season they would find that it was a lot of just sort of incidental harvest. And so they're like, well, we're gonna look like people who are planning to go bear hunting making a specific effort to go on a bear hunts. You have to buy it that law came in. I thought, you know, I get it. That makes sense that there were people who are like dedicated to it. They're on top of it, they're following the rules, they know what's going on, right, and it gives a favoritism to that. They since got rid of that, and I was a little bit saddened by it. Now Part three, the part that competes is there shouldn't be any barriers to entry, right, it should be just more wide open, more availability, easier for people to participate. So I believe I feel all of these things, even though they don't all line up, meaning I see both sides of the story or all three sides of the story. Okay, agree with that. I'm a little saddened kind because that part one part about like I'm concerned only with what affects l the young part It's like I really am, like you know, I'm looking at him like really that just got harder, so got easier, harder, harder to draw, easier, and that That's another thing is we're like we're constantly hearing like about hunter numbers just falling, falling, falling, But yet it's like harder and harder to get a tag. And how how does that? How do those two things kind of line up with each other? If there's less hunters, why is it hard? Because the numbers that are falling are the dudes that used to buy like a used to hunt pheasants for a day. But there's more guys that are getting seriously just way more. The number of like the number of like hardcore hunters I feel has to be your choppers here to take you to dinniversity. He's gonna drop me on a hunting spot on the way, give me the coordinates for that way, like to run over there. No quick should be aside a. So less serious hunters gone, Okay, Um yeah, I like I don't know, I feel that there's I feel the number of like really dedicated hunters who are like out there, you know, applying for permits and crawling back into all the high holes is going up. What do you think? Um? Yeah, I think in some areas it is definitely. I mean we're seeing that a lot of it is. I mean, you guys are perfect examples. How many different states do you put in for so you could have the same number of hunters and decide I'm gonna put into two states this year instead of one, and so those two states see an increase in the number they get. And I think that's a lot of it. Can you speak at all, just quickly to that declining you know, supposed declining number of hunters, Like we're just like hearing all these doomsday scenarios all the time. Well, I don't know if it's doomsday, but unfortunately I represent that um in that our average age of hunters is getting older every year. And you would think, well, of course everybody is a year older. But if you got a sixty year old guy and you bring in a fourteen year old kid, you just dropped that age level way down. So it's the fact that that we're an aging part. The baby boomers are aging, and I think it's I can't remeber if it's fifty five or fifty six, but it's in the fifties somewhere is the average age of a hunter, and you know everything's coming and they're looking more golf time. They may not be in the same shape. Um, you've got travel restrictions in a lot of areas. Um, just the cost of getting places if you're coming from another state to hunt here, it's getting more and more expensive. So I mean, I definitely if you go out, if you went out and spent a day with us. When you go into camps, you remember the camp where you can say there was two people into thirty years old in that camp, or that camp was everybody under twenty. They were all young kids out there hunting. That's all I run into. Is anomaly you're saying now, Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean it used to be nothing to see UM families out there, maybe just the mom, maybe just the dad, but they'd have two or three kids with them sometimes that we're old enough to hunt. But they're out there now. You might see that on a Saturday or Sunday, but they're all gone by Monday. So it's in your opinion, it's a recruitment thing. It is definitely a recruitment and retention. When we went to totally limited deer tags and I don't remember the number, we lost a lot of deer hunters and they really haven't come back because they used to be over the county used to be over the counter you can get you could make the decision that day. Here you can make the decision a couple of days after. You had to go to a UH Division Wildlife office and buy your license there after the season open. But you could get it over the tag deer hunt and go whenever you want it. Now it's it's all draw you know. A lot of the people have just they're like, you know, I just don't want to fight with it. It takes me two years or three years to get a tag. I just don't want to do it. Um, brodyn tee up. The shed hunting thing you guys like actually came in and now you manage sheds like you manage shed antlers like game animals. Now there's there's rules around it. There is rules around it, So I mean I could I'll speak to my history of it. I used to get after it pretty hard. Um. You know. Shed hunting has gotten more and more popular in the West all over the place really um, but it's like highly competitive, and it got to the point where there were days when I'd go out shed hunting and late winter early spring where I would see more guys out shed hunting than I would ever see during rifle deer season, like running into it's so weird. Like when I was a boy, it would be that if you saw one, you might pick it up. But also like the whole country decided that it was just the most important thing you could be doing, is being out picking up antlers, and and I look, I I got pretty serious about it for a while, but then I started like, because you're trying to make money on it, well, because the chew toy market. No, I mean I just collected him and liked looking at him. Before we moved. I sold a bunch for a couple of thousand bucks. But um, you had enough that you had enough to make it worth selling. Because that's another thing. And just like have we talked about this before? That the market, So there's a commercial market for antlers, and it was the chandelier So like antler, chandeliers became popelars, so they became a market for chandeliers and decorations. And then the chew toy market took off where they buy antlers and saw him up and sell them for an ungodly automony, and pet stores they do all sorts with them. They grind them up in a powder. No, that's only with velvet. But is there anything else that you know build the antlers are sold or used for after they're sold. No, that I mean those are the three main things that they go overseas and then chew toys. And but I don't even know if that commercial market is even close to being the main problem. No, But but it's this. But here's the point I'm getting at. And I can't tell you that this is actually true or not. But what feels to me, what seems to me correlated, is as the commercial market developed, the recreational market became like people all of a sudden ascribed a value to it. For instance, with Morel's when you hear that morals are worth x dollars a pound in a restaurant, it increases people's interests, like they're like, oh, that's something I'd like to find and eat. If they're so valuable, it makes me want to go do it, for instance, like trapping spot trapping spot proms or spot shrump. Knowing that that's the most like we trap them, And in my mind I get sort of like I can't help but get slightly more excited about it, knowing that it is the most expensive shrimp. And then when you hear that they're going for like thirty some dollars a pound, I'm like, wow, you're running the numbers in your head. And then I'm and I'm and I'm like kind of sinfully almost viewing them differently knowing the value. So I feel that as that chew toy market and chandelier market came in, people also also we're like, I just want to find it and have it laying around. And because I now recognize the value and get a picture of your holding it on social media, I mean that's a huge part of Yeah, people do grip and grins with antlers. Yeah. Man, Like, so you didn't do anything, You just picked the damn thing. Yeah, I mean, but they it is like as big as having a picture of you holding the big buck. If you're holding the set of matched antlers, man, that's like, yeah, so now we got Bill tell us why this increase um? Yeah? Yeah, what happened. Also, every time Dick and Brody is our scrounged around on the woods for handlers, Yeah, and they're competitive about it. I want to get there before Brody and from out of state, from from well, yeah, well, part of the problem was, you know, Wyomings always had closures on winter range, so you couldn't go there and hunt stuff, but on very specific patch of the ground right right right, but there was still closures. And and then Utah did there. It was free, but you had to do the permit over the internet, taking educational test on it and go. No big deal. But what we saw as other places close things, and as you get units like we're sitting in here now forty four that's a trophy deer unit, a known trophy deer unit where people are doing their grips and grins with their harvested two thirty bucks. People like I want to go there, and I want to go there in the spring and I'll scout and I'll pick up outlers and I'll know what I'm looking for. And it's it was no longer the recreation guy that maybe on Saturday there's ten people in you Go county out hunting it. It's like on Monday there's five people out there hunting it, and on Tuesday there's five people out there hunting, and on Wednesday, I don't know five. What people forget is I mean, I don't know that Brody walked up the same hill yesterday that I'm gonna walk up today. So you're looking at an animal again. Remember, these does are all pregnant, they're in their third trimester, they're coming off a starvation. They're starving during the winter, no matter what the winter is. Your quote is winter weekends, spring kills, right, And it's I mean, you're you're looking at all these things. And now you've got these people out there pushing deer. We've we've had reports. I haven't seen it, but I believe it will happen that people are out chasing the bucks, trying to get him and in December, trying to get him excited where they run and maybe knock their antlers off. I've heard many December in December, but I mean I've seen it out of a helicopter that as you're counting deer, they jump a fence and an antler drops off. But certainly even February, you know, yeah, I've heard many reports that some like firsthand reports of people seeing oh like a bull that's already dropped one and trying to chase, thinking to the other one's gotta be ready to fall. And and there's I mean, I've seen it firsthand of people. Every night on their way home for work, stop at a place that has elk winter range. There was seven bulls there yesterday. There's only five today, but there's seven elk. They dropped their antlers. The next morning, they're up there looking for him. Well, the next guy comes in, he doesn't know somebody else gonna do it. I'm gonna go up there tonight, you know. And then that's well, I didn't find it, but they got to be there because they're still there, so they go up the next day. You just keep pushing these animals, and you're just you're impacting the animal that you want to be as healthy as possible to produce the best offspring and and to have the biggest set antlers they can for these is they're looking for a trophy animal because it's just the time of year where those animals cannot afford to burn extra calories. That's kind of the irony of it, right, is that in looking for antlers, you sort of celebrating this emblem of like a really healthy mature animal, but in doing it, you're impairing its ability to become a big, healthy mature animal, and you're impairing the ability for that herd to grow. I mean, if you stress those doughs enough that they don't put on you know, in a in about April, these animals can start to gain weight. And that's really crucial for those doughs. They start to gain weight because lactation is the most energy requiring item they're going to go through in their life. So they're coming out of a starvation, they're trying to put weight on, they're gonna give birth, they're going to go right into lactation. I mean, they've got to have time to pick up whatever weight they can. If that dough doesn't get enough food to do good lactation, those fawns don't make it, or they make it as a run. So just like we talked about on the bear, now got an age class of the that didn't make it or their subpars, so they don't make it through the winter. And if that dough or cows in bad enough shape, they won't breathe in the fall because they're they're just not in good enough shape to get pregnant. So people are clear that the new rule is west of you cannot shed hunt on public land before May one. Have you had to have you issued a citation um. In some areas we've issued citation in other ways. We had a closure here, so we could issue citations um. In some of the areas west of they hadn't had a closure, so they have to give just warnings. Now if I if I warned you and I see you out the next day, I can issue a citation. But because it's a new rule, we generally give them a grace period that you'll just get a warning. Oh, I think just for wearing it for the first year. Yeah, did you notice you feel that that's gonna be effective? Like have you? Did you kind of notice a change? And I mean there's well the change we noticed was we had several people hearing eagle that got permission to hunt on private land and that somebody would see him walking the fence line and maybe they were over the fence line, maybe they weren't, but they were turning them in. Oh. And then the guy would say, well, I saw Brody down there, glass in me. That's I saw that sucker up on this side doing it. So they're turning one another. You know. I was walking into a spot to rabbit hunt in February and there is a lady that I see hiking in a certain area with her dog and she's like, you know, there's just you're not supposed to be shed hunting. I was like, I'm rabbit hunting. It's okay, So so what is the exact prohibition. It's picking it up actually going from memory. I haven't read it in a month or so, but it's actually uh searching for it, marking it or picking it up. So if you're out there with your GPS and marking out, you've got a problem. I got you. So then it kind of gets into um, how to stop a dude walking around the woods and be like, what exactly is your intention right now? Well, you don't have to necessarily stop him if you watch him and you know you you see him doing this grid pattern. Not many people hunt rabbits in a grid pattern and then they don't stop and do this. Oh yeah, I saw a bunny here. Let me mark that. Yeah, So I mean there again, it's it's you know, it's the circumstances and you gotta put the whole picture together. But was there quite a bit of blowback where people pissed about it. There was a lot of people pissed about it. But what what do they view were they were they annoyed because man, I like to hunt shed antlers and now I'm annoyed or they annoyed because this is a weird way for government to kind of step into one's life. I think more of it was, well, more of it was actually I'm obeyed the rule, but he's not. Oh, I want you to do something about So yeah, I can see that everyone's gonna go anyway, but now I don't feel like I can go. And I mean, I think what you'll see is more and more states do this. You'll really dilute the impact to each one of the states. Because you know, if Wyoming had it that you can't hunt there during these months, will they come here? And if Utah has something, well, they can't go there. And I think Nevada has done. There's four or five different states some season of enclosures. I know, yeah, but I think that's mainly on their state property, state game management with winter range areas. So I mean, I think you're going to see but you know, part of it is is we've been pushing, especially in this area and in the resort areas, that the level of recreation. I mean, as I sit here and look out. There's probably been a hundred people go by this path up above us, which isn't a big deal. It's not a spring winter or spring area or winter range right now. But the recreation has become such a huge issue here, and there's been a lot of studies done on the impact of any type of recreation or human disturbance on these animals that we felt you'd be a hypocrite not to say that, hey, you're out hunting sheds, you're impacting these animals just like a person running mountain, biking, horseback riding, or a TV in out there. We gotta step back and say we got to protect this too. I mean, it's not about the sheds, it's about protecting those animals that are out there trying to make the living through the winter and come into spring in good shape so they can reproduce. Yeah. Yeah, it's a pro wildlife should be viewed as a pro wildlife, pro hunting move right. Oh yeah yeah? Um, are there really like a whole ton more moose in Colorado now than it used to be? Well, we reintroduced him in the late seventies and our population now I didn't I didn't realize you guys had to do a reintroduction here out well, I don't know, well wiped out or just no longer here. I don't believe it or not. I wasn't around in those years when when moose might have been here before with the country was settled. But we reintroduced him up in North Park. So we went from I think it was seventy seventy nine we reintroduced him, and now we have about just a little over three thousand moose in the state. We hunt him in sixty different gm us, and we give out like four hundred and fifty tags each year for moose, and you're adding more hunts and new units almost every year. Almost every year we add some more. So I'm sure you're a word of like in in a lot of the northern tier states, moose are in real trouble because of primarily because of some pathogens, but in also because of increased predation in some areas. And just like it's a pretty bleak picture, um, you know, from Maine, Minnesota westward. Uh, it's like a pretty bleak picture in certain patches of moose range. So it's curious to hear that moose seemed to be doing there seems to be more moose every year in Colorado, right, I mean, we don't have brain worm here, hopefully we won't. Um. You know, our our tick situation isn't the same as the like Minnesota, Maine. Um. I mean it was up in Idaho recently and you couldn't walk outside in in May and Idaho without picking up ticks. We don't have the same level of ticks, and and ticks are becoming a big issue for him. Um. We're at a little bit of a higher elevation than a lot of these places. It may not be so certainly the ticks, the lack of the brain worm, and a lot of these places where you see the moose population going down always seems to be where there's a good number of white tailed deer, and so far in western Colorado we don't have a large, uh influx of white tailed deer. So I think that that plays a little there the vector for the brain work. Yeah, but definitely, you know, anytime you're bringing animal into a habitat that they haven't occupied, that that's good. There's kind of a niche that's waiting for him. So you can see this huge jump you see it in you a res of war. When a new reservoirs created, fishing is great for the first five or six years, and then all of a sudden really tapers off. So that's where we put some turkeys in and in a while later it just explodes and then they kind of they kind of hit that level that now we can really grow the population, and then they kind of plateau or or dropped down. So we're still in the in the climbing stages even from like so, so that's interesting that even from the late seventies they're still sort of doing that thing of like establishing a new territory and exploiting a niche that hadn't been exploited before. I mean, we moved him to North Park, we moved him to the Grand Mace, we moved him to the flat Tops, moved him down in the southwest part of the state. And the actually the ones in Eagle County here all came on their own. We haven't transplanted any of these in Um. I mean, the first moose that I knew have showed up in about two walking through the town of Vale, and by I think it was nine nine, we had them winnering in Homesteak Um. So they've kind of they've kind of taken off and done it on their own. I think part of what we're seeing, especially around the resort towns is in some places we may not have reached the habitats capability to handle them, but we may have reached the fact that they're moving into towns. They're happy to live in a town. I live near Steamboat, and there's a lot of human moose conflict, and they're really surprisingly tolerant of of people in the way, like even an anchor's where they'll just settle in and like spend their whole winter in something in a yard. They're they're tolerant until you make the wrong step and then they're gonna tap dance on you. Yeah, then they'll they'll they'll occasionally kill people. So I mean, um, I think you know steamboats an example. You know, we had some problems in Veil last winter. The winter before that, the moose were actually licking the cars to get the mag chloride off it um and and that was causing problems to it was right by the hospital to have people trying to get in and out of the hospital with moose standing by their car looking the side of their car. So it's one of those that sometimes you're going to hit a political carrying capacity that, hey, we need to reduce moose in this area because of these problems. You hit the social limit. Right as are you guys having white tail encroachment? Um, we're definitely seeing white tail along the Colorado River. We've had a few along the Eagle River. Um, like in place they've never been seen, we've never been seen before. Do you have Is there a policy here to because this is world famous mule deer country and and it's like that's kind of culturally what people are accustomed to seeing, and it's a celebrated animal. And we know that white tails don't do a lot of good for mule deer, and you have moose and white tails aren't great for moose. Is there is there sentiment, like public sentiment or pressure coming from hunters that let's do what we can to not allow the white tail intrusion into these areas. Yeah, you get it both ways. You get those saying let's get rid of the white tails and others saying, hey, i'd really like to shoot a white tail. Who's got the who's got the louder voice? Well, right now he's getting rid of the white tails. I mean, there are certain areas in the state that they've done unlimited tags, oftentimes on private land. You know. The big problem is, I mean, if you know a white tail from a mule deer, and you've seen enough of them, it's easy to tell the difference. Some people haven't seen enough of them, and we worry about somebody shooting the wrong one if if they aren't familiar with it. But there's been discussions going on. Um we have a few people with private land here that they're like, hey, I really like seeing the white tails. They're neat. I don't want to get rid of them. And we have other people that say can I shoot When you say, like, as far as the confusion you're talking about, if you were to issue white tail only tags for this area, you'd be worried that people would shoot mule deer. But as it stands now, I'm just buying a deer tag for this area. So if I saw a white tail, I'm good to shoot it. That it's an interesting point about not being able to see him, because there's like I grew up all around white tails and hunting white tails, and when I first moved out west, when I saw a deer for a couple of years. I would have to sort of like look at it, you know, consciously, like look at to figure out what I was looking at. As familiar as I was with one, the sort of search patterns or the clues I saw in the animal were more like when you see a deer, it's just a deer, because it's not an option. In Michigan, they're all white tails. And it actually took me a little while like looking at both to get to where you just like instantly and instinctively no one from the other. Um. It doesn't come automatically like you can have deep familiarity, like just like I think you can have like deep familiarity. We're looking at black bears all the time and and probably very quickly confused a grizzly for a black bear. You need to have a lot of experience of looking at both because if not, when you see it, an idea jumps in your mind, but you're not like separating the two of them out right, so you can see that like white tail, like guys who just hunted white tails all the time could make a snap decision and shoot a milder because when they look they just see dear, Yeah, exactly, they see dear. They you know, if the antlers are there, it's much easier. Moost guys are gonna see that that rack just doesn't look right. But if they're hunting antler less, you know, they aren't thinking, Wow, those ears look small, that head looks small. You know, the whole animal looks small. It's like just a yearly and I'll take it. So what else man here? You are, bro, do you have a of genuine game warden from your home area? I don't know. We've covered a lot of ground. Oh you know what we didn't touch on his uh he was Bill. I think we want to talked to Bill about some declining elk numbers mostly Oh yeah, and what the reasoning is behind that, because I know, you know, back when joannest lived in this area and and we're you know, we were both doing a lot of elk hunting around here, it was very easy to pick up an extra cow tag. I mean, to the point where some were going unsold an hour, to the point where the tags have been reduced a bunch. And you guys have some concerns about certain elk herds. Yeah, Colorado has what I mean vastly more elk than in any other state. What is the latest hundred grand more than the next state? I think what then Montana? Is it still hovering in that too, it's almost three hundred. Well, I think it's more like two, is it, is it? Yeah, we've came down from wine. We used to be around two fifty. We've reduced it since then. But you've been actively reducing the numbers by issuing more cow tax right in a lot of the units, we were trying to trying to reduce the herd numbers because of conflicts. But now you've got some concerns about certain Yeah, we've got some big concerns in certain areas. This is one of the areas from what we call E sixteen, which is the unit's forty four forty four and I think it's forty seven on the Aspen side that we've just seen it a significant decline since two thousand two, and that occurred, I mean almost fift decline. What's going on there? Grizz grizz and white tails. Yeah. Uh, you know, it would be wonderful if you could say there was just one thing, um, But as with most things of the wildlife, there's never just one silver bullet that this is what's causing it. But certainly if the big part we feel we're seeing is the human encroachment development ski areas. Uh. You know, it used to be known for its winter recreation in this area. Now it's known for the summer recreation, the loss of habitat, also habitat fragmentation a habitat. I mean, the same thing we talked about was shed hunters. Um. Any of you guys that have had kids, you know, if your kids are fussy and you're the only parent in the house and you sit down and try to have dinner, you don't get a whole lot of dinner because you're up dealing with the kids. So it's it's no different for deer elk that they're trying to fill their belly in the summer and a group of recreationists come through and disturb them. Twenty minutes later there's another group. So instead of feeding above the alpine maybe for three or four hours in the morning to get an hour worth, and then they have to go back lay down in the trees, and then they come out and try and do it at night. This whole other form of recreation, of recreating at night. Um. We used to have a rafting at night with night vision goggles. That was a big thing. And then now you have mountain bike races and twenty four hour running races, so you have people out at night training for those. And it's just getting to the point where the animals don't have a time to be alone. Solitude is important to them, The chance to feed it every possibility is important to them. Not having to move and burn energy. And then you add upon that there hasn't been much habitat improvement done. We haven't had any big fires. Uh yeah, predators in the mix. Um, you know if you're we know from our study we did in the nineties in the Upper Eaco Valley that if humans go in during the calving season in the cabin areas we can, we can drop the cow caffe ratio down by almost half too. But going back to the bear lion thing we're talking about earlier, that's that's the increasing number of bears and lions that's having an effect too. I mean, we know that bears and lions are very effective predators on calves and fonts um. And we've had more in enough radio collared adult cows killed by lions in the winter to know, pretty effective on them in the winter, and you get to that point where you get your population low enough, normally it's considered that, you know, predators aren't a huge issue if you have a healthy population there. It's what we call a compensatory mortality. In other words, they're gonna kill fifty elk, but probably forty those elk were gonna die anyways. They were gonna something else might have killed them. They might have had a wounding loss, they break a leg, they starve, but when you get to a certain level, you kind of reach that straw that breaks the camel's back and every animal you lose, it doesn't matter how you lose. It is an additive effect. There's no longer enough animals to say it's compensatory. So what we've done in this unit, um we've cut the licenses up till last year down by um this year we took the cow licenses down to ten cow licenses in every season. So there's gonna be a lot of people that were used to get in cow tags and ten a season, tennis season and per g mu per g m u y. Yeah, So like you know, first season for elk, you can hunt the whole data analysis unit. So you buy one license and it's good for all those units. In the second season, when you buy a license for forty five, it's only good for forty five. So there's ten cow tags in forty five in the second season. Third season there's ten, in the fourth season there's ten. So I mean that's a it's a huge cut in the number of licenses. Um, we're looking to run it up the chain of command and through the commission to look at maybe limiting bowl licenses, maybe doing what they did in the flat tops, limiting archery licenses. It might go to a totally limited ELK unit to reduce all of that pressure. In addition to that, out propose that only hunters are allowed to ever go into the woods. Okay, sure, those are some big changes. Those are huge changes, and we're seeing it. Uh. We just met with our research group a couple of weeks ago. Um, they're looking at drumming up some funding to try to get some callers put on cows, and we'll also put a vaginally inserted transmitters so when they calve, that transmitter will come out. It'll send a signal there calving and then We'll go in and capture the calf and put a collar on that calf and determine what happens to that calf. Does it die because of a predator? UM? Does it just die because it was in bad shape, doesn't make it through, doesn't make it through the first two months and then die? You know? Does it make it till winter and then die? I figure out when when are we losing these calves? How when you doing stuff like that? How many collars you or how many tags or collars do you have to have out in order for it to begin to be helpful? Well, I mean that's way outside of my knowledge. But the number they're talking about is like sixty. So at that point you you can start get a good picture. You start to get a picture. I mean, then you rely on on the computers that you put all the information in the computer with some parameters and it spits out what it what it should be seeing. Is this UM? Is that trend statewide or is it regions? Like is there areas in Colorado where the elk are just kicking ass or in Meeker they're doing good? And and it's funny you asked that because UM just across the road in what we call E twelve, which is thirty five, thirty six and three six I seventies. The only thing that separates them not a uh, not a blockage from predators to move, not a blockage for wintertime or summertime, and that Elkred was pretty well maintaining itself. Um. This year was a was a strange year with the snowfall and we had some issues getting a helicopter permit. Um, but we were running in the high thirties low forties for a winter cow caffe ratio UM this year. On the other side, all of a sudden, it went to explain that from a how many cas per hundred cows, so you would know, really want to see in the winter above forty calves per hundred cows to have a healthy population. And on the north side of I seventy we were maintaining that pretty easy at what number att So that's basically like almost year olds. They're nine months old or what everyone you're telling them they were counting in December and January. Um, they made it through the season. By they made it through the hunting season. You know, December is still a lot of winter to go and spring to go. So you can always lose some. But we we do in certain areas more on deer than elk. But in certain areas we have deer herds that they have enough collars on them they can tell us that the fawn mortality in this area was and the dough mortality was five or The nice thing about the south side of Ice seventy is is we had over three hundred mark animals from starting in about four untill about two thousand, so we knew a lot about those elk. We knew what their survival was. We were we were watching elk that had teeth left in their head produced calves year after year, and then in a really bad winter the cows would succumb to that bad winner. But we were getting cows we thought were twenty years plus being reproductively successful. So we had all that information to see that heard all of a sudden plummet like it has and on the other side of the highway it was staying pretty stable. Now, like I said, this year was it was a different year in our counts. We didn't get to count on the south side of Ice seventy. We only did the north side. There was very little slow snow. It makes the animals harder to find. But we went from a forty casper hundred cows down to so something's happened in that unit that bang all of a sudden. We've seen it. We've watched on the south side of Ice seventy. That's just kind of steady declined. Even though we keep reducing the licenses every year. The herd keeps going down now to see it on the other side, it's like, Okay, something's going on. They're seeing it in Montrose, they're seeing it. I think down in the San Louis Valley um Steamboat, I think saying they're starting to see kind of the same thing. Meeker they occurred is doing great and and I mean the only reason an elk herd is going to decline like that as a calf recruitment issue, right right, Well, I mean it could decline like that in in a severe winner. You can lose adults too, But yeah, if you're it's just like everything else. If you don't have any younger the year coming up, you're in trouble. And we did a Yeah, part of the reason we did the study we did in the Upper Eagle Valley is those elk were totally available to you in the summer. They were all above the alpine. You could put people out with a spotting scope and in one or two people could watch a group at two to three elk and see how many calves were nursing on the cows. I mean, we had radio colored cows and we would have to watch that cow for over three minutes to see if a calf nurse. Lots of times in the first ten minutes you get there, you'd see a calf nurse, so you know that's a successful cow. Sometimes on the ones that were barn you had to watch in the full three say, after three minutes, we never saw that cow nurse a calf, so we you know, we would go up. We did it. We did their search there because one we we had the skier is to be able to kind of keep people out. It allowed us to keep one area that there was no interaction with people. In the other area we brought people in to go due to disturbance. Then they were available to us in the summer to watch. So we went out last year because we've been talking for two or three years of doing a recreation impact study. What is the impact of recreation on trails to these elk. We wanted to see if we could get the same results they got out of the Starkey Research area UM that the Forest Service has. So we went up and flew last year in a fixed wing and in places where I normally it would see two to three elk, we saw none. Um. We put in two and a half hours of flying and we saw eighteen elk in the alpine. They did the next week they did the frying pan and they I think they saw twenty two elk in the alpine. So the elk were if they were there at all, they were feeding before daylight and by daylight they were gone. It was not unusual when we're flying to see people hiking. Um they were already at the top of the mountain at seven am in the morning. So so Pete just so people know, you were flying over alpine high country like tree lists tread so if you weren't seeing how they may have been in the timber. It could have been down below in the timber. But you know from doing it, since they normally would be out till ten o'clock in the morning. And if there's a snow field because the bugs they like to lay on the snowfield to stay cool and it keeps the bugs away from them. I mean, they weren't even on the snowfields. It was just nothing. So summer recreation, you're thinking of loving it to death? Man, loving it to death. I mean if you if you look at it, if you've lived here long enough, or you do that recreation. I mean it's seven sixty five days a year. There's recreation in this valley now. And if you look at my trail is it's the same thing. Each one of these towns wants to become a summer recreation mecca. So do you first see any like I mean, do you issue daily permits for certain areas for recreational use or like I mean what would be the way it just limit you somehow is what what would be limit use? But also educate the people. Um I mean we did a town of Aale ran a nice program, a wildlife forum. This winner um I was there, the Forest Service was there, there was two private consultants there and we addressed those type of issues. And the Forest Service provided I mean just an amazing figure that they had a trail that was closed for elk Calvin and mule deer migration closed in the spring, and so they went out and put a camera on it and in ten days they found two hundred people on the trail. So it's like, hey, here's a closed trail trying to give these animals this place to go. And two hundred people used it. And that was just on one section of the trail. There was other sections that could have been on and not use that seen that camera. Well, out of that there was enough hunters, mountain bikers, and hikers trail runners that said, well, what can we do? And so the Forest Service got them to be volunteers and they're standing on those trail closures on weekends. They put up gates so it's not just a sign now it's a gate, but these guys are standing there. Guys and gals are standing there saying this trail is closed. If you want a mountain bike, you should go here. If you want a hike, you ought to go there. So just some more education making people understand that you are the impact. Um. They did an interesting study on Antelope Island in Utah where they went out and they talked to the people that were recreating and they said, uh, yeah, you're a you're a mountain biker, do you think you have any impact on it? Now? But those horseback riders they screw up everything. Asked the horseback riders, those hikers to them, they screw it all up, pointing the finger at everyone else. Asked the hikers, it's the mountain bike riders. Nobody thought they were the impact. It was always somebody else. And it's I mean, I understand that that type of thinking on it, and it's like, it's just me and my dog. We just walked up the trail at nine o'clock in the morning, went at anybody else there? Well, but you weren't there at ten o'clock when three other people did, or at ten thirty when four people did. I mean every hour there's somebody on that trail, and that kind of constant irritation and disturbance is tough on animals. It's interesting to talk about all this from black bears and mountain lions having conflicts in town. Two. You know, agricultural practices that might allow whitetail deer to thrive in a place they hadn't thrive before. Um, this issue of what is like you know, mountain summer recreation have on wildlife. Uh, you know, no one can fool themselves anymore into thinking that there's anything in the lower forty eight that like it's just like isolated, you know, like just at a cursory glance, like of course, like humans have impacted everything, but just in these little detailed ways. Uh. We are in a position where we just have to own up to the fact that we impact virtually all aspects of the wildlife world. Um and need you in some ways like measure what that impact is and in times take like what are gonna be like unpopular decisions around how to control it, like with the shed hunting issue. I mean, it's all it's like people love to be outdoors, they love to be around wildlife, they want to participate in in you know, the world of wildlife. But my god, does it come at a cost? Man? Well, and you can't and you can't tell people hands off because then you don't want to encourage apathy. I mean it's almost worse if no one cared. I made the forest service in our organization and in all the state game and fish. I mean you see it all the time. Get out in nature, get your kids outside. They learn much better if they're in nature. So we're trying to get the people out, but we have to understand that as we do that, there's an impact, and we have to give them the tools on how to deal with those impacts. And a big thing you hear you hear at all the time at public meetings that those deer don't care. They stay in my yard every day. They don't care if I'm there, they don't care if my dog comes. And and we've told people, if the animal changes its behavior, you're too close, you've done something wrong. Back up. What we haven't told him is that whole physiological part of it. That just because the deer is standing there, if you're standing there looking at you, he's gone from maybe a green state of alertment to a yellow state. He's ready to flee. He's not eating, so he's not getting calories, and if he has to flee, then that's an impact on them. But we we haven't done a good job of saying what those physiological impacts are. The fact of a deer and elk standing up from laying down. The standing up is increasing calorie output. So if you think about it, every time you walk by, and if all they do is stand up, you increase their calorie output for that period it doesn't take long they get stood up ten or twelve times a day that you've really put a drain on their calories. And that's that's our fault. We haven't done a good job putting that out and getting people to understand that. We understand it ourselves. If you walk by a guy's house that has a giant Doberman pincher that charges that gate, even though you know you can't get through that gate, your heart rate goes up, The hair on the back of your next stands up, your respiration goes up, and it's like, you know that animal can't get to you, but you went through that physiological reflex. Nothing you can do about it. The you know, the the the animal in my yard. I feel that like that's something that you I spent a lot of energy trying a lot of time trying to counter as people to have this idea like, well, how could development be bad for wildlife? Because I have a deer, I have a turkey, I have an elk that comes into my yard. And it's you need to like when people have that mentality, you really need to try to invite them to view a much bigger picture that the fact that there's you know, a deer hanging out in your yard doesn't mean that the answer to more dear it would be clearly to build more yards, right right. It's kind of like you have to if you're gonna think that way or look at that way, you have to go a little bit deeper into some long term trends and thinking about what that deer's whole life cycle is and how it uses the landscape throughout the year. Um. But I think that it almost like does like when people get comfortable with that idea, and almost does a disservice to wildlife management, you know, yeah, and like there must be tons of them. There's one in my yard, and I mean you have to go back and say, well, before your house there was twenty there. Now there's one, and the other nineteen couldn't stand to be next to your house anymore. So they left or they died. I mean that's the question we get all the time when we talk about the reduction and elk numbers. Well where did they go? They didn't go anywhere. We don't see the herds next door jumping up in population numbers. These animals are dead, they're gone. They didn't There isn't a place. There isn't shankra law over the next ridge for them to live at. I mean every place that has elk, their elker there and they're trying to use it. If you move other elk in on them, you just double stressed them. And it's the same with you know, yeah, there's deer in my yard. You know, if you go and you followed those deer, it's like, well, they probably don't live as long as a deer in the wild because they get hit by cars. They're more stress, they're more susceptible to disease, um, they're probably not eating foods that are the best form because somebody is probably feeding them Cheetos or something. So you have all of these things that build up. And there was actually some stuff done in Chicago on raccoons of all things, and raccoons were becoming obese, they were getting diabetes, their teeth were rotting because they were eating so much human food. They weren't getting their normal diet, becoming like us. Just like us, they were eating human food. They became a human. If they could sit home on the couch with a remote and a bag of cheetos, they were pretty happy. So all right, you guys got any anymore? Man, I'm good. Yeah, I gotta follow up. Um, I killed the cow this year. I don't know what what the problem was, but clean kill. She ended up being chewy. I had had a chewy elk in a while, right, But like every single cut is just like even the tenderlan one is just like a little too eldente. Right. So I figured, you kill a lot of elk, You've seen a lot of elk, You've eating a lot of elk. You know that there's elk out there, like you said, without teeth in their head. There their twenty plus the old cows. Do you have any thoughts on what sometimes produces chewy elk? Well, yeah, I mean they're just thoughts. They're not nothing based in fact, but but on thirty some years of experience of I mean, the big thing is what happened to that elk the hour before you killed it? Did it come from the ridge side on the other side and run all the way? Was it hyped up that it was all excited? Um? You see a lot with antelope that you know, people will go out and they shoot an antelope that came. It's like, yeah, I was standing out there in the stage brush. His anilope came busting over the ridge right to me and I shot it. Man, it was terrible. Well, maybe that animal been running for thirty minutes, so all the andrelin is pumped in his body, it's got all the lactic acid, it's got all this stuff going on. So so I think that's a big factor in it. You don't know. I mean, the elk could look like, hey, there's a good layer of fat on it. It looks healthy. The teeth looked good. But that doesn't mean at some point in the time that that elk wasn't suffering some other stress or some other problems. Um. Interesting, I don't see a lot of ticks on our animals here, but when we're trapping elk every day, it was amazing. When we started in eighty four and ended in the mid nineties. During that ten or twelve year period, we started seeing more and more ticks on elk in the winter than we've ever seen before, enough that we were writing it down on our data sheets. This elk is full of ticks. So you don't know if if in the summer they were impacted by ticks. Um, you know, just what was going on with them? Something was stressing them. Something's usually stressing them out. I mean when you you see it, especially in hogs, that if you get a hog before slaughter that's too hot or it's stressed on that white meat, you'll see red dots through it, and that's a sign that that animal was stressed before it was killed, and that really affects the quality of the meat. Yeah. I feel like the last time I had a chewy animal, it was a it was a mule deer buck and uh, I didn't put didn't The first shot missed completely, it ran I shot. There was some more shooting that went on, and fifteen minutes later the animal was dead. It didn't die e'sle and um, yeah, it was a tough, tough eat the animal. And I just feel like, yeah, it was chemicals, surgeon and livestock slaughter they go through. There's a lot of steps in the process to alleviate stress doing livestock slaughter. For from a meet, I mean, not just from a humane perspective, from a meat quality perspective, to alleviate stress. So as far as as far as age being a factor, I think it's a factor, man. Do Yeah, Well, I mean I think it's a factor, but it's not a guaranteed factor that a toothless one's going to be tough. Yeah, I mean, I mean, Nick, We've all shot an animal that was we thought was a year lane, two year old maybe, and it's like it just didn't taste as good. Um. I mean, I've shot some big horn sheep that were eight and ten years old. It tasted great. We're drawn more than one big horn sheet tag grown too? Is because you work for the state. Yeah that's too big horn tags ner lifetime? Yeah? Wow, Well one was in any sheep. One was a ram tag. You gotta understand he's in a position where he's all mad because he didn't draw any good tag. I just suffered through a horrible tag draw season. But I didn't draw my moose tag. So I'm right there with you. I feel like I've been isolated out and picked on this year by the permit draw systems. So you cool. You shot a tough old cow Neil still eating her? Was it old? I didn't even go and have her aged? Well, But would the teeth look like, I mean, they look good or they look they gotta have? You got to think, you gotta know what you're doing. Really look at those teeth man, Well, but I mean are they all there? Yeah? Um, have you She's already had time to freezer age, and that hasn't helped. No, uh, you know, might just be that you're just gonna have to just grind it, grind it up. Oh no, definitely, and listen like yeah, flavor, yeah, it's it's fine. And when you cook a roast a proper way, it's eating fine. But you're just like, gosh, just a little just got a sharp knife, little thinner man. Yeah uh no, but yeah, we're out of burger, so it's like perfect. You know, I'll be taking out a bunch of roasts out and just turning into burger because the flavor is good, or cook it and and just slice it thin thin. But you know what I do have a little bit of my freezer off that like I had never experienced, and I you hear stories about it, and it's where all this stuff perpetuates from. Are these mule deer right? That the sage game? Well, listen, well I heard the whole story. It was like one guy shot it, it it went over the ridge. He decided not to even follow up, so that his body went over there. Feeling bad killed it. The guy didn't brought it to the guy. He didn't want it. It sat out and the sun for a day. Eventually my neighbor ends up with it. He's like, I'll take it, So I helped him. It didn't smell bad or anything when we butchered it. Um. But taking these packages of ground meat out, like when you open the package of ground meat, you just like you can smell it right then and there you cook it, it's bad. So like taking care of strass, stressing it, taking care of it like it can definitely happen. I've told a story a hundred times. I don't know if I've told it on this digital radio program, but about my box that fell into a sinkhole. You that one worst buck I ever ate because it was I couldn't recover it quickly down on a sinkhole. Well, my Colorado moose is eating great. Oh yeah, rub it in. It was a cow. That's the only the thing I get so sick. I was that big meal to your bucks. Don't taste good when you get that, like a nice big meal of your buck. And he's got a bunch of fat on his room. Yeah, listen, my wife who doesn't care at all about dear antlers, doesn't even get it. She can't tell a big one from a little one when the sitting right in front of her. She's like, it just looks like the same, like all the other ones. Doesn't care. She likes that meat, the big old mule deer buck meat, only going by the ship, like when I make dinner, Okay, when I make dinner, if that's what it is, she's like, that is so good? What is that? Loves it. She wouldn't like the bucks Yanna shoots. She doesn't like like white like white tail meat. She feels it's a little too mild, a little too bland, you know, used me. She doesn't really every time I cook moves. I don't even tell her what it is, but she'll eat it and she's like, what does that? And I'll be like, moves. She's like, you know, it's just something about it. Yeah. I shot a yearling cow last December, and it was surprising how mild it was. Like, because you get used to eating stuff, you know, you're shooting older elk or bucks or whatever, you get used to that just flavor. And that thing was like vealish, you know it was so and even the meat was lighter than you'd expect to see, and and it was mild. Like I know you've said it before. It's like almost to the point where it's not that it tastes bad, it's just so mild. There's almost nothing that gets to the point of being a little blamed. Yeah, pound for pound, I don't I don't like. I wouldn't trade it because I like to eat the animals that I shot, or the next best thing is animals with my body shot when I was with them, kind of thing. Just yea mentally, So I wouldn't like literally do these trades. But you know, pound for pound, I would swap out, like three or four year old mule dear meat. I would like trade out to get that back. I like it. You've got preferences, and really that's my wife's favorite, saying that's my favorite. So you like it like you like that flavor as long as you treat it right. Yeah, no, I think that we put we put in the freezer. Was it a mule? Yeah, mule deer. It's so hard to tell because we come home from you know, working and with you know, we're always digging up meat. But I had to handle open the freezer. And it's by far been a favorite this year for everybody. And I haven't noticed the difference in in bigger bucks and does and that at all. But you know that, I mean within fifteen minutes of hitting the ground, that suckers in a cooler. So did you draw an antelope tag? Yesterday? Did not? So you just gotta find out like everybody else, I gotta fight it, just like everybody else, just like I'm fighting, like on the moose. I've been fighting since there's been a moose season in Colorado for it. And there's some people in the valley that have drawn their bull tag and now their cow tags. So when they're doing the draw, do they call up like your colleagues call up and be like, build great news. You just gotta check your email, got check your just like a regular old guy that's like that's horrible, man. Yeah, I know there's no there's no benefit one where it all looked pretty bad. It would look pretty bad. Did another conspiracy theory? But I've heard that one plenty. Oh yeah, yeah, alright, anyone else? Any last things, Officer Andre, you have any um final things you didn't get to say? Be safe out there. Be safe out there. Self report, self report. Everybody's gonna make a mistake. Just turn you do the right thing, turn yourself in. I think everybody be happy with the outcome when you do that. Try to hide it. You aren't going to be happy with the outcome. And if you have to say if, if you have to say if, I probably shouldn't do it. All right, thank you very much for joining us. All right, thank you