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The MeatEater Podcast
Ep. 145: A Life of Service
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2h19m
Missoula, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Idaho Department of Fish and Game Director Virgil Moore, the author and poet Chris Dombrowski, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: open season on pine squirrels in Idaho; Steve's Mexican roadkill bonefish encounter; managing deer for opportunity versus quality; the unfortunate reality of why Idaho's winter steelhead season has been closed; the ongoing fight around grizzly bear delisting; multi-state game and fish agencies working together; caribou flirting with the U.S. border and conservation triage; the surprising issues attached to public apathy; counting wildlife; legitimate and illegitimate gripes about fish and game agencies; preference points as a pyramid scheme; and more.
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00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast calling at you shirtless severely bug bitten in my case underwear listening podcast. You can't forget anything, alright, Virgil, let's just start out and have you just get right into it. Introduce yourself, like right off for anybody even says anything interesting. Thanks Steve. I'm Virgil Warm director and Idaho Fishing Game. Um, it's the greatest job in the world. Like, that's the top that's the top dog individual. Well, I have you, but yeah, in our agency, um, the director uh oversees the operations of the entire agency and you, guys in the crowning achievement of your career, right, is this passage of the new pine squirrel season? Well, I won't say it's a crowning achievement. Yeah. A couple of years ago, one of our commissioners just asked the question can we kill Plaine squirrels? You know, they're commonly known as red squirrels, And the the answer was they're protected wildlife. And then he goes, why, Yeah, I don't know, it's always been that way. Yeah. This came up because we I was just talking about how last night we were eating some pine squirrels for dinner. And I was saying, how everywhere that I've ever lived lists the pine squirrel or red squirrel um as a non protected, non game species mean no close season, no bag limit. And I would have never have guessed the Idaho was an exception to that, because like people don't really get after them. You know, they're a common household pest, because if a squirrel gets in your attic, it's probably a pine squirrel. In the northern tier States, um, they pray. A surprising thing is they pray on snowshoe hair leveretts. Do you know that in in Alberta, they did a mortality study on snowshoe hairs and most of the ones that went missing were found in pine squirrel mittens. I got a body that watch would kill a bird one time. A Yeah, they like to kill. They like to kill snowsh your hair leveretts, and they're like the baby birds out of nests. But we'll see the pine scenes. They're they're stashes, their mittens, whatever you want to call them, become an important food source in the winter for some birds and other wildlife because they can get into those stashes and you see grizzlies in the spring will come out and excavate them, you know, pull them all out. So you guys realize there's no season for him, and what kind of magic needs to happen. You know, It's not as easy as just waving a wand and saying the season's open. We had to go through rulemaking to make them non protected first, and then we had to go through the process of proposing a season, getting public comment, and then the Commission approving it. They just finally approved that at their last commission meetings. So we will have a pine squirrel season from one extreme to the other. It's eight per day, twenty four in possession, so and it's got an open season that'll be from August through marcht one, so you know there's a close period and that conforms with our open season for other um rabbits and other small games. So just for consistency reasons, we kept all of that. You're gonna run them like small game. Do you guys have any regulations around and I don't imagine you have thriving populations of fox and gray squirrels. Uh, we do have thriving populations of fox and gray squirrels, mostly in urban areas, and uh, there is no protection on those. You can kill as many of those as you want because they're because they're a non native. There are non native non protected wildlife because most of them are in urban areas were discharged of firearms is prohibited. Um that we don't see much use of them, although there are a few folks, uh that that utilize them. I mean, I'm a Missouri native. I was raised. Probably the first thing I killed was either a rabbit or squirrel, so one of the two had to be what I was shooting at exactly. Um next to Virgil Chris, Chris just hanging out. Chris is the old friend of mine who should you should come out of the show a lot more? I want to Yeah, I mean my friends, I'm not a big podcast listener. I watched the show of the Mediator show all the time, but my friends listened to it all the time. I told him when I was doing today, they said, seriously, are you kidding me? Anti podcast listen? No, Um, I'm not. But to steal an old favorite phrase of yours that you stole from Ian Fraser. You know, hunting or fishing is something I'd rather do than talk about. So um, I'm not Antipope cast. I just I write a lot, and I need uh. When I'm done writing, I need to get out of the word world. You know. Just listen to silence, you know. I remember reading somewhere that people are saying you can't appreciate music without appreciating silence, because music is an interruption of silence. Sure. I bet John Cage would love that, right. I don't know who said, I'm just gonna act like I said that. I remember an old squirrel hassan fop for meal that you made. You remember that? Yeah, man, Yeah, we used to get after him right here in town, right here. But uh, you know live trap nowise and squirrels? Oh is that how you're getting them? In? Other ways? We go, we go honest, we go out of state that we'd go, you know, hunt them around. Uh plug your book real quick. Okay, Well, my my last book is called Body of Water. It's a nonfiction book from Milkweed Editions about uh really that centers around a man named David Pender who was the first Bahamian bone fishing guy. Uh. He went to uh he grew up on a small island called deep Water Key, and a rich Floridian man named Gil Drake, Floridian man named Gil Drake actually bought an island from the Crown um the English Crown called deep Water Key and hired David Pender too excavate the mangroves from the island, and over time hired Pender to be his first fishing guide bone fish guide in the Bahamas. So Pender made about five dollars a day at the time, and over the last fifty or so years, the bone fishing industry has become the trux of the eco to tourism industry in the Bahamas, so a hundred and fifty million dollars a year. Basically, this little fish that we used to throw into Purina food bags has become the crux of an island, the entire island's economy. Really, first bone fish I ever saw, and this is the way after bone fish became what bone fish are. The first one I ever saw is leading dead on the side of the road. Where is that Mexico? He's done on the side of the road with the weirdest thing. I was like, Oh, it's not how you want to see your first bone fish. In the r day, a buddy mine from Hawaii sent me a picture just a classic grip and grim with a whole bunch of dead bonefish lander because they make fish patties out of here, they call it. Then they don't. They catch mountain deep water, huge bonfish my brother called a big bone fish and a hundred feet of water in Hawaii. Right, So they don't look like they're like a flats fish. They're they act like they're just a fish to eat, a bony ass fish to eat. Right. I remember your your discussion in meat Eat or the book about your first experience releasing these fish. That's when I found my first dead one on the side of the road like a road killed bone fish, and then caught my first ones and let them go. And meanwhile we like killed every other fish. We didn't know what it was to like fuel our journey to let bone and fish go because you gotta eat something. We pull fish out like what's that, I don't know, eat it and let all that, let all the old ones go. Did you ever end up beating a bone fishing bone fish one? What was it? Like? You said, just boning paying the fine white flesh. Totally fine, you gotta pick it. To quote and Fraser again, who I think might have stole this from John McPhee, but he's talking about eating rochad right, and he said, it's kind of like fixing a watch, like picking the meat, like all the bones. You know. It feels like you're like dismanling a watch to get it apart. But I ate one down there, barracoutaite a lot of those kind of fish. But it's a cool book. We should maybe sometimes dedicate the whole conversation about the books. It tells the story about a fish that no one cares about becoming a fish that's like a billion dollar industry. Yeah, we should. I'll come back anytime. I'm glad you're living in Bozeman. Now. I remember when you used to speaking of picking fish, remember fishing for whitefish and making something. I was talking about that yesterday. Yeah, tedious, but great recipe. Um on down the line. Oh yeas w you have headsets on? What are you doing? Just monitoring? They're just taking yeah, entourage. Oh yeah, let's go ahead. Then we're gonna dive into and then we're gonna dive into all things, uh, fisheries and wildlife management. Yeah, tell us from the Meat Eater Crew, Virgil, can you start out I have a thousand things to ask you. One of the questions I want to ask you later once we get going, is when you hear hunters and anglers talk bad about fish and game, what are the most legitimate complaints and what are the least legitimate complaints? But I don't want to talk about that yet, but just know that that's coming, so dig deep to try to give a thing like what is the most legitimate complaints that you found in your career in the lifetime of service? I think first, I think could be interesting to talk about where your department sort of ends, and you can make it general like the IDAHO right is your area of expertise, but you probably enough exposure from all the other agencies to like like where where does what does the Game Commission? And what is its relationship to your department? And and how do you move from one of those? I think that this is this is something that's not well understood, and it might be a good basis for the conversation here. That really is And I certainly our Game Commission Idahoe Fish and Game Commission is integral to our agency. Uh. They are the policy and regulatory setting body for the department Officient Game. As director, I set as the director of the Idaho Department of Fishing Game. I'm also a non voting member of the Idaho Fishing Game Commission. My other title is Secretary Officient Game, and that interfaces the Department, through the Director and the Commission in Idaho. The Director serves at the pleasure of the Commission, a seven person board appointed by the Governor UH for staggered four year terms. They can be appointed to two terms confirmed by the Senate as confirmed by the state Senate. Our commissioners are as a director appointed by a commission, I do not have to go through that that political process with the legislature. They do that, and so that's the firewall or the buffer that's there. But the governor selects those commissioners and the commission. The governor selects the commissioners, the commissioner selects you, the director, and you have a term limit of two terms for the commissioners, so they can serve two four year terms. And then they turn out the director has no term limit, so you can keep going and keep goingment Now it's you serve the pleasure and so at any time for commissioners decide they want somebody new, you've got your walking papers. How many commissioners are there seven and that varies, okay, but they set the rules. So, for instance, we talked about and I don't want to put too much into this because it's a pretty small issue pine squirrel season that has the goal of the commission right, correct, But the Commission draws so much of their information from the Department because the Commission's not doing not game surveys. So that's where the Department and Commission are linked in. The first initiative in the state of Idaho was approved by voters in the state that created the Commission prior to ninety eight. We were formed as an agency in eight the Department Official Game prior to that, the director was appointed by the governor. It was completely partisan and most of the st spoils the war and it is and many of the staff were non professional and it was a very partisan UH structure. Decline of trying to recover Elkords, trying to get hunting back and going in the twenties and thirties, UH failed miserably because we didn't have that professional workforce out there doing the survey work. The initiative formed the Commission and put the Commission in its position of hiring the director and gave very specific roles to each body and the department access staff and managers of that public trust that's out there. The Commission is the the trust holder along with the legislature UH, they are the ones that are responsible for how to how to UH deal with that trust. We just make recommendations and manage it per their direction. So up until the time pine squirrels were protected, that was the direction. Then they decided they as the UH trust manager, they wanted to do something different. We said, there's not a problem biologically. They went on with the rules. And so we interact very closely with our commission. Who how often does the Commission butt heads of the department like meaning presuming there's people in the Commission who have an extagrind right like because they're from different walks of life, is it happens? We don't see it a lot. UH. Generally the Commission tries to work as a team together, but they are appointed to represent geographic areas of the state, and they're they're pretty much they have a district and those that district is very similar to our administrative regions. So we've got seven of those. And every so often you see um a difference in the way that the commissioners themselves to go. As director, I manage the agency to make recommendations. Where we have a disconnect is if for some reason, through public input, somebody wants a season change. But someone said, hey, there's I'm seeing fewer and fewer deer, and then you look and you he actually is probably seeing fewer and fewer deer. Let's say it's legitimate, and as an individual, I suspect that that's the case they are seeing. But our survey work, we look at it and we go, you know, we killed more deer last year in that unit than we've ever killed before. Our survey information says that the buck doo ratios in there are above policy. And so you have that disconnect between what you see in the spot you hunt and what we see when we try to manage a larger piece of real estate. And so that goes to the commission. They get public input all the time, like that. We're in the idle of it right now with some deer setting stuff that's going on, Like tell me what you mean, white tailed deer. We're we're adopting a new white Tailed Deer plan, and in that process the question of do we know what we're talking about in this particular piece of real estate versus what the data is for game management units on a larger piece. And and so the Commission is in a situation where the biological information would suggest one thing, and what individuals that are motivated to get involved in the decision making process show up at a public meeting say that isn't right. And you know what, they're probably not wrong about where they're hunting, what they see their specific spot, but what it does that mean that that's the way it is everywhere. And that's the kind of wisdom and balancing that the Commission has to go through to sort through. Here's the science as we're trying to present it to you, and here's the public input that has some veried input. We can tell you all about this, but I can't say that what Joe Hunter over here sees is incorrect. And so that is where the beauty of the Commission processes. They're there to balance out perhaps the scientific information that we provide them with some of the input from the public of what they desire. As trust Um users, they're the they're the ones who get the benefit of that public trust of wildlife. We manage it. The Commission is a trustee for that and and so we go back and forth through that process UH constantly with with our commission. Most of the time nine ten per cent of what is out there for public input, we get good public input. We get agreement with the biological information it goes through. We just approved phishing regulations for three years, a new phish management plan for six years. At this last commission neating two weeks ago took fifteen minutes, no dissenting anything. It took a year, took a year of public input to get to that point. But by the time we got to that point, we didn't have any issues. That's not true with our deer, elk and other wildlife management issues. We had no dissenting votes on point squirrels, So that one went pretty easy. Brings people together together. But but white tail deer are a big thing right now. They tell me what because there's a lot of them, not a lot of them we're seeing um because of way hunting occurs in Idaho with the ability to move around. We have a white tail tag for the late season white tail hunt. UM that that you have to decide whether you're gonna hunt during the early mule deer in general deer season, or whether you want to hunt white tail only. And you get that white tail tag. A lot of people prefer white too, I do, and and consequently they all go to these really neat spots and so they're seeing a lot more hunters. So you're out there driving around where you go buy and you see six camps in the spot you didn't see but one camp four or five years ago. Then you go out hunting and you don't see the deer immediately. There's a problem. And this is occurring in the clear Water and several other units around that, coupled with loss of access on private lands, creates this uh perception that hunting for me isn't as good as it used to be, and people perception is correct for that person. People are attributing this to forcing people to make this decision about what they want to hunt. That's part of it. They're also saying there's too many non residents, and non residents can be both people from out of state as well as people like myself from Boise coming up into their area to hunt UH. And it's it's that social tension that comes with using a resource out there. And as users, you've probably all seen that. I know, I do. Uh. You see it whether you're fishing or hunting. I get away from it by hunting later in the season so I don't have to deal with it, or I fish later in the season or during the shoulder periods. Montana, as an example, has their shoulder hunting seasons that they use right now. To try to distribute some of that, we try to use our regulations to do that, but it at some point we still have the people seeing something different than what are biological data. So some of the and I'll jump to your question, you know, what are the legitimate complaints for us? Add something. One of the writers that writes for us on our website, Pat dirk And, did a piece for us about comparing success rates hunter success rates with surveys about hunter satisfaction. He's the basic I mean, just to really take something long and complex and make it short, as people are just generally not happy, not happy, Like you take a relative picture a year to year of like what was good hunting and bad hunting, then to ask people to put a personal spin on it that generally viewed as being more negative than it was. I wouldn't totally agree with that dot our survey that we recently did on um mule, they're in whitetail hunters. Everybody's happy. No, I don't know, and I'm gonna say everybody's better, but but most people are satisfied or very satisfied. Based on the survey work we did. It varies depending on the geography, it varies on what they're after. One of the things that we are in Idaho by commission direction, we're an opportunity state. We're all about being able to hunt every year. We're all about giving people that chance to get out there and to accomplish that. We have to have that that ability to hunt every year, you're going to have fewer older growth animals than you would if if you didn't go for that opportunity. And so that is an opportunity state versus a on a quality state. Utah has UH and this is based on their public input down there and a large number of hunters there in different productivity chose years ago to go with a quality system that produced a larger proportion of the herd as four point animals. Idaho has quality. Don't get me wrong. It's just we manage the productivity of that herd so that we can utilize that productivity for as many hunters as possible while still producing a pretty good number of four point animals, whether they're mule deer or whitetail. We talked about this too as being like some states are kind of split. The Colorado's quality on a mule deer opportunity on elk correct and and part of it has to do with the number of animals that are there. In general, ar mule deer haven't been doing as well as our elk, although in Idaho, with with some of the work we've been doing, as well as the easy winners we've had and the better survival on fonds, our mule deer are really up. But half of our deer harvest is whitetail in Idaho. The other half is all those dudes up in the Panhandle. And it's because we got a lot of them, and and people are turning onto them because they taste better. Now that's just my that's my bias. I'll put it this way. When my wife is not a hunter, but she is a consumer, and when I go hunting, I generally get orders as to what she prefers that bring home and and uh a white tail are much higher on the list than a stinky old mule deer. As she puts it, now, I find them both very flavorful. I like the flavor. They're both distinct and different, and enjoy eating both. In the ticket, she puts, just keep telling her just get your own ticket and come out hunting with me. But really, late, I want to get in your bio from it. But lay a good piece of marriage advice on us. Listen to your spouse, bring home my white til. Can I ask a question about so when you guys are prioritizing, um, you know, an initiative or or you know this uh the new squirrel uh listing. I mean, are you thinking, well, that's gonna be an economic boon for the state. I mean it's the squirrel thing, or I'm kidding a little bit. But how how much are you prioritizing like revenue potential revenue over the resource or is it certainly um? Idaho gets no general funds okay. Our revenue is generated by predominantly license sales, as well as contract money and the excise tax on hangingd fishing equipment. Pittman, Robertson and Danel Johnson. What's the contract money. Contract money is mitigation money like from Bonneville Power to operate hatcheries for the mitigation of dam's Idaho Power of Vista, Um, gosh, you name it. We get contract money to work with a b p A. As an example, we've got contract money to do sage grousework for the Fish and Wildlife Service, but a lot of it most of its mitigation money to operate hatcheries for hydro power development, meaning the hydro power development impedes fish movements and they got to make up for that by running a hand correct, it's the state runs the hatches for We operate the hatcheries that they built for those facilities, and and so that's a huge piece of our budget. But as far as the discretionary funds that we get, it's almost all license money, a little tiny bit off of non game license plate sales. We have a license plate system and that generates UH together about two million dollars that runs that UH non game program um that we have in the state. So back to your question about what do we get. Do we take economics into consideration. If it was a conservation issue where you should hunt or not hunt? The answer is no. But when you're looking at the way you conduct a hunt, the way you you set seasons, how you allocate those tags to residents and non residents. Definitely, revenue is on the table as it as an item to take a look at, But by and large the Commission isn't as concerned with revenue as they are the social aspects of how this effect hunters in the field. Um, I'll give you an example. We dive into this. I mean, the Commission just recently closed steelhead fishing in the state of Ida, and the economic effects of that are huge. Well, I got a lot of but we had a public meeting last week in Riggins. Now. Riggins is on the Salmon River, a very small community, uh that has mostly natural resource based economy. Used to be timber that's gone. Now it's hunting and fishing, I mean, and whitewater rafting on the main Salmon River. And the closure of a winter steelhead fishery is millions of dollars to a community that is probably getting a third of their financial revenue from steelhead fishing, another third from chinook, and the rest of it from other outdoor based recreation activities, and so it hits a community like that hard over Christmas. Goodness, who's grinch here? And I get it. Talked the numbers, I'm guessing why, but talking about what precipitated the closing. One of the people decided no we um UM. We got served with a notice of intent to be sued. UM and about forty five days ago who was bringing the suit? It was a group of five fish advocacy groups and river groups. UH that I felt like that the what we call mixed stock fishery where we fish on the hatchery fish these mitigation fish and there are wild listed steelhead in the river with him, felt that our fishery was harming those wild fish. Technically, the problem is we don't have a permit to have that mixed stock fishery. It expired in two thousand and ten. The federal age and see responsible for that permit UH National Marine Fishery Service has failed to issue that permit to us since two thousand and ten. We have submitted it every year. We have complied with the terms of the permit, but they have been working on other areas that were very important for permitting. UM and I can get into the technicalities of that, but the point is we are guilty of not having a permit. So here we're getting a notice Noah or National Marine Fishery Services, go ahead and fish without the permit, comply with the terms you submitted. We don't have time to go through the process to give you that permit, but we're not going to prosecute you under the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Acts as a citizens lawsuit feature in it that allows private citizens to sue somebody violating it. That was I mean, this has been going on for eight years and then we get this notice intent to sue. If you go to court and are found to be guilty, I guess you would say we're not in compliance, then the state has to pay all the legal fees of the plaintiffs. And knowing what we knew, we felt that it was not useful to go through a legal defense when we really didn't have the permit trying to convince a judge, and in all likelihood the plaintiffs would have asked the judge for an emergency closure while they started in and the end result would be we would be paying the legal fees and we would have a closed steelhead system. By closing the season, we preclude them from taking us to court. So now the decision to open it back up is still with the commission. The permit will be done in March next spring. Were a black eye, right, yeah, I and and deservedly so we are. We probably could have been a little more aggressive with seeing that this could happen. But frankly, I knew for well, I've been director for eight years and the whole time I knew we've been playing doing this, and I felt because National Marine Fishery Service wasn't going to prosecute us, that we were okay. I never thought about our conservation friends and these other entities taking us to court. Are these fisher Are these angler based groups? For a couple of them are angler based groups, A couple of them are river based groups, angler groups desiring more wild fishing. Yeah, they've got a different agenda, and I'll be honest with you. Part of the agenda they were willing to not sue us if we agreed to go to no bait, single barbelous hooks fly fishing only banned the useful boats. So they were trying to say this was a conservation issue. But then they had this string of things that would have precluded most of our steelhead anglers from going fishing, just so that group could get out there, the Catch and Release group basically, and are the people of Riggings and that whole kind of valley there. They upset mostly you guys were They're upset that we allowed this to get to where it is. But at the public meeting we had last week going into town, there was a sign um, you know, public meeting so and so play such and such time, and they had the name of one of these groups just plastered on there said not welcome. So yeah, they're they're they're doing. I have a meeting tomorrow with the board of one of these groups. The season doesn't take effect until December the seventh, I think, is when it closes. Terrible day, um, but we've got a little bit time in here. We're still negotiating. We had a negotiated settlement two weeks ago, and then when all of the planeffs left, they came back a day later and said, no, we're going to back away from our agreement. So I got a couple of quick questions. First, for Chris, uh, you're you're you're a fishing guide straight over to that country at all I do not. I know, I couldn't had that far down river. No, I grew up still heading in Michigan. So, um, we don't have these problems. Now we don't have these problems. But now I'm still lying the bank with them down there, right. I spent most most of the winter righting. So as soon as I'm off the river in late October, I'm hanging up the rods and the waiters and chasing the bird dog around. But um, but do you hear guys griping about this? So I didn't. I didn't even know about it, which tells you how how often much I've been in the woods in the last month or so. But all you know, most of the Missoula single Missoula fishing guides head over there for for a good month, and you know, drag a trailer over and right. For sure. It's fascinating to me and and uh surprising too. Now here's my question for you, Virgil, on this issue. The average letter writer who writes in with a complaint. Um, let's say you were to take all those people and make a pool of them, So forget the average You're gonna take a pool of all the people that have written a letter of complaint, how many of those individuals if if you had to guess what percentage of those individuals would be able to articulate the issue to the extent that you just articulated it to me right now? Is it well understood or do you find or are you baffled by how not well understood it is. I'm baffled by how not well understood it is. We're pushing the envelope. This closure only occurred less than two weeks ago. In fact, it'll be two weeks ago Wednesday, this coming Wednesday, and so we're we're trying to get the word out there. The form letters that I've been inundated with simply aren't accurate. The misunderstand ending that there is a conservation benefit to this closure, Uh is wrong. Okay, that there is a catch and release mortality on these listed steelhead, but that is less than three of handling, and that's a worst case scenario. That's what that's what we use in our permit, and we predict that three out of a hundred fish handled may die as a result of that catch and release fishery, and that's the impact that we will have on these wildfish while we're catching and keeping hatchery fish. Okay, and it's something all the states do. I mean, Washington has their permit in hand, they got a couple of years ago. They got there's first. So the Washington part of the Snake River will stay open even though ours will close because it's it's border water. Oregon doesn't have their permit for this fishery, but they're going to continue to fish because they didn't get sued, you know, and so he had It's a very selective um legal actions going to continue to fish or in the state of Oregon will continue fish, as will Washington on the Snake River portion. Our Salmon River and Clearwater rivers would be the ones that are predominantly affected by this, as well as Idaho licensed anglers who fish Hell's Canyon the Snake River portion. But you could continue to fish by buying a Washington license. That's the absurdity of some of this. But the bottom line is the catch and release fishery is not the issue here. Um. This is partially a social issue. This is partially an issue of these advocacy groups trying to make a point that Idaho isn't doing enough as a state on down river issues, and so they're hitting us at home with a legal action on our sport fisheries. And it really doesn't hurt the department. It hurts the local communities, right you have. I mean, you you gave that, Um, you gave some percentages. But what's what's the dollar figure? You know in the town of Riggans. We've done the economic evaluation and I'm going to say the town of Riggins for this winter fishery is a million and a half dollars if my numbers now, it doesn't sound like a lot of money. Not. I mean, there's less than a thousand people there in the wintertime. There's probably half that been a big chunk of change. Be factor in population is a big deal. Clear Water, you know, or Pheno that area there, Um, it gets hit hard and the outfitters and guides that rely on that and cater to that. I mean, I got a heartfelt letter from a guide up on the clear Water and and he said, cash, it couldn't come at a worse time. He goes, I don't make a lot of money during this period of time, but it's gonna cost me five thousand dollars in the next six weeks. It's going to run my Christmas with my kids. Gosh, I just almost get into tears over something like that, and it's like, well, dang, should we have not closed it? Let it go to court fought and try to keep it open as long as possible. We're still having that active discussion right now. But these actions that appear to be just about the department and its management really are about people and the people who use the resource and the communities that benefit from those resources. Walk me through how you how you wound up where you are now? Like that, Were you aiming through your career in fish and wildlife to wind up in this position? Or does it never? I'm by training, I'm a fisheries scientist. I was worked as a fisheries biology undergraduate degrees in education. I taught high school, came to Ido, worked on fish on steelhead as a matter of fact, and my yeah, and I worked on steelhead and cutthroat. Um got on with the department to over forty years ago, uh and worked on the South Fork and the Snake River in Idaho on cutthroat trout in the late seventies and early eighties, on a problem we were having there with declining numbers in size of fish, and got an opportunity to manage that fishery for about seven years. And that included that area that I was manager over, including the Henry's Fork and the South Fork of the Snake and some of that greatest fishing country and well in the world. Maybe maybe Montana is close, but you know, we'll we'll give them since wire in Montana, I'll give him a little credit for having good fisheries. But the bottom line is then I just worked my way up when I had an opportunity and various positions as state fish manager, fishery research manager, I was bureau chief over our communications program for a while, fisheries chief. I did a stint in Oregon as director for a year, went over there and um learned a lot. I consider it now as a one year sabbatical to a different state and had an opportunity to come back Tita, who as a deputy director and turned into a director's job. So it's a really short bio when you get down to it. It's just a lot of different opportunities and jobs, but it's all doing the same thing. It's working with people to manage their resources to provide what they want while having that foundation in our mission statement, which is preserved, protect, perpetuate, and manage for the benefit of the people. That resource can only be used when it's preserved, protected, and perpetuated. And when it is used, it's primary use is hunting, fishing, and trapping. That is in the code that formed our agency, that was given to us in by the people of the state. It was approved by the people in the state in um. A lot of people said, well that's dated, you know that was that was eighty some odd years I guess it was eighty years ago and it's no longer valid. Well, in two thousand twelve, we had an initiative in this or we had a constitutional amendment the right to hunt fishing trap, and in that amendment it had the right to hunt fishing trap is held uh to be a right for the people as a whole, not individuals as much, and that the primary method of managing wildlife in the state of Idaho is hunting, fishing, and trapping. So if you're gonna manage wildlife population should do it with hunting, fishing and trapping. That got approved by seventy public right they want the public to do it. That was approved by seventy of the people in two thousand twelve. Now if that is at an endorsement of the night and their should have moved it forward. So what we in Idaho have is the benefit of knowing from a participation in an in an election what it is the really big goals are. And that makes my job easy. If you flip the card over I gave you. On the back, there is our mission statement that's in code. That's the whole thing written out there, and it's three sentences long on the back of everybody's card. Now it's on the back of mine. But that's that's something I do so that I can because whenever I doubt what's going on, I just flip that over and read through it again. It's like, Okay, everything I need to know is right there. So in Idaho, Uh, I'm switching gears here a little bit um in Idaho. When you get when you get an email in the subject in the subject line is steel ahead or the subject line is grizzly bears? Which one are you more like? Oh no, because this is like you spent a lot of time certainly um endangered species as a whole, and um, those two add in stage grounds and uh yeah, that's occupied a fair amount of our time. Um, I will take the steel head one any day of the week over grizzly bear because you have a lot of person I have some of that, and we have more biological we have. Oh, it's less value laden relative to managing fish. You know, a wild steelhead is a phenomenal creature. I mean they are there's nothing nothing like them on the end of a fly rod and any kind of tackle, they're just awesome. They'd be cruising around out the ocean and uh on the hatchery steelhead isn't far below that. But that certainly to have have that creature in your hand. But they're still generally not thought of as individuals. They thought of as a population, as a run, as a school, you know that type. That's a good point and and consequently the emotional attachment to them doesn't go to the individual level. With megafauna, both big animals you know, bears, wolves, uh, cougars, um, you name it, deer and elk um. It's lesser degree than the other ones. Your name, Well, I guess you're doing it in order. Yeah, we call them charismatic megafauna, you know, big charismatic critters, and and they come with a whole different set of values where people try to humanize those animals and their behavior, and consequently having a discussion about biology with folks who have that becomes way more difficult. Can you sketch out um and go back as far as you want. You can go all the way back to vour whatever to help was, or you can go back the last two or three years. But sketch out where Idaho sits and where things stand right now, and do the grizzly one. And you can personalize that. You can editorialize it however you want to do. But it's like tell a little narrative. We should be celebrating the recovery grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. We should be ready to celebrate the delisting of grizzly bears here in the Northern Rockies in the Northern Continental Divide, just north of where we're at here in Missoulu right now. Um, but I know in the in the Tri state area there, uh, we have an excellent grizzly bear population that's properly managed. We've got exceeded the management goals. We've answered every scientific question in a legal arena, and to still have those bears on the list because of legal issues, judicial issues, to me, undermines the whole benefit of the Endangered Species Act. We the agency that's in charge of like the agency that oversees the population. Right now, they're saying it should be delisted. Correct, Fish and Wildlife Service themselves believes it should be delisted. They're the ruins who delisted it. They've been told to relist them until such time as they answer these legal questions. Now we will get them delisted, Okay, whether it was last year, whether it's next year or three years out, because the population is secure, nothing about answering these legal questions. But this isn't about whether the population is secure or not. It is about the fact that folks do not believe that the management tool of choice, again going back to our constitutional amendment is hunting. So when we have more bears or problem bears, our choice is to have a hunter go out and take care of that, versus having our staff go out and trap the bear and get rid of it. Now we're gonna have to do a combination, But I would much prefer to use a hunter who buys a license and a tag to go out on his own time to take that animal and keep the population and check for the social needs of the communities around there, then send one of my staff out there to trap the bear and then euthanize it unceremoniously. I believe that we have a lot more respect for that wildlife we interact with in that manner than we do with wildlife that we just euthanize in a in a manner to kind of take care of that nuisance. UM. Do you right now feel as though do you feel that as though the fight around grizzly bear delisting will want of being worse than what happened around wolves, or do you feel like it will follow that same pattern off you had like some stops and starts, you had some lawsuities, but he eventually wound up at least and Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. You wound up with delisted will wolves and regulated hunting UM or do you think this is fundamentally different it will play out in a different way. It's I think it's fundamentally the same, uh, And I do think it will play out in a similar manner, But the anti hunting aspects of it is even larger with grizzly bears than it is with wolves, although it's very large with with wolves. Uh, it's um. It's a very strong community of people out there who believe in their values. And at the same time it's it's part of where the frustration is. Because delisted wildlife normal wildlife are under the sovereign trust responsibilities of each individual state. There are a lot of people that don't believe they're being heard and their needs are being addressed by our commission. And I can tell you they're being hurt. What you mean, like, what? What? What? Groups of people? Give you an example. One of the things that we were told they wanted was a buffer around Yellowstone Park so we wouldn't have a celebrity bear going outside of the boundary and getting shot and then running back into the park. And and so I get, I get that big enough already needs to become bigger, and so the park we But they're saying, well, you ignored us when we asked for that. No, we didn't ignore it. We took it into serious consideration and looked at it and said it was unmanageable to do because grizzly bears can roam as much as sixteen to twenty five miles outside of the park, and a wounded animal could go right back in, whether it is a hundred yards from the border at the border or five miles out, you know, And it just wasn't a tenable thing for us to address relative to that. But they were hurt. It was discussed, but the vision didn't go the way they wanted it. So they want to federalize management of these species. And under the Endangered Species Act, that's a Fish and Wildlife Service or its National Marine Fishery Service for fishing and pinnipeds, for seals and sea lions and um they wanted to to. They want to federalize as many species as possible so the state doesn't have the final say. And I believe at core that's a lot of what's going on here. When when the delisting happened in bears where what now has proved to be temporarily delisted, you had three states that we're looking at assuming management. Okay, you had Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and you want up having like three what appeared to me to be three very different responses to this in the hunting question, okay, where Montana was fixing to sort of sit out the hunting season, and I felt that that was kind of a lame move. This is just me personally talking on there's not Virgil. I'm not speaking for Virgil in their the Idle Fishing Game or anyone. Just personally, I thought it was a kind of a lame move because they're sort of be like, I don't want the black eye. I don't want to be caught in the controversy. I'm gonna see how it plays out with Idaho and whelming Now, Wyoming has kind of hosts more of that little subset of the population of bears. They host more anyone else. They were pretty aggressive. They were talking about, you know, harvest and killing two grizzly bears. Idaho, in a curious way, came in where they were going to issue a tag. That's symbolic, right, It's symbolic, But that was our allocation. So the tri state plan that we all three of agreed to allocates the available mortality to the states based on the size of the geography. I don't only have six of that grizzly bear range, and so we get a smaller portion of that available mortality to utilize. So it wasn't just a symbolic no. No. It wasn't like we want to do it, but we don't really want to do it, so we do on our allocation was like one point four one point five bears, okay, and yeah, had I would have liked to borrowed a half a bear from Montana or Wyoming, so that Tana's allocation was I don't it was like seven or eight I think I I. It may have been in the teens. I I don't remember, but it's intermediate to Wyoming being the largest, Montana the next, and Idahoe the smallest. How much you talked to those guys a lot? Oh yeah, we we We really don't. I I will tell you that the tri state UH working relations between Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are top notch. We formed that during the wolf delisting things, and we continually have constant and routine interactions. But the other thing you have to understand is what states is. We don't all manage exactly the same to get the same output. The way I structure are hunting seasons under the ability may be different than the way Wyoming or Montana does it, but it is still under the same state sovereignty, trying to provide for the needs of the people that they have and as long as it is above the bounds of conservation, there's really nothing wrong with that. It's the way Utah does trophy. There's nothing wrong with what Utah is doing with their trophy muletare managed. That's what they chose to do. There's nothing wrong with Idaho doing our management as opportunity. That's what we chose to do. The differences are actually great to have because each state is an experiment and wildlife management above that conservation threshold that we can learn from each other. You have to share information. We share information all the time. We have a group we call the Western Association Official Wildlife Agents. These and that group we come together twice a year and interact with each other a lot. When I have a meeting coming up in early January, and that's where I'll meet with Montana Unwyolming again to discuss grizzly beary issues and how to move forward. Were you guys on the grizzly bear thing? Did you did you issue the tag? We did issue the tag. Did you keep the person anonymous? Um? Yes, we well with the name is available about any other information about them is not by state law that they had to call him up, and I guess so the Commission took action at the last Commission meeting to brain check that um opportunity to that individual for next year because it was suspended by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Once they were relisted, they can't have directed sport mortality under yes, A does I don't have salvage requirements for black bearths meet salvage requirements not me. The Commission changed the meat retrieval portion of that one decade or so ago. Yeah, And as I was guessing, they weren't going to do a meat salvage requirement on grizzly bears. No, that is not part of the requirement. And again that's some of the variation you get from among states. Someone told me how they were in a meeting and it was like a it was a public comment period, and some hunters were saying, well, you know, we should do a you know, we're we're proposing this idea of a meat salvage requirement, and some of the people who were opposing the hunt we're sort of saying, like, uh, what's the term I'm looking for when you say don't like not infantilize, what does the word indulge. No, that's not it. That's what I'm looking for. I don't know they're saying, like, don't you know, don't do it man Kelly. It was telling me the story and I can't remember the word they use for it, but they're kind of like, don't do this phony symbolic thing to greenwash this. But that came to the word that he said that was used. But they were sort of like rather than rather than the opposition figures saying like, yes, I opposed the hunt, but there is gonna be one. I agree that there should be a meat salvage requirement. They wanted to make sure it looked as bad as possible, agreed. I. No, No, that's gonna confuse things too much. I'd rather there wasn't because it's easier for us to bash it. Right. You. Certainly, one of the things that we know as wildlife managers for you and as hunters on your behalf, is that support for hunting, that is, for traditional consumptive purposes in the United States is very high. A recent survey that I saw presented that was presented this last spring showed that over the American public is supportive of traditional regulated hunting activities. Were consumption is part of it, depending then on, and that's been pretty stable. We don't have to win support as hunters, We just have to keep it. Part of what you're talking about, Steve, is how do we regulate our own behavior so we maintain that support for that traditional hunting based activity that we so value. I believe that the use of a red squirrel where you described the meal you got off of it, is in keeping with that traditional activity that we know gives us a lot of support whether people hunt or not. We do know from other surveys that when you label this trophy hunting, when all you're out there for is the trophy without the consuming, it is a very conservative. But support from the public surveyed across the United States drops into the mid twenties. And so the anti hunters are trying to portray grizzly bear hunting as a trophy activity, not a population management activity, not anything else, and successfully then they turn the tables. We have to as hunters take a look at how we interact with the wild life. That we take the almost spiritual aspect of both taking that life as well as the consumption, whether it's the use of the fur or the meat or the bone in whatever manner, we've got to take and keep that front and center as we propose changes in hunting seasons and how we interact with our wildlife and fish for that matter. So, just to wrap up on grizzlies, if you look at a crystal ball and be dead, honest, Okay, don't tell me what you want to be dead? Honest, where is it gonna wind up? They'll be delisted. It will take another year or two to work through the legal system. Will persist on that, Uh, simply because the population itself is so strong, I mean, all the habitats occupied, it's actually plateaued out and uh and as long as we're able to delist it based on that distinct population segment that it was listed under for that Yellowstone ecosystem. The same will be true for the Northern Continental Divide. It takes in Glacier National Park. That will get delisted at some point, as well. Other populations that we've got like in the selkirks Um, these little populations that are reliant on Canada. We don't believe we'll ever achieve the populations that are called for in the recovery plans because they're so small and ISO it's hard to picture the Northern Cascades, which might might or might not have one in it like at this very second good example of that. And so uh, I think the greater Yellowstone in Northern Continental divide, where you have like maybe maybe a thousand in the other world. Yeah, I mean, um, I don't know what's in the Northern Continental Divide, but I think the fashionable And so the answer is yeah, Yeah, there's nothing to be gained by not d listing though, and there's a lot to be gained by doing that. It's a success of the es A. All of financial and human resources going into the e s A process go away and we can put our efforts on something else that's more important and uh and get on with it. And that's been my My complaint about how e s A has been used is it's it's being used two achieve other needs. It's just like this lawsuit over our steel head permit. They're not suing us for conservation purposes on steelhead, they're suing us to get other things that they haven't don't feel they've been heard on and um, and and that's a misuse of of the endangered species. That's the thing that saddens me about seeing how the Endangered Species Act is uses it. It's oftentimes in these big public battles, becomes about something very different than what it's supposed to be talking about. Like the conversations we're having around grizzlies right now. We're not having a conversation about whether the populations were covered. It's just that like, I know what I want. You know that people can look at it. I know what I want. Um, I'm not really interested in the main question that governs that, like population stability, but I'm gonna use components of the essay as a tool to get what I want. And what I want is I damn sure don't want some redneck shooting a grizzly bear. Certainly like their perspective on it. I understand that, and that we've seen that social angst over large predatory wildlife goes down tremendously when they have a ticket in their pocket, permit to kill that because the control shifted from the Fishing Wildlife Service to the hunter himself or herself, as the case maybe we saw it with wolves. Oh my gosh. They angst over wolves and the predation they were having on both livestock as well as wildlife was huge. The number of letters we got from sportsmen was unbelievable. As soon as we opened a season and people could buy or permit, that went way down. Yeah right, no, now, not even close. I mean we dropped their numbers by a few hundred, were cropping them off, but it did change their behavior. But we have reduced live livestock depredations. Uh, and we've we've shifted their behavior around. They now understand what humans are and tend to stay away. We still have hotspot problems with wolf predation, but most of it's on on our uncular it's on our dear and elk. Uh, it's not as much on livestock. We we've really used hunting as well as directed kill by our agency and its staff and the US Wildlife Services to reduce that tremendously. And um, we're making some inroads on elk management as well. We're killing enough of them that elk populations have jumped back up in some areas it did and it still has some holes. I mean, we've got twenty seven elk elk zones in the state, and of that, seven of them aren't meeting objectives. Five of those are almost certainly the result of predation UH. Two of them a combination of that and other factors. UM. So we've we've changed that. Originally we were at I think eleven zones weren't meeting objectives, and so we've pushed that back down UH to a lower number. UH. And those mostly backcountry units, we can't we're not get enough hunters in there. We don't have livestock in there, so we don't have wildlife services in there directly killing animals that are our request. We're trying that in the Lolo zone just over the hill here, where we sent wildlife services in there as an experiment to kill wolves to try to reduce their numbers to a point we can see populations come back like that. It doesn't have it doesn't have to be egg does no. No. We we use them UM. In fact, I prefer to use them. They're they're cheaper and better at it than our staff are because they got the right equipment and training to get in and get that taken care of to handle that. And we have found that we can remove enough wolves to get a response, but it's a garden weeding operation. I mean, they were very productive. They come back, so you've got to go back in there. And what we need is to get enough hunters and trappers in there once we get the numbers down, to keep the numbers down so we don't have to keep paying a third entity for our own staff to go in there and do that. And whether we can get there in a place like the Low Lo or the middle Fork of the Salmon or the Cellway and some of these really thick backcountry panhandle units is yet to be seen. We're working with the trappers in the state UH to try to enhance their ability to get in there by changing some seasoned structures, bag limits, trap check limits and stuff like that, working very closely to adjust those to try to get to a better place with being able to use sport trapping as a means of control as well. And UH, I'm pretty excited about that. But we've only been at this now for I guess eight nine years, and we've only been out from underneath the umbrella of Fishing Wildlife Service. We had a five year probationary period where we couldn't do a lot of things. We've really only been at this about three years with trans new stuff, and you're gonna see us continue to do that. What do you think will end up happening in the northern Great Lakes? And this is like we're getting like way outside of your purview. But do you think that that there's light at the end of the tunnel. There is a bill in Congress to delist wolves nationwide across the board. They're just done. Whether that stands a chance of getting through in this it's a little too you like, um, a little too elastic. Yeah, I all I know is in them in in that particular area, that's probably their best chance for delisting because of the way the judicial order is on them. Up there. It's a little different, um, but it's it's gonna be they're out. They don't have a population problem there. It's it's again they're tied up in this legal mess that they can't get out. And there it's around the question of just populations. I don't want to get us like terribly into the weeds, but there it winds up being again like nitpick that it's like nitpicking little legal things and they're not arguing about the main question, right the main question being like are there enough wolves? There's questions within that geography. There's no there's no benefit being derived of e s A. That's where I think the question. It's the it's the nuances of the Endangered Species Act and somebody arguing over the definition of a distinct population segment or some other aspect of the s A. That many attorneys are very good at arguing in a court of law, and it's not a great benefit of their pocket what probably given them given the way they're reimbursed. There's there's a number of scholarly articles on on the reimbursement of of the legal people that are taking these suits. It's a cottage industry. I can I can image me to essay lawyer. But at the same time, it is their right to take those legal actions and that's just the way it is. And until Congress decides to change something on that, it's it's what we have to deal with. Well, I don't want to blow that. I don't want to be mistaken for someone who wants to blow the whole system up. I just wanted to all end. I wanted to all end the way I wanted to end, but not I'm not I'm not adversarial to the process. I'm like like a sports fan, right, you appreciate the rules, but you're just rooting for your own teeth. So I just like to see it end up in a way that I wanted to end up. But I want jump in another one. Until the other day when someone they they officially verify that a Mountain Cariboo came down to Montana. Right, I missed that. I'm still back with the grizzly that was on the golf course and Stevensville. If you heard about that too, Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think they verified it. I think some guys had pound. Yeah, they found some flirting with the board, and I think they might have it, might be lured him over, It might be verified and step foot into Montana, which would be the first time since the twenties or something. But Idaho, right had the except for that. And I don't know enough about that to know how freakish that is if it's one that just packed up and straight a hundred miles. But Idaho has been the the state of the lower in the Lower Fort the idol has been the state where we have had or the last decades we've had some number of caribou flirting with the border. And if you were gonna have a cariboo in the US, it was presumably, I mean, it was gonna be one in Idaho. And that population is soffe. Do you see what's your take on it? Is this like a a big meaningful thing or is it wind up being that it was such kind of of a little bit of a fluke and you can't read too much into it that they're now not there, Like, give me the mile high perspective on it. From my standpoint, this was almost preordained. I'm giving limitations of the habitat at given the small, low productivity of the of the herd and the fact that it was reliant predominantly on Canada with a few animals coming in. The critical mass we needed of thirty to sixty animals we achieved I think the mid thirties and number of years ago, and then we've been on a downhill slide since. So they having a population of three or four. In fact, Canada's kind of come in and take those animals and removal to put them in protective custody to try to preserve the genetics and use those animals to breed some more in in uh captive rearing, and then reintroduce them at some other point to bolster the remaining population. Part of the problem was predation with the establishment of wolves in that area in addition to the already existing cougar population that was there, it tipped them over. It was that combination of factors. And at one point we had actually given permission to Canada to hire people to come in and kill wolves in northern Idaho, uh and they did that, but that wasn't enough because it's not just wolves. It was a combination of wolves and probably black bears on on on the young ones as well as cougar in there, and because their habitat is so small, it was easy for the predators to pick on them uh there and so this was preordained from my standpoint, Steve, it's also an appropriate action. One of the things just basically saying we're done, we can't do anymore, We're going to triage this out. And this is a situation where we did not know how to overcome the limitations to that population. We took those animals and put them into a captive rearing situation. Maybe we'll figure it out. But we we've decided that the use of resources for those few animals that were declining their extinction was not a good use of resources. Let's go into the captive rearing game. Let's try to see if we can understand this in the future as we work more, get better at managing other factors, habitat, predation, what have you, and then we can put the resources to managing something we know how to fix for some other species. And that that idea of conservation triage under ESA as controversial as the dickens. There's folks like myself to think it's the way you go. We do it medically on something. There are yeah, some of them. You just say, I don't know what to do, and no amount of money poured on it is going to make any difference because we don't know what to do. Because what a reasonable number of population be in that I can't tell you what the recovery plan was. Thank for the Idahoe portion, it was just around a hundred animals. They're flirting around a dozen, seven to a dozen, right, and then it just it went down to single digits and you know, and it was a time where they were either going to go away on their own, or we take a few and you didn't see a way to buy your way out of it. No, not with There wasn't any way and to do it effectively. And so the Canadians chose to offer this opportunity and boom they're out. So that's that idea that there are. Did we give up on them, not totally, but we recognized there was nothing more to be done right at this moment in time with that species. We damn near got there with Saki salmon. I mean, I was on the original Saky recovery team when we got down to one male, lonesome Larry came back. One year, we had four fish come back. The next year, we had zero another year and then seven. I mean that was a four years fan and that's a complete generation zero, four and seven for the returning populations Sakai salmon coming back to Red Fish Lake in Idaho. We took all of those fish out of their natural habitat, put them in a hatchery and Eagle Idaho, and expanded their genetics such that we did not go into what's called in breeding depression. We used every trick in the book, and there were some really amazing tricks that our staff used. Now we're stocking millions of fish in there to try to build that population back up while we expand. The population came from those from that, from those yeah, from those thirteen fish that we had dinner ad right, that's four or five seven, yeah, twelve fish um that we had to work with. We now have a full blown hatchery operating that we built with BPA mitigation money. And it was expensive, but we didn't waste our time trying to douce them in on site because the numbers were too small and numerically we couldn't get over the hurdle. Well, fish are different because you can't go pull a hundred eggs out of caribou. That's true, you know. Now we can get four thousand eggs out of a saki and consequently it is a different game from that standpoint. But my my point being is we have to make some of these hard decisions at some point in time not to spend money certain ways or human resources as the case maybe and um and move forward. That's conservation triosh where we make those decisions versus everything is important. We've got to pour all the resources into it, but there's not enough to take care of it when you, uh, you've been at this game a long time in this business, right and now you're in kind of a pinnacle position. When you look at like these tough decisions, do you do you imagine that there are some that will that will haunt you or that you'll have a sort of I guess he is the guy who What do you think about that? Where do you feel like you're so sort of part of a process, right and if if it wasn't, you would be someone else and that person would probably end up doing the same thing. Or do you feel like you're putting like the personal like Virgil More stamp on things that are going to affect future generations and they'll look back and be like, that was the guy certainly messed it all up, or or conversely the guy that made it perfect. Well, I'll take responsibilities for the screw ups because that's the way it works. But the successes are never a single person um, they're they're always a group. But the successes that I've been part of them that I'm most proud of are forming strong collaboratives among all of the users out there that can agree on how to move forward. And that's that's a challenge given the di visitness in society today. But the closer you get people to the resource on the ground, the easier it is for them to all focus on what they love. So if we're talking about trying to manage Yellowstone cutthroat across its entire range, gosh, that's a big area across several states. But if you want to talk about managing Yellowstone cutthroat in the South Fork of the Snake, I can bring those users together. We can sit down and form up a collaborative. We've done it on the clear Water, We've done it in the oy He's, We've done it on the Koutney River, We've done it in in Montana with the Blackfoot Initiative. The ones that I'm familiar with, and that is the challenge, is to find the right sizing of bringing people together that care about that place, that land, and the geographical geographic size that people can embrace. Some of them are massive, like the oy He's. It's a big geography, but it's it's a resource people can race and get their mind around as they try to come up with solutions to maintaining lifestyle and wildlife resources and plant resources down there and they initiative was a huge success and still is. And we've got ranchers working with conservation groups, working with other NGOs to to keep a lifestyle on the ground because everybody cares about that sage brush community down there. We see it in the clear Water basin. People care about that resource there in the lifestyle it has. It's hard, it takes a lot of work. That's when I'm most proud of every collaborative that I've ever been associated with that has been successful is because everybody came together with that common value and and it's really satisfying things and that isn't dependent on an individual. Then if that person leaves, it has momentum of its own. Uh So I feel some problems. Look, if you look at the Cutthroat in general, it's just too like it has the approached on the micro level. I think the management schemes for that level need to be uh The issues associated with the south Fork of the Snake and maintaining the spawning tributaries there and dealing with the rainbow trout intergression are unique to that area and require localized work. Uh. Public bient. The way Wyoming is doing it as different because their geography is different. The way Yellowstone Park is doing it is different, um and it's its own community up there with Yellowstone Cutthroat. Montana has a slightly different approach on it, but it's all getting at the same thing, and it's it's reliant on that. Now. We have a tri state agreement on Yellowstone Cutthroat that we put in place in the eighties and said, here's the things we all agree on are going to be common death missions and common management concepts. We're going to manage for purity of cutthroat, and that purity is defined this way, you know, by what proportion of integration is there and how we use those fish and transport them around. We agreed on those basic concepts, but then we went out and built these management things on a localized basis. I'm curious about, if I can interrupt just uh something you said about the those collaborative efforts. I mean, if you had to pinpoint something that made them work, because I've been part of plenty collaborations that didn't work, what would what would it be? It's usually some big controversy, the one that I'm no, I'm serious, and sometimes we're right at the middle of it. And that's where I take responsibility for being at fault. And I'll do this on behalf of my agency more than anything. But years ago in the Henry's Fork drainage, we've got on on Park Reservoir. On Park Reservoir gets uh utah chubs in them. That ties up the biomass and our ability to grow hatchery fish in there for sport fishing. You gotta back up on that one. People are gonna your tom about okay, I mean some people who know about this, Okay, Well, anyway, we get competition between fish species and non game species like a utah chub, which is an exotic. Uh. We're in there eating all of the zooplankton and and food and tying it up in their bodies biomass. I'm sorry, I did get carried just like what the Utah shub was, and it was sub is a mental. It's a great big mental. They got in there, and they got in there. We can have a way through bait puckets and what have you, but the bottom line is we have periodically gone in there and poisoned that system with a poison called ropano. It's an extract out of a root from South America and it it blocks the oxygen I take at the cellular level in the brain and they just die. And you've done some South American fish poisoning. That's where we learned it from the natives down there. Uh well, I haven't done that. I'd like to go sometime. And anyway, in the process of doing the one that I the last one of these, we drew Island Park Reservoir way down and we do that to limit the amount of poison that has to be put in the system and then detoxed as it flows out of there. And we usually close the damn drought down, dump the toxin in, do all the tributary strait, try to kill the chubs, close the gates on the dam, and fill it back up well. In the process of trying to get the minimum pool possible to save money, they drew the pool down so low it cut through the sediment that had built up in the reservoir, and all that sediment flushed into the Henry's Fork at Harriman Ranch, the fly fish mecca down there, and it accumulated terribly habitat and it did it created some problems that created such a public outcry about the Bureau of Reclamation and Fishing Game mismanaging this reservoir and having effects on the wild trout fishery in the Henry's Fork Below that the Henry's Fork UH Coalition formed up under guidance of the Henry's Fork Foundation as well as the local irrigators there that were upset, and they formed one of the most successful collaboratives we have today and included everybody in it. But it was an incident that created that, and if you look around you'll find often there was an incident or an activity or a legal action that caused something. They finally brought people together because they know we got to fix this so this doesn't happen again. And that's just one example of the Henry's Fork Watershed Council forming up. That was thirty years ago. The had and put from irrigators too. Yeah they're a big I want water, and you boys figure out the fishing situation, and so fast forward, the dam was rebuilt, a hydro project was put on it a few years later, and because of that collaborative, the needs of the fish and the irrigators were worked out among the collaborative and fed to the agencies so we could implement them as trust managers uh for them, and that's the way it should be. Too often we get put in a position of why did you make that decision instead of implementing things that the community as a whole comes up with. I see our agency and our staff as catalyst, if at all possible, for catalyzing that kind of community interaction, so we can come up with these Certainly, ultimately the Commission made me making some of these decisions, but trying to get people to come together instead of us standing in the middle of the circle getting shot at by all sides because they're dissatisfied with what we're proposing to try to balance everything out. We're better if we're part of the circle and everybody comes up with an idea that's implementable in consensus or as much as you can now. That works until somebody doesn't consent, and then you get these tangents out there. But it is by and large working very well. It's where the focus is right now and natural resource management of our public lands, especially in the resources on those public lands. Do you find areas where there's a lot of public apathy? It surprises you buy the lack of input. Yes, I'm always amazed on certain issues that you think are just gonna blow things up. We'll put a proposal or an idea out there, we have nothing, We'll have a public meeting or a workshop. Three people will show up. I think what we're doing right here though, with a podcast, what we can do with social media to try to get this information out on a broader sense. Because I'm old enough, I still like to sit down and have a cup of coffee and read my paper. Okay, but I'm realizing now that my paper is only three pages long, and if I'm going to really get any information, I'm gonna have to sit down at least with my tablet and my cup of coffee and and read through that. And if I've got a tablet, then I can hot link in to the to the next level of information if I desire, and that might lead me then to some of these other discussion groups and information from folks like yourself that are going to help us hopefully engage people in a different manner of community as we work forward with these things. Part of the reason these folks are here, the two staff, are to help us with that in terms of how do we get how do we do that. How do we communicate better? I came up during an era where we did a mag scene and we had a TV show. No one does magazines that in newspaper articles. I mean, it was all print or media driven under an analog system. Uh, we need to and our transgressing, you know, getting into the digital stuff. I think the building we're in here right now is an example of that digital technology. We're at quite the ONEX World headquarters because it just moved next door. Okay while we're at their annex A one thing I was going to throw in there. Um, you know you mentioned the apathy. I've been to some of those meetings where two or three people in fact this summer, I think I talked to you about this stuff that d e Q is doing on the Upper clerk Fork and um, you know, if you go down to the bar, you go down to Charlie B's, everyone will talk about it. Everybody, every fishing guy's got an opinion about it. But I think some of that apathy is derived from the fact that no one knows who's really accountable for stuff. I mean, you tell the story about the res are getting drawn down and this massive sediment coming out. Um, you know, I would imagine I don't know that this for a fact, but that that fishing community down there was probably going, who's accountable for this? Who's who's making up for you know, this money that we're losing, etcetera, etcetera. And I think some of that apathy comes out of the fact that people figura, well, no matter what they yeah, yeah, I find I I think that that's true because you hear so many of these issues, some of the ones we've touched on today. You hear people talk about them and they're very passionate about it, but the minute they open the mouth, I'm like, you know what, you're not equipped to talk about this, bro right, just by a handful of things you just said, like you're behind, you're not caught up. Yeah, And I mean, Virgil, you articulated that those collaborations so well, and it sounds like when those people come together there has to be some level of compromise and those different entities or collaborative management by its nature is give and take. I mean, it's but it also builds on relationships and understanding a core understanding that my need and value really isn't that much different. Example being the rancher who has a piece of property but relies on the public sagebrush grasses to have his um lifestyle, his ranching lifestyle. He's got a ranche, but he needs the grays Catalan and and he values that environment because it's home. He knows it as well as anybody because he's lived there for maybe three or four generations, uh, in his family. And we can't exclude their needs and be successful. Example being sage grouse. Sage grouse need water for an important part of their brood rearing. Even in Idaho with all the public lands we have, which is federal another five percent of state, I mean, it's huge, almost all the waters on private land that's what was homesteaded. And so if you put a rancher out of business because you're saying you can't graze up here because of endangered species, and they pull their whole operation into their little piece of land that has all the water, and they began to feed there and utilize all the habitat up the sage grounds suffer in the long run because it's disconnected. We need the community. Now they get that what's good for the herd is good for the bird. Is the catchphrase that we use now right, and and that's exactly right. We want these operational ranches out there that are part of the landscape and can be managed in conjunction with other resources we value. They've seen it in the past. They know what can be done. We've seen it, and so now it's just a at or a bank. Sure, we don't restrict any of our activities to the point that everybody just gives up and goes home. And that's that's collaboration. That's the thing I warned about all the time, or think about. One thing about wildlife issues is what happens when you create the damage that's done when you create a spotted owl where the spot at out a conversation around the spot at all, the spot at all like ceased to be a bird and it became like this, this symbol of something, and it became like a thing of animosity, and it became a symbol of divisiveness. And when you allow some of these conflicts to go to fester and don't strive for some compromise and like people are coming to a mutual understanding of what they need to go, you end up having these like these like wildlife fatalities in terms of like what the species stands for. And it's painful to watch it happen, Like if you've heard the howl of a wolf, right, it's beautiful, but it's painful to watch it happen where people Like when I hear that noise, I think about like my needs not being listened to, man, and that's the only thing I'm here ring right there, And it sucks to see that happened to to wildlife. And I think the way they had that off is to usually you know, these ways like finding out like what you need, but also giving room to other people to also live their lives and have their needs be met. And it's like it's hard to do. I used to not look at these issues that way. When I was younger. I looked at him in a very rigid way, where like I was right, you were wrong, and you were stupid and I was really smart. Know, then do it? You know? And then the more you round and watch successes and failures around some of the stuff, do you more you realize, Man, you're never gonna get there with that attitude. That's correct. We never got to the question, what are some like big fit, what are the fishing game grapes, fish game. Don't know what they're talking about. They killed all the Uh, we want more big fish. You know, that would be there's no big fish simplistically, but certainly if the legitimate complaint. You ask what thegitimate complaint is, and it would be that we don't know everything about the spot you hunt. When you come to me and you say, do you know how many deer or what the buck doo ratio is in you know, Timber Creek of unit five, I'm gonna go no, but I can tell you what the buck doo ratio is in units three, four, and five overall from the combined survey work we've done. But no, we don't know that. And it is a legitimate complaint that we have set management goals based on larger survey units. And this person complaint is you don't know what you're talking about relative to Temper Creek. Because I sat the same blind for twenty five years and I always see acts of this year. I saw why, and it's legitimate from the standpoint of what they see. We talked about that earlier, and what we're trying to do now is look at different ways of censusing wildlife to understanding what's out there. Going from the traditional UH site based survey work where we have to see them, count them, UH, kill them, assess them, whatever the case may be, to something that provides a different level of that. I mean remote cameras. It's still kind of seeing, but we can get a lot more of them out there. I mean I just saw him bringing a truckload to remote cameras into our office that we boxed up and sent out to all the regions. I mean hundreds of these things that we're putting out and in matrix to try to get better understanding of what's in Timber Creek as an example, versus just the larger units based on aerial flights. UM. We're using UH hair snags and scatter analysis pulling DNA out of these animals so that we contract families. We can tell you by looking at UM d N A from wolf scats whether or not that represents a family unit and whether or not they were successful with getting a pair of getting a brood off just by getting proper sampling of pieces and parts because we can type those our ability today with advanced computer analysis and the speed at which we can do things from when I started my career uh is, I can't even fathom it. I mean, DNA analysis is a good example. We have the DNA makeup of every hatchery fish we stalk out and and and it's it's amazing that we have parental based stock analysis. You take a fish in the ocean, I can take a fin clipper a swab off of that fish, can run an analysis and I can tell you which hatchery it came out of, and which female produced it and and that, and I can do it darn near in a couple of days. I mean, it would have taken you months to pull something like that off before, and not with that specificity. But I got a lab full of people that are cranking this stuff out, and it's going on all over the place, and and we're advancing and trying to push the limit. That's the science, that's the science fiction almost of wildlife management. As we move forward, it doesn't eliminate the hands on stuff, the trapping of animals to put collars on them so we can go in and assess how they died, whether it was predation, natural whatever. Get better at that, um we still have a lot of that, the fun stuff jumping out of a helicopter on a on a calf elk and wrestling it to the ground. Uh. Catching fish in a trap and putting tags on them. That's fun. Handling wildlife is really a kick. It's what got me into this business. Uh, and learning from that. But we're we're trying to get better at this. And you know, drone technology and infrared technology isn't quite there yet. But I mean these satellite collars we put on elk now beam up to satellite back down to the computer. They're instantly on a map, and we can program them to do it every five minutes, every hour, every ten hours, depending on what we want. And we're able to use that to help landowners understand where an elker it is relative to depredation on their haystack. And and that's real time management while we track some stuff around. So you're working towards being able to tell that guy what's going on in front of his blood. That's the legitimate complaint. We've heard it. We're working on it, using technology and trying to put more resources into it. Uh. Fortunately in Idaho, our finances are secure for the time being. We went through a low like everybody else when the economy tanked. Are revenues dropped by uh, real quick. Why are you tied to the economy, because people, that's good question, Steve. We're tied to the economy because half of our licensed revenue comes from non residents, but there are only ten of our hunters. And in the past say that again. I want people to hear this. Half of our revenue, our licensed revenue, which is around forty four million dollars a year, half of that, a little over half of it comes from non resident hunters. Now, we have a lot of non resident fishermen, but they don't generate nearly the same money because they're buying one day. It's it's a high volume, low cost problem. The economy goes south, people are like, I can't, I can't go to idle hunting. This year. We did not realize how sensitive it was. We'd never seen it before. But when the economy tanked in two thousand nine. We have a quota on non resident hunting permits in Idaho. Um it's thirteen thousand, five hundred elk tags fifteen thousand, five hundred deer tags. When those are gone for general hunting, they're gone. We've never sold We've never not sold those out up until two thousand nine, No kid, no kidding, we always sold them out, so half of our revenue was guaranteed. And and we we did three things. We raised the price of non resident fees so we didn't have to raise them on resident. Our elk herds tanked because of predation and other habitat related issues, and the economy tanked. All three of those things combined over a four year period to drive our revenues UH down by nine million dollars UH. It was huge, It was huge. And what we found is non residents are elastic in their coming here and further analysis, that was partially the perception that our elk herds had collapsed and it wasn't worth it. The other part was a big portion of those people who stayed away were skilled trades folks construction. Construction got hit hardest, and those guys were selling their trucks to feed the family they were they were not working because the housing market collapsed. Then as soon as the economy started coming up about a year behind that, and then people got over the price increases. Man, we we discounted nonresident products we marketed to them. But the last two years we sold all of our nonresident product out again, does this state keep trying? I mean, I'm sure they do, but um, I know, the Montana Guides and Outfitters Association just put out a reported said the outdoor recreation industry in Montana brings in like seven point one billion annually. We have those numbers for hunting and fishing in Idaho. I believe the direct economic benefit is one point four billion. Okay, I know who has an economy of about sixties six billion, So that gives you some sense of where it fits. It's a pretty sizeable number. And and then wildlife viewing adds about another six million to that. So we're about a two billion dollar uh economic activity in the state on a wildlife based economic activity, all outdoor based recreation is I think it's a six billion Okay, it's it's it's at that six billion dollars figures. So you know, just under ten percent of the economy of the state is outdoor based and a third of that is based on wildlife. So it's yeah, it's important, and we can drill that down. We've been the surveys. If you want to know how much people what the economic benefits are of somebody fishing, Um Uh, Henry's like, I can go to the file and pulling information up and today I mean fish they caught, how much money they spent, how they much money spent on groceries and housing. We've got that information from surveys and we can give it to county commissioners who can live at the local working group. And it's big. It's big. So tell me a classification of grape that you feel is illegitimate, Like, what's the thing you guys in your business people are like, oh, fishing game and you're like, man, that just isn't fair. There's probably two One is you never listen. You never listen to us, You never do what I want done, and and I get it, but it's not a legitimate complaint given the amount of public input that our agency seeks. The requirements for public input of a state agency are minimal. I mean it's like one public meeting before the commission makes decision. Gosh, we have dozens, if not hundreds of public meetings over a year in advance of regulations, setting opportunities for input electronically in other ways. So I don't consider those to be legitimate complaints because there's so many opportunities What that might mean is I told him my opinion and it wasn't reflected and what ultimately happened. So the other one is you don't know what you're talking about. In other words, will do a survey, whether it's a social survey that asked for uh, Steve, you get a survey from us and it says, uh, you know, are you satisfied with deer hunting? Um? Would you be satisfied with? Uh? Fewer large bucks but more hunting opportunity? A bunch of social science questions that we worked with the university design and they go back and they go, we don't believe any of this. Yeah, it doesn't conform with my opinion, so we don't believe it. And so and we see the same thing from deer and elk population surveys. They go because they didn't see it, We don't believe that. You do not know what you're talking about. That is not a legitimate complaint. Okay. We are a science based organization, whether it's social science, whether it's biological science. I'll stand on our science. And I can tell you, having been a in a leadership role in a state agency for over a decade and working nationally among my peers and other state agencies. I can tell you that in the Inner Mountain West, we have some of the finest fish and wildlife scientists in the world. And in Idaho we know more about predation management and ungulent management than just about anybody in the world. I mean, we're we're on top of the game and and I'm proud of that. Now, do we have things we don't know. Absolutely. Do we have more to learn and more to do, absolutely, But don't say we don't know what we're doing. Just understand we don't know everything and we're still trying to get that. So that would be what I would consider. The other thing that really bothers me that I consider is when people personalize their interaction with department staff. I don't like Steve, Steve didn't approach me properly. Um that very well could be. And every complaint I get of a negative interaction with staff is fully investigated and responded to, and so I end up knowing that most of these are not legitimate. In fact, it's it's very seldom that I find one in the time that I've spent investigating these over the last twenty years, that you find a complaint it's usually because the individual didn't get the outcome, whether it was he got a citation where he got information he didn't want, or whatever the case may be. And ultimately, when you go back through and and find the facts, it's it's not there. And that doesn't mean that the person didn't feel that way, but that didn't actually happen that way. That's one of the advantages of tape recorders and video cams. Uh. It pretty much takes care of we I've actually seen people look at those and go, oh, I had no idea I did that. You know, they don't remember that part of it. You know, that's it's we have selective memory as humans, and it's just the way it happens sometimes. Has it been, um what we miss say? Any of you were dying to get into that we can get in? Well, I I will say one of the other things that I think is important and important to all of you guys around the table is public access. Certainly, in a public lands state, we tend to think of and take our Public Act access, but we also have a huge amount of private land. And in Idaho we had an out of state person from Texas come in and buy up UM a hundred thousand plus acres of timber land and immediately fenced and closed at all the public access where the UH Corporate Timber Company had allowed public access on it before. UH. It was a huge eye opener UH to sportsman and us to suddenly have lost a big chunk of a hunting unit that was very important to folks, and it caused us to really start thinking about how do we enhance our ability to protect these large corporate lands from being closed so that the public can continue to enjoy the wildlife that they own that we manage for them on those private lands as well. So two years ago the legislature gave us some additional funds with a fee increase we asked for. UH. Part of it went to pay for depredation damage, to increase in the license increase, license fee increations, like what you're doing with that money and what we're doing, and a part of it was to enhance what we call access. Yes, it's a program we've had for a lot of a lot of years, but it was bubbling along with three or four hundred thousand dollars, most of it coming in from our lottery big game tag super Hunt. People would buy those chances, and that was funding our accesses program. Now you pay money on every license sold, whether it's hunting, fishing, it's a five dollar fee. A portion of that five dollars, about half of it goes into the access account. And now we're we've added about one point four million UH to that account. Uh, so effectively tripling what we've got available for access yes. Uh and that money goes towards me can privately and be the corporator just private deeded properties. It's to direct public access to that there to that land to hunt and fish, or through that land to get to public lands. Either way, we can do it either way. We've had real success for upland bird hunting and some stuff like that around the Boise area and some of the southern part of the state. We've not had a lot of success in the large corporate lands in the center in northern part of the state. UM. We also had a threat to state lands. Our state lands are about four million or about two point four million acres and they were under threat of lease for exclusive use. We've had some people saying, I want to lease this state section that's next to my private land for exclusive use for hunting. And fishing. So far we've been able to sidestep that, but state law requires the Department of Lands to generate maximum revenue for schools for the School Trust Fund. Some guys willing to pay more than what the public we don't have any choice. So we just signed an agreement with Department of Lands, approved by the Landboard and our Commission, that we use a portion of that access sus money. We're paying departmental Lands for all access to their lands, um every bit of it for hunting, fishing, and wildlife based recreation. So we've preserved the opportunity now and diminish the likelihood of an adverse um exclusive use agreement on those lands. That's that's gonna cost us about dollars a year. Do you feel all in all, you guys are right now every year adding to accessible acre do you think I had a net loss when when all things are considered. UM, I hope to announce shortly that we have an agreement on private timber land that will secure access to another million acres of of land in the next couple of weeks, and with that agreement we will have a net game. So we're using that additional money, and we went out for proposals for what we call large corporate landholders. What would you propose to us for a fee that we could pay you to gain access for handing and fishing to your large corporate lands. We have those proposals, were evaluating those proposals, were very close to agreeing to some of those proposals at this point in time. That will add in excess of a million acres. Yeah, I'm I'm really proud of that and the staff work that went into it. My hats off to our legislature for allowing that increase to be dedicated to that purpose as well. But it's it's a biggie and I see that as giving us the annual financial resources uh needed to secure this into the future. So um, I just wanted to get that in there, Steve that that of all the things we hear from sportsman, even in a public state, is access. They want more access or I lost my access. What you said, it's and uh somebody shut it down. A private entity bought that forty acres or twenty or three sixty or whatever it is, and it's now posted. Uh. It's it's important that we're actually meeting here at the on X place because this idea of where are you at and trespass is very important and private landowners are very sensitive to trespass. But how do you know? There's some posting requirements, but it's still in a big open state like this where you wander up one side of the mountain down the other and you come in on the backside and you walk up to a fence it's next to the road and it's posted, and you didn't see anything when you came down the other side. Where is it your responsibility to know where you're at versus the landowner's responsibility to post? And we're moving responsibility to know? I agree, and Idaho there is some posting responsibilities of the private landowner on non agricultural land basically timber and range land. But I think we're very quickly moving to the point where you've got to know where you're at all the time near it's your responsibility, not the landowners to know it. It is. But again, does everybody carry, you know, a smartphone or a GPS around with them? No? Uh, most of us do that are avid, but not everybody else does. And so part of it is getting the mapping, getting the information out there, and again the technology to do that, and uh, certainly talking about it, letting people know that in Idaho, you can go on our website and we have a hunt planner. You say, I want to go hunt white tailed deer and I want to hunt it in Timber Creek and game I use my example again. It'll pull up the maps to show you it is an excellent spot, right, that's better. Uh, And and it'll tell you the land ownership, it'll tell you the regulations, It'll tell you everything about that piece of land. However you want to scale it to look at what you can do in that area. And couple that with these machines and and uh some other third party software, so you know where you're at all the time, you're good to go. And and I've still got I would have to say dozens. That's probably hundreds of quad maps that are folded up in in the under. The came to the seat of my truck and I pull those things out and jam them in my backpack. I still carry a real compass with me because these things aren't reliable. The batteries go dead, you don't have access. I forgot to download that so it was on residence. I still still value paper maps. I think they still have a role. I agree, and I think it's something that uh we as mentors hunters should be teaching them. UH. And if there's a last thing I want to say about Idaho being the opportunity state and the need for us as hunters and anglers to mentor people in to teach them the ethics and the responsible interaction with wildlife, the respect for that wildlife, live or dead, that needs to be there as we utilize it, consume it, enjoy it, uh, reveling the experiences around the campfire, which we all do. Uh, those are important. I'm proud to say that in Idaho we have a thing called the passport. If you're a hunter and you know somebody that's never hunted, and it doesn't make any difference whether they're a kid or an adult. Somebody moves into town and sees that you're a hunter, I would really like to go up, but they don't have hunter head or anything else. You can go down to the to the license vendor and as a hunter, you can sponsor that person and get a passport. That is what's the cost of it, three seventy dollar seventy five. Then you can if you want to take them deer hunt, You buy a deer tag to go with it, go out and shoot birds for how long that year and then that then that person has to get it together and go take It's one time opportunity to mantor somebody. But it's great it it gets this obstacle. Oh gosh, I'd really like to go with you, but I don't have for sure I can get that for you. You're ready to go up again. We came up against that over Thanksgiving weekend because um, we're all kind of half doing Thanksgiving family stuff, we're all kind of half hunting, and me ran out of deer tags. We started looking at people didn't have a tag and be like, we get this person licensed stuff. And this is the way you can do it. If you had a movie that it never hunted before, just take them down and get it. And they've got to be accompanied by a license hunter. But it's neat. And you can take kids as young as eight that haven't had a chance to do hunter ed. If you're a parent or a guardian or whatever is that word is an idhole, kid can hunt, hunt deer or whatever. Eight years of age, they can hunt uh, small game and birds they can't hunt there until they're ten break off. That's what That's what I thought. Yeah, and you know you just broke your silence, But what else is on your mind? Man? Kind of on the opportunity um theme, Idaho does trophy species where you can only apply for one of the there's three, right you guys to go sheep and moves. Were you around when that was put the place? That system? And then just what are your general thoughts on it? Because that we really like it. I mean, I like the way that it's set up that you guys don't do the bonus points and their preference points and all that to deal with that big mess um. And then they put the ones in lifetime back and the ones in lifetime that's correct. We no longer call them trophy species. There once in a lifetime species again, getting at that perception, I mean, you can really never draw it again, not not for a once in a lifetime. So example of that and the answer is, yeah, I was around, and our commission has the authority to do bonus points. They they look at it about every five to six years. It comes back up, uh, and every time we provide them the information about what it means they always have backed away from it in Idaho. But you make a lot of money doing both points. From a financial standpoint, I will tell you the last time this came up about seven years ago, when we were tanking financially. It was looking pretty darn good to me as a director trying to figure out how to keep from getting deeper into the whole. But it is a pyramid scheme from a sportsman standpoint, I'll be honest with you, depending on which method is, there's so many different ways to do it. But if you keep getting the opportunity to use your points, if it goes up sequentially every year because more people are getting into it, you've created a pyramid scheme that those who get in first or near the bottom are okay, But those who come into the bottom may have four or five six years before they even get to that point. And depending on how many jam into it, it may not get there for some species. And that's what we looked at is for very hard to draw species big horn sheep, mountain goat, uh, you may not get there even with bonus points, for you know, many bonus points. I'm going into the montet, the big horn sheep, draw this year because they square him here. Not enough. I'm going in with three pints and so lifetimes where the bonus points that still run into sub chance drawn. This heck, and that's what you get into, is the squaring thing. The other methods of trying to make sure everybody in there eventually gets one UM. But the commission has chosen our commission, and this has gone back as far as years ago when it first came up. I remember I was a fisheries guy at the time when I heard the first discussion, and we've continue to give that presentation over the years to new commissions as they come on. And that presentation is, by the way, online on our website, so every want to look at it. It has some gaming stuff in there that helps you understand how the various techniques work and what the end result is. It does work okay for moderate level UH controlled hunts, ones that have under twenty to one odds UM and if it's less than five to one odds, you don't need it anyway, you're gonna get one in a couple of years without that. But in that intermediate range it works really good to guarantee if you'll stay in there for three to five years, you'll get tech on the higher than twenty two one, it falls apart, and that's part of the problem is where do you use it and how do you apply it relative to that. So our commission has just chosen to stay away from it, but there's no guarantee they'll stay like that whatsoever. That could change overall or the constituents, it's a split. We have what I would consider a mobile group of hunters that moves around multiple states and hunts. We have a lot of our majority of our hunters just hunting Idaho. The folks who move around to other states like points because they can pile them up in all the different states, and they spend a lot of money accumulating that, buying tags and what have you, so they can accumulate that. They seem to like that because they've covered their board. Uh, the residents don't necessarily, they're they're more place oriented with the way they do things, and they just want to know, oh that they've got an equal chance with everybody else, and that's their kid or grandkid has that equal chance like everybody else. So yeah, and then back to the once in a lifetime, I just killed a moose last year my a nice bowl on the south fork of the Snake. I a tag after seven years. No, it took me seven years retirement. Yeah right, it doesn't work that way, unfortunately. But the seven years and you drew. I drew one killed a nice bowl last year. I'm done. Now I can put in for a cow tag if we've got a population and is growing too fast and I want to take some cows out. That's not limited, but I'm done on moose in Idaho. We just had a friend who drew. I supposed to be what Friday, thirties right, yeah, i'd say early and to be done. You're just done. Yeah. So bighorn sheep, we have two species, so you can get one for each, the desert Big Horn and the rocky mountainto Big Horn, so you can have two opportunities there, but mountain goat one and you're done. You know, it's pretty terrible in this state. They made it that you can uh, you can buy bonus points, not whether you're in the drawer or not. So even though my kids aren't old enough to actually hunt, I can get I got them a little, I got them all numbers. They can start buying. They can take their allowance or their dad is do it for him and buy them bonus points someone they're like twenty, my little kid could have seventeen bonus points. That's horrible. I'm taking advantage of it because it's there, but it's horrible. It's so guilty doing it. It's what just games the system and blows it up because they shouldn't let they shouldn't let people let me do stuff like that. And you know you're part of the problem. You're gonna go ahead and do it anyway, you know, in this state, like they assigned so when you get a L that there's like a customer none and your customer number is your birthday and then the number after this is how many people with your birthday have it? So meaning like when they when the LS system came in, my LS numbers number three. I mean I was the third guy with my birthday to get to apply for a number. Now they're as signing numbers that are up in the hundreds, right, But when my little kids who are three, five and eight, I went down to get them a l S numbers and they're all number one, Like no one with those. I know I'm ahead of the game because no one with that birthday has gone and done it yet, so they're gonna kill it. I just can't decide how far I'm gonna run with this because I do feel guilty about it. I almost might not even not do it. Came aside, well, you'll get like me at some saying you'll have to do that with your grandchildren. Get expensive. Right, there's a multiplication one on the follow up question when you're um, when the economy tank and you're trying to figure out a way to get some more money. Did dedicated sales set ever come up? Because there's some couple of stays have done very well with that. We've looked at it. UM oh gosh. Five years ago, we did a thing called the Wildlife Summit, and it was trying to bring all folks together to talk about wildlife on a statewide basis. And UM an outcome of that was trying to build understanding of the needs of all wildlife and that we weren't able to generate enough revenue UH to take care of the needs of the of non game and other wildlife that was out there. UM a what I call a loose coffee clatch of conservation groups. After that was done, we did a survey of Idaho ones to see whether or not they would support an initiative that would either dedicate a portion of the sales tax or support an increase. The the increase was less than people just weren't willing to do that. It was slightly over of the folks were willing to support a dedicated portion of the existing sales tax. Okay, So the folks that know the politics of initiatives and everything said that given where we were at in the political cycle with elections and everything else, that that was not Probably they could get the signatures to get it on the ballot, but they weren't sure whether it would make it. And it depends on whether or not you have an entity that's well funded that will oppose it. If you don't have any well funded opposition, you can run these things through. But because we're getting at sales tax, whether it's an increase or a piece of the existing, opposition was going to be huge, and so that particular loose coffee clatch of folks backed away from that at this point in time for the state of Idaho. The beautiful people in Missouri pulled it off. They did, and being a Missourian I was in college during the time that that stuff was going forward, and it took them twelve years of trying different ways. They tell right, because when it passed, it passed with I mean not quite unanimous, but but it was a high support and and it did it. They went with a pop tax and a beer tax and failed on that. They tried all kinds of things before they came up with the one eighth of one sales tax increase, which has been the gold standard. UM Florida does a real estate transfer tax. Every time a piece of real estate sells. There's a piece of that fee. You know, all those fees you pay when you buy a piece of property. Well there's a little piece of that in there now that goes to the Wildlife Fund, and that's working for them down there. It went down when things tanked, but it went back up. UM Arkansas and Iowa went with a similar sales tax system as Missouri and uh. Arkansas got there through. Iolway got there through, but they didn't fund it. So you know, the mechanisms are but they didn't initiate it. Sins most everybody that dips, like the hunting fish, they just have a dip tip. I'm with you on that. So there is a solution, though I don't want to leave this before I speak to a solution that's live in Congress right now, and it's called restoring America's Wildlife fact and it's following it would it would take the royalties from oil and gas and mining on shore offshore. It's all of that royalties, and and that royalty package is around twelve fourteen billion a year right now. UM. It would dedicate one point three billion of that into the Pittman Robertson Fund, a subset of it which double the food. It would double the fund, and it would then that money would come back to the states based on the size of the state and the population, very similar to the way we do pr for hunting, which is a number of hunting licenses and the size of the state comes back to the state to manage a very familiar mechanism for the states to get financial resources to manage all wildlife. That's a re allocation. Isn't that a new tax. This is a re allocation of of a fund. It is the fund that the Land of Water Conservation Fund taps into right now. Uh. And so there is legislation our own Senator Rish in the state of Idaho is sponsoring it on the Senate side. It's got over a hundred co sponsors on the House side right now support it does. The House support is in a hundred and five and it's split almost equally down the middle. The co sponsorship on the Senate, it I'm not as sure of, but the co sponsors before I'm familiar with or bipartisan, so and the Senate works different than the House on that stuff anyway. UM, So we're hoping that they'll get to get a major hearing on this. We've had some smaller hearings, but it's moving forward, you know. It's it was classified as a moon shot to get it through this Congress with between now and the time they adjourn in December, but it's still live and Senator Rish was trying to get a hearing going on it. Um. This would be huge, UH for a state like Idaho. If we got our allocation, it would be on the order of fifteen to seventeen million dollars annually. So you know, take that our total t d j p R allocation is about that much. So it puts the the UH Wildlife Diversity Non Game Program on the same footing and allows us to have the resources to manage all wildlife populations. The fear A lot of hunters and anglers fear loss of control of their commissions and departments through this, and and it's not an illegitimate fear. But I go back to my home state of Missouri and see what happened there. I mean, they pumped a hundred and ten million dollars a year into their budget. It's the majority of their budget. They got about another sixty million I think in license sales and then other money in there. There about twice as big budget wise as the state of Idaho with with what they've got back there. But hunting and fishing is better and stronger there now as a result of having that collaborative of all users getting things done. And so when you look at the case histories of state that have had this additional money, Florida being the other example, hunting and fishing there is actually booming with those additional resources. It will mean some changes in in how we go about interacting with the public on allocation of budget. But certainly I don't think it's to be feared, it's to be managed. Yeah, that that'd be my perspective on it. I understand how I understand the viewpoint of people being leary about new voices sitting around the table, new voices at the table. Um, I get that. I still think that. Uh. I still think it's better to go with the money and and you know, play the game however you need to play it, but put to go with the extra funding and and then sort the rest out after the factor at least go into it with the right kind of mind frame and well our track record where we have financial resources and focus. If there's a sensitive species out there, I can keep them off the list or I can get him off the list again with that kind of financial resources. I know we can do it because we've done it and um, and I'm I would be anxious to to see that pulled off. Um, we'll see again. It's a moon shot, but it's live and it's moving forward. We've been two years moving this forward. The group that put it together was a group called the Blue Ribbon Panel, and uh, Johnny Morris from bass Pro now Cabella's Too, UM was the co chair along with governor a former governor of Freeden Fall from Wyoming, and most everybody on that panel were NGOs and private business. It wasn't a bunch of government folks. They're the ones that looked at this and said yeah, and then that their first recommendation was this one point three billion. That's where we focused. The second one is increasing our relevancy to all people about wildlife management. Money goes a long ways to helping that, but certainly, how do we as hunters and anglers show the use of hunting, fishing, and trapping for wildlife management is relevant to everybody? And I think that's a big part of of the challenge that we have in the future as hunters and anglers is to maintain relevancy. We've got the support. We've got that mid seventies support for traditional hunting, even higher for fishing. We just got to hang onto it, and we do it by doing what we know as hunters and anglers we are, and that's conservationists first, and we lead the way with our own actions and activities to get this stuff done. Good Your final thoughts, Chris Man, No virgils just schooling me. All the fantastic Virgil for Department of Interior or something right that means d C. It's I've I've learned a ton of one of the last thing I was gonna ask you maybe was done so your access yes program. Yes, is Idaho Fishing Game the only state entity in charge of procuring more public access. We have the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation that has responsibility for trail access for both motorized and foot travel, and we work very closely with them. Uh. They also have responsibility for some voating access. We have our own voting access program, they have their's counties have some responsibility because they get a piece of the DJ Daniel Johnson funds. But as far as um land based hunting and fishing and trapping were it, Uh. The others are directed at more generalized recreation or motorized or powerboat recreation in that particular case, and compared to what we're putting on the table financially, it's a very small piece of that. It seems like in Idaho and Montana as well. The public the economy benefits so much from our public land that you know, more entities should be putting chips on the table to procure it. I think some of the NGOs are huge players there, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Uh. They do and and they they've been very uh cooperative, collaborative. They've got money to bring to the table that they'll match with anything you've got. And the Mule Dealer Foundation to a lesser degree is part of that. Uh. Those are the two primary players. Trout Unlimited does some for stream access, for flying, for fishing um, and we've got some some other players in there. But I don't want to dismiss some of those n g O s that have been very uh focused and effective, particularly Rocky Mountain Elk with their initiative to get access through private land to public land. They've been able to really do some good things. Sir. Awesome, thank you, thank you man. We did We did a deep dive. Man, that's a lot of fun. I uh uh enjoy this stuff. To Dingle Johnson, yep, you got it all. Give me some more time. We'll give you more. Well, you know, I want to have you back how long you're you're retiring, right, I am, I'll be retiring in January for a big ship talking session. Better yet, I'll have you come over. And I don't know if this stuff works on the back of a jetboat while we're trolling for steelhead um, we can we can plug it all into an inverter and will make this stuff work, and and we can do a live fish and she did a live ice fishing show one time. I can do that too. I've got a place on Cascade Reservoir and we can scoot right out on the ice and uh catch some of those trophy perch that we've got there, ye yellow perch yea. Well we're pushing eighteen inches eighteen yeah, and uh it's it's still got to three year classes in there that are grown into that. So it's a fish you know, fish story. I gotta get this right. But no, they are like Wally, these things are huge. I mean fourteen and sixteen inch perch our routine up there. Yeah, you catch three of those and you've got dinner. That's great. Yeah, it is. It is great. So stay tuned and thank you good all right, thank you two
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