00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyon. This episode number two, d and twelve, and today on the show, we're joined by Bronson Strickland and Carter Neo Meyer to discuss the impacts of and dynamics between wolves, coyotes, prey populations and hunters. All right, folks, welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. And today we've got a particularly interesting and unique episode for you as we are waiting into the murky water of predators, in particular wolves and coyotes, and we're discussing the dynamic between these predators and US hunters. Now, I've want to do a podcast about predators for a long time, but I've never really known exactly you're the right way to do it, or the right people to talk to coyotes and wolves and other predators. As many of you know, they stir up a lot of emotions. You know, this is true outside of the hunting community, but especially within and it's been this way for many thousands of years. Likely you know, if you go way back in deep history. Early on, big predators were danger to the lives of early humans, and then eventually they're viewed as competition for the scarce resources of food, so so built into our human DNA. For many, many generations, we've had this built in set of negative associations with these animals. Now, if you fast forward through time up to the settling of the New World, you've got this landscape now that was jam packed with predators, and again humans were in competition with them, and so, starting in the east and gradually moving west, our ancestors slowly went about knocking these predators back in an effort to make their lives easier or to eliminate a perceived danger or inconvenience. And they did this, you know, as many of us know now, they did this with disturbing effectiveness. This kind of wholesale war and predators that began the eighteen hundreds led to hundreds of thousands of bounties being claimed on wolves and coyotes, led to the use of the widespread use of poison to to knock out massive, massive numbers of coyotes and wolves and bobcats and and all sorts of other critters. Even mange was purposely introduced to wild animal populations to try to eliminate them. So after decades of this, at least when it came to wolves, our predecessors largely achieved their goal, you know, by almost exterminating the entire wolf population in the lower forty eight States coyotes. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of coyotes were killed, but they of more difficult to actually get rid of, given some of the unique adaptabilities and the fact they have some of these built in traits that allow them to actually increase their reproductive capabilities and recalonize new areas where other populations have been killed out. So so this actually ended up leading to coyotes not only surviving the onslaught, but also expanding their range farther east and west as they filled in gaps that were opened up by the removal of wolves. But long story short, this war on predators led to dramatically changed predator levels across the country. Now, if you fast forward through time again to today, with changing societal values and an increased focus on restoring natural ecosystems and native wildlife, predators such as wolves have been able to restake a claim in parts of the lower forty eight, and you know, both coyotes and wolves to a lower extent are now present across wide swaths of the country. Once again, though, just like with other early ancestors, this is causing pension. You know, some people simply don't want these critters around, even hunters. And again, I think this comes down to competition in a lot of cases. So that brings us to this podcast today and why I wanted to put these conversations out there as a as a hunter myself, of course, and I'll admit a little bit of my bias here, but as a person who believes in conservation and as our role as hunters in conservation, I want to hear some of the vitriol today around predators. It concerns me a little bit because and this is just my opinion, um, but predators the way I see it, in the way a lot of people see it, in the way biologists see it. Predators just as much as deer or elk or we human hunters. They're part of the system, and we like to talk this big game as hunters that were the greatest conservationists in the land because of all we do for wildlife and and access taxes. We pay the pay for conservation work. But I'm worried that if we care about and protect one species, be it deer or elk, or pheasants or turkeys or whatever, if we're going to protect and care about that species but then advocate for the total destruction of another, I think we lose some credibility there. And it seems in my opinion that maybe there's maybe there's some kind of middle ground though maybe it doesn't have to be dear or predators. Maybe there's some way that these two things can coexist and hunters too, So rather than looking at coyotes or wolves as the scourge of the earth, maybe there's a different way we can look at and relate to these animals when it comes to when it comes to these creators, there's so much emotion and rumor and worry in some cases miss misinformation out there. And of course, you know this isn't just coming from hunters or those who have concerns about predators. There is also a lot of emotion and hyperbole coming from other parties on sometimes the other side of these issues too. But but either way, from either side, the way you look at this, so often these animals are looked at either as gods or devils, either divine or devilish. But maybe coyotes, wolves are not good or evil. Maybe they're just animals. Maybe they're just another piece of the system, just like the deer and the turkeys and the raccoons and turtles. And because of that, rather than worshiping or demonizing these animals, maybe the way forward is just learning about them and understanding how they fit into this millions of years old system, and then learning how we can fit into that system alongside of them. Maybe hunters and predators don't need to be an either or or maybe some of you might be thinking, maybe I'm nuts. I can't stay for sure. I might be nuts. But in today's episode, I wanted to present two conversations that explore this topic, that explore this idea of predators and our relationship with them as hunters, and as I alluded to, my goal here is to try and address some of the worries and the rumors around predators and then kind of level set. I want to kind of reality check what's going on out there, what we as hunters need to understand about predators and their impacts on wildlife and our hunting, and what this all means for us going forward. That's that's kind of what I want to achieve with this conversation. So to do that, we have two different guests. This is kind of a two parter. First off, we have Bronson Strickland, and Bronson's a wildlife biologist and extension professor at Mississippi State University specializing in dear biology and research. He's been in the show before. Hopefully you heard that past episode. It's a great one. He's an incredible resource of information. But I wanted Bronson to come on the show today to help us talk about coyotes because he's done a lot of looking into the interactions between coyotes and deer. So Bronson's gonna help us understand what the real impacts of coyotes are on white tails, how to determine if coyotes are having an impact on your local white tail population, and then finally, if they are, what are some reasonable steps to take to to manage that issue. And then from there we're going to switch gears and we're gonna go from coyotes over to wolves. Now, I did this interview with Carter nee Meyer while I was out in Boise, Idaho for the back Country Hunters and Anglers Rendezvous a few weeks ago, and Carter has a really interesting perspective on the issue of wolves because he was a government trapper and predator control agent and then eventually was pulled into the work of the reintroduction of wolves to the Rocky Mountain West in the nineties, and then afterwards he was tasked with managing and sometimes killing those wolves in later years. So he had to work with biologists and ranchers and hunters and environmentalists kind of everyone on all sides of the wolf issue, and coming out of that, he has this really interesting perspective on predators and humans and the dynamics between the two. So in my conversation with Carter, we talked about this history, We talked about the wolf reintroduction and subsequent events. We talked about the impacts of wolves, and then kind of get Carter's opinions on you know, how wolves and hunters and other humans can can kind of occupy the same space moving forward, How that's possible if so? Um So that's a really interesting one too. Now, with both of these conversations, my hope is that these discussions and guests can help us all just do a little bit of thinking as hunters ourselves and as conservationists, you know, you know, how can we or should we be thinking about predators? How can we live with prators? What do predators mean for hunting? What does all of this mean? Um? You know, you might not agree with everything said in today's episode, and there's likely going to be some ideas or opinions that are different than yours, But I don't think we need to look at that as a bad thing. You know, with partisan cable news, Facebook fees that are specially curated to reflect back just the only only the things that we already like and believe, it's sometimes easier to get lost in this kind of echo chamber of our own opinions were surrounded by nothing but our own worldview. I think though, that when this happens, we kind of lose out on something important in life, which, in my opinion, is this ability to hear and learn about and process new ideas in different ways of looking at the world, and then being able to move forward, you know, with those new ideas, maybe accepting some, maybe rejecting others, but you know, ultimately growing in one way or another. So I don't know about you. But I'm a fan of hearing new perspectives and at least getting to consider them for myself. So that's what we're gonna do today. That's what I'm hoping we could achieve today. Before I ramble on any further than I guess, we need to get this party started. We had to get going with this. It's a long episode, so I hope you can maybe come back to us one over a couple of drives or a couple of days at the gym, um, because it does stretch out over two hours, but I hope it's going to be worthwhile for you. I'm gonna leave you with one last quick recommendation, which is to go and read the essay titled Thinking like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold. Uh. This is an essay that actually gets brought up in both of these interviews, once by myself once by the guest um, and I think it's one that has influenced a lot of people when it comes to this topic of preditors and ecosystems and humans. And you can actually just go out online and google the title. You can find it online to read and full for free. But I thought I would leave you here with just a quick passage from that essay that I'll read for you, and then we'll get into our conversations with Bronson and Carter. So here from Thinking Like a Mountain by Eldo Leopold, I quote, in those days, we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second, we're pumping lead into the pack, both more excitement than accuracy. How to aim as steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her into the mountain. I was young then and full of trigger itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more dear, that no wolves would mean Hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green or die, I sensed that neither the wolf northern Mountain agreed with such of you end quote. All right with me now again on the podcast is Bronson Strickland. Welcome back to the show. Bronson, Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be back. Yeah, me and Dan when we chatted with you, if it was last year or two years ago, it was just a great conversation. I've been wanting to have you back for a while, and Um, I really should have brought you back on to talk about deer since you have so much to share in that world. UM, but I actually wanted to talk to you today about something different, Bronson, and I hope you're gonna be okay with that. I'm gonna take you away from our favorite animal and talk about something that does impact that. UM. And I was hoping to talk to you about predators, in particular coyotes, because there's there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of opinions, there's a lot of worry, there's a lot of hubbub it seems every few years, depending on where you're at, about coyotes and their impacts on deer and deer management. And so I kind of wanted to have a conversation with you to help us kind of level set, like what's the reality of this situation, what's happening out there? What do we need to know as white tailed deer hunters? UM and so with all that being said, Bronson, even though your dear guy, do you think you give us like a super high level overview of of the coyote as a species, maybe a little bit of natural history or its current status, anything like that, um, just to kind of help us understand this animal more than just it's a look kind of tiny wolf looking thing that runs around the fields every once in a while. Well, I thank you, Mark, I promise you I'll do my best. And you know, I studied deer, and I don't really you know, study coyotes specifically, except in you know, how they're affecting white tail deer um. So in the eastern us UM. A lot of people consider the coyote a novel you know, predator in the white tail system. And it really depends on where you're at geographically. We we tend to think of, you know, over over deep time, that the coyote was more of the western UH caneid. You know, it's involved more in you know, open areas, open habitat UH. It's omnivorous and so it's eating fruits and things like that as well as small mammals. And then you know, it's kind of opportunistic so it's not nearly like something like a wolf or you know, cougar slash mountain lion, where it's a you know, it's an obligate carnivore. It's it's kind of an opportunistic omnivore. And so as that species kind of moved from west to east, and you know, the best we can tell from from anecdotal evidence, genetic evidence, etcetera. You know, it's kind of like the way we are seeing the spread of wild hart mark up your direction is, uh, it was facilitated greatly by human beings, and so there's always gonna be natural movement, natural colonization. But some of the studies back in the southeast from you know, thirty or so years ago showed that a lot of the coyotes were brought in and contrary to popular belief, you know, they weren't brought in by a state wildlife agency under the cover of night. It was brought in by hunters for the purpose of hunting, and a lot of them were brought into the you know, fox pens or you know things like that where people like to run their dogs, uh to catch them, and those eventually escape and get loose and then over time that's augmented by natural colonization, and now we have you know, in the two thousand eighteen, we essentially have coyotes everywhere in the eastern United States, and we even have coyotes in urban settings. I'm pretty sure right now somewhere in Central Park in New York there's probably a coyote somewhere. So that just goes to show you how how adaptable that species is and more than likely it's here to stay. And I don't see any anyway at all that, um, we are not going to be managing deer, uh with consideration of coyotes and anytime in the near future in our lifetime certainly. Yeah, they seem to be one of those species kind of like deer that has become super adaptable to living with humans, unlike most other relatively large mammals that in some cases struggle with our encroachment on their habitat and are you know, just are are being present in the environment all the different things that entails. They've uniquely kind of found a way to intertwine themselves within, like you said, even in urban areas, kind of like white tailed deer or cockroes or rats or these different animals that have made a living off of living around humans. UM. They're kind of unique in that way, and some people may not like that. It might be viewed admirable in some ways too, if you're looking at purely as the you know, the evolutionary, I don't know creativity that these animals seem to have. UM. So that being said, like you've mentioned, coyotes are becoming ever more present across the eastern United States, south southeastern United States. UM, and we're becoming more aware of this is deer hunters too. There's, as you said, a lot of work being done to understand the interaction between coyotes and deer, and that's something you've worked on a lot before. We dive into what the results are of that kind of stuff and what the actual impacts are because there's a lot of rumors and opinions and ideas of what the impacts of kyotes are are on deer. I'm curious just to hear what kind of actual studies have been done. You know, what are we looking into? How are we doing these is? How are we learning about the interactions between coyotes and deer and that impact. Yeah, well, there's there's a lot of ways to look at it. The two that are probably most common and uh, I would say very definitive. You know that they both of these types of studies provide irrefutable evidence on impacts. Are first of all, is just looking at what a coyote eats, and so those are simply you know, diet analyzes and commonly, you know, one of the cheapest and widespread and often used are what we call scats studies. But basically you're going into an area and you collect the poop and uh you do an analysis on that, and you can tell, you know, from the feces what of course what what the animal has been eating, and so you can identify, you know, the hair of different mammals that they've consumed, and sometimes the remains of different fruits and so forth. So that that was done decade ago. Um. Now you might might imagine mark. One of the things that can be misleading is when you find a lot of deer in the diet of a coyote. You you don't know if the coyote killed the deer or scavenged on the deer. You would assume if you found fawn hair uh in the scat. Yeah. More in like of the coyotes killed the fawn, but for adults you never knew, and you would see a higher prevalence rate during deer season, which you would assume is from carcass remains or from a wounded deer um. And so that that then leads to more sophisticated analyzes where you can really you know, determine impacts and and directly measure um the prevalence of predation. And that's when you mark individual deer and and most commonly what is done UM is what we call call fawn depredation studies. And you know, one of the best ways to do that it is you will mark a dough a pregnant female. So you would capture a pregnant female and you can actually insert this transmitter into their vagina and when they give birth, then that transmitter comes out of the doe's body, goes out to the ground and then there's a difference in the ambient temperature of course, from being inside of the dough to being exposed to you know, the outside air, and that transmitter then sends sends a signal a GPS location and researchers Russian and they can find the fawn or fawns, and they basically mark them. They put a little ear tag on them and put some type of GPS transmitter on them, and those little transmitters allow the researchers to know when that fawn is alive and when it's dead. So when that transmitter stops moving for a X amount of hours, you get an alert saying, hey, something's going on with this fawn. And then once again you go there and you determine um, the cause of death. Often this is obvious based on the way the fawn has been uh consumed or you know, torn apart, so to speak. You can diagnose whether it was a bobcat kill or died of starvation or a coyote um. And then even most sophistics, the sophisticated way to do it is if if you can't readily identify the predator, is that you can take swabs and get d n A samples from the remains of the fawn so that you can detect the saliva of the predator that was chewing on the high, chewing on the bones, et cetera. And so that that kind of c s I technology really allows you to definitively determine uh, you know, the rate at which you know, you have a sample of fawns on the landscape, this cohort of fawns, and you can determine, you know, what we call cause specific mortality, how many of them died and those that did die, what were they killed by? And so those studies again have been done largely in the last decade, probably some a little bit more, but that's where the best technology has has really been refined in the last decade. And so a lot of the studies that you see now are are are based on those types of technologies and those types of results. So have there been any definitive answers then that have come from these studies? Can you give us a blanket statement and say coyotes make this impact on dear or is a little more nuanced than that? Unfortunately it's nuanced, and people get so sick and tired of dear biologists always having to qualify saying, well, it depends, but this is this is a classic it depends type study. So you can go to any particular location and you know, you think about these different dynamics that are going on. Mark you've got you know, you've got variation in coyote density as you've got variation in the number of hunters on the landscape, you've got variation in the amount of prey on the landscape, and then you've got variation in the hiding places for the prey. And so there have been several studies, uh that have you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, you know they will mark these fawns and anywhere from thirty forty fifty up to you know, sixty percent of the fawns will be eaten, killed and eaten by coyotes. Um, you have some other places where some of those dynamics are a little bit different and you won't see such a big impact. I think if you want a blanket statement, I think it's safe to say that wherever you have a sufficient number of a viable population of coyotes on the landscape and a viable population of deer, you are going to have deer that are killed either fawns, mostly fawns, and also some adults are gonna die by coyotes every single year and there's nothing you can do about it. The most important question is are they a driver of that population? And you really can't tell mark. You can't even even at a county scale. You can't say that coyotes are driving that population. It's a little more site specific than that. Can you can you elaborate on what that means. But when you say driving the population, uh, think of it as being the most important limiting factor. So think of it as as in terms of one single variable affecting the dynamics of that population. Uh. It would in this case if we were to say predation is driving the population, then that would mean that would be the single most important factor that is influencing the stability, rise or fall of the dear population. Now here's a I don't know if this is I'm assuming this is gonna be somewhere, But is it fair to say that across most areas of White Tail Country that hunters are the largest driver of a population, and hunter not hunter predation, whatever you wanna call it, our our kill of deer every year? Is that accurate? Yeah? Yeah, I'm sure there's gonna be an exception here or there, and especially in US urban and suburban environments. But yeah, on the average, I think that's very safe to say. Okay, So then so then you're saying the tough thing, though, is finding a situation or determining how much of a driver predator impacts actually are um And you mentioned there's been different studies that have shown a significant impact. There have been different studies that have shown not a significant impact. I know from from reading up on a lot of these myself and studying them over the years. A lot of this has to do with something that we call faun recruitment, and that is kind of this indicator of that impact. Can you can you dive into that for us, help us understand what that means and then how coyotes might or might not be impacting that in different areas as absolutely. Um So we often say that if if you could only measure one thing, you know, it's it's it's not as fun or sexy as you know, measuring antlers. But if you were managing a deer population, and it's like I could only have this one piece of information to make decisions about managing that population, it would be recruitment or fond recruitment. And so so think of that as a paycheck going into your account, you know, every month, every year or whatever. If you are going to harvest the population at some level, I'm gonna take five ten percent In some places, in real productive herds, thirty percent of the herd could be harvested every year. You have to know what the inputs are going to be. If I'm putting thirty percent in, I can take thirty percent out and that population would remain stable. So that is what fawn recruitment is. And so biologists are wanting to know, you know, how often, how many fawns are and and recruiting just simply means living long enough to be recruited into the population. And we typically mean that you know, they made it through hunting season, they made it to winter, and assume they're going to be recruited into the springtime population. Okay, So Mark, let's say you have a scenario where you had twenty years ago, there were very few coyotes, uh, in this particular area, and it's the heavily hunted area, and doe harvest is pretty high, buck carves is pretty high. Uh. You know, so it's providing ideal hunting recreation for you know, the public. And now you change that one single variable. Uh, the amount of hunters haven't changed, the amount of hunting area hasn't changed. You kind of every year. I'm just making up numbers here. But we're gonna, you know, we're gonna have five hundred hunter mandates on our property this year and every year, you know, your permit system, and five people get to spend a day on the out on out on that property a year killing deer. And then you add in this new element um called you know, coyote fawn depredation. And rather than recruiting again let's just say easy numbers. Whereas you used to recruit you know, three hundred fawns into the population every year, now you're only recruiting a hundred fawns into the population. The result won't be immediate, but over time, three years later, four years later, five years later, because that paycheck going into the account is getting less and less and less, you start noting the principle in your account. The adult population goes down, down, down, because you are spending more than you're putting in. And that has been one of the biggest UH sources of some of these studies over the past a decade, is what in the heck is going on. We've got this big property or this area, uh maybe you know county scale type thing where we used to have plenty of deer and now hunters aren't killing as many deer as they used to, they're not seeing as many deer as they used to, and coincidentally, we are seeing a lot more coyotes than we used to. And sure enough, when you do some of those studies and you start marking those fawns and and figuring out what caused specific mortality, is you learned that, Yeah, well that's the reason the dear population is declining because they're only recruiting about half as many fawns as we used to. So is yeah, what am I trying to say here? Is that always? M hm? He guess Number one? How often is that actually happening? Because you hear you hear people talk about coyotes, coyotes, coyotes, But the situation you just mentioned where you have that fund recruitment rate reduced so significantly that the population does decline, do you have any idea? I mean, could you say that, you know, maybe if we had to lump all of White Tail Country into a bucket, and then could you say that in one out of ten, ten percent of our populations had that kind of impact or is it fifty of the populations are having those kind of Is this rare? Is this common. Um. I don't know how exactly articulate this, but is this the rule of the exception? I would say somewhere in between. I think. I think it definitely tends to be more of an exception. UM and and market all depends on scale as well. You know, Um, is the deer herd doing well in the state of Michigan or Iowa? Well, yeah, what about in this county pretty much? How about on this property or you know, or within this five thousand acre area. Um, you would kind of have to look at it like that. You know, in the eastern, especially the southeastern US, the deer herd is certainly doing just fine. In the presence of coyotes. People are still seeing dear, people are still hunting deer. You know, there's a lot of support that the deer population has declined somewhat, but not a lot when you look at that type of scale. You know, and I can speak for Mississippi, you know, the deer herd depending on the index and the analysis you do, Yeah, over the past decade, it may have declined a little bit, but not a lot. Now you can go to certain areas within Mississippi based on a lot of details and it's usually the interaction of you know, is there a high predator population like coyotes, and what is what are the habitat conditions like And there's some pretty powerful evidence that coyotes have really taken a toll on that your population at at a much more local scale. So you know, you kind of said, Mark, you know, is it is it you know, ten percent or you know, I am just really guestimating here. I would say it's probably somewhere less than and it might even be it may even be less than ten percent. Where coyotes are really you know, driving, you know, they are the single most important thing of affecting the population. Okay, but but there are certainly things that we can do proactively with that. Uh, it's just identifying why is the deer population declining so much? Is it indeed coyotes? And then you know what what type of steps can you can you take to to help it out, to help the deer hurt out? So here here's a question, could would it be or is there are there any benefits to having coyotes on the landscape as a deer hunter and manager, because one way I could see this in some situations and so maybe I'll throw out a possibility and you tell me if this is true or false or maybe somewhere between. But for decades now, um white tailed researchers and managers have been telling us that we have too many deer, too many doughs, too many doughs. We need to we need to harvest more, we try, need to try to bring the population back in balance with the habitat. And in a lot of places, even now, even where I hunt and and hang out, that still doesn't seem to be the case. They're still seem to be way more dear than a healthy habitat and support, which is leading to probably deer that aren't quite as healthy as they could be, probably leading maybe in part, is impacting fond recruitment too, because these these deer aren't getting the nutrition they need because of the fact that the habitat isn't in balance of the herd. In a situation like that, is having natural predators back on the landscape a good thing because they can help us balance things because if we the hunters aren't doing enough ourselves, they serve that ecosystem function. Is that a way to look at this in some cases too, Or is that Bologney. I think that's the furthest thing from blogny. Um. I agree with that sentiment and the way you describe that perfectly. And you know that it's never ever with the deer management and deer hunters, it's never gonna be a you know, one size shoe fits all. Um, my colleague here at the Deer Lab, Steve Demeris, that is something that has been a presentation he has given many many times, um, different seminars, is you know, the sky is not necessarily falling here. We we have a new predator on the landscape, has been here quite some time, and it's gonna getting a lot of attention. But there are probably more situations where the coyote maybe helping the deer herd out some bringing some of bringing this herd back into check and back into balance with with the habitat. And a lot of that mark is the what have hunters expected to see for so long? And we think back when when the uh qd M, the Quality of Deer Management Association began and started educating people about we've got to get this dear herd back into balance with the habitat, you know, for healthy deer and for healthy habitats and in a lot of places, Um, it's it's just really it causes Um, how should I say it, it's too much a work that you know, the novelty of doe harvest wears off really quickly for a lot of people. And so rather than a particular hunting club in the South having to kill fifty seventy a hundred and fifty does every year, you know, coyotes moving into the system and maybe only having to harvest fifty does a year. Um, that's really not a bad trade off. And you know in a lot of those systems too, where you have healthy habitat, I think you're gonna be hard pressed to see where coyotes are going to be really hurting the deer herd at all. So in a case like that, I think you're actually helping the deer hunting scenario and helping the deer herd quality having that predator in the system. Yeah, it's interesting because this is actually impacting me right now. Um. One of the main properties at hunt in Michigan for the longest, for the first I don't know, five six, seven years that I've hunted here, I'd never got a coyote on trail camera, never saw one, never heard one. UM nothing. And UM. I had heard about there being some really significant UM coyote trapping and hunting being done in the area over the years, UM guys running in with dogs and lots of stuff like that, and it just seemed like there're never as much of a population left over, at least that I was anecdotally seeing. UM. And then over the last couple of years, I have been seeing that tick up. I'm hearing them at night, I'm seeing them getting one picked on trail camera. And at first I was like, oh, is this going to be an issue, But then very quickly another side of me said, well, weight Mark, for years now, you've complained about the fact that no one else shoots those around here, and there's so many deer, and it's just totally out of whack. There's so many doughs, hardly any bucks. You can't go anywhere in the property without spooking deer. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing, UM, And I think that it's really natural. It's kind of ingrained human nature because of kind of our our deep history with predators as competition in many cases. You know, way back in the day, we looked at these animals as competition for a scarce resource, which is our food, and or as a danger to our health. And that I think has stuck with us over the thousands of years ever since. And I think there's there's always this natural tendency to when they when they're one of the options to point a finger at, it's really easy to point that finger and be like, oh, that's that's the issue. Maybe sometimes it's not quite as much as our gut instinct always tells us. And that's kind of what I'm what I'm kind of seeing in this own personal example of my own here. Um. Not. Something else that I I've read a lot about and I know you you've talked about in the past on some of your own podcasts, is some of the ways that deer naturally deal with predation. Um. Can you talk a little bit about things like birth synchrony and some of the other things that that white tails do to to help live with predators and survive. Yeah, that that's probably and it's really interesting topic. UM. Yeah. But but synchronizing birth is kind of you know, natural selection over time, you know, and that's just a product of differential survival and reproduction. Um. But but over time when you quote swamp the predators. So if if you could pick you know, a three day or a three week time when all of the females dropped their fonts, their their calves, their pups, whatever, um, you simply overwhelm the number of predators that are on the landscape and so it stinks for for your offspring to be chosen. You know, they're the ones that's eaten. But it's kind of one of those uh bet hedging strategies where um, if you can swamp the predator population by having yet the synchronized birth event, then you know that is that is a way to ensure that at a population scale, you know, you're you're always gonna have recruit have some type of recruitment of young um the other way. So that that's kind of more at a population scale. Now, of course, at an individual scale, UM, the mother is going to be selecting the most appropriate cover and so there's gonna be variation uh in in habitat, vegetation, the appropriate amount of cover on the landscape, and that could be based on experience. You know what a mother has learned. Uh, mother has learned that if I go to this area and I bed down and this type of cover, I keep having fawns, and so she repeats that behavior over and over again. Um, whereas you have another mother that doesn't have doesn't even live in the best habitat or or doesn't have you know, access to it, um drops her fawn and they keep getting eaten. And so you know, things just kind of evolve over time like that is an individual strategy. And here's something really remarkable of how these these things can really evolve in real time and in our lifetime is my colleague Marcus Lashley, he and others when he was a PhD student in post doc at NC State, they did a real interesting study on Fort Bragg. And so it's a really really open landscape and lots of details here, but um, bottom line they they used to prescribe fire on an annual basis or every other year, and Um, the vegetation because of that is kept very very low to the ground. So it's a very very open landscape in terms of the understory. So what you have is more developed structure near what we call the drains or the creek banks. You know, is these these wetter areas where the fire stops burning. And these may be very narrow corridors, but it's where you might have more shrub development and things like that. And so a doe being a doe, you know, going somewhere where you know in her you know her her search image, you know, through her eyes and brain of this is where I need to lay down and have a fawn. Unfortunately, because that vegetation type is so limited and linear, that coyotes can easily hunt those drains. And so he actually saw that fawn survival dropped in a really really good hiding cover was lower than in an area that was completely wide open with hardly any cover what's what whatsoever, because the coyotes were not searching that open landscape. The coyote was being a coyote and walking an edge, walking along that edge, smelling the fawn and you know, uh, capturing it and killing it. So that's one of the things where the dope picking the dope pick to the right cover, you know. But unfortunately, because that type of cover was so rare on the landscape, it actually gave the coyote the advantage. Interesting, so they're working, uh simultaneously, Mark, could could you speak a little bit more to this habitat component of coyote impacts on fawn predation, because it seems like more and more of the things I read, it seems that that's a huge factor. See mentioned the linear cover versus a different type. Can you talk a little bit more about that, what we're learning about how habitat does influence the impact. Yeah. Absolutely, And this has been really difficult to prove so far. Um it ends up being a little bit more of a complicated study than you might imagine trying to develop all these all these cover types and so forth, So you end up kind of looking retrospectively that, Okay, what were the habitat characteristics where fond survival was greater? What were the habitat characteristics where fond survival was less? And bottom line, Mark, it's um. It can come in a lot of different shapes. So I don't like to say, like, for in your neck of the woods, Mark, I wouldn't say it needs to be this particular cover type or this vegetation type. It's more like and I don't I don't know, Mark, if you saw this little video we we made we've had on our social media site, we called the the basketball technique, but it kind of that kind of provides you know visually, um, what we're talking about. And so we just kind of as a little game to demonstrate a point is you know, you'll have me and Marcus or me and Steve, and you know, one of you cover your eyes, turn around and let me hurl a basketball not very far you know, ten or fifteen yards or whatever, and then try to find it. And obviously where there is well to develop cover, so I'm talking about cover that is knee high to waist high, Um, it can take you a while to find that basketball. However, if you were to go uh in a typical forest stand So let's go into a place that has a developed forest, a developed canopy. You know with eight nine canopy closure, that shading has caused the the understory to grow away. And so you even though you have trees and you have the structural cover, uh, in terms of a forest, when you get down on your knees, you can see anything on the ground. Not only can you see a basketball, you can see a baseball if you rolled it on the ground. That is not providing any type of fawning cover. And so it's more easy pickings. A coyote or a group of coyotes can work through that type of vegetation really really easy. It's not to say whatsoever that, hey, if I have great fawning cover, I'm never gonna experience mortality from coyotes. Not not at all. But what you've done is you've increased the search time. You've you've complicated the coyotes eyes, you've complicated his nose, the scent where it's coming from, it's going to be broken up. And so essentially you you've just made it um much more difficult for a coyote to find a fawn. They may find them eventually, but they're not going to find them at the same rate. And so that's what what we're looking at, Mark, is you want larger areas. Bigger is better. You don't want them in strips. And that was like what I was referring to with Marcus study is you can just think about this where if the only cover you had was ten or fifteen yards wide and a hundred yards long, man a coyote could hunt that out in a matter of minutes. It's just literally gotta walk on the edge up one side, down the other, through the middle of it, and it's probably going to detect via side or smell of fawn that's in there. But now if you had this in a larger, wider area in terms of acres, you know, ten acres or twenty acres or thirty acres, and you had that distributed all over the landscape, now you've really stacked the odds in favor of the fawn being able to hide from a hide from the predator like a coyote. So tell me this then, Bronson, because we're talking about some of the different habitat impacts. But I guess I kind of got ahead of myself by asking you about that, because what I want to what I want to make sure we understand two is how do we even know this is a problem. So I guess my first question is, how do we determine if we might have a coyote issue or or influence that we need to think about, Like how do you how do you figure out if your fonal recruitment rate is too low or or whatever it might be. How do we determine that? And then I want to know I guess my second question would be, then how do we determine which one of the levers we need to push? So I think based on what you're saying, here, if we determine there's a challenge here with our fond recruitment, I'm thinking there's three different levels we can push, and you tell me if I'm wrong here. But number one, first level you just talked about could be habitat. We could change your habitat to try to address that issue. Number two, we could try to push the predator level, which would be some kind of predator management. And then number three we could just adjust our own doe harvest. So hunter doe harvest, you can adjust that lever um. So here I am asking me a thousand questions. I guess number one, Branson, are those there? Are those the three levers? And then I'm gonna take us one step back after you answer me that, Yeah, that that's because that those are the three levers. Yeah, those are the three options you have. If you manipulate any one or all of those, then you can make a change exactly. So then would that be in the case, how do we determine if there's an issue? I guess, yeah, let's start that. How do we figure that out? Okay, so you can do this um with with the data collection, so it doesn't need to be anything sophisticated, but all it is is going to take some time. So and I have seen this firsthand, and so I'll be and heck, one of these was the home hunting club that I was a part of. I started noticing a big problem in that if you have really healthy deer I mean the doze that we were harvesting or in fantastic condition uh body size, body fat. But man, I started noticing this trend. This was the first year I was in this hunting club, and like, gosh, I don't understand this. Half of the dose that we harvest during both season, not late gun season, during archery season are not lactating. Like we've we've got a problem here. And so I let this go on just to make sure it wasn't an anomaly. And you know, year two, yes, the exact same Thing's like we we have less than uh fifties sometimes only for lactation and adult females that are otherwise in fantastic condition. Um. Then we started noticing that. UM. I noticed right when I got on the property or the hunting club that uh, the state of our forest on that property was it was the obvious to me that we didn't have any cover and coinced completely coincidental. A little natural experiment took place. Uh. The property owner of where we leased was a timber company. UH. Timber company then came in and did a timber harvest, removed three or four acres September. Uh. The next spring and summer, now we had cover everywhere and even more developed the next year and immediately, UH, the fawning fawn survival and lactation rates shot right back up to normal. They were seventy and eight. So that was just something personally that happened to me. I didn't have to take any sophisticated measurements. It's just basically where if I'm looking at lactation rate and it is well below fifty or then you have fawn's dying for some reason. Now, how would you assume that it's kaya bodies? Well, A lot of that can come from uh, your camera surveys. A lot of that can come from scat surveys. You know. Things I would do is I would get on my a t V. And I would just drive our roads and when you're seeing uh scat everywhere, I'm seeing deer hair in it when I'm putting up. But you know I was doing camera surveys all year long, and mean I get camera surveys where I see a pack of two or three coyotes in one frame and then an hour later I see them running back with a fawn head in its mouth. You know, all these things like that are pretty easy to diagnose that when the deer herd, the condition of the dough is very healthy and reproduction is low, then that's probably what's going on. And even if you don't want to, you know, if you don't want to get back to the skin and shed and you don't you're not sure about how to do this, lactation measurements and lactation index um, use the tools that we have available to you, or you know, just writing it down that every time you go sit in a stand, you are recording how many doughse and how many fawns you are seeing. And if you get to beat the end of archery season, assuming you had sufficient samples and well into gun season where your hunters still can accurately identify an adult dode or versus a fawn, and you've only seen about uh one fawn for every three does or something like that, then you very well may have you know, uh a lot of fawns being eaten by predators. Is there any formula or um easy system to input data into the will help us determine some of those things that you said, like fawn recruitment or whether it maybe whether observations or trial camera surveys. Is there something like that out there that you could point people towards to help actually, you know, quantify this a little bit. Oh, absolutely well. A tool that we develop some I'm very biased here of course, but it's one of the tools we developed called the Deer Hunt App, you know, a mobile app, and not only does it do that for you, you know, you can keep track of buck age structure, you can keep track of adult sex ratio, you can keep track of where hunters are seeing deer, where they're not seeing deer, they're seeing them during the morning or during the afternoon, etcetera, etcetera. But but literally, mark that was one of the most prominent goals we had in mind, was that someone while they are hunting is to collect data and you don't have to rely to when your hunt is over and drive back and record it on a data sheet. It is simply an app that you can open up specific to you, specific to your your property or your hunting club and during your hunt you're just recording. You're just tapping a button, doe, dough fawn or there's a dough and two fawns. And then over time, if you and enough people are doing that, then yeah, on on our app, you just run a report and there is a metric for you FAWD recruitment falls perdue and so literally the math has done for you. And it's it's nothing that you can't do yourself. I mean it is literally nothing that if you got back to your truck or to the skin and shed or whatever and wrote it down on an index card or in an Excel spreadsheet. We're not doing anything special. We're just making it very very easy for you to do it and conveniently to do it. Yeah, I love it. That's that's a big thing. Convenience. Um So hey, Mark one more. I'd be remiss if I didn't say this too. It depends on where you're at in the country and relative to when fawning dates are parturition dates. But also another way to do that is of course with a camera survey. Um. Some people might do a preseason you can kind of kill uh um a bunch of birds with one stone and do a preseason camera survey, and you can see, hey, what's my buck age structure, what bucks do I want to protect? What bucks DOILL want to harvest? And if if fawning season was back, you know, six weeks or two months before that time, then you would be able to also count the number of fawns per doe you're seeing there. So another easy tool you can do there that's not as easy in Mississippi. A lot of times our fawns are hitting the ground uh just maybe sometimes even a few weeks before both season begins, and so we typically underestimate fond recruitment when we do a preseason camera survey, so we'll sometimes do do hours at the end of the season. But but I wanted to say that, So there there's typically three things you can look at. The lactation index, you can look at uh during deer season hunter observations, and then use your camera surveys through three different ways you can tell now sometimes just thought of as as you're describing this, you know, if we're looking at those three different um OH variables or whatever, it help us determine if there's an issue. Could those things be impacted by other factors though, So could something like just poor habitat in general, poor nutrition available, Could that impact faun recruitment or lactation rates and things like that. So we might be seeing these negative red flashing lights and then we say, oh, it's gonna be coyotes then, but could it be something else? Absolutely, I'm I'm glad you brought that up. Um, So for me, what would be the biggest signal to me that not only do I have a fawn cover habitat problem, I've got a food habitat problem. If the deer and poor condition, so if dose, if their body weight is blow average, if buck body weights and antler weight, antler sizes blow average, and and even looking at fat, you know, getting when you're skinning the deer and looking at that level of fat on the rump, looking at kidney fat index, things like that. That's when I start leaning more towards we've got a situation here that yeah, predators maybe uh augmenting the situation. They may not be the cause of it. It looks like we've got a nutrition problem, and then the predators are simply you know, making it a little bit worse. So I look at the condition of the deer. Now, you can always have a disease event, you know, it's all It could always be possible that there's some specific virus that may hit fawns a little more than it would adults. Um, But that's probably just gonna be a one year anomaly type thing. Most of these mark are pretty chronic. You're not just gonna have this one year where faun recruitment is really down unless it was some type of disease. Usually these things build slowly over time. The habitat gets progressively worse over time, Predator populations grow over time, and you start seeing this trend that you can pick up. Okay, so we've we've kind of determined that if you're seeing a healthy deer population like the deer that are on your property or healthy, what your fond recruitment is lower, the lactation raise is low. That's pointing two. Okay, maybe we have a predator impact happening here. And as we talked about already, that's probably more so the exception than the role. But let's say we're in that situation where we're looking at these different factors and saying, Okay, yeah, it really does look like predators are making a significant impact. Here. We've got three levers of press. As we talked about already. We we said we could actually manage the predators. We could improve the habitat, or we could adjust our harvest. Could you rank for me how affect or how would you rank those three levers in effect in scale of what's the most effective to least effective, and or which ones we should try first? Like? How should we go through those lists of levers? Okay? Sure thing? So one thing we have to consider from from the onset is do you own the property or not? Or do you have permission and the ability to manage the habitat? So like me the situation I was in, I least property, I had that that option, that lever was taken away from me. I can't manage the habitat. So I'm left with two things. I'm left with. Um, we need to adjust our expectations. So it might be that we just say, hey, our dear herd is going to be smaller than it used to be. Um, we might are we satisfied with that? Uh? Maybe rather than harvesting this level of dose every year, we only need to harvest you know, this level half the amount of dose every year and we might reach then an equilibrium. The coyotes are gonna take some, but the hunters are taking less, and so we can reach that that balancing point of where we're still happy as hunters with the number of deer we're seeing in the condition of those deer that we're seeing. Um. The other one would be, if I'm leasing land, would be to try to manage the predator, and that is just not going to be for most people that effective. Um, it's gonna be very costly unless you're doing it all yourself. And these coyotes are pretty darn amazing in terms of how quickly once you remove them from the landscape, that territory or home range that was left vacant uh quickly becomes occupied. And so we advise people if that is an action you choose to take, you really need to focus your trapping efforts during or immediately preceding the fawning season. Whenever fawns are hitting the ground uh in your neck of the woods, right before that is when the trapping effort should be taken place. And you know, if it's one of these, if you have a sizable property and you're only removing two or three coyotes off that property. Unless you just have fun doing it, you're probably not having an impact whatsoever. You really need to remove a large proportion of coyotes off the lands escape and then it becomes an annual event. But of the those those coyotes are gonna transient coyotes that are moving around looking for an open territory as soon as the one's gone to backfill and and occupy that new territory. So that that brings me to you know what, am I getting the most bang for the buck for pun intended? That is gonna, you know, be enduring that I'm gonna get years and years of benefit from. And that's gonna be habitat management. I'm never gonna eliminate fawn predation by coyotes. I'm never going to eliminate that, but I think it can be minimized to a great degree by just managing the understory. And that's gonna be the habitat tools we talk about all the time. At Priority number one is getting sunlight on the ground, and whether that be whether that be with prescribed fire, whether that be with typically it's gonna take a thinning operation. It might be a clear cut. It might be thinning whatever that is, but getting sunlight on the ground and developing that understory so that you can develop both cover and food. Like I say, you know, knee hide to waste tile where you can throw that basketball and hide it. That is probably gonna be over time, the least amount of effort you have to put in and you're gonna get the most result from it over time. Yeah, there's one other lever um that I'm wondering if you would add to this too, that I just thought of. I've I've heard in the past. We mentioned earlier birth synchrony, that you can influence birth synchrony um a little bit with your herd structure, with doing things to improve your heard, whether it be aid structure or about to do ratio. Is that true? Are the things we can do when we make our hunting shooter don't shoot decisions that actually help us make sure we get that prey overload that could help minimize predation as well. Um, Yes, to a degree. Um. Usually the way that happens historically, you know, when we talk about back in the day before you know, quality deer management really took hold in North America when we had when we were during the establishment period, dose were protected and the you know, the bucks were just hammered, and we had these adult sex ratios that were way out of whack, and so we had four to one, five to one, six to one, etcetera adult dose to adult bucks. That is the single biggest cause of the ruts or conception dates being spread out so long. And the reason that is is that when you have dose coming into heat, they are pretty much already synchronized in an area, and so they're coming into heat and you literally don't have enough adult bucks to breathe the dose as they come in to heat, and so you might have you might only get half of the dough's bread during their first extra cycle, and then they have to cycle again, you know, about twenty eight days later, and then they're bread the second time and maybe even the third time. That's typically when we see those partriition dates really spread out. We don't see that as much nowadays. Um, without a doubt. In some places, the sex ratio is still far in favor of females, but it's typically not on a large scale the way it used to be. So just getting the adult the buck to do sex ratio in that good you know, two to one or one and a half to one ratio, then then your your partriition dates are pretty much going to be synchronized for you without you having to really take any active role. Okay. Interesting, That's always been one of those things that I've wondered if if you can improve things a little bit there. Um. So it's good to get that additional context. So I feel like we we've covered a lot here, Bronson. We've kind of gone down this funnel of ideas to help us understand, Okay, what's the situation, how much of an impact of predators have in what ways of the making an impact? How do we determine what that impact is, how do we choose what levers to push if there is an impact? Um. It's it's really interesting stuff. And I think what I was hoping we could do here, and what I think we did is I think we've kind of kind of done like a reality check because there's a lot. As we talked about a little bit a while ago, it's easy sometimes to point the finger at like the big pointy, sharp edge, sharp fang, shiny thing and say that's that's the big bad wolf for the big bag coyote, maybe sometimes they are, they are a challenge, maybe sometimes they aren't. But I think going through this helps us understand, Okay, what are the impact? How do we work within the constraints of whatever situation we're in to to deal with that, live with that, whatever it might be. UM. But I'm going to ask you, and maybe you don't want to do this, but would you if you're willing to take off your scientists research or biologist hat I take off that head and then put just your hunter um or. And I'm assuming based on everything I know about you and as I've talked to you, I think that you are not only just a hunter and a researcher, but a conservationist and someone who appreciates wildlife. Is there if we're looking outside just the management implications, is there an ethical um obligation that we have just as people who who like to call ourselves conservationists UM two, not just what am I trying to say to to somewhat embrace or learn to coexist with predators? Is there is there something to be said about learning to live with these other animals versus the scorched earth policy of the fact that our compet Titian we gotta wipe him off the face of the earth, because that's kind of what we did in the eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds. Um, and things have changed. Um, But I'm just curious if you would be willing to speak at all to what your opinion or thoughts are on on the ethics of of how we interact with predators. Um, if it's a good thing, if it's a bad thing, if we can learn to find a middle ground. Is that something you can offer a few thoughts on. Well, heck, yeah, I don't. I don't think I can be wrong since you said I could take off my scientist's cap and just give you my opinion. Um. You know, I certainly have a bias, um, just because of who I am and how I'm made up and my interest. Um. I think back to an Aldo Leopold essay, one of my most favorite, and it's called think like a Mountain, and Aldo's perspective was, you know, and there's so many nuances. I mean, it's just beautiful, just a beautiful essay. But but essentially the mountain needed the wolf because when when Aldo, you know, shot that last she wolf and saw the fire go out in that she wolf's eye that the mountain subsequently suffered for that, and the dear population grew and took over the range. And you know, he was really making a point there that predators are part of the system, and predators are are are needed, you know, for for for a balanced ecosystem. So UM, I really think you know, in society at large, you know, and there's all sorts of different sides to this argument, but there was very compelling evidence for you need in Yellowstone, you need to have some wolves. Uh, you need to have the predator. Um. One of my mentors years ago, I hope I can remember his famous quote said it so beautifully. One of my advisors when I was undergraduate was Larry Marshington at the University of Georgia and said, the the predator needs the the prey needs the predator, just like the predator needs the prey. If you take away the predator, Uh, a deer becomes a cow, a wolf becomes a dog, and what does man become. I don't know if I got that exactly right, but that's the part I could remember, and and that thing really stuck with me that you know, we also play a predator, we play a predatory role with deer and and uh and other animals in the environments we live in. And so I think it's really important. I think it's important for the ecological integrity of of the places we hunt and conserve that the predator should be part of the system. Now, without a doubt, Uh, can they Um? Can population levels get out of control? Absolutely? Uh? Can humans coexist in some areas with some really large predators, Well, that's gonna be really difficult. It'd be really difficult for um mountain lions to be saturated saturate the forests of Mississippi, you know. There there are some of these really big predators that that do make it more difficult for us to coexist in terms of a human safety perspective, but in terms of a predator that maybe limiting in some places a deer population by taking a few adults deer here and there and taking a few falls here and there. You know, honestly, I'm just fine with that. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that, bronze, And I think that's a really really helpful perspective to here, especially from your from your experience that being involved in a lot of the a lot of the data and numbers and research behind understanding these interactions both from the ecological perspective, but then also from the social perspective, how hunters and predators kind of sometimes clash sometimes can coexist. That dynamic between these two sometimes competing um parts of the system out there, it causes a lot of turmoil at times. But I think, and I gain this is just my opinion, but I think that it's it is important for us to find that way to coexist for all the reasons you just said, and then also because and this is something that i've again I've thought just from a pragmatic standpoint that if if we want to call ourselves conservations, if we want to like make this pitch to the outside world that we as hunters are good for conservation and we protect wildlife and do all these things. Um, if we just point to deer and say we we do that for deer, but we're not going to care at all about this other pocket of of species, I think we lose some credibility there. And that's always been one of the things that if if we care at all about how the rest of the of the country looks at hunting and hunters, and how we can go forward in the future. I think simply from that standpoint, it benefits us to learn to to be conservations for all species and animals and learn to think about these things as is a it's a larger integrated system. I think that's beneficial just from that standpoint to um, So, I could not agree more, could not agree more. Yeah, when you say integrated system, that that's an ecosystem, and that that's what we're supposed to preserve and and protect and conserve and be a part of. Yeah, how do we keep the integrity of an ecosystem while we're a part of it and and predators are a part of it as well. Yeah. So, So to wrap this up, Bronson, I want to read you, um a summary from a University of Georgia report that came out a year and a half or two years ago. UM. I think it kind of sums up a lot of what we've talked about really neatly, and I just like to read it and then if you want to add anything or clarify anything, just so we can kind of wrap a bow on this for everyone. Tell me if you agree with us too. Um. But the summery of this report says this quote white tailed deer have multiple predators, and individuals sometimes are killed by those predators. However, healthy deer herds can and do exist in places with abundant predators. Although it is easy to dismiss the role of predators as purely negative when regarding deer management, it's important to remember that predators are a natural and normal part of a healthy, well managed ecosystem. To assume predators have no beneficial purpose and deer management is to ignore the facts. However, when predator populations become too abundant and affect deer management goals and open discussion regarding the appropriate management action is justified. Predator reductions via trapping or shooting, habitat management, excuse me, habitat management, and or changes in deer harvests are all possible options that require careful and calculated review of available facts. The answer is not a landscape without predators. End quote. Does that kind of tie this all up? Or do you disagree with anything there? Or would you add anything? I think that was appropriate and beautiful. Yeah, I could not agree or endorse that anymore. I think the they hit the nail on the head. Awesome, Bronson. I can't thank you enough. For taking the time to talk through all this with us, and I want to make sure to give you an opportunity to share with our audience where they can learn more from you from what you guys are doing over the Deer Lab. Any new projects you have, what what can you tell us and where can we find some of this stuff? Yeah? Absolutely, thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoyed today. Um So some things we have coming up. We are in the midst where you're halfway through a project that I can't wait to visit with you in the future about looking at the interaction of bucks and hunters and and uh, we're doing an experiment. It was very similar to something Steve Demeris did in Oklahoma about a decade ago. But we're looking at the response of bucks essentially to hunting pressure. How often they get disturbed, Does it change their activity pattern, does it change where they spend time and how they spend time? And so we think that's gonna be really really insightful looking at that how hunters and level of hunting intensity is going to impact the deer hurts. So we have that going on, and we have some prescribed fire studies going on looking at timing of fire and when is it most beneficial from a deer and wildlife perspective to burn a lot of other projects like that. UM. We have a podcast that I would hope people would tune into, and it's all about dear biology and deer management and science. And it's it's less about hunting but more about the nitty gritty of the things you probably put you to sleep when you were in high school biology. But when we take those topics and kind of apply them to to deer management, and we try to take all the different questions and myths you know that people may talk about, you know, learning about the moon phase or you know, learning about this particular plant or food plot. We just try to really scientifically, you know, evaluate all these types of topics and get that information out. Uh. Something we did recently we're excited about. We we wrote a book on a topic that is near and dear to our hearts, Steve de Marison and myself, UM about bucket management. And the name of the book is Strategic Harvest System How to break through the bucket management glass ceiling. And so it's something and that market might have been something you and I talked about last time about you know, really how to manage the buck side of the deer herd to you know, to get you where you want to be, and that is available on Amazon if anyone is interested in in that. UM, I guess that is it for now. The the our our website is MSU deer lab dot com. If someone was interested in that hunting app that we talked about for measuring fund recruitment, we've got a page there with all of our apps that they can download and that are free to use. Awesome. Well, you guys are just putting out so many helpful resources. I highly recommend the Deer University podcast. I've really enjoyed it. You guys are doing a great job. I haven't got to check out the book yet, but I need to because I'm sure that's gonna be just jam packed with helpful information. So Bronson, thanks for the work you guys are doing. And uh thanks for sharing it with us here on the podcast. Anytime, glad to help anyway I can. All right, and that is the end of part one. Now, before we move on to part two, we need to take a quick break to thank our partners at White Tail Properties who helped make this podcast possible. In white Tail Properties somewhat recently has started really cool YouTube video seere is called the land Beat, and on this series they've got a whole bunch of different topics covered related to managing your property for white tails and wildlife, sharing some really great information. The most recent video is titled Planting Fruit Trees, in which they talked through a bunch of ideas about planting and establishing fruit trees for wildlife on your property. They talked through the tools that you need, different tips to ensure that those trees survive. Um very interesting stuff, so I'd highly recommend heading over to the white Tail Properties YouTube channel, subscribe there and check out that Planting Fruit Trees video and look for many more of these to come. I hear there's gonna be a bunch more coming in the near future, so check them out and you can also learn more at white tail properties dot com. Now back to the show. As I mentioned, our next guest is Carter Niemeyer. He's going to give us a wolf perspective when it comes to predators and hunter human dynamics. Like I mentioned, Ler, he's got an interesting and unique perspective and I think we can all learn a little bit from from that as well. So here we go. Hope you enjoy all right, So with me now, and I'm really excited about this. Is Carter knee Meyer. That's the right way. Your last name right, knie Meyer. That is correct? Perfect, And Carter. I read your book Wolfer a few years ago because I've always been interested fascinated by wolves in general, being an outdoorsman person who just loves wildlife and wild places. They've always been one of those animals that is just intriguing. They to their detriment, maybe they symbolize a lot um and so that was always interesting growing up. But then also as a hunter within my world and in this community, there's obviously a whole lot of negative energy around them too. So I've always been just interested in that dynamic and why there is this these strong polarizing emotions around this animal from different different communities. Um In your book and your perspective for me was still refreshing because it seemed like you could approach this topic with a level of objectivity and logic that um I could. I could take in what you had to say and know that it's seeing there's no bs there because you've seen it from all sides. You approached it from a from a set of experiences that I think is pretty unique compared to most people that like to throw their hat in the ring when it comes to the wolf debate. Um, so I guess number one, thank you for taking the time to talk. And number two, rather than me try to butcher your history, I'd just love to hear it from you. How did you get to this point? Um? Can you give me a little bit background how you got involved with predators and then eventually into this whole wolf thing. Well, it's been a long story, it's turning out to be because I'm seventy one years old now, so we go way back. But I got my first gun when I was nine, and Uh, I started trapping foxes when I was a teenager. And UH grew up in northern Iowa in a rural setting, rural community, and we had a little farm ourselves. So that early hunting, trapping, fishing experience really made me an outdoorsman. And UH some points, I think when I got a car, it was not to date girls, it was to go hunting and trapping. So it perked my interest enough that when I got out of high school, I went to college, got a bachelor master's degree at Iowa State University in wildlife biology, and my first job, unexpected to me, was offered to me out in northeast Montana, a little town called Plentywood. Um. I was offered the job on a Thursday. I accepted it on a Friday, and a hopton am track train on a Saturday and landed in Wolf Point, interesting name, Montana and was ready to go to work that next Monday. Um. That job was raby's suppression. It was catching skunks trying to suppress a raby's outbreak there because that's what I did my master's study on. It was serology study of rabies. And then that job fizzled out. So I was a fur trapper that winter up plenty Wood and I trapped close to four hundred fox and coyotes. Prices were good then, and I did that to survive, and uh, my reputation began to grow and the agency called Wildlife Services. Um, I thought this guy likes to trap, We need a trapper. So my first job was to actually be well, yes, I'm gonna skip one part of my career and go straight to Dylan, Montana. And my job was catch golden eagles that were praying on livestock down there. Um. So, in one springtime period from March to the first of June, I and another fellow trapped on forty nine golden eagles out of a township size area that were killing newborn lambs. All those eagles were banded, put in boxes, and we shipped them to Colorado, Northwest Montana and someone to Yellowstone. We tried to break up that migration, dispersed those birds, and it didn't solve the problem, but it effectively diminished the problem. How do you catch a golden eagle? Ah, that's an excellent question. Um. We used coyote traps, the regular foothold traps. They were weakened traps, older traps, and we wrapped them with sponge rubber weather stripping so that they were basically rubber eyes jaws. And then we found newborn lambs that the eagles were feeding on. And we also killed whitetail jack rabbits and stake them to the ground and conceal these traps around these dead rabbits and the dead lambs out in the fields, and the eagles would fly down to scavenge, thinking that I'm eating something another eagle killed and they would step in that trap, usually with a toe, and then they would just lay out on the ground with their wings fanned out. And we would sit on a high ridge about a mile away. And every time you catch an eagle, we had several trap sites. The birds, once they were caught would flop out on the ground, fan their wings out, and you would see this big dark circle on the ground. Uh. So we drive over, grabbed their feet, um put them in wooden boxes with a slide door, and uh we kept them in log cabins. Actually fed them dead livestock, rabbits, lambs, and every time we had about fifteen in captivity and they would go out on a shipment to Colorado or some direction. And we just kept doing that until June come and then the migration of eagles pretty much stopped. At the time, the government was being pressured to give kill permitst or answers to shoot all these eagles, but that didn't happen, so we we trappers were the alternative answer. Can you describe what it is that Wildlife Services did or does now? Because I don't think a lot of people understand that. Yes, UM, Wildlife Services back when they hired me in nineteen seventy five were called a d C or Animal Damage Control, so they went by that title, and then there was a name change. At that time, Animal Damage Control was within the US Fish and Wildlife Service Department of Interior. Subsequently it moved into the U s Department of Agriculture, and then the name was changed to Wildlife Services. Today, and it sounds somewhat sarcastic, but Wildlife Services are basically the hired gun of the livestock industry because most of our work, especially at that time, was responding to reports of livestock being killed by mostly coyotes, but also eagles, black bears, grizzly bears, wolves, not so much wolves, then mountain lions, and our agency would respond. There was about a dozen trappers in the western part of Montana about a dozen in the eastern portion of Montana. UH those trappers would assess the damage, determined what predator was involved, and then we would remove the problem animal. And with the exception of grizzly bears, those and golden eagles, of course, the predators were killed and UM Wildlife Services still exist today and it varies from state to state what they do. UM some of these Western states like Montana, Wyoming, Idaho are heavy into killing coyotes and removing problem bears lands wolves. You get into states like Washington, Oregon, it could be pigeon control, you know, feral pigeons on buildings or under bridges. It could be protecting salmon smalt from different kinds of bird predators. UM A big project of Wildlife Services nowadays two is helping out airports national international size airports to reduce bird strikes where birds get in front of jet aircraft could kill everybody on board. That's a big project. And then uh more and more. Take the state of Texas. They've got an estimated four million plus farrell hogs. So wildlife services down there have they're still hunting predators, native predators, but they're also trying to reduce the feral pig population and so they are very diversified, and they exist in many states from here to the east coast to the South. And uh, whatever is a unique situation or problem with nuisance animals in those states, wildlife services adapt their programs to those needs. So Southern after the Golden Eagles, then for you what was next where you go from there? Well, I guess I did such a good job they made me a district supervisor. So I essentially became a twenty some year old supervisor over a bunch of fifty year old seasoned government trappers and pretty much helped them lying out what they were going to do or what I wanted them to do. So um it took it. It taught me a lot of finesse at a very young age how to get a bunch of ornery old guys old enough to be your dad to listen to you and do what you asked. And so along those lines too, I got involved in a lot of problem grizzly bear management. And because I was the college boy, the college educated Iowegian, a lot of those OTTD guys called me um. I was kind of the technical guy with the dart gun and the drugs. Uh. Those trappers preferred not to know what a milligram a mill of leader or was so bringing carter down. So when we had a problem grizzly, we would set foot snares catch the grizzly, and I would be the dart man to knock the bear down. Uh. Never killed a single grizzly during my tenure. We put them all in a culvert trap and turned them over to the state who relocated them or took some up in Canada and relocated them. And then, uh, that was pretty much my responsibility. I spent a lot of time to directing State of Montana three helicopters devoted entirely to killing coyotes. So my job too is to make sure those helicopters were cycled around to the trappers and that everyone was prepared and did their homework and knew where they wanted to hunt coyotes, and I pulled the fuel trailer for them. At that time, we skinned coyotes, saved the pelts, sold them, put in the fuel fund, and uh and then um that That was pretty much my career until about mid nineteen eighties when suddenly gray wolves started coming across the border from Canada and showing up in the North Fork of the Flat Hit around Glacier and on the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. And that's where I became acquainted with gray wolves, which were never on my radar before that. So can you You've got a whole book worth of knowledge about this whole experience that I encourage people to read, called wolfer Um but can you give us the cliff notes version of what happened from that point when those gray wolves started coming down across the border to the point where reintroduction happened and what your involvement was through that process. Yeah. So the recolonization um where wolves were just crossing the border on their own, started around six and uh from that point forward, we had wolf packs pop up west to callis Bell, Montana, and then down the nine mile just outside of Missoula, and a pack showed up just west to Hellna, Montana. So they were coming down on their own. And um, my job at the time, you know, we no no budget, we had no experience, and we had no field equipment you know, traps to capture wolves. And during that time I inadvertently darted a wolf from a helicopter, which had never been done in the lower forty eight to my knowledge. So I became Carter the Darter and pretty much was the go to guy to do the all of that early wolf capture work, either with foothold traps or with the helicopter when there was a problem, and then even started helping the agencies you know, collar them just to start counting them and keep track of the packs. And if I can interrupt you real fast before you go any further, at this point in your in your life and your career, what we what did you think about wolves? Like, what was your feelings about wolves being back in America? Were you approaching it from like, crap, these guys are back, this is trouble or were you just interested in them? Or what do you think? I was fat sinated with wolves, never had one negative thought about a wolf. I felt privileged to be the guy to actually start looking at the wolf problem that was perceived, and to be the get go to guy to go out and examine livestock and see what what the wolves did if they did kill them. Indeed, so no, I've never had really a negative thought towards wolves. Ever. Um, I was fascinated. And then I think after that, I just developed a tremendous respect for the animal and admiration, and uh it went from there and and of course you have to remain objective always. And so there's a lot of tough times when you catch this beautiful wolf and look in its eyes and think what a cool animal and later either recover its body or someone had killed it, or in some cases later in my career, I had to go out and be the trigger man and kill him myself. And so you you have to accept that. UM. But one of the things I guess I learned or taught myself was to be objective and not to be biased and not to have predetermined um perceptions of what was going on. Uh. I always compare it to being in law enforcement. You know, the guy carrying the badge. You've collecked evidence. You're not to judge and jury. You just collect evidence and present it to a judge and jury. And that's what my job became. More and more was looking at more and more dead livestock because as wolves received publicity, more people started looking at that dead cow in the field through a different set of eyes, you know, in different lenses. Uh. And so I started really learning a lot about forensics because I skinned out these animals and would look for injuries that were caused by predation versus injuries caused by accidents. And then you're also looking for lightning strikes, birthing problems. Um said before the National statistics, you know about five percent of livestock die from predation causes, so of them are dying from all kinds of possibilities. So how do you know that that an animal was killed by wolf? What are those telltale signs that you look for to determine whether or not this was actually a wolf. Well, the key is you need to have someone find that carcass as soon as possible. But we're looking for trauma, and trauma UH is usually revealed with em reach. A lot of profuse bleeding means the animal was alive, there was blood pressure at the time, and there's something happened to this animal. But again, UH, predation can resemble gunshot wounds just so people can imagine what it looks like. So it remains it's important to remove the skin from the animal and you know, is it a gunshot or are these tooth punctures? Or did this animal run into a fence post? Did it get impaled on an irrigation pipe. There's so many possibilities, but every predator has a signature. I call it wolves kill uniquely compared to how a mountain lion kills, compared to how a grizzly bear kills, compared to eagles using talents. So you have to become familiar with those signatures and look at where the injuries occur. Cougar is attack a lot at the neck throat area. UH might inflict some claw marks where they hang onto the victim. Bears are dorsal attack. They come over the shoulders, over the back, bite down on their prey. Even a thousand pound herford will be bitten over the shoulders and over the top of the neck by a grizzly bear, for instance. And UH wolves attack laterally and from behind. Wolves try to get their prey running, and then they attack from the side and behind and so UH. Of the wolf attack, injuries will be revealed under the legs, under the front legs, the armpit or whatever you want to call it, in the groin areas, around the soft belly and downwards, say, where the utter is. And then a lot of bite wounds occur along what they call the hamstrings, you know, from the genitals down the back of the hind leg. So once you do this for a long time, you can pretty quickly determine what you're working with. And then all these other causes of death often resulting no trauma. You've got a animal laying they're dead, not a mark on it. And again I'm not a veterinarian. By training, but when the rancher would allow me, we would open up that animal, we'd skin it, say there, well, there's no predation involved. So you go inside and they die of ulcers and uh issues internally pneumonia, And talk to any veterinarian and ask him how many bacteria and viruses kill livestock And you couldn't learn it in a lifetime. So I'm looking for hemorrhach That tells me that there's some trauma here which overlaps what predation would appear to be. So you're arding animals, You're starting to track these animals are coming down into Montana. You're checking on livestock predation, trying to understand are these wolf kills? Are they not? What what happens from there? Well? When when predators are not involved, sometimes that's a tough pill to swallow because a lot of people farm opinions and have all the answers before you get there, their minds made up. And when you say, I'm sorry, but predation, we can't confirm that happened here. And then if you killed you try to find an explanation for them, which included, you know, put the put the cow in the back of my government truck. I'll take it to your vet you need, so I refer them to their veterinarians. When I say it's not predation. If you really think you might have black leg or scours, go to go to an expert on that field if predation was involved. Early e on, we didn't kill wolves. We relocated them. So uh, summertime, especially using foothold traps, we catched those wolves, moved them to less problem area. Early on it was up in Glacier Park. It was politically expedient. Every wolf we got our hands on turned loose alive at a radio collars so that we could keep track of where that wolf is, what it did. And some of those were repeat offenders. Yeah, until about two thousand and two, we'd relocated a hundred and seventeen approximately a problem wolves h required not killing them. After about two thousand and two, Uh, no more relocations at least I had ho Wyoming Montana and we started killing the offenders. So where where did the idea of actually reintroducing wolves then to these different parts a little farther south? Where did that begin? What what happened? And how did you get pulled into that? Because the wolves are already coming down. Imagine, as you were saying, there was already some some controversy around that. Probably there are people upset about it, maybe some people were excited about it. But then there started to be this rise of interest in bringing them back to places like Yellowstone. Um, can you can you get us to that point? Catch us up on that, and then how you got pulled in all of it? Okay, Well, again, realizing that I worked with the U. S Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services at the time, and I was taking on these wolf responsibilities. Um, I was having to coordinate with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who were the management authority over wolves whether they lived or died. So, um, it really wasn't any of my decision at the time two be part of those discussions. But back in the late sixties early seventies, there was talk about recovering wolves, so there was a lot of research done, a lot of field time where biologists went out and surveyed and looked for wolves in the lower forty eight states. Ah. And then to fast forward about fours when the discussions accelerated about talking about wolf reintroduction and I was sort of hearing about it, myself and I was in meetings where it was discussed. But they wrote an Environmental impact statement then, and I say they It was the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So at that time I was sort of swept up in this movement because I was a review member of the e i S team representing Wildlife Services who and we sort of represented the livestock growers, So I was privy to the discussions and when the c i S was written. At that point, there were conditions that if a viable wolfpack was found before the reintroduction actually occurred, that they weren't going to do it. But the surveys, the counting, the looking, the searching did not confirm any viability, any breeding activity in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. Were their wolves here. Absolutely, there were single individuals running around. People seen them, they were videoed, and those wolves were from Canada because we exterminated wolves in these states by the nineties, So these weren't progeny of some pre existing population. Uh. The fact that no viability was recognized identified the reintroduction occurred beginning of UH first year. The wolves were captured at Hinton, Alberta, which is just east of Jasper Park. Second year. They came from Fort Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada, caught in a region west of a little place called Pink Mountain on the Alaska Highway. I was part of the capture team in helicopters who went up to get those wolves again. I was working for US d A Wildlife Services, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service borrowed me and covered my uh cost and salary while I worked kind of as a contractor for them. So that's how I got involved in the actual reintroduction. So so the story that we hear a lot um, especially maybe in the hunting community where there is some animosity around the return of wolves. Even today, you still hear that when the government went and got these wolves to reintroduce, they found these super wolves up in handed other of these big monsters that weren't anything like the wolves that were down in America beforehand. You were literally one of the guys that was up there bringing these cap trapping these wolves and bringing them down. So can you tell me these weren't super wolves? Right? Well? No, and and let's back up. I mean, I keep hearing these testimonies about these wolves are different than the ones that were here. I don't know anyone living that saw the wolves that lived here. You had to be alive before ninet and you had to be alive up until the reintroduction from the nineteen forties. Weren't very many people like that. There were a few. There's people tell me while I have some of the original wolf pelts from the original wolves, Well that's fine and dany I'm not going to argue that. But what really went into the planning was that the wolves that were selected to be reintroduced, the only source was Canada, and you needed wolves recognized moose, deer, and elk as pray species. So you don't want to run up to Alaska and bring down a bunch of Cariboo hunters, you know, or go to Minnesota and bring a bunch of wolves and hunt deer, white tailed deer or whatever. So that the attempt was to bring down a wolf that was closest to this area. And as I talked about in a seminar today, um through radio collaring, it's obvious that the wolves in Canada have no barrier like a fence or a moat or something to keep wolves from Canada coming into the Lower forty eight. They always have been. The problem was from forty with a few exceptions along the border, we were killing them because there's old news articles people finding wolves dead in their field, usually a gun shot, rifle shot in the side, or perhaps somebody flew over him in an air plane hunting coyotes and shot him in the back with babies. Um. It wasn't till we broke that gauntlet by actually airlifting wolves into the lower forty eight and releasing them here did enough wolves get to the same vicinity to go ahead and breed and actually, you know, be viable and the We achieved our objectives over three hundred wolves for three consecutive years, equitably distributed over Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. We reached that goal by two thousand and two, that soon after the reintroduction in six to show you how prolific and resilient wolves are, so like you, Like you've said, we essentially exterminated wolves across America by the forties because of long spread kind of campaign against predators for for so long as we expand our own populations across the West. Um, some people today would say that we did that for good reason, that you know, they shouldn't be on the landscape, because of the trouble to livestock, because of the trouble to hunters and wildlife populations and whatnot. So some people are saying it was a good thing, and then you have other people that look at and look at that as a travesty taking an entire species off of a landscape, a place that that it belongs has been for tens of thousands of years, millions of years maybe. UM. So when you got involved in this, obviously there was a lot of noise on either side of that spectrum. You were right there in the middle of it. Actually, hands on. What were your feelings at that point about the idea of reintroducing them. Did you feel like did you have a strong opinion? Um, at the time all of this reintroduction being discussed, UM, I don't know if I had an opinion, but I thought it was a cool idea, and gray wolves are native to this, to our lower forty eight states, and I thought, what a cool idea to bring back a native species and put it here. And uh, I guess, being real honest, was when I heard this team was farming, I wanted to be on it. Uh. It was, it was historical, it never been done, may never ever be done again. But UM, I have no remorse or whatever you want to call it about being part of it. I think it was a decision the country made at the time. Um I don't know exactly, but I think comments and letters and assemble all these comments came in on the environmental impact statement. I think we're talking around a quarter of a million comments, and the decision was made. Certainly wasn't my decision, but the sun, moon, stars and constellations and the politics all lined up uniquely at that time, during those couple of years, and it happened, and certainly a lot of people resentful of it happening. People just like wolves, but they dislike federal government as much or more. I've heard people say, you know, I don't like wolves, but I hate the government biologists that brought him here. You know. So there's this feeling that exists. Yeah, can you talk about that dynamic that was especially present at that point, because it seems like, like you just said, there was there was a lot of negativity towards the wolf, but then it also seemed like a lot of the hate was towards the fact that the government was forcing wolves on people. That some people that didn't want it. Um, can you talk about that what was going on there too? Yeah, well, I'll just kind of give you my viewpoint through the situation that existed, is that the wolves that were to be reintroduced needed vast open spaces, low human presence and low livestock numbers, and recognize available prey like deer Elkin, moose Um, the frank Church, and Yellowstone. We're just it was decided by scientists above me a different paygrade that those locations fit the bill. And we have to go back to talk about public land. Vast amounts of public land in the West. They don't belong two people. Just because you live in Idaho doesn't mean it's your public land. It belongs to everybody in the country. That's the way I've always looked at public land. Um, the public spoke the public. The majority, you can argue, but the percentages were higher to do it than to not do it. And I'll give ranchers and rural folks have benefit that they were probably outnumbered, outgunned, and out politics at the time because this was so new to everybody that the resistance you might say, wasn't organized to push back any harder. So the to go with the flow had happened, and there's a lot of resentments because in there has been tremendous number of lawsuits, you know, over listing and delisting, back and forth, the wolves been on the list and off the list, and as you get more groups and more attorneys involved and more hindsight, there's I think still these resentments that gosh, if we had just done it this way and they'd listened to us, you know, this wouldn't have happened. And scientists at the time, I mean very prominent scientists, including wolf people, were opposed to it because they said, Wow, it's just going to create so much negativity. Why don't we just wait them out, let them come down on their own. There's people who believe that would have happened. Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't have. Um I think piecemeal they would have come, but have been very very slow. But we were killing wolves back in soon as it starts showing up, we were already killing them. To say that if we had just let them come in on their own, we could have lived with that, it's really not true because even when they were under the full protection of the Endangered Species Act, there was paperwork permitting us to kill endangered wolves. So in the reintroduction, they were introduced as experimental non essential wolves, which meant there was a lot more flexibility built in, and there has been because the numbers are so dynamic moving along. But we've killed about a wolf for every cow or calf that's been killed, you know, domestic animals. Um so control has always been on the table and it's always been applied where wolves have been a problem. So the wolf introduction happens in like you said, in Yellowstone, the frank Church. Now, you know, over the course of the next twenty years, the wolves did wonderfully from their perspective. They've reproduced, they've spread out, they've dispersed there now you know, present in states like Washington and Oregon and now recently northern California. There's been some spot in Nevada. They're they're dispersing all over the place. It seemed to between doing pretty well from a biological perspective, from the species perspective, but then you hear all these stories from people, whether it be hunters or livestock producers, who talk about all the negative packs that these wolves have had. Um They talk about decimated wildlife populations, the elk herds destroyed in certain regions. You hear about how they're hammering their calves and their sheep and different things like this. And I'm sure those things were being talked about in ninety six and they're still being talked about in two thousand eighteen. UM. But you've been on the ground. You've been going to check on these scenes. You've had to kill some wolves, You've had to tell some livestock producers this wasn't a wolf. You've you've actually been there, You actually have seen what the impacts have or have not been. So what have those impacts have been in reality? Not the stories and the conspiracy theories, but what has the real impact been. Well, the I S addressed all of the possibilities and being issues in the e I S was if it happened to address human health and safety, pets lives, stock, big game, ungulates, things like that. Um. Since the reintroduction in the lower forty eight States, nobody's been killed by wolves. UM. There's some stories going around. I call them anecdotal um. They need to be documented better if we're to believe them. But it's been only two humans killed in the twenty one century. Both of them occurred north of the border, one in Canada, one in Alaska, where there's sixty wolves estimated to live. UM. To talk about livestock loss, there has been some livestock loss. It's not across the board. Most ranchers have not had to deal with it. Certain individuals have. It's been taken serious. Wolves have been killed and in uh to correct the problems since then too. There's compensation for ranchers to offset some of the costs. AH, but progressive ranchers are taking it seriously and watching their livestock closer. And I think it's essential that people recognize that wolves aren't going to go away, that they can be a threat to livestock. Then you get into this two pronged discussion over private land versus public land. Um, if people I don't mean it in a negative way, but if if private landowners want to come in with napalm and kill every predator on their place, be my guest. I'm not going to fight that individual rights issue on your private property. But I think to be killing native predators, of which wolves are native, on public lands, we got to look at that a lot closer, and that it's just not that simple. UM. Their impact on big game animals like elk. I would have to contradict anyone who said that wolves are having a negative impact on elk overall. Now we can pick certain zones and certain districts in certain parts, UH, say, Idaho, there's some places where it's a habitat problem, always has been. Uh. Northern Idaho had a catastrophic fire back in n that created some spectacular elk habitat, and there were some years that elk hunting was fabulous. I am told it was before my time. Since then, those catastrophic fire areas have grown back and they're not as productive as they used to be. UM. There's other parts of Idaho and pretty much the states of Wyoming and Montana who are seeing tremendous elk herds over management objectives. UM. Montana has too many elk. It's been out there in the newspaper more than once. Hunter excess is the problem. More so in anything, it's not wolves killing elk. It's that the herd of elk have doubled in over twenty years, but the hunters can't get at them because much of the land is being sold in different ownership and all that. So in Idaho I believe set a new white tailed dear harvest record. Uh. And Idaho, Montana, Wyoming all have been having record or near record elk harvests, especially peaking in like round, which tells me two thousand wolves or more on the landscape. We've got good elk herds and good deer herds and hundred success Uh. Some states like Idaho, you know, maybe one out of four hundred successful. In Wyoming it's one out of two hundred successful. So you can't convinced me right now. And I think anybody who's a hunter and it's being honest, uh, we'll have to admit that times are pretty darn good. If you liked that big game and it seems like and tell me if this is true. But I've heard, you know, right after the reintroduction in those areas specifically where wolves have been gone for a long time and now they're back, that at first these prey populations they didn't know that that was a danger yet, so it was easy pickings for the wolves. And so you did see some maybe drastic reductions in those populations outside of Yellowstone and some of those regions, but relatively quickly, I imagine those elk herds started realizing when you see a furry legged, ninety pound dog runna towards you, you go had the other direction real quick. And they started changing where they you know, where they fed, where they betted. They started becoming like elk again, what real elk had been like for thousands and thousands of years beforehand. And now you're seeing a lot of these places you're hearing and seeing about these elk populations rebounding and getting you know, right back up there pretty high levels, maybe not pre wolf levels exactly in some of these regions, but very healthy. That's what I've been hearing, um, is that what's been happening in most of these places that there's been a kind of rebound effect. Pray, dear elka figured out, Okay, yeah, we can adapt to living with wolves. Yeah, and I think most areas of wolves and elkive adapted each other, you know more through a natural uh getting used to one another. Talk outside of Yellowstone. But what we have nowadays, two is that elk are thriving in many parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana because of irrigated pastures, grassland, alfalfa fields, lawns um there's a you know, people are trying to there's people who are of the opinion that all those elk are down in these fields because the wolves won't let them go back to the mountains. But a lot of these elkers don't want to go back very far in mountains because when you've got grazing and forage like they have down here, why would you want to go up there. So that that's one of the issues. UM mentioning Yellowstone being that beautiful laboratory to study wolves. Um. There were about an estimated nineteen thousand elk and Yellowstone at the time of the reintroduction, and that heard diminished quickly over these twenty years down to around you know, between four and five thousand elk. UM. That has been the example by people who are anti wolf. Basically, look what they did to the elk and Yellowstone. Well, you've got a factor in grizzly bears, caribou, you've got a factor in drought, you've got a factor in forage conditions in the park. There was a lot of things at work, including wolves. But for those interested, if they check with scientists in Yellowstone Park, this year report just come out. It's a good report elk from a year agos estimate and counts are up. They're showing an increase now we're talking over seven thousand elk counted. They're on the way up. And what are the wolves done. When the wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone, their population peaked at about a hundred and seventy two wolves for a while. Through no hunting and trapping or predator control in the park, that population has diminished to about one wolves plus or minus now. So the wolf population has plateaued and come back to a sort of balance with the available prey and the prayer on the increase. And that's reflected by what's going on outside the park in many parts of especially Montana, Wyoming. But I know regions of Idaho around this Boise Country going east and going northa here um elk numbers are are doing well, I guess, maintaining and increasing. Do hunters need to worry? There's a lot of people in different parts of the country where wolves are coming into the country again, or there's places like in the Upper Great Lakes where the wolf populations are still listed and they're kind of expanding in places like that, And there's there's some like fear and I feel like lots of times wolves or coyotes are the easy thing to pointed finger at because it's it's big, it's charismatic, there's all this I don't know, cultural stuff, stigma around these animals, and so it's really easy when something's not going well for you as a hunter, or you're not seeing animals or whatever it might be, that is a really easy thing to a it's got to be that I saw one, and since I've been here and i'm we haven't seen the deer, elk or whatever it is. Um, Can you speak to you or experiences with predators and being a hunter yourself, Do we need to be worried about predators? Can we co exist as hunters with predators? How do we do that? How do we think about that? Well, my opinion and from over thirty years experience in the field, it's undoubtable. We can live with predators. It's here's one of the reactions of just like killing coyotes, you know, and the government got involved over a hundred years ago in removing coyotes because they are a problem and their vermin whatever you want to call him, there a nuisance, say kill livestock. Um, coyotes some more you persecute them, actually you benefit them. I mean you're you're trying to kill them off for whatever reason, from retaliation and vengeance to just being practical at their problem. Um, those coyotes react to that. You lower the coyote density. You actually make the surviving coyotes healthier because freeze up some food that their competitors are eating. Um, the females get good nourishment, so they have maybe bigger litters of pups, and because of the available food, the more pups survive. And on a scale with wolves, wolves require two hundred and fifty square miles for a territory, similar things happen with wolves. You go in and you kill them for whatever justification you have. Um, you can break up those wolf packs. You can actually cause them to disperse sooner than they would and you recognize recognizing again whether you're talking foxes, coyotes, wolves, or any species. For the most part, when you empty out an area, create a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, and animals that species outside that area you just cleaned out start moving in. So to me, it's senseless to think somehow that eradicating predators is going to solve the problem. Um. But now if you want to hunt coyotes or wolves recreationally, you can justify that and it's legal. Um. That's the way it is. UM. That's sport, that's recreation. That's called trophy hunting, because I don't think many people take fox and coyotes home and eat them. So UM, as long as state management agencies see this surplus, that we have a viable population of wolves or coyotes or whatever, and they provide very liberal seasons for people to hunt and trap them, I guess that's the way it is, even though many in society don't understand or except that. What have you learned, um, from your experiences with livestock producers or hunters or other parties that have been opposed to predators coming back into the area? Um? Have we have we learned anything that we can apply to how we manage this in the future. So, whether it be managing predator populations or the balance between predator and wildlife and hunters. Well, I guess maybe I should rephrase it. What's your vision for the future. What's the best way to do this better in the future. Well, I guess again, if you're a rancher, Um, do your homework. Recognize if you got wolves in your backyard or wolves moving into the neighborhood, you're gonna have to be more vigilant. I think any businessman, regardless of the business you run, you have to know your risks. UM. And the state managed many agencies have been pretty liberal, as were the federal managers too that when wolves were determined to be a problem, they were removed. But I think more and more as a society, we are also putting the burden on on say the rancher for instance, that since you raise livestock and many of you use public lands in the west as part of your grazing scheme, and um, you're gonna have to be a little more tolerant of them. So we're right at a kind of a stage at this point that we've got to recognize wolves are socially and legally protected and managed. Now they're not going to go away, and and a smart businessman will adapt, and perhaps you're going to have to put a range writer or cowboy out there with them and be more vigilant. Uh. And on a smaller scale, maybe it's you know, fencing flagry ribbon. I mean They're a whole list of these non lethal ways, but I think most of all, it's keeping an eye on your livestock. UM. I worked some colleagues in Canada who are taken care of some pretty large cow calf pair units and keeping predation very low. But it takes work and commitment to do that. UM. I know a lot of people don't accept my suggestions there. UM. Otherwise, UM, you can hunt him and trap them and kill them and persecute them, but long as it's within the contained within the legal hunting, trapping, snaring, and regulated seasons. I think the wolves are when I talk about viability, I think they're pretty much replacing themselves after the killing has happened and they have puffs in the spring, They're pretty much replacing their numbers here from what I see. Yeah, I've heard a lot. There's been a lot of studies done more of the Eastern United States around coyotes and trying to manage them, and a lot of people trying to manage for other wildlife species and understanding the impact the coyotes have on faunds or different things like that, and a lot of times they find that really, unless you do a whole scale eradication via some kind of trapping program at a specific time, you know, just the occasional. You know, some of the guys will say I'll shoot every coyote I see when I'm not hunting because of the killing my fawnds or something. Um. But to your early earlier point, science has shown that doesn't really make any impact at all because they just come right back in their litters increase UM. In many cases, it seems like the smarter way to manage that situation is maybe to a learn to live with this coexistence with another productor species. And then in some areas where you have like private landers and so there's things you can do to improve habitat to help provide a better situation for fawns so that you know that you can do the the the prey dumping kind of I think it overload where there's so many fonds on the landscape at one time and there's good fawning habitat, and then the coyotes might not necessarily kill as many fonds. Those little things that you can do that to learn to to live with predators but still achieve whatever goals you might have as a hunter manager. Different things like that that seemed to be maybe more effective pragmatically than just shooting or persecuting this other animal that you think is competing with you for the animal you want to see or shoot yourself or whatever it might be. Um, when we went to college, you know, we're talked, we talked, We're taught about biological carrying capacity. And that's with the water, habitat food. You know, whether you're talking to ring neck pheasants or coyotes or wolves, there's so much space, so much food, so much water that they require to be at their maximum density. And so that's the biological carrying capacity. Now we've gone to social carrying capacity to manage wolves as an example, we're talking about human tolerance now, Um, absent humans here, I mean absent humans in Idaho, absent humans killing wolves in Idaho. There's not a doubt in my mind that wolves would plateau at a certain number in relationship to the available food base. You know, the deer and the elk, whether you hunted or trapped him or did anything, we're not gonna We're just never going to get there. I don't think as humans because no one is willing to risk it accepted in the in the state agencies who manage them are they look at we have enough wolves, we can kill this many. As long as we stay above this threshold, we can do this. And that's our culture. That's the tradition, you know, with hunting and harvest sting the surplus. That's we're going to keep doing that. But yeah, I just think that it's futile if you think you're controlling them. I mean, all you can do really is reduce them in areas and target problems and deal with that. But going back into my predator control career, there's two concepts. There's corrective control and preventative control. Corrective control is when you have say, two coyotes killing someone sheep, and you go in and you kill those two kyotes. You've corrected the problem, the problems over, you go home and no more work to be done. But preventative control is always going on, which is, if there's a coyote out there and he's alive, he might eat a sheep. So we used to send up the gun ships all winter and shoot every kyote we could shoot wherever we had agreements to fly. And now's still going on in parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and then throw in sport, recreational hunting and trapping of wolves. There is that attempt to socially adjust the carrying capacity downward so that wolves won't be a problem to ranchers. Wolves aren't going to be a problem killing an excessive number of big game animals that hunters want to pursue. So but that's but that's the way the system is working and has worked and probably will continue to. Although there's people out there trying to attack that um, attack that culture or that mentality and try and get everyone to look at wolves and coyotes and they're a social or a family group. You're breaking up a family and you're not letting that family function ecologically like they could if humans didn't interfere. Right, it's funny with wolves. I think it was either you or whoever introduced you earlier today during the seminar, said that wolves are often looked at as either a a devil or a deity or a center saint. I mean, it's it's one thing or the other people worship them as this bigger than anything type of thing, or it's the worst type of evil. These animals are are evil, killing the poor, helpless, dear. They do these like rage killings, or they kill a bunch of animals just out of lust. Um, you hear all these these polarized to oppositities, or on the other side, you hear about these loving families of animals that have special personalities, and we can't, you know, we can't break up the family and daughters and sons. And then they humanize these animals in these different ways. And um, I think there's a middle ground where you can look at these things as as as an animal, a really unique, interesting to be spected and appreciate animal, but also something that that's part of this larger ecosystem that we as humans are now a part of two and we have for a very very long time, we've been a part of that food chain. Humanity has become a giant footprint on the globe, and predators especially are in a world of hurd in a lot of places in the world. And so I enjoy predators. I just I'm not a predator killer anymore. I there was a time in my life when I did that, and now I would rather go out and locate a pack of wolves and set up on a ridge of the spotting scope and watch them and just enjoy them same way seeing a mountain lion run across the road or watching black bears, you know, grazing in the spring up on the grassy slopes. That's where I'm at. And there's a time when, like I say, they're they're legal to hunt and trap or kill predators. As long as it's legal and you've got a tag, go for it. Yeah, but it boils down to individual choices. We have this huge impact, and um, I just pick and choose. I still hunt, and I my wife and I eat elk meat, so that's what I hunt pretty much, not hunting all these other things anymore because two people can only eat so much. Yeah, I, as we've talked about, I've always been fascinated by wolves too. Um. But I also recognized the right to hunt them now and and state level management to maintain sustainable populations. I think that's I think that's great and and worthy, and I understand that the need in places to do some of the things that are done. But at the same time, I've never had this, um, I've never had the desire to kill a wolf. That's one of those animals that I think I would be more like what you just described there were for if I saw, I would just want to watch it, and nothing against someone who does want to hunt that animal, because I've hunted plenty of other animals and I've enjoyed that, and I get it. Um. But Eldo Leopold, you know, the great conservationist and wilderness advocate and game manager and philosopher of sorts. He he had this experience back in the twenties when he was down in New Mexico as a young Force Service UM ranger of sorts. And he at the time believed that the more wolves you killed, the more deer that would be in the landscape. So he thought, he shoot every wolf you see. And he has his famous essay maybe maybe you're familiar with it, UM called thinking like a Mountain, where he he shoots this wolf and he walks up to it, and he said he saw the green fire in his eyes die and he realized that all those preconceived notions he had, he realized that, and he had triggering it. Yeah, he had triggered it. And he realized that he'd been wrong, and something died there. And he realized that something that only now the mountain knew was was lost. Um. He had this kind of tiphany, and then from there he started to look at things a little bit differently. Um, the predators can also be part of this system that we are part of. Two. Um, you have killed wolves, you have been a part that You've You've walked up to a dead wolf. Um, what has that? What's that like? Is there something? Is that a powerful moment even for you having been involved with all these things? Yes, because I've personally, you know, my my capture record is I've caught myself or in since I'm in control of the situation or the person in charge. I've caught three hundred wolves and you might say had them on life support. We check temperature, pulse, respiration, we have drugs, mobilizing drugs, keeping them alive, to put a collar on him. Take some measurements when you do that with three hundred live animals as beautiful as wolves are, UM, I have lost any desire to kill one. So when I see one killed, or I see videos of them being shot or whatever, UM, I can imagine that it's a rush for somebody who hasn't been around that before, and that you know, a wolf is beautiful, I wanted for trophy or a wolf is I mean, he's got big fangs and uh, you know, he's a dangerous animal, and my buddies are going to really look up to be dealing with it. I look at wolves as you know, they're they're the source of our domestic dogs. They're just a big dog, but they're wild and untamed and um so yeah, to me, it's it's a bummer, anticlimactic A job I had to do when I was killing him as a result of livestock damage something like that, and I choose as a whortsman I could not possibly get any enjoyment out of, you know. And I've killed a couple of mountain lions in my life, and I found that anticlimactic. I've killed a few black bear early on when I first got to the West. You know, I got to get a bear, gotta get a lion, got to get a wolf, or whatever the feeling people have when it's something new. Um. But I've been there, done it, and got no joy out of it as a result, So I don't do it anymore. And that's my personal choice. Yeah, And it's it's interesting to your perspective, given like you said, you've kind of been around at all. You've seen both sides of it. Um, it's very frustrating being a predator manager, you know, in predator control, it's very frustrating because I don't want to have to kill the lion or the bear, or the wolf or even the coyote. I don't want to, but so often they persist. I mean, it's like gone it. I was hoping if we did this or that, or maybe the rnswer moved his sheep somewhere. You know, you made some adjustments that the sheep can live, the livestock can live, the wolves or the predators can live. And then there's that persistence that it can't be resolved that way. We can't move away from the problem. The problem just moves with us. So yeah, I've just never enjoyed going out and killing that predator and going home with some satisfaction of Uh, I did solve the problem. That gave me relief. And when you remove a problem, I mean it, let's the community calm down too. You don't want this persistent headline every day, wolves killing cattle, wolves killing cattle. Um. Everybody gets tired of that, and sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet so to speak, no pun intended, and remove the problem. Uh, it's not been fun for me, but it's it's it's been a job that I've chosen to do and accepted the responsibility that goes with it. And uh, sometimes things ain't always fun at the job. Yeah, any job, but I imagine there were times, particularly in your case. UM. So, wolf seasons are open in many areas now, many states across the West, Um, several states, I guess, not so in the Great Lakes. UM. So regardless of what your opinions are though on that, Um, people are killing wolves now, people are killing lots of counties. Predator management is something that's done across the country. UM, in many cases. You know, I think it's, like you said, it's legal, well founded, people enjoy it. It's happening. Um. But you did speak a little bit earlier today about some of the things we can do as hunters that if we're going to go and do these types of things that can help us mitigate some of the risks as far is bad pr with that, because because there is so much, it's so emotionally charged, um, that when one side of this debate sees a dead wolf on Facebook or something, it can turn to a firestorm of of more madness. Um, what would be your your advice to to other hunters as far as how we talk about wolves or how we um post pictures, whether it be of dead wolves or talking about hunting or anything like that. How do we handle our pr when it comes to predators as hunters better. Well, my individual opinion on this, and I guess others would look at it from my walt perspectives. But if you're a hunter and you hate what you're hunting, um, you don't represent me. There's no animal I've ever killed because I hated it, whether it was a mouse or a pheasant or a wolf, um as you huted to the It just it makes me angry when I see some guy who's legally shouted wolf and he puts a bear hug on it and he tries to hold it up. And you know, with a little camera angle, you can make wolves look gigantic, you can make antlers look enormous, you can make fish look unbelievable. Um, if you want to take that picture, be my guest, take it home, put it in your album book. I don't want to see it. I mean there was a time and I was I'm as guilty as an next when when I was younger. You know, you got your first whatever, your first pheasants, your first rabbit, your first geese. Sure you got pictures and you took pictures and your friends you carried them around, showed them to each other. But that was on a pretty small scale at you know, in the home or community area. But people putting these photos of them holding their dead whatever going on Facebook and public media, that can go viral. I mean, you're doing hunters no favor at all. You're doing trapping no favor. A lot of people say, well, Carter, if you're a trapper, you ought to be representing trappers. I tell trappers count your blessings that trapping is even legal, and if you enjoy trapping and the state permits it, be my guest. But if you wonder why everybody's down on you as a trapper or a hunter, when you look at the display of death being shoved in people's face, nobody wants to see that um And I know that no matter how much I plead, it's not going to change. So if you hate wolves and you want to put your gory pictures of the wolves that you shot, the latest one right now is somebody with an a r fIF in Alaska that mowed down ten wolves on a snowmobile. Nonetheless. Two, I mean I have no respect whatsoever for somebody does that go out there on the ground, take your little single shot weapon, one shot, let's see you get ten wolves. And uh, I really don't care if you do or not. I'm not interested, and neither is the majority of the world I think is sick of carnage and sick of death. So I think hunters that want to perpetuate this sport, this hobby, this privilege have to really work at policing, hunting, trying to get people. Two. I guess just be ethical. You can. You can go out and do this with respect for what you kill, and you can do it in the private see of the field where you take it. Uh. I don't hauld things home on the hood of my truck. I mean, we we kill a deer and elk, we cut it up in the field, we put it in we call them game bags, wrap them up to keep the insects and dirt off of them, and we put it in our vehicle and we transported home. And we don't advertise to the whole world and every town we drive through the look at me, look what I killed. And I think that's what it's about. If you want to take pictures and show them to your family and your friends and your relatives, perfectly fine. I don't want to see him unless you're a friend of mine and I I want to see it, and you want to offer that opportunity for me to view it. Yeah, that that that's how I look at it. It's a big, tall order because, uh, we've just got so many people involved in hunting, and we all have different values and attitudes and we all react differently. It definitely is a tricky topic. And it's one of those things where when this imagery, especially imagery gets out there online, that when when seen by someone who doesn't have the context of why we do what we do or how we do what we do, when they just see this image, especially if it's not a particular respectful image, um yeah, it can be seen and be really upsetting the people and cause cause harm to the overall cunning community in a lot of ways. Where and I talked to us all this time, but we live in a democracy where we are not the majority, and um, if we want to continue what we're doing, we just need to be mindful of that and careful about that. In the end, it may result and nobody's fault but our own. If we want to maintain the privilege to be hunters, and yeah, falls back on our responsibility to promote it in a positive image. If there can be one mm hm and you know one of my when it's looping back to predators to UM. When I think about this, the the importance of hunters representing themselves well to the general public because we need their essentially their approval to continue what we're doing in the future. UM, to maintain that privilege. Part of our big claim to legitimacy as hunters very often is that we are great conservationists. We are stewards of the land of the wild life. We care about these animals. UM. We do so much to to help keep these animals and sustainable populations and and whatnot. But when you start being selective about what animals you care about, and you say, oh, yeah, I'm like great conservations, I care about deer and l can do this. But when it comes to wolves, shoot, shovel and shut up, get rid of those things. When you start seeing that happen, I think we lose all credibility to being conservationist if you start just being selected, I only care about the animals I want to shoot myself. UM. So I think if even if you don't like wolves, even if you're not interested in them in any way, even if you view them as competition for your resource, that's the way you want to see it. Whatever. But just from a pragmatic standpoint, if you want to be able to continue to hunt, you got to walk the walk of of being a real responsible hunter and conservationoust which which means we need to show respect to all the animals and the landscape and maintaining a true balanced natural ecosystem includes wolves and coyotes and bears and um, people can see rights of the b s. If if we're not being true to that, in my opinion, well, these predators and prey go together. I mean, it's it's the beginning of time. There's specific predators who prey on certain prey species, and I look at that. It's absolutely I mean, when I go out to a marsh, if I see a maink attack a muskrat, I'm thinking that's the way it's supposed to work. Um. And you just take in our backyard, we feed birds all winter, and we have sharp shinn and Cooper's hawks come through our yard every day all winter and kill a junco or kill a finch. We say, that's the way it works, and there's always more juncos and more finches next winter, so they replace themselves. And those hawks have every right to exist and to eat those prey. And I hear so many humans saying, well, I just ain't right. You know the way the way the wolves kill or the way the hawks kill. Well, look in the mirror, humans, you're either killing your food or someone's killing it for you. Uh. And it ain't pretty either, no matter how you want to paint it. So I, as I have gotten older, I am careful not to judge what goes on out in nature. It's kill or be killed. This is pretty much how it works. And the humans were just one species, and I don't look at us as superior to these other species. Now there's others who would say, well, Carter, you're dead, dear dead, wrong. And I've had a lot of people tell me, look, if an elk needs killing, I'll kill it, And sorry, I don't accept that at all. And there's people who say, well, the wolves are killing my elk and they're killing my dear. And so I've said that to people in the situation it's right. I said, well, you know, I have a deer and elk tag in my billfold this year, and they can have my dear in my elk if we're gonna add this possession. You know that there ours. They're not ours. We're just privilege some of us to be able to hunt the surplus us and uh get the opportunity to take some really good quality organic meat home with us to eat. But I don't look at us as privileged over any more than those predators out there that are doing what they do. I Uh, I really appreciate your perspective on all of this. It's it's really interesting. I think the things you've been involved with give you just give you a context that I think a lot of people don't have. The I mean, I can, I can say whatever I want about wolves from what I've read or seen, but I have no on the ground experience like that, And so many people that like to debate about wolves have no real on the ground context with predators in many cases. Um, but but someone in your shoes, who's who's been there, who's talked to all sides of this. UM, who's who's come at this as a predator manager at one point in your life as a hunter, as someone who enjoys wildlife. UM, it's just um, it's fascinating, it's interesting. I appreciate you speaking up about these things, give your opinion. I think, UM, we need to hear all sorts of different things like this, and uh, it's much appreciated. So thank yous for taking the time to to talk with us about it. Car Well, I feel privileged getting the opportunity to talk to you for a while about this. Never hesitate to share my opinions with people that want to listen. And that is a rap on our Wolves and Coyotes and Hunters podcast. Hopefully you found this one as interesting as I thought it was. I appreciate you sticking around hearing it out, listening to these different ideas, ways of thinking about predators and how we relate to them as hunters. UM. A couple of book recommendations for you. Number one, if you enjoyed hearing what Carter had to say, he has two very interesting books out. One is called Wolfer. I've read that. I've found that very interesting. It goes into detail of his whole history within this issue. And then his more recent book is called wolf Land. Also, um a book related to coyotes is called Coyote America by Dan Flores, and that is a really interesting book too. And then finally, if you want to read Thinking Like a Mountain and other essays by Aldo Leopold, I can't recommend enough his book A Sand County Almanac. So give those ones a read. I think you'll find something interesting and they're related to this entire topic that we talked about. Now, to wrap it up, I just want to thank our partners who helped make this possible. Big Things to Sick a Gear Yetie Cooler's, Matthew's Archery, may Haven Optics, White Tail Institute of North America, Trophy Ridge and hunter A Maps. And finally, thank you all for listening. I appreciate you coming at this episode with an open mind. I appreciate your comments and your opinions and their thoughts. I'm always interested in hearing what you think about this stuff. So thanks for listening, thanks for sharing your feedback, and until next time, stay wired to hunt