Ep. 220: An Elk-Hunting Nudist Checks the Breeze

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
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(00:29):
Nor where you stand with on X. You know we
had a guy. We had a guy right in that
He's a He's a nudist. You know, do I know
what a new this is? My kids they were wondering
what nudists where and I had to explain it to him. Um,
how much time do you have to spend in the

(00:50):
nude to be a nudist? That's what I don't understand,
the percentage of the day. That's why when I ran,
when I was talking to my kids, I left it
to be that a nudist, Um, I kind of let
it be that, like a nudist would be someone who
would sort of go out of their way to do
their chosen activities in a place that would allow them
to do them nude like that was sort of where

(01:13):
I drew it is nude when possible. I just looked
it up. I had watched the intro of a nudist documentary.
That's as far as I got. That makes me, and
that makes me largely a nudist. No, no, because you'd
be nude right now. No, I'd get in all kinds

(01:35):
of trouble, like from a like an HR type thing.
Phil doesn't need to Phil, Phil would complain. Probably the
Oxford Dictionary just defines it as a person who does
not wear any clothes because they believe this is more
natural and healthy. Yeah, you know, I'm not. I'm not
a nudist, but um, we got a talk about with

(01:57):
our kids. I was explained to them that there is
a there's a thing that happens like because like if
they were kind of one night, why do they wear pajamas?
I'm gonna get to this nudie that rode in, But
they're talking about, like why do we wear pajamas? And
I said that people tend to begin life in pajamas
and they end life in pajamas. But then there's a long,

(02:20):
long window in the middle when you don't wear pajamas.
I find I think that's accurate, Like you spend decades
not in pajamas. I don't know like when it ends
and begins, but you you start and end in pjs. Yeah,
if I wear him now, it's more like to have
Sunday brunch or something, you know, at the house. Yeah,

(02:41):
I can't. I don't even I haven't owned a pair
of pajamas, probably since I would got rid of my
Superman pajamas. The reason I'm right about this guy's he
l counts in the nude. He says, he's. He says,
I've une with trad bows, compound bows, rifles. Being nude
is the most difficult obstacle i'veter on it myself. He

(03:02):
checked into it. Says his nudity is completely legal where
he hunts um. He says, you have to be very
careful about where you pick. He leaves his shoes on.
He says he's been a nudist for many years, and
he says one of the main things that you wouldn't
think about is just your awareness of wind direction mm

(03:24):
hmm is enhanced. You got a lot of receptors. He says.
It's it's very free, and he says you pick your
routes very carefully. Has he had any kills in the nude?
I don't think so. He's got a nudist friend who
also hunts different state, also hunts naked. I wonder if

(03:47):
they have to wear hunter orange during a modern firearm season.
That's when you get that, you get that body paint. Man,
if that's all they wear, Uh, ladies and Gentlemanell's Bart,
George Bart, how's it going going. Well, I'm gonna you know,
we've got a couple of days to cover before we
start talking about your work, your recent work. But so
all the caribou. Last time we had you on, we

(04:09):
talked about Mountain cariboo that are in the Lower Fort
which had at the time had like shrank srank, shrank,
shrank until there was kind of a couple in Idaho. Yeah,
that's been They are gone, like gone gone. We're pretty
sure they're gone, gone, gone. Yeah. Um, we did get

(04:32):
a little surprised. Oh, I can't even remember when it was.
It's been eighteen months or so ago. A couple of
caribou turned up in northern Montana. Um, just a fleeting glimpse,
you know, they passed through, you know, photographs they were
able to document them and then never saw them again.

(04:52):
Where do you think they came from? Probably out of
the purse cells. But nobody really knows. Um. So that's
a lot ask cariboo documented in the lower forty eight
and they're actually in Montana. What year was that, I said,
it's about eighteen months ago. I think it is right
when all the self right when the selker occurred was
just yeah, I remember seeing that they had turned up there,
and I didn't I never really heard what the story was.

(05:14):
Nobody knows the story. They there's no conclusion to that story.
They just disappeared. What was the nail on the coffin
for the Selkirk. We're not exactly sure they were, you know,
there's I think when we talked, there was what a
dozen caribou left in that herd, and we were putting
together a big project to do a maternal pen and
put together a whole bunch of pretty heavy handed management actions.

(05:38):
And that march, when we were about to really get
going with captures and stuff like that, we started our
census and we only found three cows. Um obviously none
of them were pregnant, so that everything got put on hold.
We completed our senses, only found the three. We found

(06:00):
three over in the purcels. I think two of them
were bulls. So we decided we'd better get those animals together,
and then moved them all north up to revel Stoke
and put them in the maternal pin that they have
in place up there. Um, put collars on them obviously,
and then let Actually it was a kind of a

(06:22):
stroke of luck. One of the resident animals from the
revel Stoke area dropped down close to the penning site
about the time they were being placed, and they captured
her and put her in the pen to kind of
help them acclimate or whatever. Hopefully the mother up to her,
and that did work. They followed her back up to
the top and as far as we know right now,
they're alive and doing well. And that heard m hm.

(06:47):
So the last of the Selkirk Mountains don't live in
the last the Selkirk Caribou don't really live in the
Selkirks anymore. They're up north, man, I invite you. What
was the name of that episode, bart and we covered
this whole thing. I don't know it was. We always
give them qute, clever names that are hard to remember. Yeah,
I think it was number forty three, but I'm not sure. Um,

(07:10):
a guy at a guy that guy know that works
at Old Town Canoes sent me this article about a dude,
a hunter who became the first World Slam recipient across
four categories. So everyone knows, um, everyone knows that I
happened to be a turkey super slam holder now almost

(07:34):
two times super Slam holder. What what? What? What? I what?
What that is? Is I have gotten? There's there's there's
this notion that there are five subspecies of wild turkeys
and and they have in different places, you know, and
I've gotten them all and once I get another Florida
one I'll have I'll be a two time super slam holder.
A world Slam holder is a fellow who gets all

(07:57):
five of the you know, all five of our wild turkeys,
and then it goes down to get this all five
subspecies of our just you know, American wild turkey, and
then you go down to Central America or you know,
bleeze southern Yucatan area and you get yourself what's called
an oscillated turkey, which is a whole different species of turkey.

(08:20):
At the point you get an oscillated turkey, you become
a world Slam holder. And there's an article about this dude.
What's really funny as he's standing there doing a grip
and grin with a turkey, and it described the caption
says that it's a deceased so he's holding his turkey,
says that he poses with a deceased oscillated turkey. Deceased,

(08:43):
but so the dude, So this is what the dude did. Though,
this is kind of like I can't tell. I can't
tell if I think this is the greatest or what thing.
So he's done the world slam, So all five North Americans,
you know, all all five American wild turkey subspecies, and
then the oscillated turkey he's got four times. He's done
it with a bow, a crossbow, a modern firearm, and

(09:08):
a muzzle loader. So he's he's like a four time
for like, I don't know, at what point you're hunting
turkeys and at what point you're just sort of checking
things off a list. I don't know. I think he's
still hunting turkeys. I mean he's out there having fun,
still chasing gobblers every time, just choosing a different different fires.

(09:28):
I saw it wasn't a gripping. Granted was a picture
of a dead turkey today on Instagram, and uh, it
was with a pistol shotgun, and I was like, I
could get like that, you know, because it's obviously shorter range,
you know, easy to pack around. Check the dude a
decade to get it done. M So that's what I

(09:48):
wish I was better at math six times four four
twenty four. So he's getting two point four turkeys per
year to work towards the That makes it seem very achievable. Yeah,
not crazy heard on the pocket book either, if you
think of it that way. Mike Petrasca, congrats, Mike. That's good.

(10:12):
When I retire, man, I'm gonna be hot on that
dude's heels. Um. Oh, you know, this is the last
thing I'm gonna bring up and the this is the
last part of the last installment of our I shouldn't
say are the Yeah, the ongoing story of like our
flip flops appropriate footwear. This has been beaten to death,

(10:33):
but you got room from one last Sure, you never
know he might learn something. So dude, he's out like
supposedly scouting for turkeys, and which he says, comes down
to sit in the back of a drinking beer, listening
for gobbles at night and his dog. He doesn't put
the he doesn't put an e collar on his dog,

(10:54):
and his dog just sized to get up and take
off and heads out into a swamp. He he's got
his flip flops on. So the dog goes off in
the swamp and it's like knee deep muck. And because
he has his flip flops on, he can't go in
there after it, but his body he's got sneakers on,
goes in there after it. The go out the flip flops,
takes his flip flops off so he can run and

(11:15):
runs around on the road and in so doing encounters
the neighbor and scores a hunting permission on the neighbor's place.
So it's sort of like an inadvertent uh af fect.
You were in flip flops, Scalel's got him on right
now and inverted upside to to run around flip flops.

(11:41):
Uh oh, companies, I want to talk about two real
quick back when when people used to just freely fly
around the country on um airplanes back in the long
long ago. Yeah, the boy, you just get on an
airplane and just go where the hell you felt like,
no mask, nothing, I travel Yanni. I keep wanting to
bring this up with Yannie. I realized Yanni is a

(12:04):
Yanni's a he's like a chatter, like you like to
chit chat with your seatmates, m more so than than
I'm comfortable doing, more so than you, that's for sure.
And uh, I keep my I never like brought this
up with you life, like, yeah, that's talking with someone.

(12:26):
They're talking behind me. I can hear him talking, and yeah,
he's telling them all about just different stuff and what
he's coming from doing. And Yannie gets to talking about
game meat, wild game meating. I laughed about this because
the woman he's sitting to, sitting next to you, tries
to up him, and I even wrote it down in
my nose and she told him my favorite meat of

(12:46):
all time is kangaroo. Yeah. I remember that too, because
I didn't realize you're sitting in front of me until
much later in the flight. But I remember when she
said that. I said, is that right? And I opened
my book and she's like, don't what you be telling
me about this wild game? You know? I also heard this,

(13:09):
do it? Like this interesting story on an airplane not
long ago, one of my final flights, and the guy
was it was like we were on a plane there's
a bunch of dudes going down to We're going home
from the Midge, Minnesota, And there was a bunch of
Minnesota dudes going down to watch their team do spring
training in Florida, which that that is a trip I

(13:31):
cannot I cannot imagine. Did you know that people did
this prior to that? No, No, they're real excited. They're
traveling down to watch people practice playing baseball in Florida.
But he was observing to someone how the area where
their Minnesota team carries on this activity that he was

(13:54):
talking about how it got built up over the years,
and he was saying, how you used to be when
you went down there, it was all cows and now
it's all buildings. And I started thinking about that. Um,
remember the old cows, not condos, the bumber stick are. Yeah,

(14:14):
you still see a few around this town. I never
think of that like applied to Florida, But like that,
the cattle operations replaced by just buildings. I look at
like every day, I look friendly when I look at cows.
I think I feel like more affection toward than normal. Um.

(14:35):
Over time, So Bart, what's going on? Man? What else
has happening? We got a bunch of stuff to talk
about about your mountain lion, crazy mountain lion projects. Yeah,
that's been the highlight of my spring. The you know,
the COVID stuff is everything kind of weird right now
at work, But are you able to get out and
do your work still? Kind of Uh, not as much

(14:57):
as I'd like. I'm really working like two or three
days a week. We don't have childcare available, so my
wife and I are kind of fighting over who gets
to go to work and who stays home with kids.
Got both both of us are supposed to be doing
our jobs. But we do have callers out working, but
we're still generating quite a bit of data. Like you

(15:17):
have you have collars on how many mountain lions. We
have five callers out right now. But so these these
collars are on a like a five week rotation, So
I really don't want more than about four or five
because we have to see every one of these cats
every week, and that's quite a bit of work, you know,
capturing five cats a week. Oh man, you gotta go.
You gotta go catch the cat and mess with it

(15:38):
every week to put a new collar on it. We
don't have to put a new collar on it that
once it's collared, though, we revisit that cat once a
week tree it, basically approach it and tree it to
do what just to grab that data point. So we're
measuring the distance. I can get into the details now
if you if you want to get a little far
ahead of yourself, am I okay? But but here's no,

(15:58):
I'm not getting into the details of what you doing yet.
I'm just trying to understand, uh, in today's day, in
this day and age, what like I thought, you just
put them on it and then you just sit back
and reap the information the caller and faller research. No,
we're not doing that. This is pretty hands on as

(16:18):
far as big cat research goes. So we're looking at
these cats every week and we are then measuring their
response to that. Okay, so let's let's let's let's back up.
Let's yeah, we we can't. We can't start there. Okay,
you tell me where to start, Well, I can tell
you about the project. Project. So the reason the project
is occurring because UM, we're seeing lots of depredations. I'm

(16:41):
seeing lots of cats hanging around um X urban you know,
urban interface areas. UM depredations depredations on what typically small
livestock and pets. Typically the way those work, um, a
cat kills whatever X number of sheep or a couple
of llamas or whatever eats its phil cashes the carcass

(17:06):
you know, near the pasture usually and then just lays around,
comes back and feeds that night. By the time we
get the call, usually it's a day or two. Um.
And we started noticing that the cats are right there,
Like we would turn the dogs loose from the carcass
and they'd have the cat caught, and like thirty seconds

(17:27):
sometimes cataby laying two yards away, bedded someplace near the carcass, um,
totally not concerned about us pulling in with the pickups
and our voices and the dogs making a racket on
the box and barking and everything else that's going on. Um.
So it kind of got me wondering, like, what's it take.

(17:49):
Why are these cats not concerned about all of this
goings on that's happening so close to them? Why aren't
they running away from all that noise? And then you know,
the next question was out, how close can we it
to these cats if we don't know it, how close
are we walking up to these cats and and maybe
never knowing it. Um. They got a couple of questions,

(18:09):
all right when they killed someone's dog, Like, is a
dog small enough where they don't kind of like eat
some and stash it and then come back and feed
on it some more. Or do you see him doing
that with house dogs? Well, it depends on the size
of the dog. A small dog they'll just pick up
and walk off with. Oftentimes we don't find, you know,

(18:31):
a carcass cashed away if it's a docks in or something.
We have found big dogs. We had a like a
pit bull that was killed and mostly eaten, and that
cat hung around on that carcass for a couple of
days eating it before we caught him. And that was
some dude's dog. Yeah, it's actually a service dog dog. Yeah.

(18:52):
They let it out to pee and the middle of
the night and the cat was just laying there waiting
and grabbed it and packed it up the hill a
few hundred yards and eight him. Obviously, a cat like
that I wouldn't want in my study. I get a
little alley about running dog killers. Um, because we're running
them with dogs. I don't want one of my hounds
to get out in front and encounter a bad cat

(19:14):
like that. Uh, and then tell me where this is
kind of happening where you're doing your work, just so
people understand. Like where we are on the map, we're
up in northeast Washington, So Spokane, Washington is where I live,
north all the way to Canada and then out towards
like Lake Roosevelt, Lincoln County. Um, so we have a
five county area that we're kind of working in. Pretty rural, Yeah,

(19:38):
pretty rural. We have cats close to town. Um had
a cat callar like ten minutes away from my house
and like I said, I'm right on the north side
of Spokane. Um. You know you could see the city
from where that cat lived. We have another one right
now that's working over by like Mount Spokane, Ski area
between there in the city. So rural but not remote.

(20:01):
Definitely that kind of wildland urban interface, you know, ex
urban however you want to describe it. A lot of
white tails to write, lots of white tails, lots of
edge habitat, a lot of turkeys there. Um. But yeah,
just broken landscape, a lot of small landowners. Ten and
twenty acre parcels are very common. When you say Uh,

(20:24):
dog killers. Have you found like habitual dog eating cats,
like cats that have kind of started to specialize on
I don't think that they have started to specialize on
hunting and you know, preying on dogs. But I think
cats do start to figure things out once they work.

(20:45):
And it might have been with a coyote or something,
but some sometimes I think those cats do figure out
that they can turn and fight a single dog and
and pretty easily take care of that problem. Gotcha. Uh
do you have Do you see where they kill many
lions or lamas, because that's the thing off. I was
a mountain lionman. I wouldn't eat anything but lamas. When

(21:05):
they get them, do they give them? They just twist
that neck. Oh yeah, they grabbed that big long neck anywhere.
I think it's probably works with them. Uh. We see
a lot of lamas, Yeah, a lot of alpacas, to
which I guess are slightly smaller than a full sized lama.
We had one cat it was a big, young tom

(21:26):
hundred and sixty pound tom cat and he's only like
three years old, right outside of Spokane. That killed fourteen
alpacas over over the course of the sweaters. You could
make with that and they were. It was a strange
one because a cat must have spent quite a bit
of time there. He had moved between three different pastures

(21:47):
to kill all of these alpacas a period of time
to take him to kill all those alpacas, I think
just overnight. But it was like a battle scene. There's
just carcasses everywhere. It was awful. He knows how uh
surplus like there's people that, Um, there's depending on how
you feel about predators, right, depends on whether you're that

(22:10):
whether you embrace or try to deny the thing of
surplus killing. Yeah, there's it's well documented. Um with livestock,
we see, I would venture your guests. More than half
of our depredations right now are multiple animals. What does
it like? What do you think? I know, you don't
know what he's thinking, But what is he thinking when

(22:31):
he wants to when he goes in and kills fourteen
al pack Because it's just that he's wired, you know,
like it's opportunity and he can't really picture his future
food needs or is he like this is a hoot,
this is great fun. Yeah, I mean it doesn't make
sense for him, right, Like I knew that if I Yeah,
I would look at that as a savings account if

(22:52):
I was a lion and just come back when I
was hungry, but rather than kill them all at once. Um, yeah,
I don't know what he's thinking. I think it's just irresistible.
I think all those animals running around in a frenzy,
and they're sort of in a you know, frenzy themselves,
and I don't think they can help themselves at that point.
How does he how is he killing the alpaca? Is
typically bites to the neck and head, not typically almost

(23:15):
every single time bites to the neck and head. Was
the owner of the alpac is pretty distraught? Yeah? They
were distraught? My brother, he would my brother would. I
can't imagine he'd be catatonic man if he came out
and all of his lamas are dead. Yeah, well there.
I mean, there's a financial value, right, But the bigger
thing is a lot of these animals they have a

(23:37):
lot more value than just the finances. There are a
lot of these people count on their goats and their
sheep for meat or for four h show animals, for
their kids and other things. Most of our depredations aren't
on big like whatever corporate ranches, or something. These are
like ten acre places with a couple of animals, and

(23:58):
you know that they used to feed their family or
do whatever with so yeah, typically the landowner is pretty
upset about it. How do people the people that lose
their dog, do they tend to be that this is
like I'm just asking for a girl's generalization here. Do
people to lose their dog tend to be circumspect and
and sort of be like, well, he's just that lions

(24:19):
just trying to make a living, and you know, I
can't really blame them. Are they like do they want blood?
They want its head on a on a spike, like
what's there? General, most of the time, if it's a dog,
like you know, particularly a pet dog, not a working dog,
people are pretty fired up. They want that cat dead.

(24:40):
That's been our experience we have. You know, that's the
other issue. When they kill dogs. It's hard for us
because you know, if they kill a goat, most people,
you know, they understand what we're doing and you know
that we're going to catch this cat and probably kill it.
So they'll let us leave that goat tied out. You know,
we'll tie it to a tree, put it. You know,

(25:00):
can't trail camera on. It will come back the next morning,
and if that cat's hit it, we'll go catch it
and kill it. It's hard to talk somebody into letting
us do that with their dogs. Yeah, they don't want
their dog bees as bait and I I understand that. Um,
I would be that way too. So yeah, dogs are
a little different than small livestock. Typically, you gotta wonder
if a cat starts out with a llama or an

(25:23):
alpaca as pray species, if that cat tries to move
on to something else, it has a very steep learning
curve ahead of it due to the margin of error
for the length and size of the neck. Oh yeah,
like an alpaca and a little teeny enclosure. Yeah, I
got kill it with my teeth, you know, I just

(25:44):
gotta get it in the neck. Now, move over to
a badger that has I don't know, I don't think
that there are very many lines that get that opportunity enough. Um,
you know, if they kill an alpaca, typically we have
to respond pretty quickly. I say we, it's really the

(26:06):
w DFW enforcement that responds, um. And then you guys
met Bruce. Bruce does a lot of those I help
with as many as I can, and we go out
and help enforcement take care of that cat. And can
you guys do anything with with the carcass at that point?
Do you guys? Not? Really? Um? Unfortunately, most of those animals.

(26:30):
Sometimes if the landowner has a tag um or once
a cat, sometimes they can get it um if they
request that animal. But typically no, we've had a handful
of them donated to the tribes. Um. You know, the
tribes will make use of that cat and the meat
and the hide and the bones and different things. What

(26:51):
do you do with them? Just burn them up? Yeah?
They just go in the dump with the road killed
deer and everything else. And people don't fish them out
of the dump. Well maybe they do. I don't. I
wouldn't else they did. I don't know, man, I don't
want to see who this was. But a good friend
of mine, he um. When he was in college, he
was working on these nets surveys, these fish surveys where

(27:11):
they go out and set nets uh in lakes and
what they were supposed to do is they're not supposed
to use the fish. They had to just dump the
fish because they put it put you put out gil
nets for surveys and he would. He would. They'd go
out in the work truck and dump the fish. He'd
come home, get his regular vehicle, wait an hour and
go back and get the fish, and then take the

(27:33):
fish back home and flame him and freeze him. Couldn't
bring himself to dump fils fish. What kind of fish
were we talking about? He he liked it, he was
he was kind of a white fish specialists. He'd like
to go get the white fish out of there with
other stuff too. Yeah, his initials were m d and
he had a thirty thirty, so we called him m

(27:53):
d Ye. You had a point. Yeah, you were going
to say something Yanni's take. Just stroking his beard. Yeah,
because again it's it's not something I'm used to. Its
found a new thing on space. Um No, I don't
think I did. Just having a glance over even you'd
happened to be glancing this drect. No, you like I

(28:15):
thought you had, like think you started to say maybe that,
Maybe he didn't. I spoke to on the disposal side
of things. I spoke to Montana game warden, longtime game warden,
and somebody in his area hit a abnormally large black
bear and killed it, and he went to his normal

(28:37):
disposal site, which was a sharp turn on the highway,
um where he'd give critters that hev ho because he
didn't he couldn't stomach taking them to a dump. He
thought it was too disrespectful to take animals just throw
them in with all the plastics and ship like that. Yeah. Um,

(28:58):
but he did. And he said, he said, his physics
were a little off on just how big this bear was.
And uh so he slit it out of the back
of the truck. Down mountain it went, and he drove off.
And the next day he got from the town police department,

(29:20):
he got a phone call saying, hey, we have a
very large black bear that must have rolled off the
mountain above town that is now on the bike path.
It did the whole hill. It did the whole hill.
Remember that very that chainsaw commercials like that, Like some
dude coming down the switchbacks and his chainsaw rolls out

(29:41):
the back of his truck and eventually like finaggles his
way down all the switchbacks and there's a sauce landing
in a mud puddles, still running. Yes, is it running? No,
it was not running. He picks up and starts with
one crank. No, okay, so here you are. You got

(30:05):
a dead alpaca tied to a tree mark. Yeah about it.
So when we show up show up the next morning.
Typically the cat comes back and feeds overnight. Um, we
check trail camera if we have one out. If we don't,
we just walked dogs over to the to the alpaca
and h turn loose from that spot. And it's kind

(30:28):
of you know, without snow, it's typically just up to
the dogs to figure out the end track and the
out track, which way the cat came from and went.
But what we're seeing is these cats are just laying
around pretty close to us the whole just listening. Um.
And we're not sneaking around out there. We're at a house,
we're at a farm with the dog box in the
back of the truck and yapping dogs and people talking

(30:48):
at normal voices, and um, it was shocking how close
the cats would be to us. Sometimes we would hear
there were times where we heard the jump race where
the dogs ran into the cat while he was just
laying around in a bed listening to this whole racket
that we were making. But and is that would that
not be like when you could you'd like to run

(31:10):
lions as the hell of a start to a sentence, Listen,
you like to run lions out in the very remote
wilderness areas too down and then right? Is that not
the same though? They're like when you find if you
find where he just killed elk Um, is he more
inclined to as you approach scoot out? Like? Is this
something that's peculiar? Is this a behavior that you were

(31:30):
curious about because you felt that it was counter to
what you'd see in other areas or aren't you factoring
in the proximity to to to the proximity to a
suburb people. Does that make any sense? That was a
bad sense? If I think I can clarify. I think
what you're saying is that you were oblivious to it, right,
And you were only realizing this because some of those

(31:52):
cats were collared. We were on the well, no, we were.
We realized that when the dogs would jump that cat
so close to us. But you got me wondering, like,
what would it take for this cat to be afraid
of people like you don't obviously, we don't want cats
hanging out two feet from people's houses, laying around in

(32:13):
the brush listening to people listening to engines and dogs
bark and whatever else that goes on to the house
or a farm. So is that normal cat behavior or
is that some level of habituation? I got you, I
got you, all right. That kind of answers my stupid,
my not well articulated question of meaning. Uh, are you

(32:34):
curious about um? Is that just like ambivalence to human
presence a factor of just exposure to humans? Or do
you think it might be innate and cats? But you're
gonna find You're gonna probably explain how you're going to
find that out, Well, we hope. So whether or not
we find out if it's just normal cat behavior that's

(32:55):
innate two cats, or or if it's a learned behavior.
I don't know if we'll pin that down necessarily, but
we are going to know whether or not we can
change that behavior and and modify the way they respond
after being chased around by dogs and and yelled at
by people in different things. You guys are in Montana,

(33:17):
you know where they've chased cats around. I'm sure any
cat that gets within Bozeman city limits probably has some
eyes on it pretty fast. If there's snow, especially, there's
a lot of there's an active community of hound hunters
there that are going to go chase that cat and
get a look at it. They probably won't kill it,
particularly if it's a female. But um, those cats, they

(33:37):
get looked at a lot, they get chased around, harassed
by hound hunters. Washington doesn't have that. We're chasing cats
that have very very likely never been pursued by a
dog we're chasing. We're chasing cats that have probably never
had a negative interaction with a person at all. So, um,
that's another one of the questions, because it's how it's

(34:01):
been how many years since they banned Uh, it's been
how many years since they banned lion hunting with dogs
in Washington? Over twenty now. I think they've banned it
in ninety six, remember, so long enough ago. There's no
cat living today that remembers those times. Yeah, yeah, any
of those any cat that was legally pursued, And um,

(34:21):
you know, I say that because they're I don't know
if people are out bootlegging around or chasing cats. That
used to be a problem. Right after the right after
they made it illegal, there was still a lot of
hound hunters around and they were pretty upset about it,
and I think that probably happened more than um. The
hound hunting ranks in Washington now are pretty slim. There's
not a lot of people that still keep dogs because
the opportunities are really tough. Okay, so you get curious

(34:46):
about this, like why do these cats just not care?
What's your next step? Well, we started kind of think
about ways to protect you know, the farms and pets
and small livestock that we kind of suspect that are
going to get picked off by cats. And a lot
of times, like real, a real common narrative when we

(35:06):
showed up at the site of a depredation would be
this landowner that would say, you know, oh yeah, such
and such saw this cat a couple of days ago,
and my kids saw it when he was walking to
the bus yesterday, and you know, it's been around um,
but nobody. There's no method to track those cats down
and do anything about them. They're just sightings, right, And
it's kind of a meaningless metric. So the state wasn't

(35:30):
really responding to a sighting because that's just a cat
being a cat until it actually does something. There's no
real reason for them to send somebody out to chase
it and get a look at it. So I kind
of got to thinking like, all right, well, if that
cat's hanging around this farm for a couple of days
and you know, showing up on whatever porch or something
like that, that's probably going to cause a problem sooner

(35:51):
or later. It's obviously showing that it's not that concerned
about people and noise and all the things that we
have going on on a farm. So the project then
kind of got started, like, all right, so when these
cats show up and they're being cited, I want to
know about it, and I want to come out and
chase them and see if they come back to that spot. Um.
So initially it was a little bit of a geographic thing,

(36:12):
but really it's a stretch to think that that cat
is going to make a connection between hanging around a
farm and then all of a sudden, you know, twelve
hours later, here comes these dogs and pop it up
a tree, and then here comes these people yelling at
it and stressing it out. Um, it's a stretch for
the cat to make that connection back to that original
sighting that might have been the previous day. So it
really became more of a behavior study. How does this

(36:35):
cat respond over time if we do this, um, you know,
how does it respond to this stimuli, which in this
case is your voice, Steve over time if we pursue
it and give this negative interaction every time it hears
that human voice. Yeah, I love that you're using this podcast.
Who's gonna who cares enough about this research mark to

(36:57):
pay for it? That's a good question. It's a it's
a shoe string operation right now. We're looking for funding.
If you guys know any plays the ground money. Imagine
like the Los Angeles Pet Owners Association. Okay, so you're
saying this is on your own dimeond that the Washington
Game of Fish isn't helping you out. You have a
bartworks to the tribe, I know, but he also does

(37:19):
work for the game of fish, correct with these probably animals,
So a lot of the fishing game is the manager
of the wildlife in the state. Spell tribe has a
pretty keen interest in cougar stuff right now because we
have um a reservation that's smack dab in the middle
of prime winter habitat, and we have had years where
we've had terrible problems with cougars on the reservation. UM

(37:40):
In yards at bus stops and all the things that
you hear about. So my initial kind of seed money
came from the the U CUT Group, which is the
Upper Columbia United Tribes. It's a consortium of five tribes
UM in North Idaho and Northeast Washington. So that was
the initial seed money for the research. UM. I've got

(38:00):
a couple of grants outstanding right now. But it doesn't
cost that much what we're doing. Um I said, we
only had to. We bought six collars. I've got uh
that w Buddy would bury his company doing the garment
stuff for me. He's been real super helpful with Alva Tech.
Um questions that I've got with garment, and we're using

(38:22):
their equipment. I think it's on loan, but they're not
going to get a lot of it back because it
just gets trashed out there in the woods for a
month on a cat. Um. Yeah, we're just kind of
piecing it together as we go. Okay, so keep going on,
keep going on the story here, so you explain how
you work and how you use how you use this
this this podcast to help Okay. So as we're designing

(38:45):
this project, we're starting to you know, we're one question
tends to lead to another, and that's where we ended up.
So we have all these questions starting to pile up
and all the the protocol that we ended up settling
on to try to answer as many questions as possible.
I'll try to describe um succinctly, but we we capture
a cat that's been sited. So Washington Department of Fishing Wildlife,

(39:08):
the enforcement group is cooperating with us pretty well. So um,
they are the ones fielding the calls for sightings or
depredations or whatever. So when there's a cat hanging around
a farm or a home that's spotted under a porch
or wherever that it probably shouldn't be, they call me
and then we get our stuff together and go get

(39:29):
a look at this cat and we go capture the cat.
It's you know, Bruce is volunteering for the project and
put a ton of hours into it, and I, UM,
we'll go out and capture this cat and get it
in a tree, and then we make a decision if
it's a cat that we want to add to the project.
We're really looking for adult cats. We don't want sub
adults that are still with their mom, and we don't

(39:51):
want lactating females. I don't want to disrupt um a
cat that's actively nursing or feeding young. So we take
this at we end up. We darted, put a collar
on it, and we put it. Explain that darting process
real quick. Uh So we just use a you know,
it's an air gun, and we're we're working on a
drug formulation. I think I'm actually really excited about because

(40:13):
a lot of people use ketamine zylazine on cats. We're
trying to save some money. We're trying to do some
things different and test some different stuff, and um use
a safer drug. Keta means a little bit dangerous and
it's also evidently a street drug that we have to
be really careful about. So we're using a drug called
bam um that we've used on sheep successfully, so we're

(40:35):
testing that on the cats and um, it seems to
be working real well. So we're darting this cat. When
you when someone uses ketemine, what are the what like?
What are they? What's it like? What what's the what
are they after? I have no idea. UM, I know
for cats, it's a it's it looks like it looks
like It would suck when you see a cat under
ketemine because they're like rigid and uncomfortable, and then when

(40:58):
they recover their drooling in their heads, bobbing around and
they could they just staggering. It looks awful. Um I can't.
So you know, you never like, you never like put
a little give a little squirt in your mouth because
you don't want to replicate that experience of the cat.
It doesn't know. It does not look like they're having
a good time at all. I was really hoping you
guys were gonna go into like the marijuana side of things,

(41:23):
like super shot of CBD, just get them high. Yeah,
we can try. Um uh, people use ether and knock
cats out. I've heard of the old timers doing that.
Um starting fluid. Basically they'll knock a cat out to
get it out of a trap or something. And then
did you hear the story we had on this show

(41:43):
one time about a guy that got accidentally shot by
the tranquil as You're gone, No, Yeah, it was quite
an ordeal for him. Yeah, it could be very dangerous.
They had to pack him down on a mule. They
had to load the guy up on a mule and
pack him out of the mountains. I thought he's gonna
die shot by dart. That's another reason I would you

(42:04):
trying to experiment with his bam. Yeah, um, I would
get that wrong if I told you it's a three
drug formulation. It's beautourphin al I think at a pamazole
and metatomadine. Um. So it's a three drugs mixed one.
It's made by a wildlife vet in Colorado. It's a
great product, super safe. They're using it on moose and

(42:26):
sheep and deer and other things. The one thing it
does have it's reverse herble. So if I was to
dart myself, I could also reverse myself. You can carry
like you can carry like a vial of antidote. Right,
so I have a reversal agent. Um. I'll get back
to darting the cat and we'll talk about reversing it
and everything else. But um, so it's a dark the cat.

(42:47):
We get it in the right tree. So if it's
in a super high tree someplace where it's going to
get injured, if it comes out of the tree, we'll
jump it out of that tree and put dogs on
it right away. So they put a lot of pressure
on it and get it to grab another tree. When
you do that, typically that cats running from those dogs
and it's gonna grab the first tree it can get to.
It's so it's less likely that's going to pick a

(43:07):
great bit. But how do you climb at the top?
How do you prompt it when it's when it finds
a tree and it goes into a tree and it's
the wrong tree, it's gonna fall, presumably right, it's gonna
fall and get hurt if you tranquilize it. How do
you how do you willfully prompt it to jump to
another tree, to jump to the ground. So we've done
in a couple of ways. Um, Sometimes you can just
bang on that tree with a stick or a log,

(43:28):
and that I think that vibration drives them a little
bit crazy and they'll just climb out. If they haven't
been treed very much and they are pretty nervous, it's
easy to get them to jump. We also carry a
paintball gun and you can rattle the tree above them
or actually shoot the cat with the paintballs and they'll
come out of the tree and try to get them
in a better tree. Right, So I want them in,

(43:50):
you know, I don't want them over about you know,
thirty five ft high, and then we carry climbing equipment
because sometimes they go down in the tree. But once
so I deliver the dart and we get this tar
pung out and it's like you would expect. It's a
big you know, I don't know if it's canvas or not,
but it's that kind of heavy cotton material. Hey, do
you have to hit him in any special spot with

(44:12):
that dart? I always try to hit him in the hamstring.
You can, you can shoot him in the shoulder, but
there's just more connective tissue and more likelihood of an injury.
So I always try to shoot him right in the
hamstring or yeah, the butt, and that's a big muscle group.
I'm using a one and a half inch long needle,
so it's a big needle and you have to get
into a pretty deep muscle. Um. So these are just

(44:35):
pressurized darts that are reusable. Um. So, once the dart
hits you know, typically the dart comes out of the
cat um in the tree. It's not barbed or anything
like that, so the drugs delivered dart typically falls out
of the tree. We get our tarp up and just
watching that cat. About half the time they go down

(44:56):
and they're stuck in the tree and we have to
climb up, tie a rope around him and push him
out of the tree down into the tarp. How long
is it to put that cat asleep? That depends typically.
If so, the BAM itself is going to take like
ten minutes, which seems like an eternity when you're out there. Um,
we have decided we have started adding a really small

(45:19):
dose of ketamine to that BAM. Um, and it's a
low dose ketamine. It's a one a hundred milligrams per
mill leader ketamine. So it's like the stuff that used
on horses. Um. We put just a whisper of that
in there, and that knocks him out way faster. So
those two drugs really work together well. And they'll go
down on about two and a half minutes with that,
And then you guys are like fireman catching someone jumping

(45:41):
out of a window pretty much. Yeah, we'll tie the
tarp up and hold the tarp up in the corners,
do whatever and catch it when it lands. Um. So
you had a funny dark story. I had one of
those just a week ago. I was shot a cat
and we're we look at the cat the through the
scope of our air rifle, you know, and I could
see the plunger wasn't all the way down on the dart,

(46:02):
which is a concern because it means there's still half
the drugs and the dart. It also means the cat
only got half the delivery. So we're wondering if we're
gonna have to dart him again. And um, he started
looking like he was going to come out of the tree.
He was getting pretty heavy, his head was hanging. So
we've gotten position with the dart and the cat started
moving around, and that I wasn't paying attention to the cat.
I was looking at the tarp and I felt something.

(46:26):
I thought a stick landed on me. And I looked
down and that dart had come out of the tree
and stuck in my palm like a with half the
drug still in it, and the sleeve was off and
his pressure eyes. I was like, oh my god, this
is gonna be embarrassing. But it didn't. It didn't. Um,
I just cleaned I cleaned it up, of course, and

(46:48):
nowadays everybody has hand sanitizer in every pocket, so I
pulled it out and smeared some hand sanitizer in there,
and UM kept a pretty close eye on it. And
I don't think I got any of the drug at all.
I didn't feel like I did any So you you've
got a lot of practice shooting cats with darts, though, right, Like,
how many cats? This is a two part question? Teeny

(47:10):
up for what's the first part of the question, how
many cats have you darted? UM, I'm not sure where
I'm at right now. So we have, oh, probably twenty
cats so far. We're permitted for thirty five this year.
You in your whole career, I figured you would have

(47:31):
shot more than that. Yeah, beyond this study. Uh, Now,
I didn't really shoot very many when I was helping
the state. UM, that was typically their their biologists delivering
the drugs on that I was just I was just
doing the capture part with the dogs. So this project
is really my most of my cat darting. I've darted
sheep and deer and some other things, but UM, for

(47:53):
this one, probably twenty cats and probably oh, I think
three or four of those cats we've had to handle
three different times, most of them twice. So I don't
know how many darts I've delivered fifty or sixty, I guess.
And since they're reusable, have you identified the lucky dart? Like,
what is the dart that comes out of like that
one is gonna that puts Tabby down? Um? We have

(48:18):
identified a couple of unlucky darts. I don't know. Um,
we don't have one that I like better than the others.
But we always test them before we load the drugs,
and sometimes those you know, it's just a syringe, right,
and sometimes those plungers and get sticky and things like that.
So we're always testing them and that has helped. But
I had a terrible time the first cat we treat.

(48:38):
I missed twice before I got a dart in it,
and the gun was shooting like a foot high, and
I I sighted the gun in on the flat, like
a total rookie move, you know, I just took it
out in the lawn and sighted it in. And that's
a very different trajectory than shooting almost straight up into
a tree. So I was shooting over the cat and
it was launching these eighteen dollar darts full, you know,

(49:00):
forty worth the drugs out into the stratosphere. UM. So
that was embarrassing, But we've got it dialed in now,
I haven't missed a cat in a long time. Good
for you. Okay. So the cat falls out of the tree,
lands on the trampoline the cop. Yeah, if the lot
of times the cat comes out still has some life
in it, we tied up. We just put a loop
around its hind leg and tied to the tree and

(49:22):
let the drugs take the full effect. Um. The dogs
are tied back a hundred or so yards to kind
of lower stimulation. We tell people to be quiet and
not talk, not stimulate the cat. Um they are. They're
really paying it like visual stimulation will really bother them
when they're anesthesia has taken effect, and it will it

(49:44):
will slow down the effects of the drugs. So we
get a head cover on them as soon as it's
kind of safe right and there and their head can
still be up. They really want to get away from
you at that point. They're not like trying to fight
or anything. They just want to walk away. Um. So
we get a head cover on and that really seems
to subdue them, and they relax pretty fast once their
eyes are covered. So we call her the cat. We're

(50:06):
using the regular survey caller that you see on every
wildlife project, right, the big GPS collar weighs like whatever.
I don't know how many grams, but they're big. And
on that we're we're fixing the garment unit. So we're
putting that that other garment UM T five tracking unit,
which basically the same thing you get from a UM

(50:29):
same thing for a dog. Right, we're fixing that to
the Vectronics survey caller and with that unit were able
to get two second data on the cat. And then
what does so on a survey caller, I'm getting data
every four hours, so I kind of have an idea
where that cat lives. On a four hour rippet, you know,

(50:51):
every four hours I get a point. So over time
you get really good data. But I only have a month.
I'm not trying to determine home range or any of
that stuff. I just want to know where that cats
at right now out. So with a with this garment,
it's the same thing I use on a dog. I
have a handheld that shows that cat's location, shows my location,
it shows the dog's location. So when I'm in the field,

(51:13):
I have this real time data on the cat and
I know within two seconds where that cat's at and
when it's moving and how fast, so you basically, I mean,
you know right where he is, that everything I know exactly.
It's UM so, to my knowledge, is the first time
anybody's done this with cats anyway, with that kind of
data and that kind of field capability. But bart why

(51:34):
even attached the regular GPS collar because battery life is
an issue with the garments. We're still working on how long.
We don't really know how long a battery will last.
In the winter time, it seems like we're getting about
a month out of one of those batteries right now.
It's extended out to about six weeks, I think. But
I just didn't want to have a cat running around

(51:56):
with a dead caller on it and have no way
to go recapture the cat. So that normal survey caller
has the four hour data and um VHF capability, so
it lasts. You know, I get two years of battery
life out of that unit, UM compared to that other
collar where I'm getting two second data and it's just
going through the battery fast. When this cat wakes up

(52:17):
from getting tranquilized. I know this isn't the object of
your study, but when when you tranquilize the mountainlin. Um,
you put the collar on it, it's effective immediately right,
you can just start tracking him instantaneously. How far does
he go and how long? How much time goes by

(52:38):
before he's back to like acting like a mountline. I
with this, with the ban, the recovery is fast. I
think they start acting normal far more quickly than they
do with the ketamine capture. I think that that ketamine
capture really it causes you know, for lack of a

(52:59):
better terms, I hangover for that cat that lasts a
day or two with the BAM, we see movement pretty quick. Um,
once they recover because we reverse it. Remember, So we
reverse that cat and within about three minutes that cat
is on its feet and running away from us. And
how far will he run before he goes? Like? How
far does the hall ask before he like chills out again?

(53:20):
Not far? Maybe a hundred or two yards. I mean
it doesn't just run for miles just nope. So they
move away from us and we get out of there.
And so before I leave, I put that garment caller
to sleep mode, so that saves the battery life. And
when I want to go find that cat again, I
use the VHF on the electronics collar. I get close

(53:43):
and I used my handheld garment unit to just wake
that collar up so it's in wake mode, and then
I started generating that two seconds data, so I'm not
logging data all the time. It's only when it's awake.
So it's kind of a nice function to save battery
on that unit. So how much time will elapse before
you go back to look at it. I've been trying
to give him at least five days after capture to
go re to go have another look at that cat

(54:05):
to recapture it. And typically how far away are they
from where you've originally caught them. You know, we've had
a couple of cats that live on the same mountain
the whole time we we've studied them, and then we've
had others that bounce around, you know, six, eight, ten
miles over the course of that week. So it just
really depends on the cat and also the time of year.

(54:25):
You know, the cat that lived on one mountain the
whole project was in the middle of winters up north,
but by Calville, Washington, deep Snow had a nice piece
of winter range for deer, and that cat was just
living right above the deer. I had no reason to leave.
And then after you tranquilize them and collar them, what's

(54:46):
as soon as you've seen him actually kill a big
game animal or kill a large animal after that, I'm
not sure. I haven't really paid attention to that. I
know one cat we collared her, so we were approaching
her to call her, and she had just killed a deer.
The deer was actually hadn't even been dragged too a

(55:08):
cash It was laying in an open field basically or
meadow up in the mountain, so she had just made
a kill. We callared her, and later that day she
was on that deer and drug it into the brush
and and ate on it for about a week. So
so pretty quick turnaround to going back to normal. Yeah,
she started acting normal pretty quick. Oh yeah, that's amazing.

(55:30):
Like you did that to a person, do it, they'd
be whacked out for the longest time. Man, Yeah, the
BC A counselor. Yeah, yeah, well we would be thinking
about it too much. She's just her belly started growling
and she said, oh yeah, that's right, killed the deer
this morning. All right, I think I can ask a
good prompting question, um kind of what are the like

(55:51):
the data points then that you're actually looking for now
that you've you've you've probably got the data point of
like where you caught it right at your start, and
then so what are the data points? And then next
time you go in that you're capturing. So there's really
there's three important data points that I'm gathering. And that's

(56:11):
more important than the actual point is that the distances
in between them. So when a week after we put
a collar on a cat, we go, we approach that cat,
and when I'm within about four hundred yards, I start
the podcast on an ad decibel little bluetooth speaker. Do
you play the intro because it's gonna think it's tree

(56:32):
has fallen down. I don't play the intro. It's actually
I've only used like two podcasts, don't I don't. I'm
not out there that long, so um so you don't
pick your favorite parts. Now. I've just got one podcast
that's been playing for the same for the cats for
quite a while. Okay, okay, what do you mind me
asking real quick? Like what's going on in the show.

(56:52):
It was the Polar Expedition show, all people eating each
other and everything that's turns a cat man. Yeah, they
don't like that. And then the other one was that
gentleman that wrote the book about Davy Crockett. Yeah, which, yeah,
I listened to. I mean, I want to read that
book now. After listening to you at eighty decibels for

(57:14):
an hour and a half talk about it, it's like,
I feel like I have to read it. Um. So
I approached the cat from about four yards I'll start
that podcast, and I started approaching the cat on it
basically a direct line, and I know exactly where it's at.
I've got it on the handheld and i know where
I'm at, and I don't have dogs with me or
anything else. I'm just walking up to the cat with

(57:34):
this human voice playing the important data is back backup,
and he's like in a predictable place. Are you like, oh,
he's he's in a cliff, or he's in you know
what I mean, or they just like our in just
weird places. If it's in the middle of the day,
which we're trying to trying to capture cats or recapture

(57:54):
cats in the middle of the day, it's a pretty
predictable place. And we're starting to make some connections that
way about. Um, wind cats are on the move compared
to wind cats are in a bed. How they respond.
But there's a little bit of individuality that way too. Um.
Some cats are a little more comfortable laying out in
a less of a thicket, and some cats really hole

(58:16):
into some gnarly little thickets or rock overhangs and things
like that, so they like it. They like to lay
in the thicket. We Yeah, there are some cats that
lay in a thicket that's like impenetrable thickets, And when
they're in one of those, they feel very safe. You
could walk right up to them, got you, Okay, So
I don't mean to derail you there. I was just
curious about. No, but what's the more open location look like? Uh,

(58:42):
penetrable thicket? Okay, So it's never like you just laid
out in the sun in the midle of a hundred
yard grassy meadow. No, they we do find them laying
an open forest on occasion, but tip if they are,
it's like at the base of a tree with heavy
with branches. I feel like when we chase those first
day we chased lines with you in northern Idaho, didn't

(59:02):
we find two beds that were in a pretty open
for forest. Yeah, that was open forest, are up up
against you know, old growth cedar trees. I mean they
had some cover. They're still so they like some covered.
They like a thicket, they're like a rocky spot. Yeah,
we find them in all of those things. Over hung rocks.
We've had a couple of cats that we walked right

(59:23):
up to that we're in over hung rocks. Um, we
actually had one Monday that was we got within thirty
yards of she was laid up in a rock pile. Okay,
so you start playing this sing and walking towards him,
and you start playing it at four yards, Yeah, four yards.
I turned the podcast on. I approached them in the
most direct line. How loud is it? How how loud

(59:44):
is it for you? Like you're playing it to It's like,
that's an annoying level for you. Yeah, it's it's annoying.
It's an outside voice for sure. Um, it's not a
it's not a shout necessarily, but it's a loud talk
for sure. If we were talking, if we were walking
in the woods talking at that level, it would be annoying,
probably it. Um, So they're hearing it from quite a ways.

(01:00:09):
So as we approached this cat. The important data that
I grab is how close do I get to the
cat before it gets to its feet and leaves? So
I grabbed at that point, I stopped, I get my location,
pin that I get the cat's location. I pined that,
and then I just watched that cat, and I keep
the speaker playing and I just stand still, and I'll

(01:00:31):
let that cat move away however it chooses. Whatever that
flight looks like, however much energy it wants to put
into escaping my approach, and the cat moves away and
I get Typically that happens within about oh ten minutes.
And once that cat stops moving for you know, I
don't have a set amount of time, but once it's
hanging out in an area and not really going anywhere,

(01:00:54):
I called at the end of the mobilization, and I
grabbed that distance. So the two important measurements really are
the distance from me the stimuli, and the distance of
the flight. And then I hop on the radio. I
walk up to where that cat was laying around. I
hop on the radio, and uh, tell, Bruce kicked the
dogs loose. The dogs are now trained to like track me.

(01:01:14):
If I ever get lost, of dogs are gonna find
me in a second. They they know what's going on now,
so they track me to the site of the cat's bed,
and once they get there, they take off and go
treat that cat. What are the distances, like the cats
responding at what distance typically, so we are seeing those
distances extend over the course of the project for all

(01:01:35):
pretty much every cat the first time, the first time
we approach a cat. So Monday was an exciting day.
Monday was the first cat that I've walked up on
and actually looked at before it ran away from me.
And it's the first time. It's the first hazing. That's
kind of what we're calling this, the first hazing event. Um.
The cat had been captured once. It was pretty calm
at capture. UM. So last Monday, I went out and

(01:01:59):
I walked up to that cat and I'm watching the
GPS and it's pretty thick. They're not terribly thick. You
can certainly see, you know, forty or fifty yards in
the forest. And I'm watching the GPS and like, man,
I'm getting pretty close to this cat. He ought to be.
It's like that scene. It's like that scene in Red
Don when the dudes in the white suits the rooskis
in the white suits start tracking that kid down right. Yeah,

(01:02:20):
it was unnerving. I'm looking at my GPS and it like,
is this thing updating? Right? Like, what's going on here?
Do you get nervous? Do you get nervous around mountainlines? Um?
I had my gun out, I had my gun out
of its holster. Yeah, I was nervous. Um. I mean
when I was close, I got within nineteen feet of him.
Ho he smokes. He's just as laying there listening to

(01:02:42):
the podcast. He's like, dude, this is fascinating. Yeah, I
can't get enough of this guy. So he was bedded
underneath the kind of a leaning log, and I hopped
up on top of the log to get a better
view and get a little bit of elevation. And when
I did, the end of the log moved, and I
think that unnerved him and he ran out from underneath that. Um.

(01:03:03):
So that's the first one that I've actually watched run away.
And then he sorry to be clear, this was the
first time you had gone in right after this cat,
after this cat. This is the first time it's been
exposed to this stimuli. So it run it ran off
and only went seventy five and stopped and would not move.
And I'm like, really, now I'm unnerved at this point.

(01:03:26):
So I'm holler and I'm watching the GPS very closely
to make sure it's not circling me or coming back
to me or something, because it knows I'm there. It
has seen me. It's here and me and now here's me,
holler and added over the podcast. Um. And it sat
there for a long time, I mean several minutes at
seventy and finally I'm like, well, I guess we have

(01:03:46):
to turn the dogs loose. It's that's that's it's flight.
That's what it's gonna do. It's not gonna run from me.
Oh yeah, yeah, I got just so you marked down
his his his flight. Yeah, that's pretty close. So the
dogs treat it within about four hundred yards, and UM,
at the first at the first hazing event, we shoot
him with a paintball gun. We tie all the dogs back,

(01:04:07):
take him back to the truck, and we shoot that
cat with a paintball gun to give it a to
reinforce that negative stimuli, and holler at it, you know,
and kind of try to stress it out a little bit.
That first capture event. So I'll see what he does.
We're gonna go after him again next week, and I'll
probably take somebody with me this time, just because and
presumably he'll I think he's gonna I think he's going

(01:04:28):
to get out of there. Yeah, that has been our
experience the first the first time we approach a cat,
they let us get quite close. Um. I we have
not had one flea from outside of a hundred yards yet,
so we're within a hundreds of anything right now the
first time. And we have complete data I think on

(01:04:51):
eight cats now and pretty much across the boarder complete me.
You've done it four or five weeks in a row. Yes,
So that's mats that have been collared, hazed four or
five times and then uncollared and released. And are you
seeing that it grow every time? Not every time? UM.
We do have a couple of negative data points. We

(01:05:13):
have a couple of cats that let us get a
little bit closer, you know, on the third or fourth event. Um.
Some of those are easily explained. Some one of those
cats was sitting down by a creek in a thicket.
Probably didn't hear us with that running water right next
to it. Um. Let us get pretty close. Another one
was up with them. It was a tom a big
tom ud seventy pound cat that had a female and

(01:05:36):
they were laid up in a rock pile together. And
he let me get quite close before they mobilized, which
I want to say that, which is to say as well,
that she let you get quite close. That was an
interesting deal for sure, because he left first. He was
in a little town called Ion up north, and he
was in a wood shed when we darted him. Actually

(01:05:57):
he was in the woodshed and we couldn't get him out.
He shot him with a slingshot to get him to
run out of the woodshed, and I couldn't get a
dart in him when he was running out, and he
went into a car port and was hiding under a boat,
and I tried to get a dart in in there,
and he squirted out the back of that and went
under a deck and we ended up having to dig

(01:06:17):
deep snow. It's chest deep snow. We had to dig
a tunnel kind of down underneath the deck and he
I got a dart in him there. Um, So that
guy had some experience with people, and he lived in
very close proximity to a little town and the first
time we when after him, he was up in these
rocky cliffy, this terrible spot, walk around and hunt and

(01:06:39):
you know in the GPS and you're looking at data
from overhead, you know, so fifteen yards might mean a
hundred or two hundred vertical feet if it's cliffs, which
is in this case is what it was, so that
data is difficult to explain. Um. Yeah, I got within
forty of him, but he was uphill of me in

(01:07:00):
this overhang with a with a female that you know,
line of sight would have been a hundred meters or something,
so difficult. So he left and I circled around and
I got up on top of the cliff and I
found his tracks, and I was sitting on his tracks,
and at this point I didn't know there was another
cat there. So I was sitting on his tracks, just
kind of watching the garment unit and filling out my

(01:07:21):
daddas sheet and grabbing data that I needed. And he
got out a few hundred yards and I still had
the podcast playing, and I hear something to my side
and I look over and there that female is walking
on his tracks straight at me and maybe fifteen ft
from me, and slips down through that same little crack
in the rocks that that mail had just used to escape.

(01:07:44):
It kind of seemed like without a care in the
world about me, and you're making noise because you're still
playing the noise she's walking toward. Yeah, she walked right
up close to me, but it was Yeah, her desire
to follow that Tom's tracks was pretty strong. She pretty
much ignored me to do that. And we got eyes
on him twice before he went in a tree that day.

(01:08:07):
He was just pretty bold. Cat. I'm surprised that I
don't picture you're gonna have a continued problem, uh, funding
your work. I don't think so. A lot of people

(01:08:28):
will be like really interested in this and how to
because the thing about it's not like rats, right, It's
not like where you have just thousands and thousands of
them and there's nothing you can do, Like what do
you have mountain lion problems or mountain lions that you
want in areas where they're imperiled and not doing well.
You're talking about like a small number of animals, so
you could actually go through and give them some white

(01:08:51):
glove of service, so to speak, and and and and
be targeted about it. And it will still make sense,
you know, I mean, because there's so few of them.
It's not like it's not insurmountable to go into an
area that has a lot of lion problems and and
adjust some lion behavior, right. Yeah, And had a biologist
from California reach out to me and he's got some

(01:09:12):
interest in replicating the project down near San Francisco on
a one of the big reserves that they have a
lot of what they believe are habituated cougars. Cougars that
are kind of just laying around in day use areas,
um and sort of don't have a care in the
world about people. And I don't tend to make a
whole bunch of promises about what we can do. But

(01:09:33):
I can, like I did promise him, Like if there's
a cat laying in a day use area, I promise
I can change that cat's behavior to not do that anymore.
Like we can we can adjust that cat's attitude really
quickly with dogs and paintballs. Have you messed with I
know that? Like I support using the podcast, think it's
a great idea, it's a great touch. But have you

(01:09:54):
um experimented with other stimul others stimuli, like do they
hear free like like a dog for instance? Do they
hear frequencies that humans can't hear? I don't know that. Um.
I have considered using the sound of dogs barking rather

(01:10:14):
than a human voice to approach the cat and see
how they respond, not like a not like a hounds bang,
but like you know, a border collie happen around, or
something that's going to hear I mean fairly regularly. If
we get to a point in the project where we
have good enough data and solid enough data with the
human voice stimuli, we will switch to another sound, but
it will probably be either like the sound of equipment

(01:10:39):
droning on like a four wheeler, or like dog barking,
or something that cats are going to hear that would
have a management It would be a management action, right,
like something you could tell people. You could tell people like, YEA,
once we do this, this cat is probably not going
to go close to your barking dogs or whatever. I
had a friend who uses to design soundscapes and films,

(01:11:00):
and when you're watching a movie, you know, and there's
people sort of driving around and you're hearing the sounds
of the city, he would like design those just just
the ambiance sound you know in films. So yeah, like
it just that that you'd make a soundscape of just
human activity, you know, doors shutting, kids whatever, people yelling

(01:11:24):
at their kids would be like my house, yeah, and
get him use of that noise, right, And then the
obvious thing that you know, if you let's say you
did this over the course of time in an area. Um,
it's a small area. This isn't something that I expect
to happen across the whole region or something. But it
would be interesting then to see how cats responded to

(01:11:46):
just a speaker at a house or out in the woods, say,
see how they moved around the landscape, to see if
they avoided that or just passed through like they always have.
And is there a thing you can do to them
that they really really hate? Touch them? Yeah, if you
can get contact with them that paintball or anything like
that just drives them crazy. They hate that. They don't

(01:12:08):
like it. No, you change your shot placement when you're
doing the negative reinforcement a game, for like point of
the shoulder or something. Something that's gonna chip of the
nose bruise. Yeah. Um, when I'm when I'm shooting a paintball.
So that's I was kind of experimenting with this permanent
paint that foresters use. They mark trees with this stuff,

(01:12:30):
and it lasts quite a while on a tree. Um.
So I bought some of these fancy paintballs with permanent
paint in them, and I wanted to see how long
that would last on a cat. Just so if we
had a cat that was causing trouble in an area
of sighting, I didn't have a caller available or whatever.
All right, we'll go. We'll go mark this thing and

(01:12:52):
if it you know, without having to drug it and
handle it. We're not going to put an ear tag
in it or anything else. If that cat shows up,
hopefully the people that see it would be able to
say yeah. As it turns out, I had a bunch
of blue paint on its side, so I wanted to
see how long that paint would last. And it turns
out it's not that effective. It comes off fairly quickly.
But I was trying to shoot the cat forward in
the body where it wouldn't be able to reach back

(01:13:13):
and lick that stuff off. So I was shooting him
in the front of the shoulder, neck and back. It's
kind of where I was aiming. But I don't know
if that. I mean, anybody that's played paintball and knows
the things they staying. They're not gonna break skin on
a cougar for sure, but they do sting and making
contact with that cat drives him crazy. Have any of
the cats that you got right now? How often you

(01:13:35):
have a cat that has a collar on and then
it gets killed somehow or another while like unrelated to
your activity. So that big tom cat that I was
talking about in the cliff just a minute ago, he
got killed. He took off after that day and walked
all the way into Canada about ten miles north of
the border, and got himself killed by a legal hunter

(01:13:55):
up there. Yeah, so I got that collar back. Um.
And then another cat was down here close to Spokane.
It was a cat that Were you pissed at the
guy shot your collared lion? No, I don't care. It
was a whatever. That's the that's the deal. He's was
he aware that it had a collar? Oh yeah, now

(01:14:18):
he knew I had a caller. I think he's a
little bit nervous. He was like, he's a little bit
resisent to to call me, and you know, on the
caller has my name and phone number and says whatever,
please call it. Found it took a little I actually
saw it on Facebook before I think I actually I
think I actually reached out to him first. Um, but
I think I'm not mad. Just by any chance that

(01:14:42):
color lying you shot right, Well, that's got you know,
that's a caller plus the garment caller plus all the
data that's on it, which is you know, that's three
or four days of work worth a data that's stored
on that garment. You know that I really want. So yeah,
I called him and I'm like, hey, look, congratulations, that's
a big cat. I can I can send you some

(01:15:03):
pictures of them if you want, you know, pictures of
him in a wood shed and pictures of him in
a tree and whatever, pictures of him with anesthetized and
whatever else. So once he knew that I was not
mad and I was also a hunter, and you know,
congratulated him on such an awesome cat he was, he
softened up a little bit and sent me my collar
back and that was a Yeah, it was a really

(01:15:24):
nice cat. Man. It's cooler for him too, because he
can be like I can tell you exactly what that
cat's been doing. You don't have to. Yeah, he'd be like,
and he ran over to this tree, and then he
ran over this that's right. Yeah, I had an ear
tag into I don't know if they I'm sure they
pulled that out for the taxi ermist. But get a
little jewelry too. Wow, And and remind me getting how

(01:15:47):
many cats you got running around right now? I got
five on their right now. So I haven't really got
into a couple of parts of the project that are
fairly important one of them. Um. So once that cat runs,
I'm getting the I'm getting screwed route on this deal
as far as seeing cougars other than happening upon one
here and there. Um, I don't understand what do you

(01:16:07):
mean by that. I'm not even going to the tree anymore.
So Bruce and the other gang walks to the tree,
and I am now measuring the habitat. So I'm grabbing
all this data from the flight of the cat. So
once that cat runs away. Once that cat runs, I
measure the distance. You know, let's say it goes two
yards or whatever meters. Um. I then lay out a

(01:16:30):
tape and I measure the slope, So did that cat
run uphill or downhill? I grab a slope measurement, and
then I grab um the basil area measurement. So it's
a forestry measurement that kind of tells you the forest type,
will give you a rough idea how wooded it is,
and then also shrub component, and you know if it's
a thicket or if it's running through fairly open stuff

(01:16:50):
or down the road or whatever. So I'm trying to describe,
then how much energy that cat used to escape? Are
you taking note of the wind to wind direction? I
have a wind noise factor that's just one through five.
And does he play the wind when he runs? Oh?
I haven't. No, I haven't paid attention to that man. Yeah,

(01:17:14):
because maybe he always he always goes into the wind.
It would be an interesting thing to start to test
some of that, as far as circling up wind or
downwind of him too. I should have been a scientist, man,
You should have been a scientist. You should come along
to have all kinds of science things I'd figure out. Yeah,
that'd be fun to circle give him, give him the

(01:17:35):
wind advantage and see if they mobilize more quickly or not. Yeah,
So I'm grabbing all of this habitat data for the
escape path, and I'll use that UM to kind of
help describe distance with you know, capital D distance then,
so rather than just a linear measurement, it will include
all of this other stuff like if it ran up

(01:17:55):
and over a cliff, that might only be a couple
hundred yards, but it's a definitely more energy to escape
than just jogging down a two track road. UM. And
then I'm also grabbing some data when we get to
the tree, uh, kind of measuring the behavior of that cat.
And we have we've kind of had to develop this scale,
but I don't I think it'll be useful when we're done.

(01:18:17):
We'll have a lot of it. How that cat's responding
in the tree. How is it snarling, is it urinating?
Is it jump bailing out and finding a different tree,
How high is it in the tree, is it moving around? Whatever?
So we measure all that stuff for a number of
times per five minutes that it's tree, and we're seeing
that number change as well. The cats tend to by

(01:18:39):
the end of the project tree quite a bit higher
and be quite a bit calmer where they're not dancing
around in the tree. They kind of know the routine
by about the fourth or fifth time we're capturing them.
It's like they just grab a tree before the dogs
are very close to them, and they climb way up
high and they're just like laid out, relaxed when we
get there. That's not going to bowl well for them

(01:19:00):
when they're traveled like that one, when they're traveling into
hunted areas, they're gonna make them. They're gonna make them
easy pickings. Maybe. I mean it might also have implications
in wolf country, which almost everything in northeast Washington is
wolf country now. So I don't know how that'll, if
that will play out, or how it would. Oh yeah,
because you were mentioned that that that you find that

(01:19:20):
cats that have exposure to wolves. You were wondering if
it changes their attitude about whether or not they need
to get into a tree or not. Yeah. Maybe. Um,
I think no, that's well documented that a single wolf
is trouble for a cat, like if is in trouble
if it encounters a cat. A cat'll kill a wolf
when it gets the opportunity, as long as there's not

(01:19:41):
a bunch of them. Um, And I think it's not
a far stretch to imagine those cats learning that on
a single wolf a couple of times in their life,
and then all of a sudden, this single dog shows
up that's half as big as a wolf. You happen
and they're just like, well, I'll just kill that because
I've done this before. So a lion will kill a
single wolf, yes, not vice versa. Oh, one on one,

(01:20:03):
it's a no contest lions or yeah, they're deadly at
all five ends. Huh, yeah, that wolf doesn't have a chance. Well,
it's interesting. I wouldn't think, I guess, I don't know.
I mean, unless it's a subadult line or something else.
An adult lion versus adult wolf, I'd say lion every
single time. So what's next? Man? Um, Well, hold on,

(01:20:26):
I gotta I feel like we You told us about
the negative changes in in the couple of the data
points right when you went back subsequently, But what on
average is the change after the hazing for the third, fourth,
and fifth times you come in there with the podcast
going yeah, um, good question. The biggest The biggest change

(01:20:48):
almost always occurs on the second hazing, So that cat
the second time it happens, I think they're still pretty
freaked out. And it's been two of both the flight
initiation and the flight distance. And we've had some that
like don't stop running. We've had some cats once they mobilized,

(01:21:09):
they run like nine hundred yards along ways. Um, so
they're getting out of there by the end of the project.
These cats, without exception, we haven't had any cat let
us get closer over the course of the project. We've
just had a couple. When I say a couple of
data points, I mean like outliers, Like we caught this
cat four times and one of them was a negative distance. Yeah,

(01:21:31):
so of the you know, let's say we have eight
cats with full data, you know, four to five points each.
You know those points are positive and two is a
pretty standard increase. So that's why you feel so confident
if you you had a problem line that was hanging
out in a day used area, that you you could

(01:21:51):
go in there and do this for a month and
that would cure his that habit of his or s.
And I think you know the other reason that second
might be so significant, that second hazing event might that
increase might be so significant because at the first hazing
event we shoot him with paintballs. If we did that
every time, that distance might just contendue to increase until

(01:22:12):
as soon as that cat heart Steve's voice at hauled ass.
Oh so you guys don't continue that the paintball. Now
we just shoot at the one time? Was that? I
don't know. I kind of feel bad shooting him every time,
Like I don't want I don't know. I just need
to learn whether or not it works. I don't need
to torture a cat. Yeah, you don want to make
a man hater out of what? Yeah? So again this

(01:22:35):
I want this to have management implications where when a
cat's hanging around a farm and it gets sited, they
can call somebody with dogs and say, all right, go
treat this cat and shoot it with paintballs, and we
have a and have a reasonable expectation of how that
cat is going to respond in the future. If you
give it a known if you give it a stimuli
that it can associate right well, and then replicate that,

(01:22:57):
then then you have to turn around and replicate that
stimuli to get the desired effect out of it. Well,
I don't think you would have to. I mean I
don't think let's say whatever, after this project said and done,
and um we get a call, say, there's a cat
on the edge of a neighborhood, can you go chase
it out of there. I don't think we would have
to go approach that cat with a voice recording or

(01:23:20):
anything else. I think we could go capture that cat,
bang on the tree, shoot it with paintballs, and it
would make the association between our because we're talking while
we're at the tree. I mean, it's hearing human voices
the whole time, right, It would make that association that way.
It is interesting though, because I mean you said in
the beginning that some of these cats were hanging out
so close to these you know, urban interface kill sites

(01:23:44):
where they're likely hearing a lot of human voices too.
So you're fighting against this kind of maybe not a positive,
uh interaction, but it's kind of like this background noise
of human ranch work, farmwork. But I can still go
down and pick off alpaca or a dog or something

(01:24:04):
like that, right, Yeah, And you know that's one of
the real that's one of the misconceptions of having a
terrible time with on this project. A lot of people
think that I'm going out and trying to chase his
cat away from a farm with the expectation that it's
not going to come back to the farm or that area,
and that's not really it. What I want is that
cat to avoid all of these human associations. Um And

(01:24:28):
I don't know if we'll get there or not, not
for all of the cats, not for all the time,
but I think there is an argument to be made
that the cats being messed with are going to behave better.
Is there a version of this you could attempt on grizzlies?
Not with my dogs. They do this. They tell on

(01:24:51):
dogs if you go, if you try to run a
grizzly with dogs, they're just hard on the dogs. I've
never done it, but I have heard stories about people
getting on them. Um And I guess they're long runners.
They're straight line long runners like a black barrel tend
to circle, and a grizzly barrel just lying out and go.
And then of course they don't climb, they just bay
and fight. So I mean people certainly do it. There's

(01:25:12):
like famous hound hunters from back in the day that
collected bounties on grizzly bears by using dogs, and I
don't think we have good records of how many dogs
they went through over the course of that time, but
probably a lot. Yeah, I mean black bears are tough
on dogs. Mean, black bear is a tough thing for
a dog to handle. Have you lost the dogs lately? No,

(01:25:33):
We've had good luck with dogs. Actually, I've still got Whisper.
She's twelve. Nosies nine Radar die to cancer two years ago.
And what's the one who got what's the one who
got mauled up? Pretty good? Nosy? Yeah, she's hanging in there.
She was with me to listen Monday. She'd treated two
cats with me. Does she Oh, she hates him, Yeah,
she's She was kind of hateful little dog before that

(01:25:55):
whole reck and now she's now she's full of it.
I got and oh, sorry, go ahead, go on with
the dogs. I got a question for you. It's out
there though. Okay. Yeah, we had and we had a
litter of pups. Actually, remember Bruce has had that big
red dog, Gus. We've read him back to Tipsy who

(01:26:15):
those were the two cats that were at your tree,
Steve Guss and Tipsy Um, So we've read those two
dogs together. Yeah, they were awesome. We have a good
litter of pups out of them, and they've been on
a lot of cats like, um, those pups are doing
most of the work right now. I think they've seen
well sixty three cats so far since January one um

(01:26:36):
that we've treated, So they're getting a lot of exercise.
Cal what's your question you have to fire you have
to fire out question. Yeah, this this would fall firmly
in the final thoughts type of I got this new neighbor,
California guy, just the guy that throws all the good
stuff in the dumpster. Okay, um, real, real, nice guy.

(01:27:00):
He's got a place that butts up to the Hearst Castle,
which is now California State Park and Hurst William Randolph Hurst.
Tons of cash through the twenties thirties built up this
incredible place. I had this giant zoo and wildlife menagerie,

(01:27:24):
and there's all these stories going around that when the
financial hard times of the thirties caught up to him Uh,
one solution that they came across was to release a
bunch of animals, the animals that they couldn't give away.
And my neighbor claims that they have trail camera pictures

(01:27:50):
of the descendants of hers Uh jaguar population that have
now crossbread with the California mountain lions in the area,
and they're getting black mountain lions that are noticeably larger
than your typical mountain lion. H I have my doubts.

(01:28:12):
Come on, I mean, if they're getting trail camera pictures,
just ask them to produce those. Let's see it. Um,
does that exist though, Jaguar mountain lion hybrids or cross
breeding of any sort. Have you ever heard of that?
I've never heard of that. And if I mean they

(01:28:33):
share range, they share habitat and the southwest right, Yeah,
I mean they we would probably know if that happened. Yeah,
they share habitat like across the I think the entirety
of the jaguars range. Yeah. Probably. I mean, no, they do,
I know they do now I think about it. But anyway,

(01:28:54):
I give this guy your cellphone number. So yeah, alright, Bart, George,
you got any more questions for Bart? No, I'm good, Bart.
Thanks for chatting with us. Yeah, man, I hope you.
I hope your money comes through because it's interesting. But see,
I'm trying to figure out what it means, uh, what
it means in general, because I don't know if it

(01:29:16):
means um like doesn't mean that this will be like
a thing that winds up being used against people hunting
mountain lions with dogs. Well, this will national geographic reports
on this. Will they be able to twist it into

(01:29:37):
a you see, people shouldn't be able to hunt mountain
lions with dogs. I gotta think this through for a minute.
I hope not. I mean, I think it's Ultimately I
wanted to lead to another tool for wildlife managers that
are dealing with potential public safety conflicts and depredation issues,

(01:29:58):
you know, like that that park or reserve down in California.
I want them to have a tool to be able
to say with some level of certainty, like, look, we
can save these cats lives in the future. If these
cats get in trouble, if they get in a mix
up with a person, they're gonna die. Like that's that's
a certainty. UM. In Northeast Washington, when a cat kills livestock,

(01:30:21):
it dies. So if we can keep that from happening,
and you know, let's say it only works of the time,
that's still that's a lot of cats, um that we
can keep out there on the landscape and um, you know,
available to sport hunters and available for whatever other purpose.
That was good. Little I liked that, man, It was
a good little twist in the end. That was good.
All right, Bart George, How long is it gonna be

(01:30:43):
till you come back on again and tells what you're
out your next how long you've be doing this for
it and go on to something else that might be interesting. Um, well,
I'll be working on this probably for another year or so. Um.
Still doing some cariboo work if you want to have
a talk about cariboo. There's still some in the Central
Selk Works and working with International Cariboo Foundation trying to
help out a group up at the Arrow Lakes um

(01:31:06):
save a herd that's down to about twenty four animals.
Got some callers out on that heard this year, so
we know that there's at least nine cows up there
and a couple of calves alive, but the census wasn't
complete because damn shut down stuff Canada. Also, so what
about personal hunting? You hunt in spring bear? Is here? No?
I usually hunt Idaho spring bears and they won't let

(01:31:28):
us come across the border. Nowadays they cut off all
the non resident taxies Washington. Our season, yeah, our season
will be open here in a couple of days for turkeys.
I'll probably go try to pick a couple of them
up on my way to work. Are they letting non
residents come to Washington for what? Turkeys? Extremely late turkey

(01:31:49):
season that you told? Yeah, probably it's that's it's turkeys
in June. June. Man, that's crazy. I an't. I I
don't like hunting turkeys after May first, once some mosquitoes
are out and the ticks are out, which I've already
found some of those. I kind of shy away from
turkey on but I'll probably try to get out. It's
the only show in town right now for us. The

(01:32:10):
last question, you're married, right? Oh? Yeah, two kids? I
was getting to is where you're at with the kid
thing right now? Yeah? We Uh, my wife and I
have two boys, two and a half and seven months,
so we're pretty busy. And ever, the older boy has
been able to tag along on a few cougar hunts.
He was in a backpack with me the other day
when we treate a cat for work. Um so he

(01:32:34):
knows the routine. He'll be has year old say or
do when they see a cat in a tree. Um. Well,
the more concerning part was before we saw the cat.
I was approaching the cat, had the podcast playing, and
he's got a stick back there, and he's banging around
hitting everything with a stick as we're walking in the backpack. Um,
and he knows we're he knows kind of what we're doing.

(01:32:56):
He has an idea that we're out looking for a cougar,
but he doesn't know the routine yet. So we march
along and he starts saying, I see a cougar. I
see a cougar. And I'm I'm close to the cat,
you know, I'm within about sixty yards. I'm like, ship,
is this call or not working? Does he actually see
a cougar? And I'm like trying to ask him where
and I can't see where he's pointing. But he hadn't
he was just telling stories. So when he when we

(01:33:19):
get to the tree, he's excited about I keep a
distance obviously, I'm not handling cats with him, Um, But
we get to the tree, will stay a little ways
back and let Bruce to all the heavy lifting at
the tree and then just call the dogs to us
when we're done. He's excited about it. Good future scientists. Yeah,
maybe all right? Man, thanks again for joining us Bart

(01:33:40):
we'll talk later hecks later.

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