Ep. 119: Alaska, New Jersey, and Tree Poaching

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Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cal's weekend review, presented by Steel Steel products are available only at authorized dealers. For more, go to Steel Dealers dot com. Now here's your host, Ryan cal Callahan. The New Jersey black bear season has been derailed internally by people like New Jersey's Governor Phil Murphy, who just doesn't want it to happen. No other reason than that. Although the state Wildlife Agency wrote a black bear management plan and it is still technically legal to hunt black bears, a hunter cannot hunt because the two thousand twenty one black bear Management Plan, instead of being read, signed, and implemented, something that represents a ton of work compiled by state employed staff, was dumped into the round file a k the garbage can, instead of even being read. The Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection just didn't sign the document nor read it, the reason being they didn't want a bear hunt. Without assigned management plan, there can be no bear hunt. According to the New Jersey State Supreme Court, despite black bears being present in all twenty one of New Jersey counties, and despite that the only population data has come from the northwest counties, the reason for that being that's where you can hunt or could hunt, black bears. That population was listed as growing, estimated at some three thousand, one hundred and fifty eight bears, which is the third highest this century according to the Division of Fish and Wildlife and according to the New Jersey Herald, in two thousand nine, state residents reported one hundred and sixty nine bear sightings and a year later in reported three hundred forty nine. During the same time, damage and nuisance reports involving black bears increased from one hundred and twenty two. There will be no bear hunt, so let's talk about COVID. One reason that sightings may have increased is that many people were stuck at home. Reduced traffic nationwide led to increased animal traffic nationwide. Conversely, when the masses headed back out on the turnpikes across our nation, animal vehicle collisions increased as well. But what else happened during COVID? Americans were smacked across the nation with, if not actual food insecurity, the real idea of it. They could finally contextualize not having food. Many homes in America were very familiar with the reality of food scarcity and hunger long before COVID, but to middle class America, the usual groceries were not available. The reality of a future where you can't have whatever you want became a real possibility. Hunting and fishing interest boomed because when you know it, that is a way to get food. Bear incidents, ranging from bears being too close to children in the park, grabbing garbage, and breaking and entering spiked across the state of New Jersey. In Bergen County, bear counts increased from twenty to seventy five, Hudson County zero to five, Gloucester County zero to twenty three, Middlesex County one to sixteen, Sussex County to seventy four to five oh four, Passaic County on Warren County. According to the DP Management Plan, hunting is the method of population control four black bears, and black bears are averaging two to three bears per square mile, which is dance kind of like New Jersey's governor well roasted. In the past five years, there have been one thousand bears killed by hunters, and of those, one thousand, five hundred forty seven were killed by bow and arrow. Again that information is from the New Jersey Herald. Great reporting over there, But because a small vocal population within New Jersey and the governor himself, who does not like bear hunting, hunters in New Jersey cannot harvest great free range meat, a renewable resource that grows very well in the Garden state, and the New Jersey Police Department has to be trained in bear conflict mitigation. Now, I've been to New Jersey only a handful of times, but I never got the impression that the time of a police officer would be better spent keeping bears out of trash cans. For the record, the state of New Jersey reported over eighteen thousand acts of violent crime, one eighteen thousand acts of property related crime, over nine acts of grand larceny, over sixteen thousand acts of burglary, and over ten thousand, three hundred and thirty six stolen vehicles in two thousand nineteen for a state of over nine million. Maybe those are acceptable numbers to keep the folks in blue chas saying boo boo. That's the picture as we know. Even though Governor Murphy, who I am sure does not wear leather himself, refuses to sit in a car seat around a couch made of leather and does not consume animal protein. Knows that black bears will still die even if hunters can't kill them. These bears will be killed by cars. They will be killed every time and New Jersey resident refuses to bring in the garbage cam or take down the bird feeder. They will be killed every time somebody leaves their garage door open and a bear wanders in. They will be killed every time they threatened crops or livestock. Only in this scenario the state is paying for the killing. But again, in my opinion, throw all of that stuff out the window. Bears are incredible animals. They should be respected, We should want them in our states, and we should be able to, along the lines of proper management, eat them. Bye bye, Bob. This week we've got crime filter feeders in Alaska. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. And my week is, you know, full of twists and turns. If you are like many folks who wrote in a little caught off guard by the adult targeted sex shop ad that's been running on the podcast, you and me both not supposed to happen, feel free to write in to Business c c p A at I heart media dot com and let them know that you don't want to educate your children as to how some adults may or may not practice the act of reproduction. While you already likely have a lot to explain during this podcast to your children regarding the sexual reproduction of other animals. You googled murder in other news. Heading up to the fish Shack this week, Canna do some angling for halibut, cod, salmon, certain species, but not all species of rock fish, scallop, sea cucumber, urch and seaweed, shrimp and crabs, bringing the dive gear, the fly rob, the rein gear, and cash because everything is expensive in Alaska this go around, I'm bringing my mother up. If you want to know something really cute, Her mother, my grandmother, gave her one and forty dollars before she left Billings in order to hey for any packaging or shipping required to bring Granny back some fish. Grandma used to tell a story about catching a halibut in Alaska, and I think it will be super fun if Mom can pull one up to really been looking forward to this one. It has been far too long since I've seen the fish shack, and Mom and I have never taken a trip. You'll get a full report on this one. I'm sure it's going to be interesting in other news. And this is one thing I have honestly had a hard time talking about. I am picking up Snort the first week of August. She's been back where I got her from in Wisconsin, Riverstone Kennels. She's been doing some serious bird dog training. The main thing I wanted to happen was a force fetch or controlled retrieve. What that is is when a dog picks up bird or a bumper or toy or what have you, and brings it to heal or your side without dropping the item. The only really yeats when you have a hold of the item and say release or give or whatever you like your command to be. That way, a wounded bird doesn't go running off out of the duck, blind or back into cover, and you know you gotta keep efficiently hunting, which is why we trained these lovable beasts in the first place. There's an old school way of training force fetch where you associate pain with an empty mouth by literally pinching an ear or a toe or applying an electric shock to the dog when they do not hold an item you tell them to. This is not what I wanted for my dog, but Snort needed some consistent training in order to master that control. Josh at Riverstone provides the service amongst everything else, and it's pain free. They associate good things, happy things with controlled retrieve, not anxiety and pain because you don't have something in your mouth. I have always trained my own dogs, but this go around, I, just as you will, hear the excuse from dog owners who do not train their own, haven't the time and made much too much sense to send the dog over to Josh. But I still feel like yuppy living in Bozeman. Anyway, We're going to make up for all this time, apart by hunting our butts off this fall. You can look forward to a whole lot of Snort report in the near future. Over to the Crime desk the Flora Division. For the first time ever, federal investigators have used DNA evidence to solve a case of tree poaching. Richard Crone, research geneticist for the U. S. Forest Service, took samples of timber that two men had sold to a sawmill in Tumwater, Washington in two thousand eight, then compared those samples two stumps of illegally taken big Leaf Maples and Olympic National Forest. At trial, Crone showed that the likelihood that the two samples were not from the same tree was one in one undecillion. For the non mathematicians out there, that's the number one, followed by thirty six zeros, which is pretty darn unlikely. I'd say some people would probably still play those odds in Vegas, but you're not gonna win there, just like these folks aren't gonna win in court. This is me. This is how I went to get an idea of what this finished wood looks like. Imagine Jimmy Page on stage with his sunburst less Paul. The top of that guitar is made from big leaf maple. That clean, figured appearance makes the wood very sought after for furniture and instruments, which in turn makes it worth a lot of money. The tree poachers, Justin Andrew Wilkie and Sean Edward Williams, likely would have gotten away with the theft if not for the large forest fire that brought investigators to the area, a forest fire which the poachers also caused. According to court transcripts, a colony of wasps had built a large nest in the base of one of the trees the men wanted, and after insecticides bray didn't kill the wasps. The men douse the nest and gasoline and set it on fire. The resulting blaze got out of their control and burned acres, destroying dozens of big leaf maples in the process and costing Washington State four point two million dollars to extinguish. I gotta sell a lot of guitars to make up for that. A silver lining to this part of the story is that big leaf maples do pretty well after fires, and in many places their populations can actually increase after burns. That's not to excuse Wilkie and Williams, who still pulled this stolen timber out of the woods despite the chaos of getting stung by wasps and being surrounded by an out of control fire, but rather a reminder to you know, take your good news where you can get it. Anyway. This was almost certainly not the first time the pair and their accomplices had stolen trees from the Olympic National Forest. They had developed a system of scouting at night, stripping a section of bark to determine if the wood had what it takes to make it valuable, then felling the trees, prepping the wood for sale, forging timber cutting permits and selling them to sawmills. But with this use of tree DNA, maybe the Forest Service can create a genetic library like fingerprint records and catch the Douglas fur poachers we talked about a few episodes ago. Perhaps there could even be a TV show about forensic tree detectives, a new spinoff of c s I. But the sea will stand for coniferous or canopy. You know you'd watch it anyway. Moving on, scientists with the Plymouth Marine Laboratory over in the United king Them have developed a new system for using blue muscles to filter microplastics out of ocean water. Long time we can review, listeners will know that the filtration ability of muscles can be way too good. Zebra muscles remove so much algae and plankton from lakes in the Midwest that there's no food left for the rest of the bottom of the food chain. The resulting water looks crystal clear, but becomes void of life. The authors of the Plymouth study, we're not worried about the muscle's ability to pull the microplastics in through their siphons. After all, part of what makes microplastics so destructive is how easily they are ingested and become absorbed into the tissue of animals that eat them. For example, when the crab species Carcinus menas eats microplastics, the stuff gets embedded in the crabs respiratory and digestive system. Several species of fish have been shown to get microplastics caught permanently in their gills and have reduced oxygen absorption as results. Even other bivalves similar to blue muscles, get plastic stuck in their systems and lose digestive and neurological function. But with the blue muscles and the Plymouth study, the microplastics went in one end and you know, out the other, with none absorbed into the tissue of the muscle itself. Even better, the plastic didn't come out in the same tiny particles. It was either captured in the muscles poop, or clumped together in what the scientists called biodeposits or quote unquote pseudo feces. Imagine, you know, like walking your dog one day and somebody being like, hey can you pick up that poop and you're like, Oh, that's not poop, that's pseudo poop, basically poop pellets made up entirely out of plastic. Anyway, both forms were big enough to be captured in simple nets, and so scientists are now piloting a program to deploy large trays of muscles and your sensitive marine habitat with net receptacles underneath them. If a few days, the nets can be pulled in and the slightly more macro plastics safely collected. The Plymouth team has demonstrated that three muscles can filter out a quarter million particles of microplastics an our, reducing the level of plastic in a body of water by up to twenty If the first trials are successful, muscle filtration systems might expand in other parts of the world in the next few years. Possibly the best result of these trials, however, is that I might get to use the term pseudo feces a lot more from here on out. Moving off. A couple of weeks back, the Biden administration announced that they are reinstating the two thousand one roadless rule for the Tongus National Forest in southeast Alaska. The process for exactly how the ruling will be implemented is still ongoing, but we know that the previous administration's exemption of the Tongas will be overturned. I won't go through the entire history of constant back and forth battle on this issue. The timeline put together by E. Thomas Donald Jr. In his January Meat eater dot Com article Does a great job of laying that out. But we can say a few things for sure. First, the Tongas nine point three million acres of old growth forest is the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, and we should do everything we can to make sure it remains healthy for the long term. Second, it has historically been hard to make logging in the Tongas make economic sense. Government subsidies of the timber industry have often far exceeded the revenue generated by logging, So this is not necessarily a clear case of unfettered access by industry being good for the economy and protections being bad. The Tongas has also become an enormous draw for visitors, including hunters and anglers, which bring those dollars into the local economy. Third, however, timber ecology is a sophisticated science and responsible extraction can take place in many kinds of protected habitat without necessarily destroying the entire ecosystem. It is the case that clear cutting in the mid twentieth century damaged the tongas and led to erosion that dumped sediment down to the bedrock into rivers, and that did a number on fish populations. But clear cutting is far from the only way timber can be harvested. In the battle to win this argument, the roadless rural proponents can, in my opinion, laps into absolutism, and that can obscure what would be best for all stakeholders. And lastly, the edge habitat created by responsible logging can be fantastic for wildlife too. Moose, deer, bear, other species thrive in that mix of remaining large tree and lower undergrowth. The tongas is an incredible place to hunt in fish, and its areas with mixed terrain can be especially good. So inevitably, the fight over tongas will continue at a fever pitch. Alaska Senator's Murkowski and Sullivan, Congressman Young, and Governor Dunlevy have all expressed their opposition to Biden's decision, and no doubt there are many, many more lawsuits to come, But as the sides continue to shout at each other, I hope hunters and anglers can maintain some nuance on the issue. Moving on to the stinky beach desk. Over the past several weeks, hundreds of tons of dead fish have been washing up on beaches up and down the southwest coast of Florida. The massive die off is the result of a so called red tide, when enormous blooms of the algae species Corennia breva's deprived waters of oxygen and spread a neurological talks into marine life. The scene has been very grim. Shrimp boat captain Tolliver Tucker, who has completely converted his operation to Hollingway dead Fish, told the Tampa Bay A Times that the fish carcasses are packed so tight and coastal canals that swarms of maggots have appeared on them. He said, quote, these canals are sick. It's devastating. I've thought about crying. The event has impacted saltwater fishing across the region. Florida Fish and Wildlife has made the season for red fish trout and snook catching release only in Panellas in Hillsboro Counties through the fall. In a video made standing on top of a heap of dead fish, the local fishing guide Tyler Capella, said, the stocks are just on the rebound and now they're being smashed again. This is going to affect the fishery for years and years. Snooker in especially rough shape as this is their spawning season. Several boaters have reported finding dead breeder snook full of eggs. Red tides have a long history in Florida. They have been reported as far back to the seventeen hundreds, and the first Spanish explorers in the area reported fish kill in the area that's now Tampa Bay. But the severity of this year's bloom almost certainly has something to do with the Piney Point fertilizer plant in nearby Manatee County. You may remember back in April when The Weekend Review reported on this cracked wastewater reservoir that was on the verge of collapsing to avoid a catastrophic breach that would have flooded the surrounding neighborhoods and businesses, with four hundred and eighty million gallons of waste water all at once. More than two hundred million gallons of the stuff was released bit by bit into the Port Manatee Bay between late March and early April this year. This water was loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer, which almost definitely fed this current algae bloom, making it much much worse. So it makes sense that the owners of the plant should be on the hook for the damage to the fishery, right Unfortunately, the entity that owns Piney Point HRK Holdings went bankrupt several years ago, and so now John and Jane Q taxpayer has to pay to solve the problem. So pretty much all we can do in this current mass in Florida is do our best to clean it up and hope conditions in the region changed to bring an end to the bloom. But this is the reason why vetting new development is so important. There are plenty of responsible mining and logging and fertilizer companies out there, and these irresponsible actors give those industries a bad name. But once a project like the proposed pebble mine in Alaska or Twin Metals mine near the Boundary Waters gets underway, wildlife habitat, and the American public can end up taking on all kinds of risks they never signed up for, which is why we have those calls to action. As I've said many times, it doesn't matter who is in office, you can't sit back and hope that your interests are represented. You got to make those phone calls, You've got to send those emails. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Can't wait to tell you all about Alaska. Remember fall is coming on. If you have a need, maybe one you don't even realize, for a new set of lopping shears, a clean, quiet, powerful, battery operated chainsaw that slides right underneath your truck seat. You'll never know what's there until you need it. That tree, that dead tree over the logging road is you're trying to get up to hunting camp, isn't gonna stop you. You're gonna cut it out of the way. If you got that vision, check out www dot Steel Dealers dot com and find a reliable, knowledgeable steel dealer near you. Get you set up, and most importantly, let me know how I'm doing, and let me know what's going on in your neck of the Woods by writing in to a s k C a L that's asked Cal at the meat eater dot com. Thanks again and I'll talk to you next. And that Tom up in a co