Ep. 499: Backwoods University - Bear Talk

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1:00Warning, this product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes. Welcome to this bonus episode of Backwoods University. As always, this is a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. And a big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. In this bonus episode, this bonus conversation, we're going to be focusing pretty heavy on the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both portion of this show,

2:04as we'll be talking to a woman by the name of Maria Davidson, who is a large carnivore biologist and specialist for the SCI Foundation. We talk about all things bears, grizzly bears, black bears, social dynamics, hunting issues, anti-hunting problems, all about it. We even have some Africa sneak into the conversation. I love having the opportunity to do these bonus episodes when the opportunity arises, and this was a perfect one. So without further ado, here's Maria. Let's get into it. My name is Maria Davidson. I'm the North American Large Carnivore Program Manager for Sephora Club International Foundation. How long have you been in that role? Oh gosh, I started with SCIF in spring of 22, so a little over four years now. Prior to coming to SCIF, I was the program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the majority of that position being about the Louisiana black bear.

3:08I managed their black bear program, which included for the bulk of my career, the recovery of federally listed subspecies of American black bear. It's the only one that's ever been listed. So during my tenure, we launched through the recovery plan. I worked with US Fish, other federal agencies, private landowners, and NGOs. And we recovered the Louisiana black bear, and then subsequently it was delisted. And right before I retired from LVWF, I had worked the department all the way through the Coast Delisting Monitoring Plan, which has to be in place prior to delisting. So we had seven years of that of management activities we had agreed to prior to the delisting. And then when I finished turned in my last report, I retired and went to work for Sephora Club International Foundation. But primarily because I developed a relationship with SCI and SCIF after the bear was delisted in Louisiana.

4:17As is often the case, you're aware, the US Fish and Wildlife Service was sued by multiple individuals and organizations on that delisting. They were sued twice once in Washington DC and once in the middle district of the federal system in Louisiana. Sephora Club International intervened in both lawsuits and really did ride in on a white horse and save the day. So during that process, it went on for approximately two years. I worked fairly closely with the litigation department within SCI. And I thought, this is it. This is where I'm supposed to be. I really felt I was with like minds and kindred spirits and fighting for the rights of hunters and basically just doing what's right for wildlife management and wildlife conservation felt really good to me. And you know, I was ending a career at LWF. I'd been there 28 years and kind of ready to move on and it just seemed like a perfect place to kind of put a pin in that and move on.

5:23So that's exactly what I did during that process with SCI. I spent some time with their administration. And as what I was reminded just a couple of months ago during an email exchange with the SCI CEO, layered Hamlin. I ended my email with the PS. I'm going to be working for you in two years. And I actually, it only took about a year and a half and they created this large carnivore position within the foundation within the conservation program. And here I am. Yeah, let me just tell you, you came out the gate talking about a subject that is near and dear to my heart personally. And then we'll speak to directly the people that listen to this. Not just backwards university, but this entire Bear Greece podcast feed within meat eater. They've heard clay talk about the black bear and kind of its whole story, particularly in Arkansas. And then I did an episode about a year ago on this show talking about the black bear in Mississippi.

6:32And in that episode, I talked about kind of the story of the black bear in Arkansas and the story of the black bear in Louisiana. And in my opinion, from a wildlife conservationist point of view, there's a lot of exciting things happening for black bears in Mississippi right now. We've had just, I think it was two weeks ago. There was a confirmed black bear sighting. I mean, like it's, they're still culturally new enough down here that people just kind of get all wound up when they see them. But there was a bear come through less than five minutes from my house. And in my lifetime, that has never been the case. So we have this growing black bear population mostly along the Mississippi River, which of course you know, we got a lot of those bears. Swam over from Louisiana, which you know, but we've talked about the recovery of black bears on this show and on this podcast feed quite a bit. So you're coming out hot with good topics. Black bears are cool. Well, fairs are cool. I least I, you know, I think so. Yeah, it's a topic I'm pretty familiar with as you can imagine when I started working on the bear program in Louisiana.

7:45And that was 19, 99 somewhere in there. And so I worked with some of the original bear buying the largest from from Arkansas, Rick Estrich. Rick Estrich was there when I was there and also Mississippi and saw that whole progression. You know, the Louisiana black bear is a subspecies that extends into Mississippi. It does extend into Arkansas and East Texas. When US fish listed the Louisiana black bear, however, they did not cross that Arkansas border. So Arkansas bears were never federally listed. You know, so they kind of had it a little bit easier. But you know, it's been interesting. As you can imagine, bear world and bear biologist world is fairly small. It's a fairly small group of individuals relatively speaking. And black bear population growth is not new or unique to Louisiana, Arkansas or Mississippi. It is happening everywhere.

8:52The other thing that's happening and has been for quite some time, population goals and objectives are not being met in many states in the southeast and the east because harvest is just not keeping up and left to their own devices and suitable habitats. Bear populations can grow relatively quickly. You know, anti hunting groups love to talk about how slow to reproduce. They are in such. And I guess if you compare them to smaller species are ungulates that that is in fact true. But over the course of a decade or even five years that growth can happen at 20% 15% relatively high. And that's what's going on in the south and the east as well. Yeah, it's interesting you say that as well because I've had some long conversations with Mississippi's black bear biologist about that very subject and you couldn't be more correct one about I mean just kind of the controversial nature of the species.

9:54But then when you hear these things get thrown around about how they can be so slow to recover. They compare it to like this like very high for quantity species. Like if you compare it to a white tail deer that you know they can start dropping fawns in like the first year I think it is then then sure. But I like I have no data to support this next statement. But my opinion here in Mississippi like it feels like we're hitting some sort of inflection point with black bears like I don't think we are just exploding. But we're having like a like a pretty strong growth in the population that's been very encouraging to see and I think especially Arkansas has had a bear season for a while Louisiana this will be their second year I believe with the bear season third year. I really do think in my lifetime to be conservative about it. I think we'll see some sort of season in Mississippi just at the rate that the population seems to be growing.

10:55You know it bears are are interesting beasts for a couple many different reasons but from the management perspective one of the things that drives it is there is almost nobody on this planet who has a neutral opinion about bears. I just don't know if it's not just my experience either you know you have people who absolutely want to kill them all and you have people who want to love them all. And obviously those are disparate things and it's difficult in taxing and challenging to be the management authority in the middle of those two very different opinions. And putting blinders on and making decisions based on what is best for the management of the population within the structure that you're existing in you know to speak to hunting bears in Mississippi. You know I can remember back to going into Mississippi and doing didn't work on my own bears as you said we had colored bears when the river I had colored bears oftentimes in Mississippi and they didn't have anybody to do the bear work so we would go over there and do our din visits over there and and an individual bear showing up in and Wilkinson County was a was a big deal in newsworthy and of course it's not anymore the other interesting thing that's going to happen.

12:21And you know I think this is a guess but it's an educated guess based on my past experience Mississippi has far better habitat for bears and much more suitable habitat the Louisiana does so while Louisiana bears I think are going to be for the most part held within the Mississippi alluvial valley in those areas adjacent to the Mississippi River and then down on the coast. Mississippi has got in terms of just acreage so much more so once once they really get kind of a toe holding those individual counties they're going to really expand and they're going to do so relatively rapidly I'm sure you've been in those areas you know the road densities are very low relatively speaking you know the pressure the human pressure is very low relatively speaking to other bear areas in the south. South and the southeast which is going to allow for more bears just like Louisiana Louisiana doesn't have a huge number of bears but they do have enough bears to sustain a harvest and the one thing about bear populations like many other wildlife species you can monitor it is just mad at that point if you monitor it appropriately you can apply statistical models that'll tell you how many you can off take every year it's just math at that point if you if you input no information.

13:49Emotion and politics or anything else into it and you but you know that you can off take 10% it's not hard to do so you just have to factor in those the societal norms and desires for the state or the management authority you're working for and even if Mississippi decided they had a thousand bears now you know you could still easily harvest anywhere from five to 10% of those bears with no impact to the population you would still continue to see a population. Yeah it's it's so interesting to talk about like the different dynamics of it and anecdotally the you might enjoy this fact the first bear workup that I ever got to go on was a bear that had come from Louisiana so my friend who's the biologist was in contact with Louisiana wildlife and they had said you know I think she'd been over there for a while and they just switched her collar like they took the Louisiana collar off and they

14:49put a Mississippi collar on her because she had been over there for quite some time but that was my my first ever hands-on experience with a black bear was with a Louisiana collared bear which I thought was I thought was cool oh it's I for someone like me right it's you grow up I grew up in central Mississippi and so like as you could imagine a big part of like when you're going through your state history classes in middle school in high school of course you hear the story over and over again of the odore Roosevelt comes down and bear hunts with hold call you're and sure you used here and you hear all these stories but you're like nobody sees them anymore you know when I was young until fast forward to now like like we're saying here I still live in central Mississippi I'm a couple hours away from the delta so bears are new where I live but you go to something like Wilkinson County some of those other areas that you you referenced in the delta and bears are not rare there which I think is just stupid cool you know it's it mean like you're watching wildlife conservation happen in front of our eyes that's the phrase that that I like to say but what is interesting is people don't seem to fall in an in between with bears they their lover they hate them because the the anti-hunting part of it I don't support it but I'm not surprised by it I'm just like I guess the one that I've had to wrap my head around the most here is a

16:15kind of there's there's a lot of the folks like you alluded to it earlier there's some folks that they're like kill every single one of them we don't want them they don't need to be here there's this ongoing fake piece of news that floats around that the Mississippi Department of Wildlife is is bringing them in and release them I'm sure you probably dealt with some of that as well but but that side of it still buckles me because you know I'm over here like I'm excited about it I'm like you got a growing native wildlife population you're going to have a new hunting opportunity in the near future like what what's not to be happy about but that that whole kill every one of them in tallies that still to this day is the hardest one for me to wrap my head around I can't figure out why these folks are more excited which most of them are it's some outliers that aren't but it is that does exist in some people you know I think having spent my entire career so now basically my entire life in this

17:15industry and field I think it's a combination of a couple of things the at the most basic you know let's face it predators have always been viewed to some extent that way by humans just generationally historically for whatever reason whether it be fear competition whatever so there's that component to it but there's a new component now and I believe it to be political and it's people believing that we are forcing these bears on to their properties through some type of government overreach why they insist on the narrative that the bears were brought there by helicopters in the middle of the night and that kind of stuff because that just reiterates their point right that we have somehow encouraged upon their rights and I don't know that there's any way to combat that I've seen it my entire career the only thing I've ever known to do is kind of let the truth set you free and you know always remain as black and white and a political and just

18:21you know to the bones this is the way things are and and and be completely transparent and completely honest and one of the reasons I think we were successful in Louisiana and miss is it before delisting the bears is is we stayed true to that thought process you know we really proved the point that the endangered species act if left to how it is meant and how it is written and you work it that way and actually does work we went into the process a political we didn't choose sides we had we had these core missions and these recovery plans and management goals in place and then we worked together to get them that way you know we were not combative with the federal government we worked hand in hand the recovery coordinator for the Louisiana black bear lived in same town as as I lived in we worked together all the time and the recovery of the Louisiana black bear to me is is more than just a success story for the conservation of that

19:24individual species and my mind it should be held up of you know see it can work the endangered species act can work if you work it the way it's intended to work and if people actually come to it with the best of intentions and not this future mindset of well we want it recovered but we never want it hunted you know to me I do find it strange and I agree with you what you see today at its core becomes people with a hyper focus of no matter how many of them we have we will use every excuse in the book to not hunt them they shouldn't be hunting and I just find that odd and fascinating because the vast majority of these people are not vegans they're not vegetarians and many of them even believe in the sustainable use and hunting of other species but when it comes to bears or even a larger thing predators they just can't wrap their mind around it and since they don't want to do it they think nobody else should

20:28and I find that harmful to any type of collaborative recovery effort and and meeting goals and objectives for for basically any predator species whether it be you know let's you can name them and they're all controversial bears mountain lions wolves they're all controversial and it's because of that that specific mindset yeah no no doubt it is it's fascinating and it's one of those things it's like I don't know if I'll ever really have the answer to it nor do I know if it'll ever really stop oh check engine ABS or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly VeraScan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASC certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for O'Reilly VeraScan today

21:30strong hands built America and kept it running for 250 years strong hands also keep Copenhagen moving today here's to the bravery of linemen the endurance of truckers the skills of welders the traditions upheld by farmers and all American tradesmen sharing in our work ethic Copenhagen celebrating American craftsmanship proven since 1822 warning this product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes this is clay newcomp from bear grease if you're only using chat gpt to answer questions you're missing a lot of what it can do think about planning a hunt you've got weather maps gear regulations travel plans and seasonal patterns to keep straight none of it lives in one place but it all has to come together chat gpt work can be the same way chat gpt work helps with bigger projects that have a lot of moving parts

22:31you bring the goal along with real information like notes files research calendars spreadsheets and project plans then chat gpt can help turn it into something useful a plan a tracker an analysis a presentation outline or a workflow you can keep building on and you stay in control you set the direction review the work approve any actions and choose the final result chat gpt just helps carry the load and keeps the work moving put chat gpt to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects get started at chat gpt.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans you know you bring up the endangered species act and and definitely I I would 100% agree with you what happened with the black bears down here is if you if you look at the the endangered species act for for what it is and for its original purpose then I completely agree like that's an example of like this can work if it is used the way that it's

23:37intended to be used I would think or a lot of people get frustrated with the endangered species act is another bear species that comes up all the time which is the grizzly bear which I'm sure you know all too well because when we originally started communicating about you coming on I think the first person that reached out to me from the SCI foundation said that you had been on some sort of collaring grizzly trip we all collared like 20 grids or something like that I did that so I I live in Wyoming so the grizzly bear stuff is pretty near and dear to my heart but the project you're referring to is a predator prey project that we are doing in spazzy wilderness park in northern british Columbia and I believe when you were speaking to our marketing person I was still in british Columbia you know that area is so remote that trapping bears is not really the way to go when you need to deploy collars so we launched a two week effort where we were helicopter

24:37bears in order to deploy all of those radio collars so that's that's exactly where I was I was in the spazzy wilderness park helicopter darting grizzly bears and I got to tell you it did not suck I okay yeah now like let me just move to the side everything else I plan to ask you and let's just talk completely about helicopter darting grizzly bears like if that sounds that just sounds like a good time I mean I'm also enthused like it fascinated by what you know what value came out of that from a you know wildlife biology standpoint or research standpoint but it also just sounds really fun from being honest well at somebody texted me earlier today and said oh my friends think you have the like coolest job ever and I said well while I appreciate that they probably don't see that 95% of my life is spent in front of my computer like probably everybody else on the planet right but the project in BC is a predator prey project we wanted to look at the impact

25:41grizzly bears were having on those important ungulate species most importantly caribou you know and they have caribou mousse sheep in that area so we we're going about it two different ways hoping that the data can inform each other one would be a special GPS video collar that we put on these bears so they're wearing a video collar that comes on during the calving season and the rut so it will it will inform us specifically what those bears are doing during that time frame but when we capture the bears we take blood and hair and there's some fairly complicated analysis you can do on stable isotopes in their blood and hair that can tell you what those animals have eaten over the past weeks as well as the past months so when we go back and we take those collars off and put another collar on there we'll take another batch of samples of blood and hair and then overlay those two so we'll have the collar data and the blood data and hair data to complement or

26:48contradict each other whichever the the case ends up being and that will inform us not only what component of their diet is meat because as you know they're they're not 100% carnivorous but what kind of meat it is or you know are they eating marmots are they eating caribou calves are they eating adult caribou some of those those tests they can do are pretty rigorous now and pretty technical so like if you get blood and hair during the cabbages and there's some stable isotope tests out there that purports tell you if that meat is actually a nursing anongulate you know it's just the the signature in in the isotope itself so it's fascinating work and fun to do and and then yeah the whole thing of darting bears out of helicopters just a great way to spend the day yeah I would say that that is wildly fascinating if I do say so myself I say this next part knowing that

27:48it probably probably couldn't be done but still so their video collars yes do you could you imagine I understand immediately why this would be like a hard-known as an answer but if you could take some of those videos and post them on the interwebs when you get something interesting do you know how cool that would be now oh you go you oh yeah well oh man we don't I mean we don't have any yet or we quite frankly would have already done it the video portion of the collar technology doesn't upload so a GPS collar uploads locations to a satellite and then that locations downloaded back to us so at any given time of the day I can go on my computer and see where those bears are you know for the last location that uploaded but the video component of it is just store on board simply because of the battery requirement it would have taken to upload those videos onto you know up to a satellite so I can't access those videos until I get those collars back in my hot little hands and yeah I can't

28:55wait my goodness I mean I just think that would be some crazy cool video I understand some people I hope so stay tuned I mean I where where would you watch them at like if when you get on where could be where would we be able to see them SCIF has a YouTube channel and we'll be we'll be uploading some of the videos to that you'll see some of them for sure we'll piece together some of that we're going to do I don't know if you've ever been to our convention in Nashville in January but I will do a seminar on this project and as part of that we will upload of portion of those videos to that I've been to the convention before and I'm actually my wife and I are planning on coming this year so great look man I'm there all week yeah no that would be way cool um isotopes can determine what they're eating correct that is wild well there's so many tests that can be done on you know like for instance when they take hair and and they look back at you know what

29:57they've got drug tests that can look at hair and they can tell you how long ago you were taking specific drugs I don't even know all of the different medical technology they can use on on the air alone but once you combine the blood in the hair you not only get short term but you get longer term as well which is super helpful what's the long term hope of this study and then like how longer y'all planning on doing this like how long are y'all planning on monitoring these bears in this way because what we really need are the video data in there to inform what those bears are doing we are we will go back in the fall we'll dart those bears again change their collars out and then begin assimilating all of the data off of the collars that we have in hand we'll let those bears go through the dint because in october within another month or so they're going to be dinting and then they won't be out again until april so everything you'll just kind of be on sitting around the little in our thumbs waiting for the bears to wake up so in april when they come back out

31:01you know they will immediately go into the spring and they'll start with just vegetation but it doesn't take them long to switch to meet if that's what they're going to do and then specifically it will cover the time frame of capping season and what we do is the video portion of that collar obviously can't run all the time it would run out of battery immediately so you have to program it for it to capture short bursts so handling time of a carcass is maybe not well published but it is a published known entity so we've decided that if a bear could completely from start to finish take care of a caribou carcass meaning from the time he starts actually chasing it to killing it packing it around or whatever he's going to do with it and consume it you know you need no more for sure than 45 minutes and it quite frankly could be lower than that so you program your cameras accordingly depending upon the season so by the time

32:08you know bear come emerges from the dint in april somewhere in there and then goes through calving season all the way through the end of june beginning of july we'll go back out there the end of july ish somewhere in there in the summertime in 27 and grab those collars again take another sample of hair and blood and then that's the end of that say goodbye bears and then go have a fairly significant amount of data to be able to inform those questions yeah that is wildly fascinating I look I really do I look forward to seeing something video it'll be a relatively short turnaround that's way cool grizzly's man that talk about like I feel like and this is anecdotal this isn't me basing this off any sort of data this is just me and my personal interest I feel like like both black bears and grizzly bears they're just seem to be culturally everywhere

33:09right now like at home they're growing like we we already talked about that and then gris you have this it's a kind of a similar thing from what I'm looking at you have this seemingly growing population in flux with the endangered species list you have some people that are like we should never hunt these things you have some people there like we should shoot every one of them you have some people you know it but I see some some parallels with both species of bears regardless of how different they are no yeah absolutely they're they're very very similar the opinions with grizzly bears may be a little stronger not maybe I think they're definitely a little stronger and actually I think they're a little bit stronger from both sides of the argument and from the anti hunting side it draws opinions internationally you have people nationally and internationally that want to weigh in to the fight in the courtroom over how they should be managed and locally those people

34:09have stronger opinions but quite frankly I think a grizzly bear population can have more of an impact on local communities than necessarily a black bear population can again relatively speaking but you know it's interesting to me that one how similar they are and two how disparate those groups are such that they will assign this holier than thou platform for a certain species like bears but then they'll say but it's okay to hunt white tail deer or it's okay hunt elk but you can't hunt bears and they're doing the same thing for black bears and grizzly bears when you make an animal a game species like has been done now in Missouri then Louisiana then Florida far black bear you begin to see that side that was just angry and they wanted to kill them all that begins to light

35:10enough because then bears at least in their backyard have some type of added value to their life even if it's not economic even if they're not going to lease their property to a bear hunter for X number of dollars a year it doesn't matter now it's a renewable resource that they can tap into while they may not draw bear tag they have the ability to put in for a bear tag so I think it it changes their mindset to some extent and I've certainly seen it in in more than one state you know I just traveled down to my home state of Louisiana where I attended the Acadiana chapter banquet where they raffled the secretaries tag for $18,000 so you know I think people are interested in bear hunting I think they want to pursue it I think that that it is going to provide value and add benefit to landowners and that's one of the things that was for me personally

36:15it was very important because Louisiana is is like many southern states it's the majority privately owned so these animals are living recovering thriving on private land to some extent at the expense of the landowner sometimes so when I was doing the recovery work and in the entire time I was the bear program manager for Louisiana when I worked with landowners and I worked with a lot of them I was very honest no you cannot hunt them now but in order for us to hunt them we first have to recover them in order for me to recover them I have to know how many of them there are in order for me to know how many of them there are I have to get on your property so they allowed access based on trust they trusted that I would be good to my word and and you know I was meaning what I said and that once they were recovered and they were game species in Louisiana we would have a harvest

37:18so for me personally it's really gratifying to see that that happened because I feel like I I kept my part of the deal you know I was lying to them all of these years that they in fact do have a harvest and that harvest is going to continue to be monitored and and regulated such that bears will be sustainable in the future while allowing a legitimate opportunity and what I mean by that is you have you have those that say oh 40 tags is too many well you also have those that say 40 tags in enough you know that there's a bear behind and every tree and that kind of thing so a legitimate opportunity is the opportunity allowed based on the data and so you know a state has spent the decades that that Louisiana has spent collecting data which is not a cheap thing it has been an incredibly expensive thing but it's allowed them to provide legitimate opportunity and to me that's

38:19worth the money yeah I mean just going off of like what I've seen and what I've heard from hunter satisfaction from Louisiana already I heard somebody else I don't know if they want me to mention their name or not because they still work in the space but they said the same kind of thing they you know talking about the folks that wanted to kill all of them they said you wait whenever you whenever you open that up they said whenever you open that up some of those guys will be the first people you see that if they draw a tag they'll be posing behind it grinning from ear to ear you know it's just like there's something about when you when they actually have access to that and it now is a resource it there's like a shift that takes place and yeah I know hate part of it kind of drifts away which is which is preferred you know and it's interesting for me because like again I'm I feel like I'm watching this I feel like I'm still in the middle of this story here at home in Mississippi feel like I'm watching it happen when the moments in your

39:19life are too important to miss you can trust O'Reilly Auto Parts to keep you and your plans on the road our professional parts people can test your vehicle's battery and even give it a charge if needed in most cases we can install your new battery for free it's just one of the many services we provide at O'Reilly Auto Parts to ensure life's best moments don't find you stranded strong hands built of America kept it running for 250 years strong hands also keep Copenhagen moving today here's to the bravery of lineman the endurance of truckers the skills of welders the traditions upheld by farmers and all American tradesmen sharing in our work ethic Copenhagen celebrating American craftsmanship proven since 1822 warning this product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes this is clay newcomp from Beargreese if you're only using chat GPT to answer questions

40:23you're missing a lot of what it can do think about planning a hunt you've got weather maps gear regulations travel plans and seasonal patterns to keep straight none of it lives in one place but it all has to come together chat GPT work can be the same way chat GPT work helps with bigger projects that have a lot of moving parts you bring the goal along with real information like notes files research calendars spreadsheets and project plans then chat GPT can help turn it into something useful a plan a tracker an analysis a presentation outline or a workflow you can keep building on and you stay in control you set the direction review the work approve any actions and choose the final result chat GPT just helps carry the load and keeps the work moving put chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects get started at chat GPT dot com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans mississippi is just a couple of decades behind Louisiana

41:29you know and i say a couple of decades is it 20 years i don't know is it 12 i don't know i don't you know i don't know how many bears are in mississippi but i will i i've always said it i stand by it today when mississippi gets where they're going in terms of bear numbers they are going to so far surpass Louisiana they're going to have three to four times the number of bears Louisiana ever thought about having they had better habitat and more of it and that you know that's really all bears need they you know they need suitable habitat and just the time to meet that demand right and and they will for sure yeah no i i agree and i look as i'm still excited about it well it's it's something to be excited about and now in Louisiana non-residents can put in so that's pretty cool when a landowner that has been working with the bear program for 20 years can then lease his bear hunting lease and glean some money off of it that's a pretty big thing to me you know it's important to me it's it's important to them yeah it's it's it's added value

42:37it's added value over over the years you know we always had between 40 and 60 females on the air every year so that's it that's a lot of been more and most of the time i was on kind of the same landowners year to year to year but occasionally we had new ones and i always always always invited the landowners and encouraged them to come and not only to come but to bring their kids and bring their wife and you know bring whomever and and they did oftentimes they did and it never ceased to amazed me that when i could bring a landowner that through my interactions with them over the past whatever a little bit i they were somewhat negative about bears you know because bears destroyed their feeders and they chewed up you know their deer feeders and their deer stands and they got into their ag crops and you know all the things all the things that people say about bears but if you take them on a nin visit with their kids or their grandkids or their wives or whatever

43:39and you know i've kind of always went about it the same way i'd dart the female and then you know pull the cubs out and because i'm trying to change the collar on the female or whatever i'd give the cubs to the landowner to hold and you know you're in charge of these until i can handle it and get back to what i'm doing or whatever the shift in the mindset was pretty consistent among those that had somewhat of a negative thought process about bears to oh wait a minute this is another wildlife resource that is using my property therefore i'm responsible the shift in mindset was interesting to watch and and i really liked doing it it was probably one of the better parts of my job for sure yeah what's interesting there what's is is the parallels again because the the bear program coordinator here in Mississippi he's a good friend of mine and i've heard so many similar stories and i'm telling you that you very similar stories of going to do not eat some of them

44:41not even dint checks just some of them just like you know workups that he's caught in a trap and he's gonna put a collar on and say a deal takes a person out that he says kind of bear a verse you know like not not straight up hate him but like they're not just overly tickled that you know this bear now showed up on their place but he's he said he's never had he's never had anybody walk away from that experience without a positive feeling towards bears you know yeah i don't i can't think of a single time where when i got done and we were talking afterwards drinking a coke or whatever that they were still negative in any way then it became war about well where where does this bear go and where does it live and when does it leave my property and when does it come back and then it was more into an information seeking and well how many bears are on my property and and that kind of thing and it was a very positive experience and in my mind for everybody involved

45:43yeah no and that's what it takes which obviously everybody can't go on a you know a dintrip but we said i say it all the time on this particular show it's impossible to appreciate something that you don't understand and every single i've not i've i've yet to find an exception every single wildlife conflict any of the word that involves bears black bears grizzly bears anything name a species if there's conflict it all derives from a lack of understanding every time you know it's interesting the parallels that you can you can look at and draw in this project that we have in british columbia we're working with first nations first nations as you know can that you know they don't have to follow the season they can go and can and do go and and track bears kill bears that kind of thing for conflict or even the perception of conflict so part of this project was to provide some higher level professional training to their wildlife guardians to allow

46:46chemical immobilization safe handling techniques and so on so when we were up there there were you just had to wade through the black bears we were catching so many black bears you had to shoot them away from the trap sites in order to get the trap set but we did catch we did catch grizzly bear so when we started handling bears with first nations with these wildlife guardians that had a lifetime of wildlife experience hunting including bears but they had never handled a live bear and the awe that they approached the live bear was palpable and visible and i think it surprised even them because they they all said to the man and individually to me in different times i didn't know i've never touched a live bear you know so there's a presence and to me and an all that goes with that that they felt and they didn't realize it was going to happen and afterwards

47:51they were so all in they were their first thing in the morning and the last thing at night it was it was inspiring to see but i think almost everybody experiences that whether it be a black bear or grizzly bear they experience it for sure yeah it just takes it just takes being willing to understand the animal a little bit more and you can take it as granular as you want to it's like if you take take the same principle i got into turkey hunting when i was young the older i've gotten the more i've done it the more i understand turkeys as a species do i understand them completely no that's why they still hoodwink me every spring but the more that i understand that animal the more i appreciate them you know it's it's not a it's not a far concept and it's not just bears like you take anyone any hunter if they take the more they hunt them the more they understand that animal the more they appreciate that that animal is there and the same would would go to anything in every

48:53elk hunter loves elk every mountain lion houndsman loves mountain lions i mean they just they are so singularly focused on their species and not just the conservation of their species but the fact that they want that that species to persist and thrive that's the common denominator overall level and bear hunter bear hunters were the same way i mean i don't have to tell you you know that it's a common misconception and a common well lie i mean let's face it anti-hunting organizations flat out lot because they can't they can get away with it and the the lie that offends me the most is that hunters hate wildlife because it's just it's just flat out not true you know and the other the other thing that really begins to offend me and and i have a hard time with of this hunting is amoral and unethical there's nothing amoral or unethical about it you know we've been doing it as

49:57humans forever you know and the other odd thing i find is that the interjection of the word trophy is supposed to somehow then make hunt a for letter word that makes no sense to me a trophy by it's very definition is something you keep because you want to remember it's of the event or you you are proud of it and it makes you proud of how you accomplished that you know cave dwellings have pictographs and they document their hunts on the walls of the caves they kept trophies back then so there's nothing again amoral or unethical about trophy hunting it's just the trophy is what you kept to remember the event so those things that have been twisted up to mean something that they're not offend me personally and professionally yeah and and i'm sure especially working for you know like the the Sphari Club International Foundation i mean you deal with the anti-hunting side of it all the time so and and again we're talking about stuff that principles that apply

51:02to the same species you could take like the anti-hunting thing we can talk about Africa you work for Sphari Club International yeah like the the probably one of the best examples is Kenya right Kenya hunting is banned in 1977 and hunting is banned there's no hunting in Kenya they've lost like two thirds of their wildlife since hunting has been taking out taken out of that country made completely prohibited like it's it's night and day you go to places countries in Africa where hunting is allowed and they're thriving oh there's places where there's too much wildlife you see now but the way i have it in my head here at home bringing it back to the bears is i'm like i know because the history that i the history of hunting and wildlife as a country and as a state of Mississippi in my head i'm like if if we ever get the black bear population high enough to a point where we can sustain harvest if we ever get to the point where there is a hunting season again

52:02then i know they're gonna be here for the long haul because if you put in a hunting season you put value on that animal you put the hunting community behind it and that animal will subsist period it just will you're right i get flat like it just will that's how it works there's too much history to to prove it you're right i mean and if you look in the us hunted species game animals are not in jeopardy anywhere and they're not in jeopardy because hunters aren't gonna allow it you know you can look at it across the country and those stakes that liberalize a harvest for whatever reason there's always a significant portion of the hunting population that goes way by way way is that too many we don't want to take too many i mean it happens all the time here where i live in in Wyoming a couple of years ago we had that terrible freeze that really impacted the mule deer population but it really knocked the antelope population down as well and the local hunters just absolutely refused to put in for the most part for a tag for antelope or mule deer

53:08for a couple of years and they did it because those populations are important to them so you're right of game species is some of the best protection any species can want yeah is there's just too much proof oh again and again again internationally i agree personally i've become pretty uh obsessed is probably the best word with africa in the past few years and so i do all these i do all these like history dives with wildlife and hunting history in the continent of africa i was just there in uh late June great trip i saw lions catch a warthog that was crazy they like worked as a team there was uh there was a male lion chasing a warthog and as soon as he chased him around this bush another male lion that we didn't we didn't even know was there jumped out and caught it it was wild that's crazy yeah it's one of the coolest things i've ever seen but i digress um i want to be respectful of your time so where once again just so we don't forget where can people

54:12find keep up with your work like especially this well the gris like the grizzly stuff where can people find more more on that if they go on the our youtube channel which is Sephora Club International foundation we video all of our projects we bring videographers out there because we want people to know what we're doing and if you go on youtube to our channel you can see all of our cool stuff from we've got a bunch of leopard work going on in in africa right now where we're helping those countries with their population density and abundance we are just beginning work down in south america and then in perigway and other countries down there i've got an actual really cool project on agiatic black bears in japan right now so we're kind of all over the place but if you you follow our youtube channel you'll see all of them no that's cool i'm gonna have to check that out myself and and you know your followers that come to nashville we've got it the foundation has a great big booth right out front net front hallway where where we all are and one of us is in that booth at

55:14all time so you know we do nothing but talk about our projects 24 seven so we're happy to visit with anybody well i will i will look you up there this year because i'll we'll we'll be there and i'll it's just stuff fascinates me if you can't tell from about it looked at you well thank you for your time and uh thank you for for shedding some light on all this work this is fascinating stuff i appreciate it well thanks for having me and that's going to be all that we have for you today i hope that you enjoyed that conversation as much as i did be sure to check out some of that stuff that mario was talking about that's going to be some pretty cool content when they roll out with it and as always thank you for listening to backwoods university as well as bear grease in this country life it means a whole heck of a lot to all of us over here and we'll see y'all next time when the moments in your life are too important to miss you can trust o'riley auto parts to keep you in your plans on the road our professional parts people can test your vehicles battery and even

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