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6 Ranch Podcast
6 Ranch Podcast
Old School Wildlife Biology with Vic Coggins
Vic Coggins started working as a wildlife biologist in the 60's and during his time gathered as much history as he could. He wrote a hell of a book about the history of wildlife and some of his stories during his five decades as a biologist. Listen in to hear stories of doing game surveys on foot and horseback, the history of mule deer, bighorn sheep introduction, whitetail and more. Great episode with a knowledgeable man.
Vic Coggins' Book
These are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands. I'm James Nash and this is the Six Ranch Podcast. Well, good morning to Mr Vic Coggins. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing good for an old man.
Speaker 2:Vic, I think it was 30 years ago when I first came into your office and started bugging you about wildlife stuff. I was eight years old, I remember.
Speaker 1:I remember you coming with your mom out to Zumwalt quite a bit, yeah, yep.
Speaker 2:And I just had all the questions in the world about wildlife and how stuff worked and I do remember coming into the back of your office as a little kid and you taking the time to talk with me about elk and deer and whatever questions I had, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking time to do that. I think a lot of folks wouldn't.
Speaker 1:Well, I tried to. I always thought about that's one of the thoughts I still have about our diminished wildlife populations is the effect on young people?
Speaker 2:Sure, Because that's kind of how it works, If we think about it from a practical point of management. Wildlife is held by the state in a trust for the public. Right, Right, yeah. So how did you get into it and when was that?
Speaker 1:I started, well, when I was small, from the time I can remember, my grandparents had a cabin in the Southern Cascades and so I just kind of grew up with it, southern Cascades and so I just kind of grew up with it, and then we lived outside of well well, it's now Medford City but at that time it was rural and there were oak hills and not not many people and you could just roam wherever you wanted. And once I got a horse well, he wanted. And once I got a horse, well, I ranged a long way and I trapped and hunted and, yeah, so in in that area, and at that time there was, well, there wasn't any deer much in the valley because there were too many people shooting them, but but there were loads of pheasants. What year were you born? I was born in 43 and lived in the Rogue Valley until, well, I guess I was about 21 when I moved up here.
Speaker 2:Okay, so right in the middle of World War II.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I of course don't remember, but my dad was in Japan. He was the Philippines and Japan. Was he a. Marine, no, he was a medic actually. Okay.
Speaker 3:In the Navy. No in the Army In the Army, yeah, gotcha.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he had all kinds of stories. Then I grew up hunting with, when I got older, hound hunting with a bunch of old ex-World War II Marines and mostly Marines. I think they were a colorful lot to put it mildly as they tend to be.
Speaker 2:I just heard about a really interesting story from Alcatraz in 1946. And there was a bank robber and a couple of his gang that overtook the prison. Do you know about this? No, I don't. So they wanted to escape and they couldn't find a key to get out through the yard, but they'd overtaken the armory.
Speaker 2:find a key to get out through the yard, but they'd overtaken the armory and they ended up just taking over the whole prison and letting the prisoners out, and they took all the guards. The local law enforcement couldn't do anything about it. The FBI couldn't figure it out, but there was a little Marine base that was nearby called Treasure Island, and this is 1946. These guys had just got home from World War II.
Speaker 1:Nobody to mess with Hooking and jabbing across the Pacific.
Speaker 2:They sent 20 Marines in there and they had them balled up in about four hours, but they caused so much damage to the facilities.
Speaker 1:They did because they were used to it. It took months to get Alcatraz back on its feet. So much damage to the facilities. They did because they were used to. Yeah, it took months to get Alcatraz back on its feet, but I also learned that there was a period, I think either during or right before World War II, where they shut elk hunting down in Oregon to encourage more men to join the war?
Speaker 2:I don't recall ever hearing about that. Yeah, it's written about in the Oregon Elk Management Plan, which honestly is a pretty good document, yeah, okay. So you grew up kind of on the west side, starting in 1943, always interested in hunting and trappingpping wildlife. At what point did you decide that that's what you wanted to study and pursue as a professional?
Speaker 1:I started working for a local veterinarian when I was about 16. In fact, I rode my horse. I didn't have a driver's license, so I rode my horse to work all the time, and so I was my horse.
Speaker 1:I didn't have a driver's license, so I rode my horse to work all the time, and so I was pretty interested. Of course we dealt with all kinds of animals. He was a large animal vet as well as small animals too. But I was real interested in veterinary medicine too. But one of the bios the district bio there, the same as I was here invited me to go with him, and so I just spent a lot of time with him His name was Bob Maben and doing surveys, different surveys, from morning doves to black-tailed deer. Surveys from morning doves to black-tailed deer. There weren't hardly any elk down there at that time, but that really started me. Then, finally, I went to Oregon State and got a degree, but they ended up coming over here in 1965. Okay.
Speaker 1:And I had a summer job and because of my horse experience, I ended up working in the high lakes doing lake surveys, gill netting fish and sounding lakes, and so I got well acquainted with the county, working here and there. Yeah, so I finished my degree and was lucky enough to get on here. There was an opening. Everybody started in fisheries in those days because that's where the jobs were.
Speaker 2:And at that time fish and wildlife were separate divisions, weren't they?
Speaker 1:There was a commercial the commercial fish was Okay, and sport fish and wildlife was Oregon. Well, Oregon State Game Commission Okay Is who I started working for first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so working in the high lakes at that time, were you stalking brook trout? Was there a rainbow initiative? Was it golden trout?
Speaker 1:Well, they did a lot of different things and I mean they had put golden trout I wasn't involved in any of the golden trout, but I was involved with netting a bunch of the lakes and sounding them and we mapped them and we did spawning areas mapped spawning areas and that's the biggest problem with brookies in most of those lakes is there's just so much spawning area that they outproduce the capability of the lake, so you end up with small ones. But, there's some of the lakes that they do really well in too.
Speaker 2:Sure, sure. It seems like the lakes that have a mix of deep and shallow water tend to produce big fish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, crescent Lake was a real good one. It had really nice brookies probably still does, yeah and it had a spawning area, but just not excessive amounts like some of them, and I mean the season's darn short there for them too.
Speaker 2:Yeah it is. I mean these high lakes. Here are a lot of them, over 8 000 feet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they'll still have ice on them in june yeah, no, I know, I know some that ended up having little surprise plants, aerial plants, because they couldn't uh, you know, the lake could be froze, the boys would dump them somewhere else yeah which they weren't supposed to do, but well, I mean, what, what else you know? I know, yeah, I know I know, yeah, but I've had some several that I found fish that weren't supposed to be in them, and not that it was that big a deal because they were.
Speaker 1:It was usually rainbow and they no darn few of them reproduce there yeah, so I know one of the concerns right now, depending on the on the watershed, is hybridization between between the brook trout and bull trout yeah, I know, I know and that you know, I, I can remember Hurricane Creek had both and it probably still does, and my theory was there was a lot of that water that was not really very good brook trout habitat, because they like those mountain meadows and the streams, the gentler streams, and of course, bull trout. As you know, fast water they do well in too. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of what I'm curious about, Vic, are the changes that you've seen over all the decades that you've worked here in Willow County, and even though you're retired and have been retired now for a good time you're still very active in working on wildlife. Problems Like this is a lifelong pursuit for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true, and I do have a private business, and so I work on private ranches Mostly. Right now I've slowed down to Rocky Dixon's place, yeah, and then our own land. I work on it a lot, yeah, and my son-in-law has feed lots around and we've been doing some trying to get. I've been working on him to leave the some of the corn fields longer and he's got several that have real good potential for big mule deer and yeah, corn.
Speaker 2:Corn is an interesting elixir for wildlife isn't it?
Speaker 1:Oh, it is, it is.
Speaker 2:I don't know if there's anything that has changed wildlife in the US more than corn.
Speaker 1:No, no, I had to laugh. And Montana, I'm not saying anything bad about their magazine because it's a pretty good little magazine, but they're trying to encourage people not to feed. Somebody in there said that corn was poisonous, and my view is well, corn might not be good at certain times, especially if they're starved down, but there's an awful lot of Midwest deer that don't know anything but corn, and that's where those massive deer come from too.
Speaker 2:And it's fascinating to me that we continue to break records. Yeah, I know it, I know it Like we're breaking records on a regular basis and if you think about a species like, there should just kind of be an upper limit to their capabilities. But through the way deer and elk, for that matter are managed and their access to the nutrients and whatever else is in these modern corn and soybean crops, they're getting bigger than they've ever gotten and they continue to do it year after year.
Speaker 1:You don't know, and that's true, and some too is harvest management, you know, and especially on private land. Yeah. You know you can set your own quotas and do culling and everything else.
Speaker 2:So how did wildlife surveys occur when, when you started with wildlife, that would that have been in the 60s.
Speaker 1:It was in the 60s yeah and they were horseback and a few foot and vehicle routes, but mostly horseback and they did. We did some flying and we did it in the super cub. Almost no helicopter work until later, but yeah, it got people out on the ground and I mean they weren't random, they were regular routes.
Speaker 2:Okay, you, you ran every every year same time, so you do it on the same same day every year. Well, it wouldn't be necessarily the same day, but the same within a couple weeks okay, and you just kind of look for your weather windows when there's visibility, yeah, and then you, of course, kept good records, yeah, and so you had those.
Speaker 1:I've got all those records too.
Speaker 2:What was the elk population like at that time?
Speaker 1:It was probably about I could look here because it's in this book but it was probably about half what it peaked out at in 2000.
Speaker 2:Why do you reckon the elk numbers were low then compared to, you know, 2010?
Speaker 1:One thing people don't realize is how intensive livestock grazing was in those days. So there was that, and then there was the seasons that were very liberal and of course mule deer were in extreme abundance in the 60s. I mean, we had some hard winters and that'd knock them back, but if you gave them about three years they were right back. They had good fawn survival and good years, but the forage wasn't like it is now. That's where I really differ with some mule deer managers, and at least here is I've just seen such a tremendous increase in forage quality and quantity.
Speaker 2:And what we commonly hear from wildlife biologists now is that habitat is the primary issue and limiting factor for mule deer. But when I go into the high country here, I see vast, vast amounts of really ideal habitat with plenty of forage, and there's just hardly a deer left in this wilderness area. I know, I think that there's more mountain goats up there than there are mule deer. Yeah, it's crazy to me, and if I look at stuff like mountain goats and bighorns, we issue a couple tags for each of those species in this wilderness, and then we'll issue 800 deer tags.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, how can that be?
Speaker 1:Well, it's predation isn't habitat. It's not habitat here. It may be some places I'm not saying that you know west wide, that there isn't areas in oregon too where you've had subdivisions take over but where are our biggest densities of mule deer here in towns?
Speaker 2:That's right, and you think that they're living in town to escape predators?
Speaker 1:Yes, I do. I see it on our place. We've got 200 acres that our Y had up west of the Lime Quarry Road, yeah, and we've done a lot of habitat work there in those old landings. We've turned them into food plots basically, and improved water and seeded all those roads. I've got clover growing, the clover roads, yeah, and well, we maybe have, we've got cameras up there all the time and we maybe have 10 mule deer. No, white tails, and you'd think I mean the white tails are just really close in abundance and you'd think there'd be one once in a while that'd go up there, but we just don't see them how often are you seeing lions and bears at?
Speaker 1:first a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they seem to have dropped off some now so I I checked a bear in to the state office in Pendleton this last fall and I asked him if he'd been seeing any lions come in, and they said that as the wolf population had increased in that area, that the number of cougars that were being checked in had dropped off substantially number of cougars that were being checked in had had dropped off substantially.
Speaker 1:I looked a couple years ago and totaled up. I always kept track of the harvest by unit of both black bears and and cougars because I and I was real interested in what had happened, since we had more wolves and I do think there's some truth to that and j Jim Atkinson and Holly saw that happen over in Big Creek as wolves increased, cougars hardly had any kitten survival.
Speaker 1:Oh really yeah, and a lot of it was probably because you know the cougar would make a kill and the wolves would find it and eat it, Right? And so a lot of that was probably the amount of food they had.
Speaker 2:What was the cougar population like in the 60s Low and how could you even survey something like that at that time?
Speaker 1:The only thing you did is when you saw tracks, we kept track of them, but you couldn't, yeah, other than old bounty records are probably the best. When was there a bounty? There was a bounty on cougars, probably from the early 1900 well, even before the early 1900s, until they became a game animal. And when was that? It would have been? I've got it in here in that cougar, but it was in the in the 60s. They were at a real low numbers. They survived here because of the wilderness and the snake river unit. But even in the snake river unit if you talked to the old stockman down there, you know if you got back towards. Well, south of Saddle Creek, there were some cats in there and of course in Idaho had some too. So there were some. In fact I've got some old pictures that show some of the early settlers there and some of them relied heavily on the bounty payments. Of course they went to the state that had the highest bounty down there yeah pick idaho or oregon, based off right, but ours was, I think.
Speaker 1:The state paid fifty dollars and then the counties paid some on top of that, or some of them did. That's a substantial amount of money. It was a substantial amount of money. Yeah. Especially if you had a little ranch and you know you maybe sold 20 or 30 head of steers every year, right, I mean it was, and they weren't worth much, right, and it was a lot of money.
Speaker 2:And I know Papa Doug Doug Tippett. He of course grew up down there at Doug Bar, spent his whole life in southeast Washington, northeast Oregon, living and running cattle in the canyons and out here in the hills and all over the place. He died without ever having seen a cougar.
Speaker 1:Oh, did he Yep. I would have thought he'd have seen one out on Zumwalt Yep, never did.
Speaker 2:I'll be darned His whole life out here, yeah, cowboying and running around, and he never saw a cougar.
Speaker 1:No, and that was common. I mean, it was really unusual to see him. And then we got to where we were seeing him on our survey routes. You know, sometimes I remember seeing five, several different times. You know it'd be a female and kittens, which that's a lot of kittens, but sometimes there'd be a tom with them for a short time, gotcha.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had five show up right here on the ranch one time and a neighbor called and said I just saw five lions down here and I was like, oh, I think maybe, maybe coyotes. But he goes, I shot one of them and I was like, okay, I'll come down there and see what's going on. You know, the springtime and there's just, uh, there's frost on the grass, there's no snow, but I could see tracks where the frosty grass had gotten crushed down. I was like, well, sure enough, there's lion tracks. I don't know about five altogether. And then I picked up some blood and I'm kind of following the blood along and I was with my stepdad and he says you know, make sure you look up in the trees from time to time.
Speaker 2:I was like, well, there's not going to be a cougar waiting in a tree for me after they just got hustled out of here. Me who were waiting in a tree for me after they just got hustled out of here? And uh, then, as I was going along there, I felt something drip on me and looked up in a juniper and there was a, a young lion that had died up there in the limbs. But we ended up, I think uh, marlon came down, uh, the government trapper. Yeah, he got a couple of them, but it ended up being an adult female who had what we think was a sub-adult or young adult female as well, and then that one had kittens and that was kind of how they'd swarmed up.
Speaker 2:They were all female lions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what they'd do is, you know, they'd starve out of the high country and then they'd just move down where the game was.
Speaker 2:Right, and this here is the closest contiguous timber between the mountains and the valley Right, right so it's either here or up at Hurricane Creek which is another major line crossing where people see them all the time. But we get a lot of them coming down, especially this time of year around Christmas to the middle of January, and you know they're just coming down here, I think, to hunt whitetail. Yeah, I think they do too. Yeah, so well, I bet you had some interesting experiences from those early game surveys.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you saw a lot. We used to go every year and stay with the Bascos and Cherry Creek for three days and do those surveys, and that was always entertaining, yeah, and educational too, because I got a huge amount of information from Gus. I mean I got to where I could understand him pretty well. Gus Malaxa, yeah, yeah, that's quite a character he was, and I mean he went clear back to. I think it was either it's in this book, but 1917 or 1919 was when he came to this country to herd sheep and he worked for Jay Dobbin and at that time of course the whole Snake River country was sheep and he was at Cash Creek and that bunch of sheep went up on the big burns in Montana and Idaho. He said once you got the sheep up there, there was so much forage that there just wasn't much to do. Right.
Speaker 1:They'd just fall because they'd fill up so fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just protect them from the bears and the lions.
Speaker 1:But I'd always ask them too about mule deer, even though we were doing the survey, what they were seeing because they were out all the time and that's something a lot of modern bios. They spend too much time on computers and not enough time out Right, and especially they don't value a lot of those old boys, like some of the people that cut logs all their lives or been on a ranch all their lives and they're very good observers. What like Doug? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean he, he had that guide operation, you know and he's probably told you those stories, and I had his old guide reports and I, just before I left the office, I looked for him because they had a lot of information in them, you know, on the intense harvested, four point bucks for the most part.
Speaker 2:yeah, they'd, they'd kill like 40 a year down yeah I know, and within the, they'd usually try to get done opening weekend so they can have a big party yeah, and then go trucker hunting and fishing after that, right, right and yeah, they'd rarely have to go above the first bench of the river. Yeah, I know Absolutely. I mean, I never got to see those golden days of mule deer.
Speaker 1:No, they were in the 60s for the most part and early 70s. Yeah. I mean, there were periods when we'd have a winter, bad winter, and they'd drop.
Speaker 2:But I hear all kinds of things get blamed. From what I can tell, if you have domestic sheep grazing, that tends to help the mule deer population. I think it's the predator control, the predator control that goes with it. Yeah yeah, I wondered if it might also be like the shrub regrowth after sheep go through an area that was a lot of cheatgrass in those days.
Speaker 1:People always say, oh, the cheatgrass is increased, but it I, not to me oh really I think the blue bunch wheatgrass is increased and I don't think that's the best for mule deer, but it it's a little different. You know, and what happens with the cheat and I've seen this many times is if you get the right conditions early moisture and warmth you know it grows like mad and it needs to be grazed or manipulated too. So from that standpoint, what you say is about sheep or cattle can do it too, or burns, but for them to get good value out of it.
Speaker 2:But it's pretty good food for them during that green stage, the cheat grasses yeah once it dries out, it's not so right, not so good, but yeah, but so what would need to change to bring mule deer back to a healthy level Because they're under management objectives statewide?
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, I know they are. I know they are. I did part of the review for OHA on that mule deer plan and they just missed the boat and we just insisted that they look at predation too. And they finally did mention it but before it was going to go unmentioned.
Speaker 2:They weren't going to mention predation.
Speaker 1:And that's to me is most important.
Speaker 2:You know, Vic, I was looking at the mining unit and the reporting for the surveys for the last few years and there was two years in there where they said they had 100% fawn survival over the winter. Isn't that outrageous?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what happens sometimes. It's where they classify the deer. You know if you get around in the valley, or you know you shouldn't have 100%, but you know it's much higher, or especially if somebody's feed numbers something like that.
Speaker 2:But uh, but how could you even publish a number like that? I know, I know it. And to say that in the most predator, saturated portion of the state that you didn't have a single fawn get killed throughout the winter, that's crazy, no no, and it's just if that I'm not questioning that they saw that somewhere.
Speaker 1:They probably had a small sample to have them as random as you could I mean we'd go to the best deer areas? Obviously you wanted to do that, but to winter ranger yeah, the winter range areas and but there was a lot of difference between drainages. Yeah, I mean huge amounts some might have, and I see that today and I mean I do surveys on rockies and if you get over in joseph creek and you can just expect low fawn survival yeah there'll be a few big bucks, but not a lot of deer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and it's predation.
Speaker 2:I mean that's excellent habitat so what's to be done about predation?
Speaker 1:well, you know the. Then it gets over into the political side of things and animal rights people, and so you have to be pretty careful that you don't stir up a. You know a lot of opposition to it, but you know like right now here there's a good deal of aerial coyote gunning going on and you don't want to necessarily broadcast that, but yeah, but uh well, I mean that's something that happens throughout the west right and that's it's from the state it's from private individuals it's from the, the usda.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, like. That's something that occurs throughout the West.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we used to, you know, pay for some of it and encourage. You know you didn't have to encourage Marlin, yeah. And then Wildlife Services had their own airplane and they did pretty good with it, right, I mean you couldn't do anything in Snake River country, yeah, I mean you couldn't kill enough of them because of the kind of country it is. But you sure can out here Right In the zone between the timber and kind of the timber and prairie, yeah, but that doesn't get to cougars, right, doesn't get to wolves and bears and bears. And we do have a pretty good tool in our spring bear hunts. They're highly sought after and we kill. We got good records too, which saved our neck this year when we had to move on trying to outlaw bear hunting, right.
Speaker 2:So why is it that some of these preservation groups tend to fight harder for predators than for prey animals?
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's just that they just value them higher and they don't realize. You know, those predators have to eat. Yeah. And you know they're bound by the same rules. I mean no food, you're going to have a low density. Yeah, they're bound by the same rules. I mean no food, you're going to have a low density, so they're much better off to have managed populations in this day and age.
Speaker 2:Right and talk to me a little bit about what the North American model of wildlife management is.
Speaker 1:Well, it's basically our system. I can't quote all of it without reading it, but it's basically set up our system of states, you know, managing wildlife based on populations and hunting seasons, established hunting seasons and and pretty rigorous law enforcement to protect animals.
Speaker 2:And it uses legal hunting.
Speaker 1:It uses legal hunting as the primary mechanism and, of course, that also pays for it, right? So, and that's what a lot of these people don't realize Like. So, and that's what a lot of these people don't realize Like, right now, with the new administration, I hope we can get like grizzlies downlisted and back under state control, because they just need to be hunted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a shame, the decision that was just made about that, to just expand the grizzly area rather than to acknowledge that they had recovered.
Speaker 1:Well, I know it, I know and see. That's my real criticism of the Endangered Species Act. Tell me more about that. Well, you, just you know nothing. Well, I shouldn't say nothing. If it's not a predator, well it can. It comes off sometimes, but you should be able to get them off you know when they're recovered and go on to another species. That's how it was designed. And then the animal rights people, of course. They think you ought to have them in every state, like grizzlies. Well, there's no way.
Speaker 2:You don't have habitat I don't know if folks understand how much ground a predator needs to be successful no, no, they don't.
Speaker 1:They don't.
Speaker 2:The average person doesn't yeah, when was the first time you remember wildlife issues hitting the ballot box?
Speaker 1:The one that affected us the most was cougars dogs being outlawed In 1993?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That was the one I remember. When I heard that passed I just thought, oh no, we're in real trouble. Yeah, because we'd already protected cougars and you know we had not enough harvest at the time because we were very protective of them at first, because they were in such low levels and not, you know, most of the state didn't have them. Southeast Oregon didn't even have cougars in those days, didn't have any numbers, and look what they have now. Didn't have any numbers and look what they have now. Yeah and uh, we had a quicker recovery because we had these refuges, you know, natural refuges that, like the minum always had at cougars. Well, the wallowas do sure, even though you know they tended to be more abundant down on the minum, because there's more, more game there.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, so at about the same time, that was sort of the beginnings of the talks about wolves as well right, wolves were getting brought back into the Frank Church and into Yellowstone. This was during the Clinton administration. Logging was getting shut down, so folks in this area just felt so, so beat up on, like, well, you just took our main industry away, which was timber. Uh, the forest service is restricting grazing for cattle more than ever, yeah, and now we can't hunt cougars with dogs anymore, we can't hunt bears with dogs anymore. And now you're talking about reintroducing wolves. And people were just like what, what's going on? Like why is your herds were going down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and well, the other thing, I mean, if you go back to like 2000 or so, our elk herds, bull wise, were pretty good because we were managing them pretty intensely. But you know, before that we had thousands of cow tags that you literally had 100% chance of drawing Right and there was a huge number of people they'd put in for their favorite bull hunt. They didn't get it. They'd go to Snake River Cow Hunt, lake River cow on and we sustained that high harvest for a long time over there until the predation rate got high enough that you know you had really poor calf survival, which then that meant less bulls coming into the population but less cows coming into the population and finally we just had to shut the season off and people didn't seem to even pick up on that loss of 5,000,. You know, tags hunting opportunity 5,000 tags had to get cut yeah, wow yeah.
Speaker 2:Wow, the years that I was off in the Marines were some of the best elk hunting years I know it was. It was such a big deal to kill a big bull when I was in high school that I remember a kid in my class shot a six-point bull. He was just a bull, you know yeah but that wasn't at that time.
Speaker 1:But he was a six-point bull.
Speaker 2:It was on the front page of the newspaper. Yeah, it was a big deal, everybody was talking about it, and you know, then I go off to college, I go off to the Marines and I start seeing these pictures and people are all of a sudden shooting absolute monsters. And it is no big deal at all to find a six-point. Now people are trying to find you know these absolute giant, giant bulls and you know people were regularly pulling out 360, 380 inch bulls out of this area, and then the wolves showed up in force.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it all changed. So now we have in the Snake River for several years now we've had single-digit percentages of calf survival.
Speaker 1:Oh, and that's gone on for a long time. That's when we had to cut. There were 1,200 cow tags in the Snake River unit in two hunts Wow, and they would never fill. I mean, anybody that put in got one, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a big deal for people to be able to get meat.
Speaker 1:It was a real big deal, especially for well, not just local people, but Oregon people, Because they relied on that. For, you know, if the bull hunt failed, well, they didn't get the tag.
Speaker 2:Well, they relied on that and they've always had a hunt, something I talked with Lisa Collier about on the show earlier, our new county commissioner. Congratulations to Lisa. Yeah, food insecurity in Wallowa County here is somewhere between 15 and 25%. Yeah, so maybe you know one in five, one in four people who are residents of this county are not confident in their next meal or in their next five meals. Hunting used to be a really big part of that and you could be certain that you could get an elk tag every year. Yeah, those days are over.
Speaker 1:They are, because now you're talking bulls, and bulls only in most places and they just are.
Speaker 2:And you might only get a tag every five or six years sometimes. If you take our county by area of substantial portion of the county, it's going to take you over 20 years to draw a bull tag.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, if you put in for the monohaw yeah you might get one in your lifetime, maybe, maybe yeah, yeah and, and more than likely, you're going to be an old man by the time I know that's the other thing, yeah yeah, well, talk to me about bighorn sheep. I know that's a big passion of yours. Uh, how, how did bighorns sort of come to be here? I I've. I have a copy of the hunting regulations from 1903 that was pasted into one of my family journals. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It had no seasons, no limits on bighorns in 1903. But they did have seasons on grouse, on pheasants. It was open season on moose. It's a really interesting thing. It's got to be one of the first years that we had hunting regulations I've got some that came from my great-grandfather from 1912.
Speaker 1:And it's his hunting license and the regulations are on the back. Yours is probably the same, isn't it?
Speaker 2:You know, this was just a little piece that was glued into a journal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a picture of that hunting license and the regulations in this book Is there, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Wow, Wouldn't it be nice if we could have it so simple. Yeah, yeah, you know, I think one of the big barriers to entry in hunting now is the regulations and navigating the websites and draw applications. The amount of time you have to wait to draw a tag For somebody brand new to get into it it's pretty prohibitive.
Speaker 1:Well, and then you need a place to hunt, which I mean we're fortunate in that we've had public land, but lots of public land in Oregon but a lot of states don't.
Speaker 2:Well, the public land isn't in very good shape anymore. Yeah. Well, the public land isn't in very good shape anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, tube predation is taking a real toll on a lot of the public land.
Speaker 2:Well, what about timber management and fire management, grazing things like that on public land?
Speaker 1:I think we have done better on fire management on our forests than than a lot of the others. You know they had controlled burns. I don't you might have been in the marines when they burnt the minum over a period of 10 years, burnt the lower minum yeah, they were all spring, spring burns and they were in the wilderness, yeah. So they don't ever let them tell you you can't burn in the wilderness because you can. Right, they did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do remember being home on leave and seeing spring burns come up through the minum. Yeah and yeah, those were effective.
Speaker 1:And with all the burns we've had, to me that answers the habitat thing, because those burns are premier wildlife habitat, at least for big game animals.
Speaker 2:Some of our recent burns have been really nice mosaic, patchy, just beautiful burns. Some of them were a bit hot, like the canal fire stuff like that. It burned too hot. It came back as really thick reprod they're actually. Finally, they thinned a bunch of that stuff.
Speaker 1:I saw that Canal fire. That looks good.
Speaker 2:I was really pleased to see that yeah.
Speaker 1:But that's the one thing that keeps us from being like the Cascades or something, it's that. And then in the mountains, avalanches, right, I mean, those avalanche paths are just, you know, food plots really right that edge habitat is pretty important no, it is very important, especially for mule deer talk to me a little bit about edge habitat well, well, you just get such diversity and you get a lot of deciduous stuff, you know, coming in.
Speaker 1:It's like after logging or a fire. You know well done logging. I mean, I don't know if you ever go down to the Winona Wildlife Area. Yeah Well, you've seen how that's been burned and logged Right, and I went in there. I wanted to see how it was doing because I worked on it so much. And this last fall, and boy to me, it's really doing well, it's opened it up and you still have control of the road. So you don't have, you know, the road system that you end up with sometimes after logging. But those can be controlled too. I mean, you can put gates in and have a time period when they're open and a time period when they're closed.
Speaker 1:So a lot of the one-on-one is kind of a wet forest anyway up on top and it comes up with a lot of beneficial stuff when, when it's logged let's get back to bighorns.
Speaker 2:When did you start working on bighorn?
Speaker 1:sheep stuff. I started working on bighorns in 1971. We got our first transplants from alberta from alberta.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay and it was really hard to get sheep in the early days In Oregon. We started, let's see, it was in California. The first ones were in 1954. And then they all they came from BC and it looks like we're going to be able to give them some stock back now, years later. We're going to give sheep back to canada, to bc. Really, they've got some places that they've had big die-offs and and they're getting to the bottom of that and they're starting to come back and so they're they're starting to talk about getting some of their sheep back, which we would gladly give them. I see that we, which we would gladly give them, I say that we, the department, would gladly give them. Do we have sheep to spare? We do California's. We got both. The Deschutes and John Day are both major sheep herds. You never know with sheep because of the disease issue, right?
Speaker 2:What's the difference between a California bighorn and a desert bighorn?
Speaker 1:You never know with sheep because of the disease issue. Right, what's the difference between a California bighorn and a desert bighorn? They're definitely different subspecies. The deserts tended to be more on the south of Oregon, although there is some dispute about whether ours were deserts or California's.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but we've worked with California's from the beginning. But when you get like California, arizona, new Mexico, well, utah's got them. Now A lot of the historic habitat has been, they've been restored and there's more desert tags available now than you know there probably has been in this century just because of all the management activity. But our sheep that was the start of them and of course we had no idea the problem with disease, because you'd go to, you'd talk to, I'd talk to every old-timer that I knew of that had been around them, which at that time was quite a few. You know people that worked in the mountains and of course they're attracted to domestic sheep and it's just the diseases that domestics carry and are fairly immune to will start, just horrid die-offs in bighorns.
Speaker 2:Yeah, attracted more than just socially too. Had Leanna Wentz on the podcast and she said that there was cases down there where bighorns were actually breeding some of those domestic sheep and having viable offspring.
Speaker 1:No, they did. I think they might have. I think they were, if I remember right. I know some people that. Well, they had some in Wyoming. And the problem is, if they inherit the domestic's disease resistance they're all right, but if they get the bighorn they die.
Speaker 2:So but the sheep we would have gotten from Alberta, those must have been Rockies, right they?
Speaker 1:were Rockies, and that's what we had here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how are the Rockies doing up here in the Eagle Calfs?
Speaker 1:Not very well. Well, it depends on your perspective. Okay, my perspective we had none. Right. When I started. So we have a thousand now in Hell's Canyon in Oregon and so from that standpoint. But right now we're going through a disease episode and so we're losing sheep out of some of the herds, mostly in Idaho and Washington, at least so far.
Speaker 2:Now the domestic sheep are all but gone.
Speaker 1:They are, but how come the?
Speaker 2:Rockies are still getting sick.
Speaker 1:The bad part is there'll be farm flocks. Same thing happens to sheep, that happens to deer. They get tired of being preyed on and so they're pushed towards town. Not all the herds. Some of the herds are, you know, in the wild country, because they'll move right down along, like the Snake River, and be there all day where they got enough activity and people with rifles, that protects them. But you get some that just they just get pushed towards. Well, like the lower Mnaha or below the town of Mnaha, those get pushed right back up towards the people. Then I think you know they're close enough that they get exposed. But we know a lot more about Just have a couple sheep in their yard, or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or goats or goats. Yeah, goats seem to be more popular than sheep. I think people you know end up their cheap livestock and they have a small place and so they get them to eat the weeds or they don't know. Goats butchering, or really a pain in the butt or really a pain in the butt, but anyway, we've.
Speaker 1:Actually the three states and the wild sheep groups have yeah, are hired to go around and talk to people because a lot of them don't have a clue that there's an issue. But anyway, we ended up learning as we go and that's pretty well outlined in that chapter in here. On the big big orange stew yeah, tell me about your book. That was the most challenging thing I ever did. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's came right out of our records. You know department records and I I have kept a journal my whole adult life, department records and I have kept a journal my whole adult life and so I had that to fall back on, because you think your memory is pretty good, although I don't now.
Speaker 1:But a lot of times there's a little difference in what you thought and what you wrote and what you think, but I had really good records. What you think, so, but I had really good records and so all of the all the transplant records that are in this book came right out of fish and game records and and my journals.
Speaker 2:but well, tell me a favorite story out of that book there is so many different stories.
Speaker 1:So probably some of the historical things, because I used to you know when I'd get around some of the old timers well, like your grandfather Biden did, but I spent more time around him because he had Jim Crick but some of the old stories they told, they were highly entertaining. Sam Loftus was another pretty good old storyteller and I had the privilege of being around some of the old people that were raised in Hell's Canyon on those ranches and at the time I never thought anything about it and unfortunately I wrote a lot of that stuff down which is in this book too, but it just was very interesting to me. But just the historical value was there too and I mean, when you think about it, they were the generation before, they were the kids of the generation that settled out there, right, so it was right back to the beginning. So yeah, and there I got some.
Speaker 1:I tried to figure out what we had for deer, which was really difficult, but there were some pretty good references to people that went in there and wintered, like at Temperance Creek, and they had good records of what they killed there and, if I remember right, they killed and there again, that's in that book but it's I think they killed it was the Warnock brothers and I think they took a herd of horses in there to winter and they market hunted while they were there, killed 105 mule deer, five cougars, but it was all written out there. And they saved the hides because they had traded them to the Indians, to Nez Perce for ponies and the Nez Perce for ponies, and then they also saved the hindquarters cured them and sold them.
Speaker 1:But those kind of records I tried to find as many of as I could. And then I had some others of deer numbers below Hell's Canyon Dam and there were literally hundreds and some of them just like a couple of drainages that those stockmen would see in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know that was a lot of your interest was just in sort of collecting all of your own data, but also trying to reach back into history and and see what was actually there.
Speaker 1:And I, you know a lot of the old, the old timers, like to deer along the highway here. Prior to the 40s, if I'm remembering right, there were hardly any mule deer that came down here in winter.
Speaker 2:I'm curious about about whitetail here. I'm curious about whitetail here. I've seen it written from state biologists that whitetail were abundant in northeast Oregon prior to 1890. But I cannot find a record to support that.
Speaker 1:I couldn't find. I could find records of whitetails, but not in abundance. So there were some whitetails here in the 1800s. There were native whitetails here and it was in Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon Bailey's book. He had some records and then I had records in some of our old monthly reports that I went through, all of them from the 50s.
Speaker 2:The 50s is when they got reintroduced into the Washington side of the Wenaha right, I think it was before then it was before then.
Speaker 1:I'd have to look, but they were. They were around elgin. Okay, that part of the winaha gotcha and and uh. Like I say, I think our earliest records were in in the 40s. From our bios okay.
Speaker 2:So so you think that they were originally native to this area but didn't start showing back up again like there was a 50-year absence or something?
Speaker 1:up, the one on Aja and a few on the East Moraine, and then they gradually filled in a little. Not filled in, I shouldn't say that, because they were never very abundant, but they were along this slope a few. So we killed one, I think, on a doe tag, when we had lots of doe tags and my family did in the late 60s or early 70s.
Speaker 1:That had to have been one of the first ones that was one of the first ones we killed, and then we had a whitetail kind of a trophy hunt in the Winawha, a limited entry hunt, and that was when we killed the very first buck. So Well, there's plenty of them now? No, there is. But, it's interesting to me to have watched their distribution change and you know I mean like flora, still a pretty good hot spot for them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're pretty abundant there and the Winawhas, you know they're all over that timber. But then if you get down towards the Grand R ron, there's pretty good numbers of mule deer coming back there, but not back up the country, right, and I think that's predation. Okay, I have, as you do around your house. Do you ever see any negative interactions between them and mule?
Speaker 2:deer? Yeah, in the springtime I do, because we're not necessarily winter range right here. Yeah, you're more spring, it's more spring right. So in the springtime there's a real separation of church and state between the mule deer and the whitetail and I do see the mule deer moving away from the whitetail quite often where the whitetail will get to select that fresh green up and the mule deer kind of get kicked out by them. My big concern right now is hoof rot and chronic wasting disease, and some of our whitetail populations have really high densities here in the valley, especially if you get down between Losteen and Wallowa, and that's a situation where once CWD gets in there it's going to affect the entire area. I think it'll vector through those river systems and you know we're familiar with Umatilla.
Speaker 1:County how their whitetails. You know it killed like 90% of them and I've asked the guys. I said, well, okay, so now you've got a lot less whitetails or you're seeing more mule deer. And they say, no, have you talked to them about that, andy, I haven't. Kersh, mark Kersh should be the one to talk to Okay.
Speaker 2:I'd be interested in that, and the shape of a whitetail's mouth and a mule deer's mouth are quite different.
Speaker 1:And I think that the whitetail can be a little bit better selective oar than the mule deer can, just because the whitetail has a little bit more of a narrow palate.
Speaker 1:Yeah they do, and I think they're more grass eaters than mule deer are. Yeah, I mean I've got them all around my house. In fact mine are kind of pampered and I've got a few mule deer. I had one old mule deer doe that come and have twin fawns in my hay field. Every year We'd have to spend a little time making sure we didn't cut them up, but she was a dominant. I mean, she was really a nasty old doe when it came to protection. She killed several dogs which probably needed killing, like people's pets that were out there pestering. Well, they're usually some poor old dog, but they'd get near fawns and fawnin' season was a dangerous time for dogs. But boy, she could just clean anybody's clock, but it could have been the individual too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because right now I'd missed her last year and I didn't have any mule deer in there then. But then just soon as you get in the timber but by cra Craig's and our timberland was different there's hardly any whitetails, even right next to the valley. I mean you'll have a few, except up on that high ground, you don't. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's good whitetail habitat. I mean, it's all you know logged within the last 20 years and all those seedings and you would think that well, they have to go through there once in a while, have to know it's there, because they're just less than a mile to the valley edge, right Loads of them. Yeah. That's kind of puzzling what goes on there, because you know you go out well in the Winona country. They're in pretty steep country there.
Speaker 2:My understanding about whitetail vision is that they have a lot better vision at close range, it's say less than 100 yards, whereas mule deer can see really well for an awfully long ways. So they just might not feel as confident getting into that high country.
Speaker 1:I don't know what it is. I've talked to some of the bios I know in other states too about the competition thing. Like Alberta has both of them, a lot of both of them, in places and they could never see any real competition.
Speaker 2:It drives me nuts that we don't have whitetail and mule deer as separate tags. That was a big mistake we made?
Speaker 1:Was it yeah?
Speaker 2:It feels like an easy correction.
Speaker 1:See, it occurred, though, when we didn't have many whitetails Right. But right now, let's see, I found some information and it wasn't from last couple of years, but it was fairly recent, and I said whitetails were like in the mine immunity, 40% of the harvest Right and it's like if you had to rely on mule deer in the mine immunity, well, and some of the others too you know it'd be pretty meager, but you could split it up and then, oh no, you could. You could easily have white tail season and mule deer season, and I think it, I think it'd be a real good idea to look into that again and you could start out. You know you'd have to be pretty sparing on the mule deer and and.
Speaker 2:That's where I think it would help yeah. Right now, since it's either species, a lot of these baby mule deer bucks are getting killed just because it's easy and they're convenient. And if you only had a limited number of mule deer tags, you could potentially increase the total number of tags available.
Speaker 1:By utilizing the whitetail, and there's some talk of that. I think that'll happen at some point. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every year they've got an opportunity to just change a couple lines in the regulations and do that, gosh, it would help so much.
Speaker 1:I don't know whether that was. Have you looked at that mule deer?
Speaker 2:plan. I haven't dug into it. I've read it but I haven't dug into it. I haven't done a show on it yet or anything like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I need to look at that part and see if they mentioned it. Yeah. One of the failings in it is they didn't acknowledge some of the old studies, like the Steens Mountain study. That was just a classic mule deer study. Then why didn't?
Speaker 2:they acknowledge it.
Speaker 1:Well, they just had something against using anything that was older and I mean, I'm very familiar with it. I didn't work on it, but I know a lot of the guys that did and they didn't. We had that Minam study that we did and it was published in the mule deer proceedings and they didn't mention it.
Speaker 2:It and then they so why are they trying to?
Speaker 1:disregard history. I don't know that's that, that's a failing that I think a lot of modern bios have. I mean, that's the first thing I'd want to know, sure, historically, what you have there yeah but it's just like those holes. Another. Another one they didn't mention and it's a fairly new study because it was done by Idaho Power and my God they had. I know the guy that net gunned all the deer for the study and it was 160 mule deer and they had deer going from Brownleaf and oxbow clear up into the minum.
Speaker 2:Okay, here's another question. I got to ask you A couple of those bucks down at the Mnaha Tavern. I heard as a kid from the old timers that those are subspecies that used to exist that don't anymore, the ones that are super palmated. They look totally different from every other mule deer. You're going to see any validity to that? Did we used to have a different subspecies of mule deer?
Speaker 1:I don't think so okay, I'll tell you who's got a good collection. The snake river bucks is david morris. Okay, have you ever done anything with him? No, he's got the bit. That big does the big game tour and he's in the process. He's from Grant County and he does the record book, the Oregon record book which, by the way, there's a brand new edition out. It'll set you back about $100, $100, but it's got all kinds of historic pictures. He's done a real good job on the history.
Speaker 2:So he's got a bunch of Snake River deer, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Came from the Wilson boys not Lamb's family, but the ones from Saddle Creek, all right and so he's got some of them and they're just amazing, well, well, like the ones you see in the Imnahon Tavern.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really want to take some DNA from those deer and see if there's something different about them, because their characteristics are so wildly different from these other bucks.
Speaker 1:It might pay to talk to David and see if he's maybe done some of that Okay or know somebody that might also be interested. Gotcha. Because he's got a collection of trophy animals that won't quit and he's got the history of a lot of them because people have given him. He's building a big game museum at Canyon City right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll have to get down there and do a show with him. Yeah, roosevelt's and Rocky's. I know that we had our native elk here. We brought elk in from Wyoming. I know also that at various times we sent elk over to Astoria. Is there a difference between a Roosevelt and a Rocky?
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's the difference? Well, roosevelts are generally a little bigger, generally a lot darker, like their, their hair is darker. Their hair is darker. Which would fit living in the timber more yeah, because their antlers are.
Speaker 2:The record book just separates them by the interstate yeah, I know it I know it, so it it seems weird to me to say well, and that's not necessarily scientific.
Speaker 1:Now I will tell you the old-timers, and you've probably heard this they claimed that the native elk here were different than Rocky Mountain. I believe it, and people thought it was kind of common knowledge. But wrong is that you know, all the elk were wiped out, which they were not, and then they all came from Jackson Hole, which only the Chestnip elk you know were, and the ones that were La La Lake, but there were elk in the Minam and elk in the Manaha, and I could find no records of any other transplants other than those that people are well aware of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those that were brought to Billy Meadows.
Speaker 1:However, a buddy of mine, pat Fowler from Washington, he was a bio there for 30 years, him and I worked together all the time and when they were collaring elk they took genetic samples. And I know he called me one time and he said do you know of any Roosevelt's that were ever transplanted into the Winaw country? And I said no, no records whatsoever. But they had some genetic characters of Roosevelt Interesting. But they had some genetic characters of Roosevelt. But when you think about it, it wasn't just a line out there thousands of years that it was Rockies on this side and Roosevelt's on this side. You know they had to grade together some time periods anyway, oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And so I think these could have been more towards the edge, they were a little different, but Well, and if you look at the antler characteristics of elk that come out of Emily Walla Walla Winawha the Minam, you see antler characteristics that are different from no you do From these Wyoming elk.
Speaker 1:Especially when you were overseas and they were killing those hog bulls in the Winaha. I mean, I've got a whole bunch of pictures of those bulls that the guides gave me and they just were just, you know, huge. They're a different animal. They just got different antler characteristics and some of us probably aged because we weren't used to seeing any old bulls.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I pull teeth out of every single animal that we kill when I'm guiding. Yeah, and liver tissue samples. We take live weights, we take hanging weights, we take meat yields. And I found some really interesting stuff and I've tried to talk with the state about it a little bit, but the average age of of the cow elk that we're harvesting is a is a teenager.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I don't doubt it. Cause when we used to have those snake river hunts, we got those tags all the time cause we could never hunt during the bull seasons. Yeah, we were too busy during the bull seasons. Yeah, we were too busy and we got Abel's killed, the oldest one of any of us, I think, and it was 21.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got a couple 22-year-old elk. Yeah, we shot an elk this year that didn't have any teeth left. Yeah, there wasn't a tooth for me to pull that 22-year-old elk. She'd been bred. I doubt she was going to have a calf, but she had been bred.
Speaker 1:I know we had a bighorn ewe one time that golly, she was like 18 or so, which is really old for them and she was bred. She was still having lambs. She was still having lambs. I wouldn't say they'd survived, but then they had the disease issues.
Speaker 2:So you don't know, under normal conditions If you could pick a decade in the last 100 years to be a wildlife biologist, which decade would you pick? Probably 2000.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why then? Because we had so much abundance, yeah. And we had cut back on the bull seasons enough that we had magnificent bulls Like Snake River was just incredible bull hunting. You know, 50%, 40, 50% success.
Speaker 2:You know those, the reputations that were earned during those times. They don't. They don't die off Like. People are still dropping huge numbers of preference points on the Steens for a buck tag. I know they are and you know they'll be lucky to see a buck. Or if they do, it's just a forked horn. Yeah, same thing with with mount emily. Yeah, same thing with snake river bulls. People think that they're gonna, you know, drop all these points on a snake river bull tag and go have an incredible hunt. It's just not the case anymore no, and I I twit.
Speaker 1:A lot of them still call me and they said I got a whole bunch of preference points. I said we'll save them unless you think you're gonna die. But save.
Speaker 2:There's no unit I'd recommend right now, especially for deer. Yeah, I get messages three or four times a day like, oh, I got six deer points, I got 11 deer points. What should I do? Just get rid of them? Yeah, there, there's. There's just not a unit that's worth anything I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know of a single unit yeah, so I know there's some people that had trout tags, yeah, and they didn't end up getting. Of course they were holding out for a better bucks, but they didn't even see anything halfway decent.
Speaker 2:You know, I dropped seven points on an Hawaii tag here a couple of years ago and a buddy of mine went and spent four hours in a Super Cub flying the unit right before the season. He said, james, we only saw one group of deer and there's a buck in there. He said, james, we only saw one group of deer and there's a buck in there. He wasn't much, but in four hours we only saw one group of deer. And these, these are guys who had hunted coyotes from super cups professionally yeah, like they were game spotters, they knew what they were doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah so I just ate the tag yeah, like, rather than go down there and make a bad situation worse even though I'd waited for seven years for that opportunity, I decided to just eat my tag. Yeah, and it's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1:Oh, I know it is, I know it is. And some of those guys have 15 tag preference points. Yeah, yeah, for those tags. Yeah, you know why.
Speaker 2:I've seen.
Speaker 1:That's my advice right now for them. Unless you had some private land that you knew there was, you know some good bucks on.
Speaker 2:All right. So here's the biggest question that I wanted to ask you today, and this will be the last question that I ask what is the most important thing that a hunter in Oregon can be doing to help wildlife?
Speaker 1:hunter in Oregon can be doing to help wildlife. Well, number one be involved with political scene and really be on guard on the antis, trying to keep them from forging ahead, because they'll just keep it up, they'll hit on trapping. They already have Hit on bears. Hit on the predators first, but that I'd say would be the most important. Also, try to get involved in some of the public land management and make sure they continue to do control burns where they can Encourage good logging for wildlife, which that's a pretty broad statement, but probably should say for deer and elk.
Speaker 2:Those are surprising answers I don't disagree with you in the slightest, but it's a lot to ask of somebody.
Speaker 1:No, it is. And it's like I've been involved with OHA and was on the board for a couple of terms and to get hunters to step forward and get involved is really tough. And to get hunters to step forward and get involved is really tough.
Speaker 2:Well, I know there's things coming up this year that I'm going to have to drive 16 hours round trip to go to Salem and I'll have between 90 and 120 seconds to speak my piece on it. And that might be to a very unreceptive audience of politicians, but I'm going to do it. Yeah, because it's got to be done, but I'm going to do it yeah. Because it's got to be done, yeah, and you've got to show up People have to show up.
Speaker 1:I know it, I know it, or they just. That's how the and I's have beat us on. Some of these is just lackadaisical hunters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, okay. So that's it. Folks Got to show up, got to fight for your right to hunt.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, exactly, and be you, know, and, and and watch. Make sure the public lands stay public lands and open. Yep. You know, we've had park proposals for Hell's Canyon years ago and we were able to fight them back. If that was a national park, there would be no hunting or no.
Speaker 2:No, we're basically no wildlife management yeah, and probably no jet boats either.
Speaker 3:Yeah we're not going to let that happen yeah, okay, where can people find your book?
Speaker 2:grain growers has it, they can call me directly is there a place on the internet that they can get it?
Speaker 1:It's on the internet, on Amazon. Here I got it.
Speaker 2:It's on Amazon I got some cards.
Speaker 1:I'll leave with you that it's got all this.
Speaker 2:I'll get one from you in just a minute here For folks who are interested. This is an incredible historical book. There's some great stories in there, and it's not just the history of Vic's many decades of service as a wildlife biologist, but the history of wildlife in this area before that, and I encourage folks to look for it. We're going to have a link to the Amazon order in the podcast description so you can just click on that and go straight to it, and then you can get this book. It's really cool.
Speaker 2:Vic, thank you so much for your time, thanks for your stories and your information and again for your many years of service to wildlife in Oregon. Okay, thank you All. Right Bye, everybody. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their busy lives to write a review for the show and share it with their friends. I'm extremely proud of how intelligent, engaged and adventurous this audience is. Original music for the Six Ranch Podcast is written and performed by Justin Hay. Art for the Six Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and digitized by Celia Harlander. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next week.