Ep. 476: Deer Dives, Screwworm, and a New Lab Puppy

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Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cow’s Week in Review with Ryan cow Calian. Here’s cal. We all know that deer tend to do silly things when they’re in front of a car’s headlights. Well, a white tail deer in New Jersey reacted especially poorly to oncoming traffic on the evening of Tuesday, June nine, when it leapt from a Garden State Parkway overpass and landed right smack on top of a twenty twenty five Tucson traveling on the road below. The diving deer dealt some serious damage to the vehicle and even caused the doorframe to be damaged, trapping the forty four year old driver inside, But authorities quickly responded to the scene and safely removed the woman from the totaled car. Thankfully, her injuries were not life threatening and she’s expected to make a full recovery. The same can’t be said for the deer, which, unser surprisingly didn’t make it. Sadly, this incident is far from the first time a deer has jumped from great heights to meet its demise. One famous incident took place in Cedar Rapids Iowa back in twenty seventeen, when a group of white tails, including a nice typical buck, startled by traffic, jumped from the eightieth Street bridge and died upon impact in a ditch below. While we may poke fun at these incidents, the need for wildlife crossings is no laughing matter, especially in places where infrastructure, including roads, obstruct the historical migration routes of critters such as mule, deer, elk, and pronghorn. In fact, earlier this spring, the US House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure renewed the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, which is a three hundred and fifty million dollar competitive grant program that helps states, tribes, and other entities reduce vehicle collisions while improving habitat connectivity for terrestrial and aquatic species. It’s a win win for everyone, and especially the folks who might otherwise be blindsided by a deer jumping from an overpass and into your car. Which seems too far fetch to be true, but it’s not. This week. We’ve got lions, screwworms, and data centers, plus so much more. But first I’m gonna tell you about my week and my week has been amazing. We welcomed a beautiful, so tiny yellow lab puppy into the household. Her name is carp. Yes, the dog got my number one pick for a human child name. But mom and Dad’s ability for complex thought is pretty low, and it felt great to check something off the list. Josh and Whitney Miller over at Riverstone Kennels have this mix of chill, trainable and intense drive that make it hard to look elsewhere. The intensity with Snort, who after human baby and now dog baby have entered the house, is a little much. She’s questioning her place. I suppose she also has transformed from our little yellow lab to a big, muscly six year old dog overnight. It’s wild how the perspective changes with the context. Top of the order for in the moment updates, it’s the America. The Beautiful Act is looking promising. It passed out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and there’s many signals that this thing may get a vote. Got big help from public lance champion in the Senate, Martin Heinrich, and quite surprisingly, Mike Lee’s willingness to allow some bipartisanship for an outgoing Senator Steve Danes, who is the sponsor of America the Beautiful. He and Angus King introduced that act this week. If you remember, Steve Danes and the rest of the Republicans on the Senate e and I voted to support Lee’s amendment on the Wildfire Prevention Act to fully rescind the two thousand and one roadless Rule and by so doing, completely circumventing the public process now here in the home state of Montana. Many many people would like to see roadless reform, but not a lot of people want to see roadless recision. You’re throwing a lot of good stuff out with some things that need some work. Now are these votes related? You may ask, did Steve Danes, Montana senator who says he’s in support of public lands many many times vote in favor of Mike Lee’s amendment in order to get Mike Lee’s support for America the Beautiful. Don’t fight me on this. I won’t fight you on that. Well, you be the judge. Don’t make it right, but here we are regardless. Now, America the Beautiful has a bunch of great stuff in it. I want to see it past backhuntry hunters and Anglers is in support of this one. You’ll see some action alerts in this Act. The big ticket item is reauthorization of the Legacy Restoration Fund, which is another bipartisan thing that was kind of like on a trial that put a bunch of cash in place for addressing the maintenance backlog on public lands and national parks. It was originally just national parks, and we got public lands slid in there in the eleventh hour. So this is a good thing. We need it. It’s already working. This just authorizes it for the future. So look out for those action alerts and be ready to ask your Senator to vote in favor of the America the Beautiful Act now tied in with this Roadless Conversation and Legacy Restoration Fund. I’m still getting lots of reports of illegal cross country or off trail off road use, as well as motorized use on non motorized trails and vandalism of signage and destruction of gates, most likely related to an executive order that came out of the White House Trump executive Order. We’re sinding some previous executive orders on OHB use off highway vehicle. We covered this before. We’ll cover it again very briefly, that executive order said, hey, we’re open to changing this. These old executive orders are antiquated. In the future, when this change happens to travel management plans, we are going to be looking for more inclusion for the motor communities. However, existing travel management plans, which are the rule of the land on US Forest Service, those are still the law. So you still need to get a motor vehicle, use map and go where designated destruction and poor representation now may in fact lead to less motorized access when the time comes for new management plans. So make sure your friends in the gas and electric powered communities know that the travel management plans are still in place. We only have all of this stuff because of our ability and willingness to self regulate. Only reason we got hunting and fishing in America. Only reason that we’re still out there cutting timber for ourselves on public lands. Only reason that we get a pick from this quiver of access messas, both motorized and non out there on our public lands. So spread the word. Moving on to the legislative desk, Montana policymakers are retracting some controverty regulations when it comes to Mount lions. On Friday, June twelve, the governor appointed Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission voted unanimously to change the way the state sets hunting quotas for lions. Essentially, the Commission is moving away from a percentage based approach to mount lion harvest and likely to revert to the use of forming advisory committees to help develop harvest goals along with input from Montana Fish, Parks and wildlife biologists. The same commission had implemented the percentage based approach back in twenty twenty three at the behest of big game outfitters, who hoped knocking back the mount lion population by thirty to thirty five percent would help elk and mule deer populations. But hound hunters, the folks who actually target Mount lions, worried the regulation change was too aggressive and would negatively impact their ability to pursue lions sustainably. They also called the percentage based goals arbitrary, considering it super difficult to get accurate population counts of the elusive species. I think it was a mistake, Commissioner Susan Brooks said of the twenty twenty three action. I voted for it. I was wrong, So this is my attempt to go back to where we were. Montana Fishing Wildlife Commission also made another change that both houndsmen and big game outfitters lauded. They unanimously approved a two month hound hunting season for mountain lions in the Charles m Brussel and Ulban National Wildlife Refuges, which are historically great public hunting grounds. Previously, lion hunting was open at those refuges, but chasing them with the aid of hounds was not. If you have thoughts on the mount lion hunting situation here in the Treasure State, send us a message askcl at the meeater dot com. Jumping over to the world of you know not outside data centers. These facilities house massive networks of computers and servers. They’ve been around for a long time, but in the past year or so there’s been a serious surge in the construction of these because of the proliferation of AI or artificial technology. They do use a lot of water in electricity, which means we need to be thoughtful about how and where we developed them, and that doesn’t always seem to be the case in some instances. I’m tracking two data center stories. In particular in the home state. Some folks are proposing putting one right on the banks of the famed Blackfoot River that’s at the Bonner Milltown area. The data center would draw groundwater and surface water and use up to eight hundred megawatts of electricity, necessitating the need for the development of further infrastructure for the energy grid to be able to handle all that. These challenges would all come as the Blackfoot River is facing low flows and drought conditions, as well as proposed gold mine near its headwaters that could also wreak havoc on the cold water fishery. Last week, over fifty concerned citizens gathered at a meeting in Missoula to speak out against the proposed data center. Meanwhile, down in Utah, a proposed forty thousand acre data center on undeveloped land north of the Great Salt Lake could be the final arrow for Locomotive Springs waterfowl management area. That public waterfowl refuge has already been seriously struggling for a lack of water, largely due to over allocation and drought. Now, developers of the the data center are working to secure their own water rights in the already drier than normal landscape. This is sure to hurt the public waterfowl hunters in that area. Our Jeffrey Hicks, board member with the Utah Waterfowl Association, said that even if the state was somehow able to secure separate water rights for locomotive springs, the forty thousand acre data center would likely ruin the hunting. Quote. We’re talking about enormous buildings, generators, and a gas plant to supply the generators. With all the heat and noise and disturbance that’s going to create. What bird would want to come here, even if there was a lot of water. While data centers are a relatively new issue when it comes to fish and wildlife and recreation, it’s also new in the world of regulation, so there’s not a lot of facts out there for the general public to consume. And these things have big footprints. In addition to the consumption of water and energy, they’re going to make a mark. We don’t know how big that mark is, and we don’t have enough data to make an informed decision. Head on over to our friends at Field and Stream. Old Travis Hall has got a good scoop on the locomotive spring situation. It’s worth a read. Jumping down to Texas. Last week, Agriculture Secretary Brick Rawlins announced the first case of the New World screwworm and cattle the state is seen since nineteen sixty six. New World screw worm. It’s one of those things you want to be real careful about googling. Some of the images will ruin your day if you think I’m kidding. Considered the Latin name of the species, see Hominivorax, which literally means man eater. It earned that name after a gruesome outbreak in a prison colony off the coast of French Guiana in the eighteen hundreds. Unlike regular flies, who lay their eggs in dead organic matter, screw worms lay their eggs and wounds in living tissue, wounds that can be as small as a tick bite. Female flies lay hundreds of eggs at a time. When those eggs hatch, the maggots start feeding on the flesh of the animal, often devouring holes down into the body cavity. Severit, tissue damage and death are common if left untreated. Screwworm is particularly detrimental to animal breeding, as flies often lay eggs in the healing belly buttons of newborn animals. Screwworm had a major problem in the US in eighteen hundreds, resulting in losses to cattle producers through the middle of the twentieth century. Screwworm can afflict wildlife as well, and for a long time it held deer numbers down in the southern part of the US. Fortunately, humans figured out how to control screwworm. You breed huge numbers of the flies, expose the males to radiation to sterilize them, and then air drop those males into existing screworm populations with enough volume to introduced males out compete their wild brethren and no new maggots hatch. The USDA pursued this program for decades, extirpating the past from the southern US, then all the way down through Mexico and Central America, finally creating a firewall in Panama. Well into the twenty twenties, the USDA air dropped over fourteen million sterilized flies per week into Panama to keep things quiet. Unfortunately, a new spread north began several years ago, getting past the bottleneck in Panama and prompting even more air drops and here’s where the policy problem begins. Just as screwworm was moving northward in twenty twenty five, DOGE was in the middle of slashing government programs, including the US Agency for International Development, which is best known for distributing foreign aid, but USAID was also the center for animal disease monitoring, and the screwworm detection program was cut in February twenty twenty five. DOJE also turned to the USDA at the same time, which is the agency that coordinates the breeding and distribution operations of sterilized screwworms. According to an article from last year from the North Dakota’s Ranch Radio eight ten am quote. In March twenty twenty five, under the Trump administration, funding was cut by the USDA for animal disease control and prevention, including highly pathogenic avian influenza, New World screwworm, and African swine fever. Specifically, funding was targeted to monitoring and responding to New World screwworm unquote. Cuts to the USDA also eliminated thirteen hundred employees of the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which is the main authority for preventing problems like screwworm outbreaks. In response to the recent news, the USDA has now added more staff to the problem and they are ramping up sterilized fly breeding and distribution. But bringing the operations back up to scale is going to take precious time and money. An ounce of prevention is worth pound a cure, as they say. Since news broke of the first case, there have now been twelve reported cases of screwworm infestation in Texas, which will no doubt be outdated by the time you hear this. This could be a major problem for ranchers, hunters, and pet owners, so if you see an animal with maggots and living tissue, reported to local authorities immediately to have major impacts on our southern deer populations, as well as a bunch of other stuff we enjoy. If you want to hear more on this, we did a good job at covering this on one of our interview episodes. You have to look up screwworm and the old Cows we can review index jumping over to the public land, which has started to feel like reporting from a battlefield. In addition to OHV orders, roadless rule recision, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge leases, Ambler road, and on and on. We’ve got another issue incoming. According to the New York Times, the US Department of Agriculture is set to issue a memo recommending that all quote unquote recommended wilderness nationwide be managed for multiple uses, with the imply use of motorized Understanding what that means requires a bit of review of different kinds of public land. On certain pieces of public land managed by the BLM, for example, you can hike and hunt, and a timber company or mining company can get a permit for resource extraction, and there’s broader use of wheeled vehicles the whole spectrum motorized. In a national park, on the other hand, you can’t mind for cobalt or cut down spruce, but you can build roads and sometimes a hotel. Then there are capital w wilderness areas created by Congress defining the Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four as quote undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation unquote. This is the highest level of protection for federally managed public lands. You can’t have any business activity. Commercial activity is limited to guiding outfitting for all kinds of things bird watching, botany, big game fishing, sight seeing, but no wheels, no motors, primitive you’re on foot or horseback, or you’re floating non motorized. Now, places like this, as you can imagine that meet this definition of undeveloped and retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation, are scarce and getting more scarce. And there’s a few that still meet that definition, some of which that are already labeled potential wilderness kind of don’t. It’s a scarce resource and getting scarcer every day. Now, Good folks over at the Wilderness Society explain this a little bit more. Recommended wilderness areas have been assessed by Forest Service staff as exceptionally intact, untouched by development, and critical to wildlife and the broader ecosystem. They are deemed worthy of legislative protection as a wilderness area and provisionally managed that way. In the meantime. There are in fact five point one eight million acres in the US that have been identified as having what it takes to become wilderness, pending a vote from Congress, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is pretty hard to come by. That’s the way we make wilderness through congressional acts, which in part is why we have so little wilderness. Five percent of the entire US is a designated wilderness, which is one hundred and eleven million acres spread all across the country. Our biggest, like contiguous wilderness areas are right there at like two million acres, which really is not that much, especially on these western landscapes where you know, we just don’t have the forage and water density that a lot of folks on the eastern side of the States think of as normal. That’d be abnormal out here. Now. Once these areas have resource extraction happening, or have established vehicular access, or otherwise show the marks of human beings interfering with them, they lose that primeval character and the chances of the capital w happening are very very slim now the official memos not out right now, but as a commodity, that five million acres is at an all time high of value, and it’s dwindling and getting more valuable every single day. Now. Some similar is happening over the Department of the Interior, which recently announced a process to review whether policies on so called Wilderness study areas and lands with wilderness characteristics should be quote, updated, clarified, or revised. Essentially, Wilderness study areas are like recommended wilderness land that happened to be managed by the BLM instead of the Forest Service, different terminology and government agency, same plot to remove protections from wild land. And there’s WSAs on USFS two, there’s about eleven point one million acres under Wilderness Study Area designation. DOI recently opened a sixty day comment period for this process, and we’ll put a link to that in the cal To action site. Wild Places are scarce Gang. If we want these things to exist, we’ve got to stand up for him right now. Moving over to the invasive desk, all of these assaults on public land can feel like vulture circling. So here’s a couple of feel good pieces to end the day. First, the Congressional Review Act, which we’ve covered many many times here, which is like the break glass in case of emergency tool that saw extremely limited use up until recently, had been pitched for a recision of Grand Staircase Escalone National Monument to use the CRA as it was used for Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one to rescind a mining moratorium, and one to rescind a moratorium on oil and gas lease sales. The deadline for that CRA came and went, which is a good thing because there was many folks, and especially many Utah folks who have their own good reasons, wanted to see some more vehicular access in certain areas. But that can be done without the use of the CRA. The dangerous part of the CRA is when it is used, it reverts back to the previous management plan and whatever budgetary constraints that management plan was on or under, and the wording that it used the best available science and public input of the management plan it was throwing out could not be used again, which is kind of like that cove in there of like, hey, if you’re going to use this, beware it’s got its downfalls too. And as we’ve said many times, like the CIA just like cuts around a giant public process. So if you’re one of those folks who want to see changes within ground staircase Escalaune, you got the power of the public process. Scientists the University of Florida have published the first documented evidence of the scavenging birds preying on Burmese python eggs. The team had been conducting a radio telemetry trial and EVERYLAS to track the location of the invasive snakes, and after locating a nest in the Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area, they approached it to destroy the eggs, but when scientists arrived, they discovered that vultures had beaten them to it. Four vultures were in fact still circling the nest, seemingly in the middle of their meal. Of the seventeen total eggs in the clutch, three had been totally consumed and the rest had holes poked in them. But thankfully, even though the vultures were disturbed during lunch, they didn’t leave the python nest. A one star yellp review. When people talk about invasive species, they often say that populations get out of control because they have no natural predators. Well, maybe the native predators of the Sunshine State are learning to find those delicious snake eggs. After all, bobcats, alligators, and black bears have also been documented eating python eggs, and I bet humans could help there too. I’ve probably eaten weirder. That’s all I got for you this week. Thank you. So much for listening. Remember to write into ask c Al that’s Ascal at the meat eater dot com. Thanks again, we’ll talk to you next week.