Ep. 823: Restoring Alaska's Wild Buffalo

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No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at FirstLight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E. Ladies and gentlemen, joined today by Tom Seaton from Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Montana Native. Tom runs, you tell me the title of the programming run. Woodbison Project Biologist from Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Woodbison Project Biologist. Can I lay some context? Tell the story you're going to tell. Tom's going to tell the story of what I consider to be the most exciting thing. It's big. You're going to be under a lot of pressure. What I consider to be the most exciting thing in Bison Recovery. In the whole country. There's really nothing like what you guys are doing. In order to set up the story of what you guys are going to tell, I'm going to talk a little bit about what's going on around the country. If that's cool with you. Sounds great. Just lay the context. As people know, and we talked about this a ton on the show, for some reason, the American Bison or Buffalo are the only animal in the United States of America. They're the only wild native animal, mammal, in the United States of America that is not treated, generally not treated like a wild animal. There's the one I always bring up. Everybody knows. Everyone around the country knows or has some familiarity with the fact that in the also national park, there's a buffalo herd in the also national park. They've been in the park continuously since the beginning of time. There was points in the history when the only ones left in the park were fenced in and they were feeding them hay bales, but they've been there. However, when those animals, if those animals walk north out of the also national park and they come into the state of Montana, they stop being wildlife when they leave the park and they become, they walk into an environment where they're under the authority of the Montana Department of livestock. In the last 20 years, there has been some efforts to be more lenient with the animals. There's some, these little things they call tolerant zones around the area of Gardner, Montana, where the bison can leave the park and mingle around without getting rounded up or hazed back in. But it would not be allowable. It is not allowable for a little band of those animals to decide to leave the park and just go wandering their way down the Yellowstone or wandering their way into the national forest and set up shop, say in the Gallatin Rangers set up shop in the Absorca's. They would be under the jurisdiction of the Department of livestock who would have the authority to shoot them down, load them up, send them off to slaughter. They're just not welcome as a wild animal. We have all around the country a lot of habitat where we could be putting buffalo on the ground and building up populations that are big enough to support hunting and we just choose not to do it. A lot of species that are imperiled or endangered or absent on the landscape, sometimes it winds up being that the reason we can't recover them is because it would be really hard or be really expensive or there'd be like intense social risk, right? Like putting grizzly bears back in Golden Gate Park in California is going to come with inherent risk to individuals. So you don't go and do it. With buffalo, we could fix a lot of the problem we created when we wiped them all out. We could fix a lot of the problem by doing nothing because we have these little populations all around the country that could be allowed to grow and expand. The example I just gave them on TANO and again this is all setting up for Alaska. The example I gave them on TANO is here you have the also national park. It's administered by the park service. The park service is very friendly toward the animals. Since 2000, they've had to say, the park can support around 3000 buffalo, 3 to 5000 I think is what they have. Recently, the park national forest and tribal entities all agreed on a new management plan and they're like, hey, we're going to double it. We're going to say that the park can hold 6,000. Trusting that some of these animals are going to migrate out of the park. Well, the state of Montana turns around and sews them. saying, you got to drop it back to 3000 because we don't want the risk of these wild animals leaving the park. ElkenLY the park. Big horn sheep can leave the park, grizzly bears can leave the park, mountain lions can leave the park, black bears can leave the park, Moose can leave the park, everybody can leave the park, but not him. If he leaves the park, we're gonna shoot him, okay? Or round him up. Then you got this other example, like we'll jump down to Arizona for a minute. So Arizona has had Buffalo, a couple Buffalo, or a Buffalo herd going back to 1906. Okay, there's this dude named Buffalo Jones. He was a reformed hide hunter toward the end of the animals engagement in the country when they were wiping them all out. This dude went out and caught some wild ones. He literally went out and roped up some Buffalo calves. And he bought some from other guys and got this little herd worked up in 1906. This herd makes this way into Arizona. And they set up this game area where these animals live in confinement. Later they moved some to another game area. Eventually they shoot those ones off and bring some in from Wyncave National Park in South Dakota. And so like these genetically peer ones. And then at one point in time, a group of this herd breaks off. And they go down and they set up shop in Grand Canyon National Park. So here you have the inverse of what's happening in Montana and Arizona. The Grand Canyon National Park is tended to be antagonistic to the animals. They're saying, oh, they're not from here. There's these problems. They're damaging habitat. They're restricting their causing trouble with other wildlife. So we don't want so many of them in the park. And when they leave the park and go on the national forest, they're welcome. So it's like an inverse relationship to what happens in Montana. But for the animals that boils down to the same thing where again and again and again in the lower 48, their movements are restricted. We have in the country in North America. So between us and Canada, there are about 500,000 buffalo in existence. 94% somewhere around 94, 95% of all the animals in existence are privately owned. They could be privately owned by a tribe. Or they could be privately owned by an agricultural producer. Most people have heard of Ted Turner. Ted Turner owns a ton of privately owned animals. They're out on the landscape, but they're owned. They raise them for meat. They raise them for leather. They raise them for production. They're treated like livestock. So what does that leave? It leaves about somewhere four to five percent of the buffalo that exist in North America are in some way arguably free ranging or wild. Right. You have a small number in the Henry Mountains of Utah. You have a small number in the bookcliffs area of eastern Utah. Some of those have been moving over into Colorado. Colorado just did an interesting thing and they've made a new rule that was just passed. And they said, if a buffalo walks into Colorado naturally, we are going to treat it like wildlife. They did what Montana has not done. Right. Montana has buffalo walking into the state on their own four legs naturally, but we don't welcome them as wildlife. But Colorado in a brilliant move has come in and they've gotten out ahead of it. And they said, when animal walks into the state naturally, that animals wildlife. If you own buffalo in Colorado, they're still yours. They're livestock. If they walk in as wild animals on their own four legs, their wildlife. The reason they did that is because some of these bookcliffs ones in Utah are crossing into Colorado. So Colorado has a future where they're going to have to potentially have a wild herd. On the north rim of the Grand Canyon, you have what I would call a wild herd there, as I mentioned, what makes them wild is they can move from one jurisdiction to the other. That's like a definition of wild, right. They can move from the park under the Kaibab National Forest into a state game area. And when they're doing that, they remain wild animals. So that's like a wild herd. They can move across jurisdictions and remain wildlife. But these are just little isolated things. The reason we have, I haven't time seen here is because he is in charge of a program that I've been watching for over 20 years of finding some ways to bring wild, free roaming bison into Alaska and put them onto suitable habitat and allow them to live as a wild herd. As wild life. Okay. So as I handed over to Tom, the first question I'm going to ask him. And this is when I was joking with him that we might have different understandings of the history, but he's going to educate it on us. And it's going to be the first thing you think the listener thinks when you think of bison in Alaska, huh. I didn't know they had bison in Alaska. So Tom, you can talk a little bit about your program, but for the first question. How do we call, how is Alaska Buffalo country? How is Alaska like, did Alaska have bison and it's so when? Yeah, it seems a little bit odd to a lot of the public. But if we just take today, we've got about a thousand wild bison in Alaska. And when I say wild, I mean, you know, unfanced unrestricted in any way subject to natural selection exposed to all forms of predation that they originally had in North America. And, and, and, you know, exposed to a lot of difficult weather. Of course, Alaska's got some difficult weather as far as bison range goes. And so they're valuable animals for us conservation goes, but it's like say a thousand is about what we have in the wild. And I think a lot of estimates say that there's probably about 10,000 wild bison in North America, like truly wild, not not fenced in any way. And so Alaska has around 10% of of the world's wild bison really, which is shocking it. I didn't really understand that until he got into it myself. But the reality is is that there's not a lot of habitat left for wild bison to be wild anymore, you know, most places that were good bison habitat historically for the last say 10,000 years are now agricultural, you know, bison eat things that are right at the ground level. And that's the same place we like to grow crops, you know, and, and so it's it's difficult to try to restore bison anywhere anywhere but Alaska now, like you said, there's just not a lot of habitat left or places to go with them. I don't agree. I understand what you're saying. Yeah, but there are a lot of places. I think so. I think but but it's like a low it's a different definition than what you're thinking. Yeah. And I don't want to get into it. But man, like the area of Missouri breaks areas in the gallant and range areas in the Madison range areas in the Absorca is just a name a few areas around here. It could definitely have some. Yes. They just it would require more social tolerance. Yeah. Then what you're speaking about. Yeah. Well, I think there's always been a conflict between agriculture and bison. And I'm not sure I've done some thinking about that. And I just don't totally understand what it is. I mean, there's the obvious part that a bison can. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. And it's a lot of the same. 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I think, you know, we would nearly wiped out anilope in both species of deer and buffalo and most other, you know, cats and bears and everything. And elk, we eliminated elk from New Mexico. Totally. Yeah. But now we've brought them all back, right? We took all this effort to get all these animals back on the landscape, but bison haven't really come back yet. And we don't really want, or a lot of folks don't really want them to come back because there's really not a lot of space for them. That's what's perceived in that point. That is the perception correct. Yeah. I agree with that. I think in Alaska, it's a little different. The Alaska Parton Fish and Game really wants to restore wildwood bison as a wild animal performing their wild things in a niche that's unoccupied at this time for a large lowland grazer. Can you do two things, lay out, and I haven't gotten into it. Can you lay out when you say wood bison? Can you contextualize that against what most people are familiar with, to be planes bison? And then also, can you talk about historically, prior to any kind of introductions or reintroductions? What evidence do we have that they were present in Alaska? Sure. I don't know how far you want to go back, but the history really starts about 10,000 years ago. The end of the plycecine, the beginning of the whole of the scene, which is the error that we're in now. And bison, there's a bunch of species of long horned bison, large or bison that occurred. They're just generally called step bison in the plycecine. About 10,000 years ago, when a lot of Megafon in North America went away, bison persisted, but they became short horned bison or evolved into short horned bison. And it's the two persistent subspecies left of those short horned bison, our planes bison, and everywhere from northern Mexico through law 48, you know, Eastern Oregon to Pennsylvania, all the way up to Central Alberta Saskatchewan, British Columbia. But then north of that was the wood bison. And they occurred in the boreal forest, all the way up to the mouth of Kensy River, which is, you know, goes into the Arctic Ocean there. And all the way west to the Yukon-Kuskrum Delta and western interior Alaska. And they kind of stopped at the bottom edge of the boreal forest. And so if you look at a map, you can see that, you know, the great planes kind of ended and became forest somewhere in Central Canada. And it was wood bison and the boreal forest and planes bison south in the plains. And those suckers look a little different. Like, if you weren't used to looking at Buffalo at all, I don't know what you say, I'm going to say bison because you like the word bison. If you were used to looking at bison at all and you were driving down the highway at 60 miles an hour, you might just look and be like, oh, some bison. But once you look at them a fair bit, you'd look, even at that speed, you'd think something's different about those. If you were looking at wood bison, you'd recognize something's different. They got like some physical differences. With 30 seconds of training, they're abundantly different at 100 yards distance, you know, which to me, that's pretty grand for subspecies. Most subspecies you got, I kind of have them in hand and you're not really sure what the difference is between the two of them. But planes bison and wood bison are quite a bit different. You know, the planes bison have a much more forward hump. It's a taller hump and more forward. The way their hair lays on the bodies a little bit different. A plane bison has that really big thick cape and it goes into thin hair after that with a real strong demarcation between the front shaggy hair and the thin hair in the back. Wood bison just kind of has curly hair along its whole body. And it is a little bit bigger, you know, a little bit longer and thicker in the front than it is in the back, but it's fairly uniform. Then, you know, a plane bison has really curly hair around its head and especially the adult males that get this big kind of afro and they're called for lack of a better diet. 100 days in total a mop. Okay, yeah. And it's just thick and maybe it's, you know, six, eight inches thick and sometimes it even covers their horns and everything. Well, a wood bison, a classic wood bison doesn't have that. Wood bison has like a bill that sticks out that's just like straight, perfectly straight hair that kind of looks like the bill of a baseball cap and that his hair is all lay flat and straight. And they can get that curly hair on the sides that can cover the horns a little bit too. But then planes bison have a really big beard and really big shafts and all these grand secondary sex characteristics that wood bison don't have. Wood bison have really diminished cape and beard and and shafts and all that. The other thing that I find really interesting is that planes bison roar during the rut, but wood bison are fairly silent. Oh, really. And it's been hypothesized that wood bison occurred in much smaller groups. Since they occurred in the Borrio forest, they they live in these tiny patches of habitat, which are mostly wetlands. And so they never really needed these strong secondary sex characteristics to compete with other males and work out which females they could breed as opposed to the planes bison that lived in these groups of, you know, a thousand, ten thousand, whatever, you know, when they would come into rut in these massive groups where they had to roar and have secondary sex characteristics that really stood out amongst everybody else so they could breed, right? Yeah. So that's hypothesized why that might be. But the whole big hump and the big head and a little bit bigger body size is hypothesized to be a reflection of the demands of the environment in the north. So deeper snow, colder weather, that sort of thing. Deeper. Well, the reason why snow is important is bison sweeps snow with their face. That's how they get to the vegetation in wintertime. And to do deeper snow, you need, you know, more bone structure and muscle structure and tendance to be able to sweep that big head. And that's why it's not the hump is further forward in taller. How far bagged you got to go in Alaska? Like, like, let's get rid of the modern times because from a period, I think it was around the 1920s. I wrote about, I wrote about this extensively when I wrote a book that I published 17 years ago called American Buffalo in search of a lost icon. I wrote a story, the story about how some Buffalo were brought from Montana and released up in Alaska and that these planes bison from Montana wound up this little shipment of planes bison from Montana formed the nucleus of what would become four little scattered herds of plane bison around planes bison around Alaska. And at that time in the 20s when they brought them up there, there were none in the state. But if you went back 100 years, 200 years, at some point, you would have found in Alaska, there were, there were wood bison in Alaska that were wiped out. Perhaps, financial causes, perhaps by man, what is your, what is, what is sort of the academic consensus about when they were there and what happened to them? Well, it's believed that they were in interior Alaska for most of the last 10,000 years. And there's, there's a paper that we published in 2001 and it's on our website. And you can read it. It's called Woodbison in the late Holstein Alaska and adjacent Canada, paleontological, archeological and historical records is written by Bob Stevenson and several other folks who was published in 2001. And it goes, takes a deep dive into collecting a whole bunch of specimens, radiocarbon dating them. And they look at like accumulation of specimens through different periods and not, and that 10,000 years. And the most recent rate, radiocarbon dating is about 170 years before present. And then they went into oral history. They asked a lot of local native elders about what they knew about bison in the area. And they were amazed to uncover a pretty rich oral history about Woodbison, especially in Yukon flats. Give me some examples. So in this paper, I'll read you a couple of real short ones here, a couple that really grabbed my attention. And that's, here's one Virginia Titus recalls that her father, Robert Albert, described to her how he and his adopted father, pretty Albert, encountered a bison near Tannenau village, probably in the winter of 1918. This occurred when they were on their trap line and when her father, who was born in 1904, was only 14 years old. Her father, remember being scared when they encountered a large animal in the brush. His father shot the animal with a lever action rifle. The first cartridge rifle they had obtained. The animal was a large bison. After butchering the animal, they stored the meat in an underground cellar insulated with grass. The hide was given to their chief, which he used in their quote unquote talking house as a place to sit. The carcass provided food for their dogs for a long time. Mrs. Titus said that this was the last known occurrence of bison in the Tannenau area. And so that was a, that was, you know, 1918 roughly is what that's expected to be. And if you get this paper, there's 20 or 30, maybe more just oral accounts that are a lot like that. But there's a second one that I really enjoy and I'll read it. With regard to their disappearance, to the disappearance of Woodwicin, Mrs. Mary Sam said that quote unquote, maybe they ate it up, suggesting that hunting might have contributed to the disappearance of bison in a black river area. She also described how on one occasion her grandparents pointed to another young girl saying quote, when this young girl grows up and her children grow up, then the bison will come back quote unquote. And the cool thing is if you kind of laid out in a timeline, it's about now. Oh, the prophecy. Yeah. Welcome to Meet Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Maltreem Mobile and on X Maps. 12 of Meet Eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meet Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. That historical stuff matters, right? Because nowadays, well, let me talk about what used to have, because I've referred in the 1920s. There was a long period in an American kind of wildlife conservation when the idea was generally with state game agencies and others. The idea was generally the more animals the merrier and people would look around the country and they would find areas that they thought were game poor, right? They would see areas that they thought should have more animals than they do. So let's say someone goes and looks in New Mexico and it's like, there's just not that many animals in New Mexico. It's desert country. The desert doesn't support things well. Let's try some other animals and you would be able to just seemingly at random move creatures around the world to see what would take. So to give you a few examples, like Sam Bar Deer were brought into Florida. Seek a deer from Japan and areas of Asia were brought in in turn loose in Maryland. Ibex were brought in in turn loose in New Mexico or from from Asia or X were brought in from Africa in turn loose in New Mexico. Audad cut loose down in West Texas and other areas. Nil Guy brought in from the Indian subcontinent in turn loose in Texas. I hogs brought in wild hogs from Siberia brought in in turn loose all over place. Ring neck fesits brought in from Asia, turn loose in North America. I could go on like this for an hour. Bison, planes bison brought from Montana and turn loose into Alaska. In those days, the 1920s up into the 1950s, you could just do this stuff. They didn't have environmental impact statements. It's like if you had the money in the will, you would probably work it out and you would cut animals loose. That is not hip anymore. So with this project that you're working on to bring wood bison into Alaska, you need to have the sort of authority of history. You need to be able to say this is a reintroduction. This is not us really nearly moving animals around. Can you explain that process a little bit of how you sort of get the political go ahead to do a project like this? So the Alaska Parton Fish and Game has a policy to not release animals into places that they weren't previously there. Of course, like you say, history is not quite like that. There's deer on Kodiak, Blacktail deer weren't native to Kodiak. They're there and they're super successful. Moose and the copper river delta weren't there and humans did that too. Elk into a fog neck and Razz very island. All that. And of course, even here locally, I'll just do a little side thing real quick. Right here in Boseman, there's Brooktrowt, Rainbowtrowt, Browntrowt, Fesens, Chuckers, Hungarian Partridge. That just goes on. The things that you're really familiar with that you don't realize they were from somewhere else. Anyway, there were problems that were created. When you look at things that were released in Australia and Hawaii and stuff where there's isolated groups of animals that got, you know, didn't do well with incoming new animals. So there's problems that were created. So people are scared of recreating a problem. In our situation in Alaska, there is a lot of a record of woodbison being there. And so what we're really trying to do is restore these animals. And we believe that hunting played a significant part in their demise. And so humans may have caused their disappearance. So we want to kind of correct that. But it is a challenge. Woodbison are listed as threatened under Endangered Species Act. And so we can't just grab a bunch of animals and start releasing. And we have to go through all the process of the Endangered Species Act, which includes the NEAPA documentation, which for us in this particular situation is environmental reviews and environmental assessments. And we have a non-essential experimental population rule for interior Alaska so that we can hunt them. That's pretty unique as far as those kind of rules go. But it is complicated to make it happen. So once you guys got the idea, once the state of Alaska, I understand this happened before you're in your current role. At some point in time, like very much in our lifetimes, the state of Alaska started moving ahead with a plan to reintroduce these animals. People might be thinking, where are you going to go get them from? Can you explain the source herd? Like if you want to find a sort of disease-free, somewhat genetically pure woodbison to begin turning them loose in Alaska, how do you get them? Yeah, excuse me. There's a park in Canada called Elk Island National Park. It's East to Edmonton. And they've got plainsbison and woodbison that are separated from each other with a highway. And so there's just no mixing between two subspecies. And they maintain those herd specifically for conservation purposes, where they kill test and live test for diseases every other year. And they produce animals that can be provided for release to create new herds of plainsbison and woodbison. And some of those, if they don't have a need, like if no agency comes along or Native American group comes along and says, I want these bison for conservation, they can just sell them into private ownership, like you talked about. There's a lot in private ownership. But for the woodbison that they have, we're one of their highest priorities right now, and we have agreement with them to get their bison every other year. They're surplus. That amounts to about 40 bison every even year. So 20, 22, 24, 26 like that. And we've been getting them for a while now. Do you guys get them for free? No, we have to pay, it's close. We pay for all the effort to collect them from the wild. I think they have 75 square miles in their park, and maybe a third of that is woodbison habitat. And so they're collecting out of, let's say, 20 square miles or something like that. So it's not that easy, but they lure them in through supplemental feeding in the end of winter, and then they capture as many as they can. They have to run them through shoots, and they have this handling facility, and they get all these people there to do that process. And so we kind of pay for that process, and then we pay for the disease testing, all the veterinary services that are needed for the new disease testing. They do the disease testing, but then as a state of Alaska, we do it again just to be redundant and do due diligence to make sure that we don't bring anything from there that might be bad for native wildlife in Alaska. So that's mainly what we pay for is just the handling and the keeping and the trucking. And Canada has, they kind of have their own versions of what you guys are trying to create, because they have like wood, wood buffalo or woodbison national park. They have a couple populations that even have this support limited hunting. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. One of the greatest populations in my view is the one in Yukon territory between White Horse and the Border, and that's around 2000 wild woodbison, and it's still growing at something like 15% a year. Oh really? Something like that. Yeah, and they harvest 280 bison a year, the last few years out of that herd. And it was only put out in 1988, so it's not very old. Oh, so it's doing good. Oh, unbelievable. Yeah, I've heard from like like that there's some schools and stuff that will take the students out to do field harvest on those animals. Yeah. Yeah. Right, because bison, you know, if I think if you lived in North America sometime in the last, you know, a thousand years up until just 200 years ago, you would have thought of North America as a bison continent. You know, we think of it now, maybe it's an elk continent or deer continent or something, but it would have just been predominantly bison then. But people have lost that connection with bison. So sometimes it takes, you know, training to help people understand how to deal with such a big animal. Yeah. When what year was it that Alaska started to have a confinement area where they were keeping woodbison in anticipation of trying to find good habitat to bring them and put them on. It's been going on for a long time. It has. In 2008, we imported 53 woodbison from from Elk Island National Park. A farmer imported some in 2002-ish illegally because they were designated as endangered under the ESA at that time. And he went and got something in Canada anyway and brought them in without the permits. And then those were confiscated by the Fish and Wildlife Service. And we ended up with those and their progeny in 2006 or so. And then because there was really nothing else that the Federal Government could do with them. And then we combined those with the ones we imported from Elk Island in 2008. And then we've received more in 2002-2004 and we'll get some next spring too. So what was the most you ever had in one little spot? In the captivity, we had about 145 in captivity in 2014 at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center south of Anchorage. I saw all those ones there one time. They're still about 35 or so there right now. There's got a really good operation going on there and those cows are really productive and they produce 8 to 10 releaseable animals every year. And so every other year is when we tend to release. And so we can get 15 to 20 or so bison out of that herd every year and take it out. We have some at the University of Alaska Fairbank's large-enable research station too. And that's a smaller group. It's like a dozen. But we are importing the ones from Elk Island National Park to UAF these days and just holding them there temporarily and then taking them back out to the wild. Yeah, what's that process like to go find them when I was looking into this subject back in early 2000s. It was kind of undecided where Alaska might try to do a reintroduction. I would hear a thing like the I hesitate to even say where I remember initially hearing talk about Yukon flats. But Yukon flats hasn't happened yet. Can you explain the process of identifying a place to do it? And then the sort of political and social process of ever getting the okay to go take this large herbivore, 1500 pounds, 1600 pound animals and turn them loose in a place where they have been absent for over a century. Like you can't just spring that out people. Right. Yeah, no, it's complicated. The first thing we did is after we acquired all this information about the paper I discussed with the redo carbon dating, the oral history, the habitats that's available in modern times compared to historic times and all that, we took that to the public in a feasibility assessment in 1994 and asked for public input. And the input from the public at large that came in verbal and written feedback was overwhelmingly positive. And that really set the course for Alaska Department of Fish and Game to pursue Woodbison Restoration in the state. Because the question and that feasibility assessment was, do you want to do this or not? Is this something we should pursue? And we were essentially directed by the public to pursue it. So at that time, a Woodbison project biologist was created and there's been a position like that for the last 30-some years. And it was Bob Stevens in that time. I met with him in Fairbanks, I believe, years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And so it has been other folks on that program too over time. Sometimes it's as many as three people. But you asked, how do we identify places? So what we want, if we're going to try to restore a species of places that's large enough to have a minimum viable population. And through modeling of genetic work with Bison, it's decided that a minimum viable population is more than 400. You'll maintain most of your genetic diversity over 100 years with the other population of over 400. It's even better if you can get a population over a thousand. So what we were seeking was a habitat patch that was big enough to hold 400 to a thousand bison or more or something like that. And so it had to have certain characteristics too of not really deep snow and not really firm snow. It had to be soft snow that wasn't too deep. But also the winter time food. So bison are generalist grazers, so they can get by with darn your anything in the summertime. But they really need grasses and especially wetlands sedges in the winter time. And so the three largest areas that had those qualities that we came up with and we wrote an environmental assessment about it in 2013 or 2014 were the Enoco flats, which is kind of West Central interior Alaska, Minto flats, which is just about 50 miles west of Fairbanks and then the Yukon flats, which is about 100 miles north of Fairbanks. Well, the Yukon flats was the original place and that's where Bob Stephenson was an area biologist. That's where all the oral history comes from and that's probably the largest and best piece of habitat in all of interior Alaska. That's kind of a stunning area. Yeah. You got like the Brooks range to the north. You got the White Mountains of the South. All these big famous rivers flowing out of the Brooks range coming in there. Oh yeah. Tons of mosquito. It's a difficult place to stand in the middle of June. Yeah. Yeah. The Enoco flats eventually got settled on the Enoco flats. That was an interesting thing. Since Woodbison have a listing under the ESA oil and gas and mining industry was worried about the influence of that listing on development. Yeah. And there were no oil and gas prospects at the time in the Enoco. And so a lot of the industry leaders were like, well, we understand you have a non-essential experimental population rule that protects us and we understand that there are only listed as threatened right now. But just to be safe, let's go with the Enoco. Because what they're worried about is that they're worried that you're going to reestablish this population. There's going to be some protection of the population. They're going to want to industrialize the landscape. And then they're going to have to hear from people about how there's an endangered species living there. So the argument would be, well, don't put them there. Then we won't have to worry about them being there. Because it could potentially stop oil and gas development. Well, why don't I just like, I don't want to drag you into like a quagmire here. But like, why would anybody ask them anyways? Well, that's a good question. Well, Alaska, their economy is based on oil and gas and mining, really. That's what Alaska's economy is based on. And so all the political leaders and big business leaders care about the fact that we need to be able to extract resources to make Alaska survive. And so that's why I think it mattered. And they have influence in the legislature and the governor and everything else. And it's important, right? And that's why we spent five years negotiating with the official office service to make a non-essential experimental population rule that gives full deference to development and talks about bison can live in places where there's development. And the and the reality is, you know, most of that country's borough forest. And so any sort of development breaks down that borough forest into, you know, places where sunlight gets to the ground, whether it's fires or roads or or drilling pads or whatever, that turns that into better habitat for bison than forest, really. And so there's it's it's a hard argument to say that that development would hurt bison anyway. It's just that the the endangered species act has been used as a club in the past to hurt industry and the industry leaders know that. Yeah. I want to just touch on this for me, this experimental status, because this is something that you see come up again and again in wildlife recovery efforts would be that oftentimes, let's take let's take the recent move to bring wolves into Colorado. Okay. Here you're you have portions of Colorado that have no wolves. They were historically there. They've been gone for a long time. And someone proposes, hey, we're going to bring wolves into the state. Well, right away, there's a negotiation that's going to happen where you're taking you have a landscape that doesn't have an endangered species or a threatened species. And also, you're putting a threatened species on the ground, right? And you know that it's going to cause conflict with livestock growers, for instance. So they're like, oh man, the minute you bring them in, they're going to start killing my cows. And there's nothing I can do. I can't shoot them. And the state can't help me out because they're in danger, they're an endangered species. So you're just creating a headache for me. So this deal that will often get brokered in these situations, as people will say, we're going to bring them in and turn them loose, but we're not going to treat them the same way we might treat an imperiled historic population. We're going to give managers greater latitude to deal with this new population that we're creating. Then we would give managers to deal with a historic population that's imperiled. And it just greases the wheels a little bit, right? You might come in and say, sure, we're going to turn, you know, we're going to reintroduce bears into this area. And there will only be a few, but if a bear is killing your chickens, go ahead and shoot it, you're not going to get prosecuted. Whereas in other areas, you might, under different circumstances. So this is kind of like a way to, it's a way to a, it's a compromise that can be made when reintroducing animals. Well, there's a monumental irony there. Like when, I think the ESA was really designed for when, when populations are in a, in a decline to stop that from happening and try to keep animals from going away, they didn't really plan for, I don't think, as well, for when you're trying to restore an animal on the landscape. And the, the, endangered species act itself has probably been the biggest detriment to wood bison restoration in Alaska. Because every time we'd want to do something, the bureaucracy and political nature of the, and, and, and, and species act being involved, just makes it extremely difficult. And so it would have been a lot easier to, there's been several times when political, you know, higher ups above me have said, let's just do this with planes bison. This is way too hard. No, planes bison aren't listed. And then we have to, you know, from the biologist perspective, perspective, we have to say, look, you know, our, our policy is not to release animals here that, that weren't originally here, you know, let's try to stick with wood bison. And it's a real challenge to get on the ESA. I don't want to stick you with having this viewpoint. But so this is, I just want people to clear this as me talking, not Tom talking, but you're here, especially lately, you hear a lot of people talk about the endangered species act being cumbersome or aspects of it to be revisited. Oftentimes you'll see that and you'll think it's people trying to dismantle protections for imperial wildlife. A lot of times it's like kind of like good guys will say that sometimes too, like people that are pro wildlife will say that for the things we're talking about, where it just, when they drafted the legislation, they couldn't anticipate all outcomes. And you don't have a crystal ball. So you can create situations that later, like, I wish we'd have thought of that. And that's the thing that they hadn't contemplated, is they hadn't contemplated what about ways in which it would make it harder to restore wildlife. And it happens with other pieces of legislation, like famously, like the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act. When they enacted that, they're like, there's these wild horses out in the desert. People are killing them all off. We should try to save them. And they create this piece of legislation that winds up being its own worst enemy. And then you just stuck with it. You're stuck with it, because it takes a super majority to change it. And so then generations thereafter have to live with a cumbersome ESA, or have they live with the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act, which is wind up, you could almost at this point call it like the Wildlife Habitat Destruction Act, is what the Wild Horse Burrow Protection Act became. And I think if you deal with it. Yeah, if you deal with an animal like woodbison, that everybody kind of wants on the landscape anyway, it's just an impediment to have the ESA there. Because, you know, people want this grand resource to be able to use there. It's different than if it was a tiny fern that only grew in wet spots along creeks or something. And we really had to focus on trying to make sure there was habitat for this fern. It's not like that. You know, people want bison on the landscape. So we got a little off subject, but explain the area that we're talking about, like explain the Enoco, the flats, the wetland. I shouldn't say the wetland, but like basically it's a river coming in from the south. I believe in flowing into the Yukon. And that's kind of where this site is, right? Yeah. Well, the Enoco kind of comes out of the northeast and the Yukon happens to be flowing to the south there. And they kind of come together to make about 40 miles apart. They make this valley. And then they kind of come together to bottom of it. So this valley is maybe 80 miles north and south and 40 miles east of west. And sometimes only 20 miles east to west. And it floods on a regular enough basis that it keeps that habitat in grass and sedge. You know, it inhibits tree growth there because it's so wet. And that's just perfect. Woodbison habitat. And since it floods too, a lot of the productivity or the nutrient value of those plants is really high along with their productivity. And so bison really like it. And it's worked out great as a good piece of habitat. The problem that we've had is in that particular place is snow. And we worried about that somewhat in the past before we released bison there that occasionally has as deep snows and ice layers and snows. But the reality is that winters have been very wet and warm in the last decade or 15 years in Alaska. And that's been really hard on all wildlife. There's, you know, we've had 80% loss in a lot of sheep populations. We've lost about half our careboe in most places of interior Alaska. And then we've lost a, it depends on what you're looking at by far as moose goes. It's something like 30 to 40% of moose have gone away in a lot of places in interior Alaska. And it's mostly attributed to these really difficult winners we've been having where they're just so wet and warm that it makes snow that's hard. It's deep. So it's hard to get through for a lot of ungulates and it encapsulates the forage where the animals can't get to it. Especially sheep where they rely on the mountain sites to be blown off. So the snow blow off and so they can get to their grass and things they eat. Bison are similar, but they live in the lowlands where they get through the snow without a problem if it's soft, but if there's a rain on snow vent that makes an ice layer in the snow, it's much harder for them to get through that vegetation or through the snow to the vegetation. And so one of the things I often have a difficult time with is all the history and the legal process and the political process and the funding has all come together and culminated to now for releasing wood bison, but the weather is just really difficult because it's hard for all ungulates right now and we're trying to restore a species of ungulate in the midst of this. Is this winter's shape and don't be more the same? No, it's the opposite, which is great. Like last winter, the winter of 24, 25, we had two ice storms even in fair banks. It was crazy. Trees falling down everywhere and forage getting covered over with ice. But this winter has been like an old school winter. The winners I remember from my 20s and 30s where it's really cold. We've had long, long spells of 30 below, 40 below, the snow falls, but it's just super dry. It's like the way it used to be. So the snow can be two feet deep, but you could just smack your hand right through the whole layer of snow. It's just so easy to get through and so bison and moose are, I think, are probably doing real well this winter. So far, I haven't had any mortalities from snow conditions in the bison herd that we just released in Mintoflats. Welcome to Meet Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Moltremobile and OnXMaps. 12 of Meet Eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bearhunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bearhunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meet Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. My phone and then I'm going to use Kanva to edit and upload it. Oh, sorry babes. Oh my god, whisper when I edit it. Anyways, Kanva makes social media edits so easy. I'll upload this in a minute. Kanva, make everything. I got it. How do I stop recording, Darren? So talk about how you guys got them in. How you guys brought animals in on the Enoco Valley. Okay. So in the Enoco, this is, well, first of all, I mentioned that local people were really supportive. When we were trying to pick between Yukon Flats, Mintoflats and Enoco Flats, the Enoco people were always, hey, bring them here. If you got political or otherwise conflicts in that country, bring them to us. And so that was one of the major decisions, not just the lack of conflict oil and gas industry, but also the support from local people made us go there. So now, is that when you say that, is that with native Alaska? And who was there? Like what group is there? So there's four villages around the Enoco landscape, where the Bison are. And that's the villages of Grayling, Annvick, Shagelok and Holy Cross. They call it the Gash area, just the abbreviation of those four places. And so those are communities that are mostly native. But there's other people, non-natives in those villages too. And they have been involved in the process of deciding whether Bison should go there or not through the whole time. Now, when we went through all the political process and all the public planning process that we did, we finally got down to, okay, we're going to take Bison there in the spring of 2015. And so we had to get Bison. This place is more than 300 miles from the closest road, the road system. There's a couple of little roads to airports and stuff like that from villages. But it's really remote. And it's way down the Yukon river from any road too. So what we did was we had these animals in the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. And like I said at that time, we had about 145 there. I took 130 of them and took them to the Enoco. But it was kind of a complicated process. The state only had enough money at that time to release a smaller subset than this 145 we had in captivity. And so I kind of had to do a piece mail bit by bit. And I was able to get donations from Safari Club and Bass Pro and then match that. Oh really? We have match that with Pittman Robertson funds and come up with enough money to fly Bison. First truck them. Safari Club helped out with that. They did. Which was great. Yeah. And first truck Bison from the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center to Anchorage Airport. Put them on Lyndon cargo plane C-130s and fly them to Shagalok. Which had a good runway with Bison, habitat nearby and a place, a little road we could take Bison. We could pull them in these containers to a little pen that we could build along the Enoco river. And so we took a hundred total of 50 cows and 50 younger animals there in the spring of 2015. It was like late March 2015. And we were released them on April 2nd 2015. And that was, I think there was seven loads. Herk loads went back and forth with feed, equipment, Bison, all kind of stuff. But in the previous winter we'd built this like six acre pen that was kind of divided into two pieces that we held them in. That was about three and a half miles out of the town of Shagalok. Anyway, we released those animals. And then in May and June of that following summer we released a load of bulls by bar, two loads of bulls by barge. As I realized that I had enough money to do that through donations. So you brought the females in by plane. Did you not bring the bulls in by plane because they're too kind of wild? Well, they're big. And then if you fly stuff it's the more weight, the more difficult it is. So I brought 50 adult cows and then 50 young animals. Those 50 young animals were about half and half male and female. So there was plenty of bulls there to breed. They would have got old enough bred anyways. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I had all these adult bulls and captivity that I wanted them to be out there too. And so the barge, I put the barge process out to bid, which would have been a 750 miles. I think it's somewhere around 700 miles from the barge station at Nenash. I wore the park's highway hits the 10 hour river. They would get barge down the 10 hour down the Yukon to the mouth of the Inoko and then back up the Inoko to where these cows were. I put that out to bid and one of the bidders. It's 700 river miles. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. Well, that gives you sense of the remoteness of that stuff. 700 river miles. Yeah, and it took like four, four plus days. So we had a truck on about 100 miles, actually like 200 and some miles, 250 miles or so by by semi truck and then get them on the barge and then go down the river and that whole process was four and a half to five and a half days. But the cool thing is there was a guy named Charlie that owned inland barge at the time and he drastically discounted his rate to barge those bison 750 miles because he really wanted to see this project to see it. Yeah, you're super cool guy. That's great man. And he helped to get those animals down there. And so what they would do is they'd come down by barge and it would take them all those days. I'd be down there with the cows and I would fly to find out where the cows were and figure out where we could land the barge closest to the cows. And with the cows and young animals, we did what's called a softer lease where you hold them to kind of get them to calm down before you release them so you don't get animals just like scattering everywhere from fear of the stress of transportation. So we held those animals about 10 days and then they kind of they stayed there pretty good. Well, then I would figure out where they were at when the bulls were coming and then I would just hard release the bulls, which means you just show up and open the gates onto the bank. But we needed a place where we could land the barge and all that. Anyway, it all worked out pretty good and about 60% of the bulls got into those cows in the first 24 hours. The other 30% of the bulls would just kind of wander around and eventually connect them with the cows. But you think they smell them and find them? Man, I don't know. I think it's smell. I suspect there may even be some sort of low low frequency sound that they do. You know, like elephants do that low frequency sound that communicate every long distance. I can hear bison making low frequency grunts and stuff. But, you know, my ear, you know, nobody's ear, human ear can't go that low. So I don't know if anybody's tested that with bison, but it's fascinating. So he just went right to it. It's crazy. So you here you have, you know, these animals have been captivity most of their life. You got these bulls that have never been allowed to be with the cows other than when they were first young animals. You kept them separate in captivity. You fed them hay. They're just in a pan, you know, at 30, 40 acre pen, their entire life. You take them to this place that's a thousand miles away and total wilderness and just dump them out on the river bank and they just navigate to a cow group that's a, you know, a mile away or something over the course of a night or something. And it's just it's mind blowing. And other also when we released these cows and young animals, a lot of the young animal, we made feeding stations because I had all this grand ideas that I thought, well, if I make feeding stations on these native sedge habitats, they'll kind of transition from captive feeds to wild feeds and stuff. And they kind of kept their calves there a little bit and by calves, I mean, like 11 month olds. But the cows started doing this, the exploratory forays and they'd go on a foray until, you know, they'd walk five, 10 miles until they got out of bison habitat and they would walk back in to where to that original spot that I released them. And then they would take another exploratory foray way in a different direction and they would come back and they did that over and over again until they went all the way around the, you know, all directions and every, it depended on how much bison habitat there were, there was available that they would walk through. So to the south, bison habitat goes for 60 miles and they would walk that whole 60 miles and they'd get to the end of it where they hit canopy forest and they would turn back and go all the way back. Yeah, it was really cool. And so here you have these animals that haven't been wild during their lifetimes. That can just navigate a landscape so well and and and they would they would they do all that. Well, then in the winter, they would go to these places that were really good habitat for winter habitat and summer habitat and if you look at it, it's places they bang it away in their head. Exactly. They they they they were just like serving the whole landscape. Okay, what do we have here? And we're going to cover 1500 square miles in the course of this summer and figure out what's out there and they're going to use it and they found places. For example, that have a lower snow load that than anywhere else. I didn't even know that this this low snow existed in this little snow shadow behind the Russian mountains, which is about 60 miles to the south and now they all winter down there. They go down to this place that's maybe 10 miles across that you know the storms come in off the Waikid Delta. They go over the Russian mountains and there's just this little spot, you know, not little 10 miles across that has low snow. The little range. Yeah, and they go there, you know, for winter. That's where they winter now and that they found that 60 miles away from their release site and so their understanding of navigation and habitat is so much greater than than us, you know, it's it's pretty cool. You know, when you you mentioned doing the cold release and you hear this in in wildlife work fair bit where you take animals to a spot where you're going to release them. It could be any number of kind of creatures you do this with and like you said, you bring them into an enclosure and feed them there and just let them calm down and then one day you leave the door open, right? And they might even leave and come back but just try to get them settle in. There's a great story from Alaska when they brought those ones up in the 20s. They went into this area, Delta Junction and eventually they got a bunch up there and they wanted to just try to move them around. So at one point they take, I think it was 13 of them out of Delta Junction and bring them up the Slana road towards Slana mine in a truck and they just open the door of the truck and shoot them all out of the truck. Well, they split for so long that people thought they were dead. I mean, people would there be rumors of them. People would apply an over would see them or something and they didn't settle in for 100 miles and that's the ones that wound up being in that copper herd. Yeah, the copper herd. So like the Nadina, Dodina, Chettaslina and they're migrating between a glacier and all the way down to the copper river. They went 100 miles before they found a spot they liked. And that's like a cool, that's a hot release right there, man. Oh yeah. They just split, you know. I know a daughter of a homesteader named Sharon and she used to live on the Danali highway and they would see him years after that release in Slana and she'd say, well, you know, when I was a kid, the bison walked through here and then three years later they walked through there. Yeah, I think one of the issues with that is that we didn't understand their habitat needs as much then. And if you look at the habitat around Slana, it's kind of Tussektundra, which is not it's not quite like Alpine Tussektundra, but it's it's Tusseks and it's not what bison select for habitat. They'll eat some some tusks in the spring, you know, especially the top end that turns green first. I mean, that's what a tussekt really is. It's just a micro climate that allows, you know, thawed parts at the top while the bottom's frozen. Anyway, it seemed like they didn't like that habitat and that hard release might have been not enough to keep them there too. So some of the ones you guys cut loose, you were telling me they went on some tracks, man. Yeah. If you talked about a few of the outliers, yeah, like what they did, why they did it, you know, but most I guess you don't know the why, but the what is incredible. Yeah, I want to make it clear first off that 98 and a half percent of them stayed right where we had a habitat assessment and a right where we wanted them to stay. And so these really are outliers there. They're they're very unique individuals. So that's a good that's a solid point. 98.5 percent stayed put. But of course, let's talk about the one point. Yeah, right. So the one point five percent was three animals and that was we had two cows that went on really long exploratory forays and a bull and I'll explain them all right now. So we had a 10 month old cow that just disappeared right after release. Uh, within maybe less than a month of when we released animals in the spring of 2015, not wearing a collar. Well, she had a collar on, but then we at that time, we made them out of like spandex like you'd wrap your ankle with, you know, the spandex wrap with a little canister collar and it was a VHF. So I had to fly and actually get within like 10 miles of it to hear it. And then since it was made out of spandex with this growing animal so that it would just rip off early. And when I was radio tracking, that one just disappeared and so sometimes they go off the air and things. And so within a month or so after release, I couldn't hear her and I thought she was just, you know, her collar fell off and fell in the mud somewhere or something like that. So I didn't know. Well, a biologist in Galena spotted her that winter in a habitat about I think 150 miles north of where we released them and she's by herself still. And we went caught her then and put a collar on her collar. Yeah, his biologist do an aerial surveys and spotted her. And you were able to go find it? Yeah, well, his name's Brad. He lives in Galena. He's a great biologist and he kind of kept track of her, you know, and so we went and searched for her and found her in the winter when things were froze up and you know, Bison, they're not that hard to see. They're dark and they stay in open areas and so you can you can tend to generally pick them out. Anyway, we put a collar on and we've tracked her ever since and she stayed up there, which was in like the if anybody knows that that the area, it's like the pilot mountain habitat, you know, the marshy area, the big open marshy areas and so she liked that. But then she moved down in the kayo flats east of Caltech after that. She started kind of migrating back forth between those two kind of really nice woodbison habitats. Always by herself. Always by herself and she's stayed now. She's she's east of Caltech now in the kayo. Still what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she's old. What is she? What would she be this year? She'd be twenty or twelve, you know, coming to the start. It's never like just lived the rest of her life an old spinsdirt. I guess so. And we've had some that the reason why we don't add more bison there is it has really deep snows there. And I think without the demands of gestation and lactation, she's been able to survive even in these horrible winners where the snow will be, you know, forty inches deep with ice layers and all kinds of stuff. And she just should be standing out there and doing her thing. And yeah. Anyway, kind of depressing. It is. Yeah. But here's here's the very interesting thing is that I often wonder, well, why was it her? Why did she go do that? I tried to take all the animals from captivity, you know, the full social structure that we had in captivity that because bison social structure is a very powerful thing. And it's generally matriarchal lead. And then you they these big groups of bison include all the young animals from calves up to about three years old. Once they're three year olds, the the bulls kick off and go do their own thing, but the cows tend to stay with the older cows for their whole life. So. And I think if you look at bison and the way that they're a generalist, grazer, and they can occupy all kinds of different niche. Like I mentioned from northern Mexico to Pennsylvania to Oregon to the to the Arctic Ocean, I think they can do so much diversity because of their ability to learn how to adapt to a particular site. And they are very their adaptation is very plastic. They can, since they're generalists, they can occupy all these places and just learn what the best thing to eat is there. And I think part of that is the education from the adults, you know, that, hey, you know, eat this and not that and go here and not there. And that sort of thing. Anyway, that's the the preface to the concept of why I think she went away. Um, the cow that gave birth to that calf that did that. She was still back in captivity. She's one of the cows they didn't take out. Cause she was so on me that I didn't want her to hurt herself in transport. Um, so I left her back in captivity. Cause I thought she just might throw a fit and, you know, hurt herself. Her calf didn't have that bond to the herd and split looking for mom. I don't know that. This is totally, you know, a guest. But if you could somehow measure her contentment, like is she content or not content? Where she's at now. I don't know. I don't know. I think she knows how to get back. You know, yeah, maybe not. Um, well, if you look at the work of, um, the, the Montyth shop, Kevin Montyth, those things have incredible abilities. Yeah. To, to, to retrace journeys. Yeah. Like when they go somewhere, they can, I mean, from his stuff, his coloring projects, not with bison, but with mule deer and elk, when they go somewhere, they can damp your walk back on their same tracks. Like they know where they're going. And maybe she was kind of in shock when she left. Because she just got transported in him. I don't really know. But onto the other things, because it ties into that one, a bull then in 2016. So a year after release, left and went north to the kayo flats, where this cow that had already gone up there, let's say she's cow number one, and he's bull number one. Um, she was going back for fourth, being the kayo flats and the pilot mountain area. Um, this bull went up to the kayo flats. And so at one point, we had both the, this cow disperser and a bull disperser in the kayo flats. And a lot of local people were like, oh, we're going to make a herd. You know, this is really going to work out. And then he stayed there. And then how close did they get to each other? Maybe 15 miles apart or something like that. So not quite close enough, I guess, to smell each other or whatever. Um, I was like a romance. I know it was. And then, uh, rut, rut happens, right? So the, this bull that did this dispersal, you know, he just takes off and heads north and rut and she starts heading west. No, no, she's, she was north of him at the time. And they crossed trails like, they were like four days different or five days different or something like that, but they didn't, you know, like turn around and try to find each other, whatever. And the bull went now onto the story of the bull. He crossed the Yukon, guided into the kayak cuck when all the time swam, you know, they're good swimmers. They, they're, they're, they're very dense and they don't have hall air. So they swim really low. Like when a bison swims, the only thing sticking out is like it's nostrils, it's eyes and it's horns and maybe a little bit of its hump. And, uh, so that you don't see much and they can be drowned easily with waves. Um, but, yeah, he crossed the Yukon. In fact, there, those cow groups and those exploratory forays I talked about in that first summer, we had some that were crossed on the Yukon with calves and everything down in that lower Yukon. It's a mile or more wide. And then going back, yep, they were just, you know, they go over there for a week and then they cross back the Yukon for a week. Yeah, just crazy stuff. Anyway, this bull went north. He went up the kayak cuck, hit the upper co-buck, went into the Brooks range and got, got up in the high Brooks range between the co-buck and the no attack. And, uh, and, uh, was over by then, he got up in there in like October or something. And I don't know what happened to him, but he died somewhere in there, um, in late winter. And if, if he, he had a GPS tolerance, he'd kind of see his movements and he looked to me like he got up in this high mountain valley and then couldn't get out of it. And I think what had happened, he must been injured or something because, uh, when we finally dug him out, um, of like nine feet of snow, he, you know, he, he died in there. And the way he was trying to make forays out of this valley, he just couldn't make it out. And I don't think it's because it was too much snow at the time. I think that, you know, he got buried in snow afterward. But anyway, he died. And then the other, the third one that I know of the big dispersal was a cow that left, left the initial range, went south around, uh, Annie, uh, and Kalskig and then came back to the main herd. And then she left again, a few months later, it went down by Russian mission, which is, so Annie and Kalskig are on the lower Kuskum. And then she went down Russian mission, which is, uh, the lower Yukon. And when I say those villages, I mean, like right at the village, I mean, that's the closest landmark. Yeah. Um, she spent much of a winter down in the mountains or the hills around Russian mission. And then she worked her way down and end up on the lower Kuskum. Uh, and she was like, we, we, we called her, um, uh, like a diplomat because everywhere she went, you know, everybody was, you know, writing us letters and calling them, and the woodbicens here, you know, it's great. Oh yeah. Yeah. They were super excited about it. In fact, you know, we got a light, nice long letter from the village of, um, Eek, where they said, uh, you know, hey, how can we get more, uh, woodbison down here? We really like this, you know, we want to start a population here too and all that. And but it went past Eek and went to, uh, down by, uh, Quinnahawk, uh, how far from the, from the release? Uh, it's probably, it's probably something like 150 miles down there too. I might have to measure it to be more accurate, but that's roughly about right. And she got into that lower Kuskum, which is just phenomenal habitat. There's sedge as far as the eye can see, and it's good thick stuff. And I, I had a friend from Bethel biologist there, radio tracker and took a picture from the air and she was just fat, you know, she was really having a good time down there, I think. And uh, all alone, all alone. And, uh, why can't you sling a male over there and go get her and sling her back or something? Well, with all this good publicity that she was doing down there, I thought that was going to happen, but she got to near a village of Quinnahawk and a guy shot her essentially. He was, uh, he did. Yeah, he was, he was a long ways away. He had a 3030 that he got for Christmas or something like that. And he, he shot at her like nine times and finally got her wounded enough that he came up and finished her off. And then what do you think it was? Well, first he thought it was a bear. And then that's what he said. And then when he got close and saw it at horns, he thought it was a musk ox. And, uh, then he saw it at a collar. So he shot the collar so we couldn't use any of that information. And then shot the collar. Yeah. Right. And then, um, then he got it back to the village. So he did take some of it back to the village. And then the elders were like, you dinged on, you shot the woodbison, you know, and then he felt kind of bad about that. And then, um, we talked to him about it. And he had to give a, he didn't have anything. He couldn't like find him or put him in jail or whatever. And, and so he had to give a public apology on the radio, which he did. And he had to, um, uh, get all the meat to the elders, uh, building in in Bethel. And, you know, it was all fed out there and stuff like that. So, but it was, it was pretty much a tragedy. It would have been kind of neat to have bison. And because I don't hear that public apology. Yeah. Me too. Is it lengthy? I don't know. I don't know. There was on the radio there. Yeah. I can have an opportunity. Yeah. Low, low, low, low, radio. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. So, there is kind of a long tradition in America of seeing something. You're not quite sure what it is and shooting it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's like a common response with people. I've had several old-timers call me and say, hey, you can't do this because people, local people are just going to shoot them all. And I found that not to be true. I think a lot of most local people are pretty darn excited about it. And they, they want it to happen. And they want to be, uh, you know, conservative, carcassivationists for these animals. You know, they wanted to work. But there's a few things. Fence of that one, bro, though. The muskocks is plausible. Maybe. I mean, if he wasn't aware that you guys were doing the reintroduction, what the hell is she going to think it is at a distance? I don't know. Big brown object. Yeah. I'm one time in the fog. We went after, what we went after grizzly bread turned out to be a muskocks and fog didn't shoot. I mean, it was enough to make us cross the river. Heavy fog. Well, it was enough to paddle across the river and we're like, no, shoot, that's the muskocks. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's all I know. That was the spree. Yeah. Yeah. Man, you got to go save that one. I'm not going to be able to sleep at night. I didn't realize it was still live, man. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, a lot of folks say that too. We a lot of folks argue that we should supplementally feed when conditions get tough too. There's been times. I don't think that. But I think that would go along with the objective, to have wild populations doing wild things. Yeah. It wouldn't be like a, it'd be, like this is just me talking in my view. If you start feeding them, yeah. What are you doing? Right. Yeah. It's not it's not anything. Well, but here's a gone. Well, one of the problems we're trying to go do anything with her is that she is outside of the areas listed in the environmental assessment that we could do stuff. That's another thing where it comes down to the ESA, the Endangered Species Act, making things difficult as we have to go with what is written like 10 years ago in that document. We can't just like go, I would like to go the path of least resistance. There's a lot of villages that say bring them here, but we're like, I'm sorry, we can't because the ESA says, I want to set the record straight on something. If I was in your shoes, I would do the same thing you're doing. I'm just saying like as a guy sitting here, feeling all sad about that one and anthropomorphizing its experience, that makes me say, like go get it, but of course in your position, you can't go take your money and be like, oh, you spend thousands of dollars to do what? I totally understand them than the issue. But here's, when you look at the numbers, and I'm rooting for you on this, I'm rooting for you on it, but when you look at the numbers, man, you guys have put more animals on the ground in an OCO, in the ENOCO Valley. You've put more animals on the ground than are currently alive. So what does that say to you? I mean, you dressed this series of bad winners, right? Where are you at? Like where are you at right now, mentally about this whole thing, knowing that you turned out what, 140? We'd at least 130 right off the bat. So you got to put 130 on the ground, but you don't have 130 alive right now. So you would expect with a reintroduction and they're exploiting new habitat. They're not competing with other animals. There's all this room to grow. You'd expect it to just be like boom, boom, boom, population growth, population growth, population growth, population growth, and that you'd be seeing it like skyrocket. That would be the hope. But it didn't. Nope. So what's your, like what's your, what's your take? There's been several years of growth like that, even up to 25% growth in a year. The problem is we've had these catastrophic bad winners with ice, you know, rain on snow events and ice layers in the snow, like I mentioned, it makes it hard for them to get to their forage. And you can lose a lot more bison to mortality and winter than you can replace that by calves. Because you know, there's only so many adult cows that are of breeding age. So the population can only grow, you know, 20% or 25% in a year based on reproduction, but it can lose 80% or 100% in a year, you know. And the spring of 2018, we lost 30% spring of 2020. We lost 20%. These are rough numbers. And but in the spring of 23, we lost, was it 23? Yeah, it's spring of 23. We lost 50% of the population. We end the two previous years were really great survival. So 21 and 22, like all of the calves and all the yearlings survived and the population was just cranking and and then we had what happened was it snowed in mid-October about two feet deep and then it melted down to about eight inches or just concrete and just you know, locked in their forage and then they had to go through seven months of winter with that with most of their forage. So you know, locked in the ice. See how the bunch get drowned, right? Yeah, right after we released them in the spring of 2015, we had about nine that we knew of go through the ice. You know, there's always going to be bison going through the ice. That's that's a common cause of death in in Canada, you know, where they have a lot more bison than we do and it's you know, I mean, humans still fall through the ice, but they're all there real, I've written about this. I mean, they got an incredible capacity to drown. Yeah, you wouldn't think of it. Well, they're so they're so low in the water that they can't get out. So once they get in a hole in the ice, it's it's done and I've had them go through holes by beaver houses where they're just to they're just there's just under there, you know, and you can't even radio track them tell the spring when when the ice melts and I can hear the collar and the carcassel, you know, float up to the surface and stuff, but like a moose when a moose falls to the ice, you can see a whole bunch of struggle where it tried to get out for a long time and stuff because it's, you know, somewhat buoyant, but a bison is so dancing. Yeah, they're just under the ice. Welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch remobile and on x maps. 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on meet eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. So what do you think, like what do you think there? What do you think's going to happen? And let me set this up too as you answer that because here's a deal though. You got like these other, you got these other four populations trying to think so copper river, farewell burn, Chitna, right, has some, was that it for for plans? Yeah, so three other groups and Delta. Yeah, Delta. I need this for since 1920s. So for a century, there have been planes, there have been these populations of planes bison, which for all intents and purposes could be just as well adapted as anything else to live there. So for a century, you've got these populations of Buffalo that weren't even put on on scientifically selected habitats. They were turned out that have survived for a century. Now in Delta junctions, sure they hang out in those old fields and there's agriculture around, but the other three groups that is living off the land and they got their ups and downs, but like they made it. And if you didn't master them, it's safe to assume in a hundred years, they'd still be there, right? So that makes me think that like there's a really good chance that these things could take off. I don't know how, like I don't know just a piece seen like other animals are doing in other places, why not there? But what what's come to be your opinion about the survivability of that herd, could it ever turn into like thousands of animals? Well, the way I look at that in Uncle Hurd, as I look at individual years and what to try to understand their potential. So they've only been there 10 years. And like I mentioned, there's years where the snow was fairly normal, you know, it was fairly soft. They could get through it that the population gained 20 to 25%. If you can maintain that over the long term, they'll end up being the thousands in a short time, you know, a couple of decades. The problem is this weather regime that we're in right now is much different than the history that we had before we released them. If you look at the weather records before we released them compared to just the last 10 years. And I've got a good slide on this in a lot of presentations. I give that you can find on, you know, YouTube or whatever that. The in the last 10 or 15 years, it's been so wet and so warm in Alaska that we get these, you know, rain on snow events and ice layers and things. And a bunch of that has happened just during this time that the Enocal Bison have been out. Even with all that, they still have grown in seven of the 10 years that they've been out there. But the problem is that, you know, a catastrophic winter can kill a lot more than what they can reproduce in a year. So right now, I'd say they're persistent, but the reality is is every one of these populations is an experiment, right? You know, we can sit on our hands and just say, well, let's not do this because it's too scary and they might die. But we can also just say, let's give it a shot, you know, there's good habitat here. The snow, they might be able to hand the snow, they might not. And then you give it a go. And so that's kind of where we're at now, I think, is trying to just run these experiments and see if it's a reasonable thing. That's why I mentioned it's so it's such a difficult time, you know, and all like all the money and the legal process and the politics all came together to do it now. But we're in the middle of this thing where ungulates in Alaska are just getting pounded by these warm wet winters and I'm trying to do it right in the middle of that. Well, let's jump to the next one. So that wasn't the only release site. Correct. Some time went by and you moved on to release site number two. Yeah. So there's the three release sites listed in the environmental assessment and that's the Enoco flats, the Minto flats and the Yukon flats. And we were directed from the commissioner, which is the highest level person in fishing game a couple years ago to pursue the Minto flats one. And so we went through the public planning process and road management plan and we took bison out to the wild and Minto flat stake game refuge in the fall of 2024 and then we held them in a hundred acre release pen that we built out there all winter long and then released them about May 13th of 2025. That was about 60 animals since then we've we had three calves and lost two bison. So we're at 61 animals now. And yeah, that perhared seems to be doing pretty well and it was pretty exciting. Now that habitat there doesn't have as much historically of the heavy snows that are wet with with with icing you know rain on snow events, but it does happen out there. You know, there wasn't a rain on snow event to my understanding until about 15 years ago and interior Alaska like around Fairbanks area. But now it's much more common and like I mentioned last winter it happened twice in Fairbanks area. So some of it's just going to be luck. And the weird thing is if it's colder like like the historic winters, the win the snow is soft bison can get through without a problem. If it's just a little bit warmer, you have these shinnooks that melt out the snow and so then they can easily get to the forage. And when that happens, that's happened twice in the anoko and every time that only one melt out in the course of the winter produced about a hundred percent survival on bison that winter. And so all it takes is just a little bit warmer to where an assortment comes at most of that. Well, we're not in that regularly and we're not in in the cold part regular. We're stuck right in this middle thing where where snow is wet and there's ice layers in it and so if there really is you climate change that's making us go more warm, I'm hoping we just get off this pinnacle of difficulty, you know, one way or another. Yeah, it would be like if that would be that as the climate changes, if it wound up being that that was one of the winners, you know, that it made that whatever moose suffer in bison. Yeah, it's going to take the those balancing acts have occurred, right? And it would maybe it'll be some peculiar balancing act. I'm not a climatologist, but a lot of folks from the University of Alaska that I've talked to that are have mentioned that they think the future of interior Alaska is very conducive to bison, but that stuff is changing so fast, you know, like a lot of the predictive models that I'd heard of before in interior Alaska was drier, drier summers more fire occurrence, so it would kind of convert more to an aspen parkland sort of thing like like Yukon Territory is, but it's gotten so much wetter just so fast that I don't know if that's still true with those kind of models. Yeah, you know what would surprise me is that I guess I don't know if surprise is the right word. Yeah, sure. The wolves don't hammer them, or the brown bears don't hammer them, but then you think like they don't know how to deal with them because they can they have a defense mechanism, right? They got sharp horns, they got really powerful hooves, and I've read in the past that like it's a it's a real learning curve for wolves to figure out how to kill one, yeah, without themselves getting killed, but I think you did say you've had a couple. Yeah, there's an argument out there that with these reintroduced populations, it takes wolves and all predators maybe a couple decades, 2025 years, you know, that's kind of the Canadian experience for the predators to learn how to really kill efficiently bison, but even after they do, and even in populations that persist, have to persisted forever like we'll Buffalo National Park in Yellowstone, predation rates are low in bison compared to all deer species like, you know, white tails, mulees, you know, moose elk, that sort of thing, much higher predation rates in deer species, and if you think about a bison, they kind of look like a, you know, big slow animal, but they're not, they're quick and agile, and they can kick with all four feet, they got the horns, they're super strong, they're big, they're fast, you know, the fast runners, and so it's hard to kill those things, and then they work socially together against predators, so, you know, when a bear shows up, they'll, or any predator, and I've seen this from the air, you know, when one wolves show up, they'll approach those predators, which is really interesting, you know, I mean, they go to them. Yeah, yeah, they'll just kind of, the calves will kind of work their way to the middle of the group, and the cows will just kind of like walk toward the wolves, and I've seen a group of bison in the anvil, where there was, you know, three or four wolves kind of around the edge, and they just kind of had a standoff for half hour, 40 minutes, and then, and the cows just, you know, kept, you know, working their way toward the wolves, and eventually the wolves just kind of got tired of it, and worked their way, you know, when it did something else. That's a spear fisherman move with sharks, really? The friends of mine, you just showing me. Don't, yeah, they'll go at, they'll go to them, and it throws the sharks whole perception of what's going on, like changes his whole groove. He's like, home at what? You're coming to me, they don't like it. There's a body language, there's a predator and prey body language, and I remember the most significant time I've ever done that, and if you'll allow me a little rabbit hole here, is a buddy and I landed in the spring for bear hunting in the, in the Brooks range, and at night, overnight, the river came up, and so we couldn't take off in the place that we'd landed, and so we had to make a new runway farther up on this girl bar, and there's a bunch of rocks, so we're throwing off all these rocks, and we're just, you know, heads down, throwing rocks, and making this runway, and at one point, we look up, and there's a wolf that was kind of in between us, and he's scouting us out, and you can tell he's in predator mode, he's looking at us very carefully, and kind of stalking us a little bit, and we were kind of just bent over doing all this work, and he thought, man, these must be prey animals, you know, and my buddy looks at me, and there was a gun leaning against the airplane, and you could tell, as soon as my buddy went to, looked back at this animal in a predatory posture, that wolf knew that immediately, he's like, oh my god, these are predators, they're not prey, and boom, he was gone in a second, and so I think about that a lot when I'm working with wildlife, if I can act like a prey animal, I can, you know, make a lot more progress, being around bison, then I can a predator, you know, cowboys do that a little bit with horses too, you know, if you try to act like a predator, they're not real happy about that. A buddy of mine, we were talking about this thing with shark body language and sharks, and a buddy of mine who's had a tonics of exposure to sharks, he had an interesting observation, he made it me one time, where I was commenting on, and I didn't grow up around sharks, so everything's new to me with sharks, but I was commenting on, it's weird that you can like, intimidate them by going at them, and he said, they can't afford to get hurt, like when he gets hurt, he's not, the minute he's hurt, his body's a ripping part, they're just careful, you know, and it's like, you think about two of the wolf or bear, whatever, like, they don't want to hurt, you know, and he put them in a situation where, sometimes he put them in a situation where they're like, I don't know, this thing maybe's gonna mess me up, it just changes their conversation, you know, and they don't want to get hurt. Well, back to predation on bison, I think that's their strategy is to try to face those predators, and I think with bears it works really well, because you got, you know, 20, 30 bison on one bear, it's a little bit, wolves can kind of break that, because I think wolves as a group can work against a group of bison, and finally get them run and then try to pick something out of the population, and you see that in the videos from, from Woodbuffalo National Park, of course, Woodbuffalo National Park is a diseased herd, so that, both brussels and tuberculosis, brings down enough animals that, that it's wolves can actually have a better time killing animals there, than in a lot of these non-disease populations, but I think that strategy that bison have to avoid predation is probably central to the reason why humans killed them off in North America, is because we have weapons that if you stand and face a human being and the human being has a rifle, you're done, you know, you have to run and get away, and that's what servants, you know, deer species have done is they, they run and get away and they hide and things, bison are in the wide open and they stand and face you, and there's an argument out there that bison are the only really, you know, the only North American ungulate that absolutely requires modern conservation to exist because of their predator avoidance strategy, it's impossible to just let people shoot whatever they want with rifles, or even bows, and they'll just all be gone. Well, you look at another one, moscox have a similar approach and they're very easy to wipe out. They're also existed at much lower numbers, but they were very easy to wipe out. I mean, they're wiping those things out, the Russians, even just the Russians initiating the fur trade was wiping out moscox in the Arctic, you know, because it would be the same thing, like they don't boogie. And so far, you know, Alas has been trying to restore moscox too since 1950, and one of the issues there is that bears have figured out, you know, grizzly bears have figured out predation of moscox and they can get them running and pull out animals, you know, moscox go into that, you know, the tight group where they put the calves in the middle and stuff, but if they can get them running, they can kill some. And I think a bison are just so much larger, you know, bison are, you know, roughly three times larger than a muscox, and it's a little bit tougher for a bear to kind of make that happen. I think so let's talk about the last one is the last area. So you got the Enocle Valley, mental flats where I've hunted ducks and fished. It's a cool spot. I'll say a funny thing, a mental flats. We one time at mental flats had been duck hunting left our ducks land. Let me just write in our camp. In the morning, we had them all gutted and they're gone and mink had hauled them off and we were able to recover them just by hunting around. You find a stash in the wood pile, stash in holes, you know, but so you got some there, but it seems like the real promise, man, is that the the Yukon flats would work out. Like what needs the fallen to place to do some of the Yukon flats? And if you imagine it, Yukon flats, and you can say this about the other release sites too, like if everything went perfectly, what is the estimate of how many you could have at Yukon flats? Well, the estimate from the habitat assessment in 1995 was more than 2000. So that's not really a number, it just means greater than 2000. Yeah. So it could, I mean, let me ask you this, could it possibly de-throne Yellowstone National Park as the high number, figuring there, you know, typically around, you know, 3000, 4000? Could it possibly, I mean, would it have the potential to knock that off? It's to knock Yellowstone off its, off its bison pedestal? Well, humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future, but I think that, yeah, I think it has the habitat. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to depend a little bit about the appetite for harvest from human beings in Yukon flats in Alaska, a little bit about the social density. So if we have, we end up a lot of bison in Yukon flats, how do people, do the people like that, you know, when it comes to bison interaction with infrastructure, human infrastructure, and so there's a lot of regulating factors there, but if you just take like what could live in Yukon flats, yeah, absolutely. I think we could have way more than Yellowstone in there. But, you know, the AGI Accurd in Yukon Territory is ahead of us now. They're, you know, they're passing 2000 with a growing population, and so, so it's that again? The AGI Accurd is the, is the herd between White Horse and the Alaska Border in Yukon Territory. They're going past 2000 animals with a growing herd right now that's super productive. And they're just in like, boreal forests and aspen stands. Yeah, it's so weird. Yeah, they're just open mixed forests, essentially, with some kind of aspen parkline, they've got some old like, places seen, step kind of habitat on some of the big hills, you know, where it's just kind of these grassy. It looks a lot like that picture on your wall there, where it's just like the grassy slopes with, you know, spruce and things mixed in. But it's mostly boreal forests and a lot of it's burned and stuff, you know, but the productivity of that population always stands me and I'm a little bit jealous to be honest with you. Yeah. So what would it take to be able to do a release up at you? Like what are the obstacles right now to doing a release, a release on Yukon Flats? Is the obstacle having the animals? Not really. We've got the two captive populations in Alaska. We've got an agreement with Canada get more animals. We've gone through the public process, the public planning process here in the last few years. We had our third public planning meeting where we get 30 different interest groups or representatives from 30 different interest groups together in one room. When we sit down for three days and we go through every possible thing, anybody could ever want to say about bison. We record all that. We summarize it all and we turn it into recommendations for the board of game and fishing game and local landowners. It's what's in what's called a management plan. That's where right now that public process has happened and now we have to write that in no management plan, which I haven't done yet. So I'm going to be summarizing that the public process here over the next month or two and then I'll be trying to write a management plan over the course of the next year. We're going to work out some logistics on how to get bison into Yukon Flats. So a whole bunch of Yukon Flats is national wildlife refuge and a bunch more of it is native corporation land both local native corporations and regional native corporations and then there's about 500 square miles of state land in eastern Yukon Flats and that's where we're going to go is to that state land. We don't have any access overland to that state land so we're going to fly them all in and so I got to work out all those details and I've done some proof of concept work with flying bison and smaller airplanes like to have land beavers. Really? Yeah. I flew two. You can stand one up in there? No, no, no, they're immobilized. So they just you just dart them toss them in there with a lightweight veterinarian and go for it and so I flew two the minto flats that way. Yeah because the beaver can haul like two thousand pounds. Yeah exactly and you got a 600 pound yearling or something like that. It's no big deal. The two cows that I hauled were 22 months old and they were they were something like that 700 pounds maybe. So why not barge admit? Well the state land that we're going to go to is maybe 20 miles or more from the Yukon River so there's no barging. There is a little tiny corner of it that's many many miles probably two 300 miles from the closest like boat landing and you could get there by river boat and so maybe you could haul one at a time on this like you know three day tracks and a river boat or something like that but it'd be a real challenge. But you got the legal go ahead to do it. Yeah. Well I won't until I write the management plan and the board of game approves the management plan but right now all the political support exists and I just got to make it through that last process of giving the getting the plan written approved internally in fishing game and then approved by the board of game which is a panel of people appointed by the governor that sets wildlife regulations in Alaska. Welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch remobile and on x maps 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on meet eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. You know I mentioned Colorado's recent move to sort of buy for Kate and the state of Colorado where they've said there are bison and Colorado their livestock. We're creating a new classification and just remind folks it's a new classification saying buffalo that come in naturally into the state that walk into the state will be treated as wildlife. They pave the way for hunting which is a brilliant move because a thing a thing you wind up with when you do introductions or reintroductions as you wind up with you might have wildlife managers that are planning on using hunting as a control mechanism in the future and they'll bring in an animal and then later down the road you'll encounter public resistance to hunting even though it's the intentional long people down the road will be like wait a minute I thought they were endangered or imperiled in now you're talking about hunting season form. So in Colorado they've already laid out that they're like they will be a big game animal and the bill they passed even specified what a tag will cost they set out the fine if you kill one or capture one it's a $10,000 fine there's $1,000 restitution to the state for the loss of its asset there's a resident tag price there's like a really hefty like $2,700 non-resident tag price but they don't even have the animals yet but they're laying out like here's what it's going to look like right as this becomes a thing here's what it'll look like what would it look like in the future like how have you guys contemplated what it would look like when one of these populations is in the many hundreds or moves into the thousands what would it ever look like to open up hunting opportunities because that's probably part of the public buy-in with locals is that in some way they are setting up a future in which they have a diversified portfolio of wild game available to them yeah right so what would how have you contemplated this so the primary reason for this restoration is to restore this subspecies as a component of the ecosystem that functions in this empty niche so that's the that's the number one reason but if we are successful at it then it will be a renewable natural resource that we can harvest and that's what you like you mentioned there's a lot of people that are counting on that that's why we get a lot of support from their average person is because they think that someday they could harvest that animal and it's a pretty big boon you know to harvest you know 800 pounds of meat or something like that you know it's a it's well worth it to a citizen to have that on the landscape the way our regulatory system works is that every few years for each area the border game meets and they hear proposals from the last part of fishing game and just average citizens can just put a proposal into change regulation in Alaska and so that there then there's a process of locally elected citizen advisory committees in each village and each large community they can also produce proposals and they you know vote any proposal from anybody else up or down and that all works its way up to the border game and when they get to these border game meetings the border game reviews that proposal they hear all the public testimony from everybody else including the department's perspective fishing game department which is usually just a biological perspective and then they make a decision right then there's how we're going to do it but there's a lot of options like I've written in the management plan for the Minto population or lower ten in a population as its formal name where you know there could be drawing permits there could be registration permits that there could be all of the permits that are available to hunt any other species are as a possibility and so we really don't know what that hunt structure is when we first started releasing animals in a no-core before we were going to go to the no-core with the animals the planning team there set up this they had it all figured out they were like okay the hunt's going to be this many drawing permits this many locally registry locally available registration permits on they were getting into numbers or they had them on the ground totally yeah and they had they had we're going to have a trespass fee on these lands and and so people can you know access these bison on private lands and like we're going to have a scholarship fund that a bunch of these trespass fee dollars goes into and that helps local people go to college to study you know by and they were just going for it and and they I thought it was a beautiful piece of work of people trying to work together to make something happen it was just absolutely wonderful however over time when the local population didn't perform as well and then different people you know were elected into different these different groups that helped make that that then it changed over over over time and so I think one of the important things to realize is that it's not the people from 1928 when they released the bison and dealt the junction that determine how we're going to hunt those bison today it's the people of today that determine how we're going to hunt bison today and it's through the board game thing and so we can record everything that people want to see happen with wood bison now before they go on the landscape and that's why we have this public planning process where we we write down everything everybody says any opposition any support any any concerns all that stuff and then try to address that in these management plans so that later on when the board game does hear proposals regarding a harvestable surplus in a particular bison population then they can look back at these recommendations that were there originally and be like oh yeah well they really wanted the harvest to be you know to include local people as much as it includes everybody else and you know whatever and then try to act in that way if they if they choose to but as you know public trust resources there's a lot of conflict there because they're all and there always will be that's that's why we have a board of game and all this citizen advisory groups and all that is because there always be conflict about something that we all own together you know because we're a territorial social animal and we want those resources to go to our group not some other group you know whatever our group is and so it's a challenge yeah you raise a really good point when you say that when it's time if and when it's time to do a hunt it'll be the people then figured out because like yeah like you said with the original the 1928 ones I mean think about what happens since then and now stay hood the native claims settlement act I mean you know I mean like you can't anticipate totally I mean right and in the last good regulations I'm not sure if you're familiar but prior to like 1989 or so we could discriminate by somewhere you live we could give more permits to people in this town than people in this town because they were closer to the resource or they had more subsistence you know a history there in a particular resource or something like that well we lost that to a court case in the late 1980s where it said all right the last constitution says that all people have equal access to wildlife resources and so we have to treat all people equally we can't discriminate based on where you live that was a difficult thing well then the the federal government stepped in and said oh no that's not fair through a nilka we are going to say that you have to provide a priority for rural people on resources and you know in on federal land and so that created this kind of dual management system between the state and the federal government and that's been really complicated well that just happened that's gonna I mean we're gonna talk about this on upcoming episode but that system is is in a review process right now yeah the current the Trump administration is reviewing the federal subsistence board and some of the decisions they've made recently and so that could be again you know just another we don't need to get into it now but I mean it's like but my point is that things they're they're poking and prodn at it right now you know and you just added to it I mean I think things change you know 30 years ago the state could do that then the federal government can do that well who know 30 years from now when we have a big harvestable surplus of bison in a particular area who knows what the regulations are gonna be then hey I don't want to I don't know I'm paying into a corner here but I mean just like I mean just just for conversations say what would you put 130 animals on the ground okay you put 130 wood bison on the in the lower inocle valley if you just had to get like what would be a number that would make sense to you in the future where if you heard from your grave or wherever you heard hey they're running a bunch of they're they're giving out 20 permits in the inocle valley you'd think to yourself well I hope there's at least blank animals on the ground 10 permits they're giving out 10 permits you'd say I hope there's at least yeah you know I want to see a minimum viable population of 400 or more for the long term but we've harvested plain spison you mentioned all the hurts the plain spison hurts in Alaska and so a lot of those bison bison hurts have been managed at less than 200 for decades and decades and so we know it's possible and I think we could have a hunt in the inocle now we could have one or two drawing permits there no problem without any sort of issue with right now yeah right now but the planning team doesn't want that yet now it does feel that I'm all for low hunt you know but it does feel a little premature what they what the planning so the planning team includes all kinds of people right it's all the local people and urban people and Safari Club and animal welfare groups and all that we all get together why are you in the welfare groups in on it they do anything I think I'll let that one go with so we it's just part of we're trying to get it being inclusive right you know get everybody in there maybe animal welfare groups is the what how about wildlife I don't know like Alaska wildlife alliance and there's another one I can't remember name it right now anyway we're just gonna want to keep everybody involved so people don't feel alienated and come back later with some of the issues right now I understand anyway where was I going with this oh so this group that's the planning team the site specific planning team for the inocle they first started out and said well we don't want to start any harvest until we have a harvestable surplus of 20 animals we're gonna run part of that into drawing permits and part of that into locally issued registration permits so that local people will have the ability to harvest in the presence of of drawing permits well when the population wasn't that productive then now they lowered that to 10 they're like well when there's a harvestable surplus of 10 and so at the last meeting I was like well do you guys there's enough to have a harvest of a few do you guys want a harvest few and they were like nope we want to start this in a way that there's local harvest and and and drawing permits and of course drawing permits do service local people too but they just have a small chance of getting the permit and we have no way because of that court case in the last constitution we have no way of just giving permits to local people we have we have a way of you can issue local registration permits where you're more likely to get it if you're local the problem is the planning team kind of predict this and they can say what they want but ultimately it'll come down to a border game action and nobody's done a proposal to to to start a hunt in the inocle if somebody would would propose that there should be hunting the inocle then that would kind of force the issue and we'd have to go through that process yeah um with the when you talk about the permit thing and the local hunting all that they also have a mechanism the stay as a mechanism to where you have to destroy the trophy value of the animal that's that is in some places yeah in some species yeah so you said here's the deal though you can't take the horns you got to cut the horns in half you would lose a lot of outside you wouldn't lose my interest but you lose that outside interest yeah that happens people do that if they think that the you know yeah there's a bunch of little tools like that to try to level the playing field between uh different user groups yeah but I think man I think that you got a way till you got a way to you're on a steady upward incline man I think it's a little early right now and I think that's going to be depend on the weather which is something we can't predict right but I think it's like probably I'll care what I think but I'll tell you anyway I think to have in that I think to have an at hunter buy-in um is really important and it's a it's a thing that frustrates me down here in the northern rock he's and well and the entire in the west the thing that frustrates me is it's just an area where you don't see we don't see widespread hunter buy-in on buffalo restoration I think people can't picture it meaning this whole brusselosis thing if someone if a politician in Montana said hey man we're really worried about brusselosis we're gonna start killing every elk that walks out of that park it's political suicide it's political suicide hunters have a fit you know hunters have a fit they're like if any elk walks out of the park we're shooting it or hauling it away yeah dude they would they would they would be apoplectic hunters would be um and as much as I invite people to be like not in a listen like restoring these animals is a long-term hunting play like restoring these animals I'm always like picture man picture that we have public herds on public land and you draw tags and hunt them like we do for moose and everything else um I think it's too far-fetched like you just don't see hunters in on it some but not all it's too far-fetched to picture but I view in order to get more more of the animals on the landscape I think that it's gonna be really important for hunters to like advocate for that knowing that it might not even be for their benefit but it might be for their kids benefit and that happens all the time because you look at like you go to like look at people in big horn all the people that do work on big horn sheet okay all the people that support wild sheet foundation there's a lot of people that support wild sheet recovery and conservation that are never gonna hunt big horns they're never gonna hunt big horns I've never hunted a big horn I'm all four big horn recovery right so it's not just the people do it like the people that were involved and bringing it out back into Kentucky there were people that were heavily involved and bringing it out back into Kentucky the knew they were never gonna hunt out but they did it as hunters right they did it as they they were they're they're they're heart as a hunter motivated them to get involved even though they themselves weren't gonna benefit from it so I think that like I wish more hunters were involved in like in building up public publicly owned herds using public land as a long-term play of being not just that you're doing the right thing by the wildlife but motivated as a long-term play of restoring this really important game species on the American landscape it's like the forgotten game animal yeah and you go back and look like the tribes that lived here historically that was their pick man they were slumminate when they ate deer meat they were slumminate when they ate prawn horn yeah that's what they wanted and I just think we need to get back there yeah I think that that is the main motivation for most people is the concept that someday they might get something but we have to but I don't think it's a bad motivation no no it's not but but we have to be as biologist we have to be brutally honest with them and say this is an experiment we're gonna try to make a renewable resource we're gonna try to fill this empty niche in the ecosystem and improve nutrient cycling at all trophic levels from insects up to human beings but it may fail you know the unoco population as you pointed out is you know is not climbing at this moment um maybe these other populations we try maybe maybe they won't work out either you know but if we look at history and we look up bison bison can do it might be a massive success you know do you know what I hope would try and earlier I made like I made a comment about I think before we start recording I made a comment to you without explaining myself where I said using oral tradition or archaeology or paleontology to prove that bison were in the modern period present in Alaska right so that you have the political cover of saying it's it's a reintroduction or recovery effort which relies on you saying they were here and they were wiped out by people or people were influential in wiping them out that gives you the political cover right to go ahead and bring the animals back in and I said I don't really even care if it's true or not what I meant by that is at European contact we had 40 million of them somewhere around 40 million you hear 28 million you hear 60 million a bunch there was a bunch and not all areas are suitable so in bringing the animal back me personally I'm not so concerned about having it match up exactly to where they were historically I mentioned that group that's living on the north rim of the Grand Canyon they're spending a bunch of time in Grand Canyon National Park and in this whole conversation about whether the animals belong there is this thing well how many were there historically and they're like oh it was marginal habitat at best it was fringe habitat at best I'm like I don't care it's suitable but like it's a suitable location for them now they can be there now maybe there maybe there were more of 100 miles away like I don't care the public wants them there the habitat supports them being there it's it's okay for them to be there let them be there because there's places like they're not going to be in downtown Dodge City but Dodge City had a lot and they're going to have a lot now so it's like where it's suitable put them on there right yeah because there's a lot of places we covered up and so if it winds up being that you can go into valleys in Alaska and it's not and they're not coming at the cost they're not pushing moves into extinction they're not pushing care boom to extinction and local people want them there I'm like go for it because we have a lot of ground to recover I completely agree yeah the the problem is right now is the the constraints of the Endangered Species Act make it difficult to just do those paths of least resistance where we find places that people want them and the habitats good and we can just put them there we just can't go willy-nilly like that we have to stick to the that and yeah it's a lot easier for me to be a dude sitting here like telling you all about everything that should happen like yeah you're the huge that there's a huge difference between me and you I mean I can say all these like grandiose ideas but then you got to live the reality and like thank God I'm not putting animals on the ground you are so I appreciate the obstacles yeah you know I appreciate the obstacles but I just like that that's all like a long wind away of saying that I'm like I really am elated like I'm it the work from my personal perspective the work you guys doing is beautiful I think it's like a really cool testament to the state um aspects of the political atmosphere the social atmosphere the state game agency like to kind of have the audacity to like try to do this you know I think it's great man I think it's great and until someone can come and point out some overwhelming harm that none of us have anticipated I think it's like full steam ahead man I think it should like I wish you guys the best luck thanks yeah about the harm thing there are no studies I know of where bison show that they've they've harmed other species but there are many many studies that I know where bison help other species you know like I said everywhere from all trophic levels from insects right on up to you know human beings and so it's uh yeah I think they bring a lot of benefit to most systems yeah I want to point out the folks like there's one last thing I'll make on the same point is uh if you go back to european time of european contact they think that there were turkeys in 34 states we have wild turkeys in 49 states now why is that because it just no one people have looked no one can go and find where they're causing harm they're not driving species to extinction they're not displacing native wildlife right it's like they're just not causing problems that's why we don't have turkey eradication efforts people welcome them being on the landscape right I think there's gonna become more and more places we're not only do people welcome out on the landscape there's gonna become more and more places where people like hey man why can't we have some right like let's get some back and they're big they're dangerous I don't know tough shit yeah it's like I hope it can be that way is bison and I think it can be I mean yeah there's such a valuable resource I think it's worth trying oh man I'll tell you what too I used to when I first got a hide off one we tried to sleep under it it's got you pretty cold for you to sleep under that thing man it's all there is a useful animal man but I should appreciate you coming in and talking about your work glad to be here thank you and this is home for you originally yeah yeah I was born in race in Montana I left when I was 18 but you go right to Alaska went right to Alaska would you go to school a uaf fairbanks yeah and you're married yeah how long have you been married oh uh 26 years this summer but I was with her for three years more than that so almost 30 years so if your wife is driving by at 60 miles an hour and she looks out the window can she say would would bison her planes bison I don't think she could no I'm not totally I'm not totally sure but my new I understand it's stressful we're good but well do thanks so much for coming on and thanks to your agency for letting you come on welcome I know sometimes there's a reluctant to cut people loose a big long conversations about policy but I don't think you I don't think you'd cause any trouble for anybody I hope not we'll find out when I get back thanks man appreciate it yeah all right everybody those Tom Seaton from Alaska Department of Fish and Game tell me the title again would bison project biologist for that's part of fishing game would bison project project biologist and if people want to check out some of you guys work what's the best place to go look well we've got a website if you just google you know Alaska wood bison restoration and Alaska Department of Fish and Game there's all kinds of documents on there the the website's a little bit old right now we've got a new draft that it should come out in the next few months but yeah there's all kinds of information if they want to dig into it and if you're looking for where you click to apply for a tag it's too early but you can apply for the planes bison hunts all right you know you can apply for those but you'll have to keep waiting to get your wood bison permit so stay tuned thanks again Tom welcome so welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch remobile and on x maps 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunting manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meet eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months this is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human