Episode 136: A Former MNR Biologist Explains Why Wildlife Counts Are Never Simple

Counting wildlife sounds like a spreadsheet problem until you try doing it over millions of hectares of bush, broken habitat, bad weather, and animals that do not want to be seen. We sit down with Bruce Ranta, a former Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources biologist, to pull back the curtain on how population estimates really get made and why “the number” is often a best-guess built from multiple imperfect signals. If you’ve ever wondered how the province decides on moose tags, elk harvest levels, or whether a population is trending up or down, this one gets into the real mechanics. 

We start in the forest, because habitat drives everything. Bruce explains the moose mosaic versus caribou mosaic approach to forestry, why moose need younger browse-rich cuts, and why caribou planning can aim for massive contiguous blocks that reduce moose and wolves. From there we get into Ontario moose surveys: helicopter-based plot counts, stratified random sampling, correction factors, and why repeating surveys over time matters more than believing any single result. We also talk carrying capacity, predator pressure, moose ticks, brain worm, and how those factors can swing a population faster than most people expect. 

Then we widen out to other species and methods: why woodland caribou are hard to count at a provincial scale, why elk are notoriously difficult to spot even when collared, and how chronic wasting disease has changed the entire conversation around moving cervids. We cover deer management without aerial counts, leaning on hunter reporting, winter severity, crop damage, and vehicle collisions. Finally, we get into bear population estimation using DNA hair snag surveys baited along lines, plus the assumptions and limits behind every model. 

If you care about conservation, hunting, forestry, or evidence-based wildlife management in Ontario, hit play, then subscribe, share this with a hunting buddy, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s one wildlife “fact” you believed that this conversation made you question?

Transcript

Welcome To Outdoor Journal Radio

SPEAKER_06 0:01

Hi everybody, I'm Angelo Viola. And I'm Pete Bowman. Now you might know us as the hosts of Canada's favorite fishing show, but now we're hosting a podcast. That's right. Every Thursday, Angela will be right here in your ears, bringing you a brand new episode of Outdoor Journal Radio. Hmm. Now what are we gonna talk about for two hours every week? Well, you know there's gonna be a lot of fishing.

SPEAKER_10 0:22

I knew exactly where those fish were going to be and how to catch them, and they were easy to catch.

SPEAKER_06 0:27

Yeah, but it's not just a fishing show. We're going to be talking to people from all facets of the outdoors. From athletes.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

All the other guys would go golfing. Me and Garcie and Turk, and all the Russians would go fishing.

SPEAKER_10 0:41

And now that we're looking foresting away, things it's the perfect transmission environment for line. Chefs, if any game isn't cooked properly, marinated for me. You will taste it.

SPEAKER_06 0:53

And whoever else will pick up the phone. Wherever you are, Outdoor Journal Radio seeks to answer the questions and tell the stories of all those who enjoy being outside. Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Fireplace Maple Sap And Dog Runs

Sportsman Show Plans And Chaga Blends

SPEAKER_08 1:15

As the world gets louder and louder, the lessons of our natural world become harder and harder to hear, but they are still available to those who know where to listen. I'm Jerry Olette, and I was honored to serve as Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources. However, my journey into the woods didn't come from politics. Rather, it came from my time in the bush and a mushroom. In 2015, I was introduced to the birch-hungry fungus known as Chaga, a tree conch with centuries of medicinal applications used by indigenous peoples all over the globe. After nearly a decade of harvest, use, testimonials, and research, my skepticism has faded to obsession. And I now spend my life dedicated to improving the lives of others through natural means. But that's not what the show is about. My pursuit of this strange mushroom and my passion for the outdoors has brought me to the places and around the people that are shaped by our natural world. On Outdoor Journal Radio's Under the Canopy podcast, I'm going to take you along with me to see the places, meet the people that will help you find your outdoor passion and help you live a life close to nature and under the canopy. So join me today for another great episode, and hopefully, we can inspire a few more people to live their lives under the canopy. All right, as always, we want to thank all our listeners across Canada, the States, around the world, usual. You got questions? Ask them. You got a suggestion for show? Let us know. We'll see what we can do. And as always, we give a little bit of an update on a couple things. You know, the fireplace insert had it cleaned, as I mentioned before, and it's working great. Now, mind you, the weather's warming up down this part of the province that we're in, so I'm only putting the fire on at night. It was plus six yesterday. And but a little cool at night. So when I got up this morning and then uh took out my chocolate lab gunner out for his run, it was uh minus six or minus seven this morning. So it was still a little bit cool, but uh the the the insert uh keeps the house very nicely warm, and that's what I've been eating with it all year and doing a uh bit of an experiment to see how well it worked and how to regulate the wood and what wood do I put in. And right now I've I got a bit of uh yesterday I burned a fair bit of uh poplar. I got some small poplar, which uh gave off enough heat just to heat it up because it uh the the the drier the wood or the hotter the wood, um, hotter being the maple or the ash and and some of the other beech that I'm burning gives off a much hotter wood. And I don't need it that hot because it's warming up here, so it's working great. But as always, uh we're out at about 6.30, maybe uh no, it was later than that today. Yesterday was that time, when I was running Gunner, and he's always looking uh for his buddies, uh, whether it's Cooper, another chocolate lab, or Willie, a German short-haired, or it's uh Rocky, which is a Viesla. And then uh there's Winston, which is another little dog, and always see these other dogs that are out there on a regular basis. So he gets uh looks forward uh to meeting his friends out there and has a good time. And of course, Benny, which is uh my son's Josh and Casey's dog. He doesn't mind Benny too much, uh, but uh we'll have to re-educate him as Garrett and Brittany bring in Belle, which is a dope, which is and she's a little bit cranky. And Gunnar just he just he doesn't respond. He he kind of goes, All right, okay, I won't sit around here. I'll just go into my room and leave everybody and be away from the cranky dog. But we'll see how that goes as Bell's showing up um Sunday. Anyways. Um now I was out tapping, as I mentioned before, tapping trees, and I was quite surprised it was plus six yesterday, and it was warm the day before, but the sap wasn't running. So I figured, you know, the day before I got a couple of days, uh warm, warm days, cold nights. The sap should be uh the pails because I'm still using a pail system. So um the sap just wasn't running, and I got virtually like I don't know, out of my less than a probably a quarter of a five-gallon pail, and that was it. But we'll see how it goes. And I'm hoping later today it'll uh it'll produce pretty good so I can get some more boils. I've already had one boil go this year, but I'm looking for some more to have product ready for a lot of the uh shows and events that I do. Now, as uh this time of the year, this week, leading up to the Toronto Sportsman Show, which runs March the 19th to the 22nd at the International Center in Mississauga. And of course, there's a lot of fishing and boating and camping and outdoor gears and hunting exhibitors that are there with a lot of lodges. And you know, this year they've got a fly fishing uh tour for uh and free youth hunter education, which is is uh good to get the youth out in the outdoors. But also uh this year, um my buddies Angelo Viola and Pete Bowman from the Fish in Canada TV show and others, I'm not sure which ones are other ones from the show are coming out, but they'll be at the on Friday, and Saturday will be at the Ontario Tourism Booth saying hello and answering questions and talking to people, as well as Saturday, uh Pete Nanj will be with uh the current Minister of Natural Resources, Mike Harris. And I gotta tell you, I was in the legislature with uh Mike Harris's father, Mike Harris as well, and when Mike Sr. stepped down and said that uh he wasn't running again, and that they'll be there on the Saturday. So the minister will be there on the Saturday at the sportsman show, and uh an opportunity to meet the minister and talk and answer questions and things like that. But when uh Mike Harris Sr. stepped down, he said he wanted a time to go fishing. So I presented Mike with a a rod and reel for him and his two sons to make sure that you're gonna go fishing. We'll give you some great stuff, and we gave him some great product on behalf of the caucus. Just to say thank you for the time served and all the things you do. Because it's no matter what position you're in, uh what side of the the the legislature you're on, it's never easy to be a leader and just try to please everybody or anybody is not an easy thing. But we'll be there. Now, this year I'm trying to get my booth changed because to be perfectly honest, my location sucks, but uh I'm trying to get it changed. But as it stands right now, I'm still booth 2105. But if you check uh when you show up at the show, if you can't find us, just check uh or give us a text or a call, and you'll be able to locate our booths. If you want to come down and talk Chaga, we'll have samples there for people to try the new blends. Of course, uh last year we had Morning Glory, which was roasted chicory root, roasted dandelion root in Chaga, and the year before that was apple cinnamon. And I know I had those people from Ohio come down to the show to try and pick up some apple cinnamon, but they showed up at the end of the day and I'd sold out, so I shipped them down some because they they came up to the show specifically to pick up the apple cinnamon chag. And I have to tell you, so uh they said, Well, we just drove up for the show. And I said, Well, if you you come back tomorrow, I'll I'll uh meet you here. I'll I'll uh get you a pass to come in to pick it up. He says, I'm sorry, but I'm sold out. And he said, No, no, we just drove up for the day. I said, Oh, where'd you drive up from? He says, Ohio. I said, Ohio. Well, how did you know about the show? He said, Well, I listened to your podcast and I came up to get it. Oh, thank you very much. So, anyway, so in this year we'll have two new blends, and you can come out and try the Chaga Mint or even a newer one, which hasn't been released yet, but is being released at the shows. And it's the Chaga, of course, all our products have the Chaga, turmeric, ginger, black pepper, and chaga tea. And I gotta tell you, the the people who are trying it are just loving it, including my wife, who just raves about it. But we're on to talk about some different stuff. And we've got a returning guest to the show. Welcome back, Bruce. Bruce Ranta, former Minister of Natural, uh Ministry of Natural Resources Biologists. Welcome to the program again, Bruce. Hi, Jerry. Hey, how's it going? How's it going? Now, just so our international listeners know, kind of give us a sense of where you are from. Well, I guess the closest would be in Ontario, Thunder Bay or Winnipeg. Kind of let everybody know where you are, Bruce.

SPEAKER_07 10:05

Well, I'm in uh Kenora, which is uh right on the north uh shore of Lake of the Woods, and it's about uh two and a half hour drive to Winnipeg and about a five-hour drive to Thunder Bay. Thunder Bay being uh to the east and Winnipeg being to the west. Kenora is the first city uh when you leave Manitoba coming east into Ontario. Right on highway, the Trans-Canada Highway.

SPEAKER_08 10:33

Yeah, I recalled a little incident in October there one year when I was junior minister for Northern Development and Mines and was asked to go up and and do the what was the Northern Noto Northern Tourist Outfitters Association conference and do a um remarks up there. And here it was down in Toronto when I got on the airport. It was basically kind of um short-sleeve shirts and and uh I could have worn shorts, but because I was heading north, I had a pair of long pants on. Got on the plane and land in Thunder Bay because you fly from Toronto to Thunder Bay and then to Kenora. And I get up to Thunder Bay and they say, Oh, Mr. Olet, we we we can't find your baggage. So what? Can't find your baggage. Uh but it could have gone on ahead already to Kenora, so it might be there when you get there. I get to Kenora, no baggage, nothing. All I got's a shirt, uh shorts, or not shorts, but uh um just a pair of uh shoes, and I get out and it's a blizzard out there with a still a heck of a pile of snow, and uh it was absolutely horrendous. So I'm walking through with no coat, no nothing, no sweater, anything, to try and get from uh get some at least some toothbrush and a bunch of stuff to be able to be able to do the conference there. And when I get there, I talk to a bunch of the bush pilots who said, you know something? We would never fly in this kind of weather. Why are you here? I said, Well, when you're leaving the south, you didn't, I didn't know it was going to be like this when we got here. But big difference in the province of Ontario. And you see that uh quite regularly, a big difference in the weather, Bruce?

SPEAKER_07 12:11

Oh, yeah, it's uh quite a bit of difference here. We're more uh like uh Manitoba of Winnipeg weather than we are anywhere else in Ontario. Even Thunder Bay is uh quite a bit different than uh Kenora often.

SPEAKER_08 12:27

Yeah, because well Thunder Bay has the ma the the moderating effect of uh Lake Superior as well. Would that be I don't think uh Superior freezes over, but I'm not sure, does it?

SPEAKER_07 12:37

Uh that's uh right now it's uh about 50% frozen over, maybe a little bit more.

SPEAKER_08 12:43

Is that normal or is that uh uh because of the coldness that we've had uh a little bit more than usual?

SPEAKER_07 12:49

Uh it's a little bit more than average, but I've seen uh winters where it's almost uh it's almost all frozen over.

SPEAKER_08 12:58

Oh, very interesting.

SPEAKER_07 13:00

Okay.

Meeting Bruce Ranta In Kenora

SPEAKER_08 13:00

Well, Bruce, I I I brought you on the program because I happened to read a blog of yours that uh you were talking about um wildlife counts and and how the province of Ontario, from your time uh as being a biologist, and and I guess your area, because they have different biologists for different parts of the province. What area or what district were you in when you were a biologist for the ministry?

SPEAKER_07 13:23

Well, I was uh in Kenora District, but I also worked for the Northwest region, and then for uh about seven years I was uh in uh main office in the forestry uh branch. So I was uh Maine? So uh yeah, Main Forestry branch in Sault Ste. Marie. I was in the I was the biologist in the forest policy section.

SPEAKER_08 13:48

Oh, okay. So you're working out of the Sioux or working out of Kenora at the time?

SPEAKER_07 13:53

Well, I still uh lived in Kenora, and uh, but I spent I was uh in the Sioux for seven years. Some days I'd be there for two weeks at a time, sometimes for a week at a time. Um, and then near the end, I was uh mostly in uh Kenora, and then we had we would have meetings and they'd fly me to whichever part of the province uh they had a particular meeting. We were at the time uh doing uh what we called the Stanton Site Guide, which was uh uh basically uh a document that provided direction to the forest products industry on how uh to plan for forest harvesting in the short and long term to provide uh my role was to uh provide direction on how to ensure the cut uh benefited uh wildlife.

SPEAKER_08 14:50

Right. So now that's something uh that very much interests me. It's uh because there's uh basically for moose numbers, there's a moose mosaic and a caribou mosaic, is there not for cuts, for forestry cuts?

SPEAKER_07 15:04

Uh there is. Uh we were involved with the caribou one for a while, but then caribou uh because it became uh a species uh I guess a threatened species, uh responsibility for caribou management shifted over to the Ministry of the Environment.

SPEAKER_08 15:24

Oh, really? Okay. So now well, we can talk about that a bit now. What's the difference? Just so, and I and I know myself, having been the privilege and honor to serve as minister, what is the difference between a moose mosaic and a caribou mosaic for harvesting forest products?

SPEAKER_07 15:46

Well, basically, uh a caribou mosaic tries to uh have a maximum size of clear cut that's uh possible, leaving very little residual force. So it's just a big, huge, massive cut uh carried out uh contiguously over a period of years. Uh thousands and thousands of hectares, up to ten thousand hectares clear cut. Uh whereas uh moose mosaic tries to keep it smaller, uh usually in the neighborhood of hundreds of hectares, and uh irregular boundaries and patches of forest left uh within the clear cut, and patches of forest left around uh uh values uh important to moose, such as uh uh dense conifer cover for uh winter habitat, little patches uh around uh moose aquatic feeding areas, and uh basically a lot more residual force left, uh uh a mosaic of mature timber, middle-aged timber, and clear cut. So uh whereas a clear cut for caribou, as I said, tries to just cut everything that's possible.

SPEAKER_08 17:07

So why do they try to cut everything that's possible? Like what's the what is uh the the reason for um supporting caribou by doing that? Because I know, but I'm just trying to give it to the our listeners to understand. So that um I mean because they're grazing on fields as opposed to browsing or what?

SPEAKER_07 17:26

Uh well the main reason there's the main reason is you for one, you can't cut big enough to make uh a caribou habitat in the long run. It's just impossible. Caribou habitat in the forest in the long run is actually a hundreds of thousands of hectares that result from a large forest fire. But cutting really large swaths of forest that you as logistically as large as you can, well, in the long run, doesn't really provide much in the way of caribou habitat. It isn't good for moose. So when it grows up, it comes back as a fairly even-aged forest that doesn't have a lot of moose habitat in it. If it doesn't have a lot of moose habitat in it, it doesn't have a lot of moose, and therefore it doesn't have a lot of wolves. So that that's the main point is not having a lot of moose and not having a lot of wolves. So it keeps uh wolf numbers uh down, and uh uh so it doesn't have the wolves, don't use that as a base to go into uh adjacent patches that might have caribou that resulted from a fire and have those wolves eating up the caribou. So it tries to really have a kind of a uh uh desert, uh, if you so to speak, of moose.

SPEAKER_08 18:48

Really? I I I I never really considered the the moose-wolf application in regards to uh fiber, fiber being timber cuts and in dealing with um large the forestry sector. I always thought it was mostly because um caribou required long terms of undisturbed areas, and if you cut large sectors, there's no reason to go back in it to bother it so that the lichens which they feed on actually grow in that area.

SPEAKER_07 19:20

Yeah, so you have a great big fire that uh burns hundreds of thousands of hectares, and 60 years to 180, maybe 200 years after that fire, uh it's this big even-aged forest that's uh pretty much all the same age, as I said, even-aged. And uh then it has a lot of uh not only arboreal lichens in the trees, but it uh it's all it hasn't been disturbed for that 60 or 100 or more years, and it has ground lichens, but not and not much browse. So, as I said, no browse for moose, but lichens in the trees and on the ground for caribou. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_08 20:03

Very interesting. Yeah, it's it's it's always interesting, and I think a lot of those people that particul uh you know that uh participate in the consumptive activities in the outdoors never really gain an understanding of all those sort of aspects that that just you know, why does it make a difference? Well, there you go. And quite frankly, I I didn't really realize or I may, if I thought about it, probably yeah, I would have realized it, but never really took the the wolf predation uh into consideration when when thinking about the the uh the various cuts. And now a moose one, so you mentioned about the you know the um uh the the production and all that, but also I guess for wintering and for for um uh feed areas and things like that as well, make a big difference, right? Yes, it does.

SPEAKER_07 20:52

For uh moose feed moose are browsers in the wintertime almost exclusively, so uh you need to have uh abundant areas of uh uh young forest, usually less than uh 25 years of age, where it has a lot of browse uh in the understory before the canopy, the forest canopy gets large enough that shades out the light and uh there's not a lot of browse left. So moose are dependent on uh younger stage forests, younger ages of forest uh to produce the browse that they require.

Moose Mosaic Versus Caribou Cuts

SPEAKER_08 21:24

Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, this kind of leads into what you know I essentially reached out to you to talk about on the podcast was uh we're looking at how does the province of Ontario actually determine populations of moose and caribou and and other species in the province of Ontario. And let's start off with moose. So essentially, every how often and why is it necessary, and how do they determine populations of animals like moose in the province of Ontario?

SPEAKER_07 21:54

Well, you have to count them, and you count them generally as What's been done uh lately is you count them uh from a helicopter in plots. So you section off uh the landscape. Sometimes it's done on a wildlife management unit basis, but now it's more often done uh on uh groupings of wildlife management units in what they call cervey ecological zones. So you put a bunch of management units that are fairly similar, and you have a mosaic of uh plots inside. The plots are about 25 square kilometers uh in size, and you try to uh distribute those in a um stratified uh random selection. So you try to determine where there's high moose densities, uh, this done beforehand through local knowledge or computer models that looks at the habitat uh and medium moose densities and low moose densities in areas with virtually no moose. So you don't sample those and you exclude them from the sampling. And then you uh uh with in each of those stratified low, medium, and high, you have a uh set of uh plots in them, not that are chosen randomly. So you don't do the whole landscape. And each plot, as I said, it's 25 square kilometers, and you uh in January, where the when the moose are most visible because uh snow is out there, it's cold, and they are out in the open browsing. So you you fly these uh 25 square kilometer plots. It usually takes about half an hour to 40 minutes with a crew of uh four people in the helicopter, and uh you go lengthwise, the plots are uh uh 10 kilometers long and two and a half kilometers uh wide, and you go up and down and try to cover the whole plot and count all the moose in the plot. So you count up the moose, and then you figure out how many are in the plot on average, and you apply that to the whole stratum, and then you add up the stratums, and then you apply it to the whole area as a whole, uh, and you come up with a number, and then you usually have what they call a correction factor because no matter how good you are in the helicopter at trying to find moose, research has so shown that uh best under perfect conditions, you might count 80% of the moose that are actually in the plot. So it's pretty complicated and uh it takes a lot of money because helicopters are uh really expensive. They're I I think it's I'm not sure how much they are these days, but I think it's around the neighborhood of$2,000 an hour just to fly the to rent a helicopter, plus all of course the uh uh salaries of the people that are engaged in actually uh counting. Um so you come up with this number, and every three or four to five, maybe six years, you fly the same general area again with that same methodology, but often different plots, because you're choosing them at random. Some will be the same plot, some will be different. And uh you try to track the population as a trend through time and figure out uh what the population uh is. So it's uh right it's a it's difficult, expensive, and but it's uh necessary because if you don't know how many moose you have, it's pretty hard to say how many is available for harvest.

The Helicopter Method For Moose

SPEAKER_08 25:30

Right. So now these helicopters are they not owned by the ministry or are they rented out? Both. Okay. So they do both, so they do quite a few. Now uh Bruce, when I was minister, the one area there down the Quinty Walleye, um ADM came, which is the assistant deputy minister, came in and said, Minister, we need to uh shut down the walleye fishery in Quinty because the um the tonnage in the area is below base minimum. And if we don't shut down the fishery, we're gonna lose uh the entire fishery. And anyways, I said, Oh well uh okay, let me think about it. So what I did was I I reached out to a lot of people um in the area, which would be the the recreational, the commercial uh fishermen, the recreational fishermen, as well as a lot of the municipal areas, and I did quite a bit of extensive research on my own. And then came back and I said, Well, I don't think we're gonna shut it down. And oh, did the ADM scream up and down at me? You'll be known as the minister responsible for losing the wildlife fishery in the area. And I said, No, this is what we're gonna do. And I said, We're gonna include the recreational fishermen. We're going to include the uh commercial fishermen as well as municipal people in the counts, and we're gonna try some different areas. And they he just I got that look like what the hell are you talking about? Anyway, so they went back out and uh later on after they did their counts, uh they came the same ADM back and came to me and said, Minister, how do you know? How did you know? I said, Well, when I reached out to these individuals, uh I found out that zebra mussels had came into the area changed the what was happening with the water in the area because zebra mussels were feeding on all the small organisms that the minnows used to feed on, that the walleye used to feed on, and the walleye had relocated. So the the tonnage was actually fine and the numbers were perfectly fine, but the ministry had done counts in the same area. The point I'm getting to here, Bruce, is checking those same areas, and we just finished talking about moose cuts and caribou cuts. So if there's a moose mosaic, because I know where we do a quite a bit of harvesting up near Chapleau, Ontario, um, there's a lot of forest harvesting in there. And when we're in those areas, we're seeing moose populations explode because of all the new growth in that. How do they factor that sort of thing into their cuts and to their counts when they're doing this? Because if they're doing the same plot and they haven't had any any harvest in the areas for 30, 40 years, and all of a sudden they do a year after the and five after the survey and five years later, then all of a sudden there's a huge population increase because of the the food forage base in the area. How do they factor that sort of thing in?

SPEAKER_07 28:32

Well, that's why you survey a very large area. So if you're surveying a very large area to get the population over a very large area, and you recognize that in some places in there, there's going to be really high population densities, and in some places it's going to be very low populations. So if you sample a large enough area and you do it, as I said, uh in a stratified random uh using a stratified random methodology, uh it uh it accounts for all those differences. So you wind up it evens out in the long run as long as you're uh uh sampling a large enough area and with enough intensity. So uh you you uh you uh you'll sample in your uh survey, you'll sample some of those areas where the population is really high, and you'll sample some that are very low. And uh you're over time you're sampling different areas uh because you're always applying the this methodology that's uh stratified random. And uh so that way uh it doesn't matter if the population changes in any one particular area because it's always changing in every area over time. And if it's the same in some areas over time, well, uh again, your survey methodology captures that. And uh you know, really if you do really good surveys, you'll get to maybe, as I said, your uh you're even using a correction factor uh to account for the missed moose. You're a good survey is gonna say, well, we're pretty sure this is the population. We're about 80% accurate that we're within uh 20% of the actual population. So that's why you have to repeat sampling over time. Uh and hopefully in areas where there's a lot of uh harvest pressure, a lot of hunting, you try to make sure you sample every three to five years because the chances are that uh every once in a while your survey is going to be completely wrong. Uh it's just gonna be wrong. It's gonna uh so that's why you have to follow trend through time information and not uh get too uh wound up if your survey number comes in and says, holy macro, there's a lot more moose than we actually think there is out there. Or conversely, oh Jesus, look at that. The moose population at the bottom just fell out. Well, maybe it didn't really fall out. So you gotta, you gotta, there's always a risk involved. And then at any given time, that's why you have uh people uh on the ground, and that's why you don't rely just on a population survey, you also take into account uh what your uh harvest data uh is, and that's why these days, uh last few years now, it's mandatory for licensed hunters to report uh you know uh what they did with the uh their hunting activity. So you buy a moose license, you're now it's mandatory. You have to tell the ministry, uh, did you go hunting? If you went hunting, did you uh how many moose did you see? Uh did you tag a moose? Uh and uh and a few other questions they have. So you can't rely on just the one single statistic when it comes to what the population is, and you always have to keep in mind that whatever you you think it is, it it's not necessarily uh exactly that. It's always uh it's around that, you know? Right.

Why Surveys Fail Without Context

SPEAKER_08 31:53

Well, I think it's an absolutely worse risk if the no surveys were done at all. Because then they'd have no estimates and no, you know, are we a healthy population? Is it growing? Is it not growing? And those sorts of things. Now, uh Bruce, I I recall a conversation. Bruce and I, for the listeners that don't know, we go back to actually the first time I met Bruce was around uh late 80s or 1990, in around there where we'd uh we went and looked at um some caribou or sorry, some elk stuff at the Burwash um area in regards to elk populations that were there. But after that, I I recall conversations that we had that would be uh probably 25, 30 years ago. And I think it was uh WMU Wildlife Management Unit. Was it 77A where the was it was the Avalon Peninsula where the densities of moose were so high? That was uh because of the forest.

SPEAKER_07 32:46

Because of the forest harvesting. Uh the Alno Peninsula, and it's uh wildlife unit seven A. And at the time at the time there were about uh a thousand moose uh on the unit, and uh uh the units less than a thousand square kilometers uh in size. Uh but subsequent to that, uh that was like you say in the 90s and maybe in the up until the middle of the 2000, where it peaked, as I said, around a thousand moose, uh maybe maybe 1,500 moose, really lots of moose. Um subsequently the moose population collapsed, and for a few years, uh up until recently, there were absolutely no moose there. So it went from really yeah, none. Pretty much zero. So really the moose now are slowly starting to come back, but uh I don't think the moose I uh I I don't know when the last time uh all know population was uh surveyed, but there's not uh very many moose out there today.

SPEAKER_08 33:50

So yeah, because I can I can recall so some of the things they determine is the densities of moose. And others there must be a carrying capacity in certain areas that uh because I know in Quebec, they uh although they they haven't been able to determine the you know the impacts of the George um uh river caribou herds in the population, and you may have some updates on there with uh from more than what I know about it, but there's a carrying capacity, which means once they go beyond that, they kind of eat themselves out of house and home and disease and predation steps in and they have huge die-offs, which has happened there. Is it the same for moose that there's a maximum capacity or an ideal capacity that's targeted for to make sure those numbers are up uh where they are so to have to sustain healthy populations?

SPEAKER_07 34:37

They try to do that, but it's uh uh it's a constant uh point of argument and discussion amongst biologists as to what the actual carrying capacity is for moose. And as I said, moose are depending on browse. So if uh the forest uh doesn't have uh continuous uh disturbances uh here and there from either fires or blowdown or from forest harvesting, uh eventually the browse uh gets uh there's less and less browse. So if there's less and less browse, the carrying capacity gets lower and lower. Now, even if you have fairly high uh carrying capacity in terms of browse, if the moose population gets too high, they can eat themselves out of house and home. Uh and then there's other things that happen, like you uh have outbreaks of uh moose tick, which can result in huge moose die-offs. Uh if the deer population uh gets too high in eastern Canada and eastern US from uh high population of white-tailed deer, you get uh brain worm. Brain worm can uh have a devastating impact on the moose population as well. And if there's lots of deer and moose uh combined on the landscape, then there's lots of wolves and the wolves eat up the moose as well. So there's a whole series of factors that determine how many moose there can be on the landscape at any given time.

SPEAKER_08 35:57

So, Bruce, when they do these aerial surveys, are they able to determine are there uh uh an inordinate amount of disease like moose tick? Or uh can they determine uh the the species, like is it a male, female, calves, and that sort of thing when they're doing their counts?

SPEAKER_07 36:16

It's you can do that, but generally speaking, uh moose uh uh the seriousness of say moose tick infestation isn't really uh visible until late in the winter time. So when the moose surveys are done in January, you don't see too much evidence of moose tick because the ticks haven't yet resulted in the moose scratching themselves uh and getting hair loss. But if you do see hair loss in January, that's noticeable when the people are doing the surveys and you note it, uh there's a good chance that it's a serious problem. But it often it doesn't show it manifest itself till late in March. And then every once in a while, the ministry, if they're concerned and they have the money, they'll fly a late winter March survey just to get an uh an idea of what the tick population is like. But uh that's uh an again a big huge expense to do because again in March, by uh the sun is out and it's getting warm, uh, and the moose are in thick cover, so they're hard to see. So it's uh it's uh all tricky.

SPEAKER_08 37:23

Okay, so now a lot of these harvests that take place as well. Um I believe they kind of some of them actually emulate historic forest fires that took place in certain areas. So that when you know determinations of okay, how much do we harvest and how do we harvest in what area, and a lot of those things would emulate what a a forest fire, because we have uh what's called a no-burn policy in the province, which means um that we basically put out all the forest fires to the best of the ability. Um so a lot of the determinations of how we cut the woods is actually done to emulate some of those historic forest fire locations. Yes, no?

SPEAKER_07 38:04

Well, that's the thinking, but it's uh it's it's sort of there's a flaw in that uh argument because uh uh a fire is a chemical uh process, uh whereas uh uh harvest is a mechanical process. So uh the end result is uh it's very different. And uh uh and the force that results as a result of a forest fire as a pair compared to uh the force that uh comes in after a forest harvest, it's very different. So uh the the best you can do is you sort of emulate the pattern on the landscape in terms of uh uh the amount of of uh young forest and middle-aged forest and old forests. Uh you try to uh keep the pattern similar from forest harvesting, but you can't really uh compare a forest that's a result of um the mechanical activity of forest harvesting to what comes in after a burn.

SPEAKER_03 39:17

Back in 2016, Frank and I had a vision to amass the single largest database of muskie angling education material anywhere in the world.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Our dream was to harness the knowledge of this amazing community and share it with passionate anglers just like you.

SPEAKER_03 39:32

Thus, the Ugly Pike Podcast was born and quickly grew to become one of the top fishing podcasts in North America.

SPEAKER_01 39:39

Step into the world of angling adventures and embrace the thrill of the catch with the Ugly Pike Podcast. Join us on our quest to understand what makes us different as anglers and to uncover what it takes to go after the infamous fish of 10,000 casts.

SPEAKER_03 39:53

The Ugly Pike Podcast isn't just about fishing, it's about creating a tight-knit community of passionate anglers who share the same love for the sport. Through laughter, through camaraderie, and an unwavering spirit of adventure, this podcast will bring people together. Subscribe now and never miss a moment of our angling adventures.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Tight lines, everyone.

SPEAKER_03 40:12

Find Ugly Pike now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

SPEAKER_08 40:26

And now it's time for another testimonial for Chaga Health and Wellness. Hi, it's Jerry from Chaga Health and Wellness. We're here in Lindsay with Tula, who is actually from Finland and uses Chaga. Tula, you've had some good experiences with Chaga. Can you just tell us what that experience is?

SPEAKER_00 40:44

Yes, I got sick with Fibra, and uh one weekend my husband came here alone. I was home, and uh he brought your um your leaflet, right? And I read it, and I said, next weekend when we go to the market, we're gonna buy it. Some and so we started putting it in our morning smoothie, right? And uh among few other things that I was doing because of that, the chaka has been the steady one, right? I would not wanna live without it. Oh, good, yeah. So it's been working for me. Very good. Lots of it.

SPEAKER_08 41:23

And you had uh some good luck with blood pressure as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

Alright, yeah, thanks for remembering that. That's uh yeah, I had a little bit of high elevated blood pressure, and within the two weeks of starting that every day, every morning, uh, it went to normal.

SPEAKER_08 41:42

And you think the chaga was the reason why?

SPEAKER_00 41:44

Well, I didn't do anything else in that time frame.

SPEAKER_08 41:49

And so how much chaga did you have and how did you have it?

SPEAKER_00 41:52

Well, we just put that powder in the smoothie and uh it's about tablespoon. No, it's less than tablespoons of two of it. Yeah, so you don't need that much.

SPEAKER_08 42:05

Right. About a teaspoon, yeah. Yeah, very good. Well, thanks very much for sharing that. We really appreciate that and wish you all the best with the Chaga. Oh, you're from Finland as well, and Chaga is pretty popular in Finland, is it not?

SPEAKER_00 42:18

I think it probably is because there's some professors in a university that uh that start teaching it and uh talking about it, and of course it's being Russian. Right because that's where you know the northern roots that comes from. And of course Finland has lots of trees.

Discount Code And Quick How To

How Ontario Tries To Count Caribou

SPEAKER_08 42:38

Right. Yeah, and it's the only mushroom that can't forge Finland. Everything else, but not Chaga. Oh, very good. Well, thanks very much for sharing that. Okay, have a great day. We interrupt this program to bring you a special offer from Chaga Health and Wellness. If you've listened this far and you're still wondering about this strange mushroom that I keep talking about and whether you would benefit from it or not, I may have something of interest to you. To thank you for listening to the show, I'm going to make trying Chaga that much easier by giving you a dollar off all our Chaga products at checkout. All you have to do is head over to our website, Chaga Health and Wellness.com, place a few items in the cart, and check out with the code CANopy, C-A-N-O-P-Y. If you're new to Chaga, I'd highly recommend the regular Chaga tea. This comes with 15 tea bags per package, and each bag gives you around five or six cups of tea. Hey, thanks for listening. Back to the episode. Now, uh Bruce, um what What about uh caribou and their counts there? Because I know I spent some time up in Pickle Lake, and quite frankly, we saw probably uh five or maybe even ten caribou to every moose in that area. And do they have regular counts or do they count caribou as well?

SPEAKER_07 44:17

Well, most of the caribou are north of uh where the moose are, so you have to go fairly far north in uh what they call a caribou line. Well, it's still almost half the province of Ontario is north of the caribou line, but it's north of where most of the highest moose densities are. To count caribou, though, it's a really it's a difficult process altogether. You don't see enough of them when you smok fly these small plots looking for moose. And in the far north, uh you don't do too many surveys because there's not that many moose and there's not that much hunting pressure. So to look for caribou, what they do is they use transect surveys where you fly hundreds of uh uh kilometer length transits, and you look out of each side of the helicopter, and uh you run across caribou and caribou tracks every once in a while, but you have to again survey vast areas, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of square kilometers using transits as opposed to plots. And again, you put it into a model as to how many miles of trans kilometers of transits you flew and how many caribou you saw uh to come up with an estimate, but it's really expensive, and uh uh the count is pretty difficult to say with any degree of accuracy, unless you fly, like I say, thousands and thousands of uh kilometers of transit. And even then, your population estimate is gonna be off. But the last time they did it, I think it was almost 20 years ago, as far as I know, and uh they determined that the population of caribou in Ontario was around 20,000, uh which was about 5,000 higher than they had thought it was. So but as far as I know, they haven't flown a caribou survey uh since then, province-wide. Now they fly caribou surveys on specific areas that uh uh on the southern end where there's uh caribou, some of the islands out in Lake Superior, for example, and there's a few other places where they look and where they are. Uh but uh in terms of getting account for the province as a whole, uh it's really time-consuming and they don't do it very often. So expensive.

SPEAKER_08 46:39

Yeah, I know uh I had some concerns about the Slate Island caribou population. I think that's the one you're referring to in Superior.

SPEAKER_07 46:47

Yeah, there's that's the main one. And there's uh also some on Michipottin Island that they introduced them, and then the wolves crossed over on the ice and started eating up all the caribou there. So they panicked. Ministry panicked and uh uh went and captured the bunch of caribou off there, most of them if they if they could, and they transferred them over to the slates where this population had just about disappeared. But uh it's let's not talk about that one too much because I think it was uh kind of a crazy uh idea and it didn't make a lot of sense to me.

Fixed Wing Versus Helicopter Reality

SPEAKER_08 47:22

Yeah, yeah, okay. I I I I get the hint, but I know that uh caribou, and to me, the when I was minister, it was a conversation that came up that they wanted in that the population was eating itself out of house and home in the slate, and they wanted to bring wolves into to regulate the population. I my position was no, no, what we should do, and we can get sponsorship in groups and organizations like Safari Club or OFH and a whole lot of other groups out there to use that as a a base place to stock uh populations in other locations to get self-sustaining herds elsewhere. But that's another conversation we could have another day. Um so uh Bruce, you mentioned about uh helicopters, and I know the answer to this, but I'm I'm kind of leading here for a lot of the listeners. Why don't we use fixed wing planes if they're that much cheaper and that much uh uh more uh potentially, you know, is it easier to do with fixed wing planes than helicopters?

SPEAKER_07 48:16

Well, it's a lot harder. You can't uh hover with uh fixed wing. Uh your visibility is a lot uh poorer, so your chances of missing moose are a lot greater. But probably the biggest factor of all is that uh you can't get people to fly uh fixed wing uh surveys for moose because people are spending their time throwing up instead of uh uh looking out the window.

SPEAKER_08 48:41

Yeah, and we've had this conversation before a long time when I was minister. I know I I secretly reached out to you on a lot of this kind of stuff because you had some good insight. You know, and essentially, uh as I recall, when you did a fixed-wing count and then you went back to those areas and did a helicopter count, the numbers drastically changed substantially in most of those areas, did they not?

SPEAKER_07 49:02

Well, uh again depends. I mean, if you can uh if you have a good crew in a fixed-wing uh aircraft, uh you can get a pretty accurate count and uh a good pilot and a good crew, you it's not that much different than a helicopter. Uh probably it's a little bit better in the helicopter, but I again the problem is it's hard to get a good crew. Even in helicopters, a lot of people uh uh suffer from air sickness. Um so, but in an airplane, uh because the people are their ministry staff and they're they don't spend much time in an airplane, and they go up and you start doing all these circling and this and that. As I said, they're spending their time throwing up rather as opposed to uh looking out the window trying to count moose. But if you have a good crew, uh it's okay, but people don't get hired uh on in the ministry uh for based on whether or not they're uh uh capable of uh being a good uh uh moose observer in a fixed-wing aircraft. Doesn't it's not a consideration at all.

Polar Bears In Ontario Briefly

SPEAKER_08 50:13

And it wouldn't surprise me if uh sometimes those pilots uh uh may have a little bit of tipsy-turvy stuff that uh uh I'll fix this guy, I recall. Uh when we were doing, I was up at Pewanick uh for the polar bears, uh, when we were doing the polar bear research with um what was his name? Uh Dr. Oh is it uh probably Marty Obart. Yeah, Marty uh Martin Obart, yes. And uh we were landing on the tundra with a twin otter, and we had uh what the ministry did at that time, they had uh a person by the name of Peekaboo Street out there with the American sportsman doing some filming. So when this pilot landed, and I tell you, I swore that he did it on purpose. We had one bump in the area we were landing and probably threw the plane that would would jump over a house that much into the air. But uh it was certainly interesting. So things like polar bears we do in Ontario as well. Do we not for polar bear counts?

SPEAKER_07 51:17

Yeah, I'm not too familiar with uh polar bear counts. I've never uh seen a polar bear even. Um, of course, where I worked in the uh doing surveys was well south of uh polar bear country. So uh I believe they do look for polar bears, but polar bears are pretty hard to see if you do in the wintertime because white on white, of course. So I yeah, they uh I'll most of the polar bear stuff to the polar bear specialist to you to explain how they do polar bear counts, but it's uh well it's something that's uh pretty controversial as well.

Elk Surveys And Why They Miss

SPEAKER_08 51:54

Yeah, there was uh most of those counts were done in in September, uh and in areas because they're not on the ice, so they're congregated to a lot of areas. And uh up at Pewanick, there was huge numbers of polar bears up there. And I saw polar bears, I probably saw on one small island that would have been maybe 10, 15 acres, there was walruses on there and probably 10, 12 different polar bears on that same island and all along the shore as well. It was very, very interesting. So we have one of the world's largest polar bear populations that most people didn't even realize in Ontario. But let's talk about some of the stuff that you have, a lot more expertise on. So, how about elk? What do you think about elk and how they do elk counts in Ontario, Bruce?

SPEAKER_07 52:41

Uh it's uh sort of a modified way that they do uh moose surveys, but the plots are smaller and they do more intense uh uh well, put it as I said, the plots are smaller, they do uh greater sampling on the portion of the landscape where the elk are. But we have a lot of uh problems with the elk because elk are really difficult to see. And the last few surveys that uh the uh ministry has done, everybody's sort of in agreement that at best we saw about 50% of the Musa were actually there on the plots that they surveyed. So no matter how much time you spend in the helicopter intensely surveying uh the plot, and I I don't know what their size, I think it's about 10 square kilometers as opposed to 25 square kilometers. I could be wrong there, but it's smaller than a moose plot. You're still only you're only seeing about half of what's actually there. They're really, really difficult to see. I've been in the helicopter where we've had uh elk uh with a radio collar on. We have the tracking equipment in the helicopter, and we're out in the open. It was a great big sedge uh marsh, and uh signal from the radio caller was telling us there's elk right below us. And we're sitting there hovering around, everybody's looking. It says, Where what maybe they're dead, or maybe that one's dead, but it says, No, it's dead, it says it's alive, according to the signal. And we're there hovering for about five minutes, and nobody could see those elk. And all of a sudden, after that huge length of time, eventually the elk stood up, and there was five of them that just all of a sudden materialized, but lying down in the sedge, you just could not see them from the helicopter. And of course, if they're in heavy conifer cover, they're virtually impossible to see. We've I've been up many, many times in the helicopter, and that's with animals that are radio collared. So we know they're there and you cannot see them. So if you're flying these days, there are no uh elk uh in Ontario that I'm aware of that have uh functioning radio collars on them. So when they're flying surveys, uh you never know if there's one below you or not. You're actually trying just to see what's in that plot below you. And of course, they do see some, but as I said, uh every everybody who has any sort of knowledge of the area, uh expertise, say, you know, we're only at best we're only seeing about 50%. So we're trying to improve on those surveys by where the reason I include myself in that is because I'm uh chair of uh what we call the uh provincial elk technical advisory committee in the province, where we try to get together a bunch of people who have interest and knowledge of elk. We give advice to the Ministry of Natural Resources as to what they we think they should be doing to, for one, improve how they do surveys. Uh everyone's sort of trying to move towards a use of uh drones where you can put a drone up and you can look search for elk using with thermal imagery and cameras and this and that, but it's still in early stages of doing that, so we're not quite there yet. But uh yeah, that's that's trying to try to move ahead.

SPEAKER_08 55:59

I I recall in in about two thousand around 2002, 2003, when I was up in the helicopter doing um looking at the radio-collared ones up in Burwash, which is just south of Sudbury. And the the interesting ones, and I know exactly what you're referring to, uh, but a lot of the biologists that were there, and I was spotting them uh all the time. There it is, there, there it is, there. And how did you see that? Are you available to do um uh the uh help us with aerial surveys? Once you're done as minister, I said I'd be more than happy to, because I love this kind of stuff. That's why I got involved in the first place. But one of the things that I found very interesting was when they did their surveys before, they didn't see there were zero elk calves found in the burrwash surveys when they were doing them. And what they figured was they were monitoring it and they kind of checked with trappers in the area, and they saw a large increase in the number of wolves that were harvested. And they figure that the wolves were harvesting elk calves because they were easier to kill than were moose calves or moose at the time, which was the predominant food forage uh food source for a lot of those wolves in the area. So it was interesting that they learned other data rather than just the numbers. Okay, why are there no elk calves here? And guess what? We're seeing an increase in the trapper's harvest of wolves in the area, so maybe the two are coming together. Wolves, wolves eat a lot of things.

SPEAKER_07 57:27

They eat wolves will catch and kill and eat whatever they can. So if there's um if the prey is uh elk, that's what they're gonna go after. If the prey are moose, that's what they're gonna go after. If there's deer there, that's what they prefer to go after because it's a lot easier to catch and kill and eat a deer than it is anything else. But they're opportunistic and uh they're also uh pretty uh voracious, so you you they they gotta eat, so they gotta kill.

Chronic Wasting Disease Stops Transfers

SPEAKER_08 57:56

Yeah. So, Bruce, now uh I was the one that brokered the deal to bring the elk in from Elk Island, Alberta, with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation as the predominant uh because they were the agency handling all the trap and transfers out of Elk Island, Alberta. Is there not the those options available to do any more of that, or is Ontario completely done with uh bringing any more elk into the province?

SPEAKER_07 58:18

Well, chronic wasting disease has put a pretty much of a halt of movement of uh animals uh uh all across Canada. So you really can't move animals anywhere, uh animals uh meaning deer, especially, deer being whitetailed deer, mule deer, caribou, elk, and moose, all cervids, uh, because they have potentially have chronic wasting disease. So you don't want to move any animals and risk uh transferring of chronic wasting disease. And there's no way to test an animal for that as yet for chronic wasting disease until unless you kill it. So you it's not gonna do anything to test say, yeah, that one had chronic wasting disease, and how do you know? Well, we killed it, so I guess we can't move that one. So uh it's pretty much yeah, that's pretty much a uh, at least for the time being, it's a it's uh it's a it's a non-starter.

SPEAKER_08 59:19

So uh Bruce, being on this committee, so there's a harvest that takes place with very, very minimal uh amounts of uh allocation for harvestable elk in the province, with uh uh on your blog you talk about a neighborhood of a thousand elk in the province of Ontario. Yet earlier on we talked about 20,000 caribou, and there hasn't been any harvest, um licensed harvest by uh licensed hunters in the province of Ontario, I think since 1929. Um is there something you you can is there a reason why, or is this caribou something that could be eventually looked at in the province?

SPEAKER_07 59:55

Oh, that's uh we could talk for uh days on this one, uh uh Jerry. Uh couple of things. Yep. Although caribou are the most abundant uh uh deer in Canada, um they're considered the ones that live in the woods are considered uh threatened uh with extinction. So if they live in the woods, they're woodland caribou and uh they're threatened with extinction, supposedly, right? And so it it becomes uh virtually impossible politically to say we can hunt them, although if you're aboriginal right, you have aboriginal or mate rights, uh there's nothing stopping you from hunting them. So it's so it's a basically it's an uh it's an allocation to the uh natives, uh, and they don't want to give that up and risk uh uh having a greater harvest. Although with 20,000 animals, you could definitely, in my mind, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't have uh some sort of a licensed harvest, but there would be such a hullabaloo from uh the uh the conservation non-hunting, anti-hunting crowd that it's just critically impossible to uh no one wants to go there.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:26

Yeah, well the things like that uh um that generate revenues. And I recall uh so for example, I talked about the polar bears in Ontario. One of the things that I was able to do was I was able to set it up with um actually, oh, you'd know the person's name. I've been driving me a little bit crazy. He was uh uh the director in charge of Fish and Wildlife uh back uh back when I was minister. Uh if you said his name. Um boy. Who would that be? No, that's not it. Um, it'll bug me. Just throw it out there if it jumps out at you. Um anyways, um what we did was um we sold off to Safari Club International um the ability for them to have uh people participate in the polar bear survey, but they paid for it. And the way it worked was I think the the um the director uh at that time, he was the one that handled the elk that came from Elk Island, Alberta. Um and he's the one that shut it down because of CWD, uh any more transfers. But he worked it out through Trent University that the funds were raised at a fundraising dinner and went through Trent University that gave the individual that bought it the uh a tax receipt for the amount that they paid to participate in it. And I was there and I saw these, the the ability for a person to go paid$15,000, and all that money went to the research for polar bears in the province of Ontario, and all it did was it opened up for somebody to go in and participate to to see with these polar bears. And I remember um the individual uh being at a dinner the next year saying it was the most thrilling uh thing that he'd ever done in all his years to be able to participate in this, and they sold uh as well a big one down at the there's two tag two of these tickets available, and Marty Hobart was opposed to it at first, but afterwards he came to me and said, you know, I was really opposed to it. He said, but this has really helped the research because it increased the amount of funds that gave us the ability to do more research on polar bears. And essentially the reason I'm mentioning this is that you have that opportunity for caribou in the province as well, that if you increase and generate revenue with uh the bills that come in, that all the funds that come in go directly back to the ministry, then you have more funds to be able to do more research, to do more management of caribou to get a better understanding and learn how to how we can best do or stay out of the caribou's life to make sure the populations are sustaining or increasing.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:10

Jerry, you just make too much sense. Uh just because you make a lot of sense uh doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen. I just saw a caribou hunt advertised in uh Newfoundland for over$40,000. Just a spray woodland caribou hunt in Newfoundland. Over$40,000. Yeah. I can go to Africa and uh harvest uh 10 species of planes, game, uh, have all the heads mounted, ship all back here, spend 10 days or two weeks there, and I can do it for uh less than$20,000. Wow.

Deer Trends Through Hunters And Damage

SPEAKER_08 1:04:46

So so there's our and it it you know I spoke to outfitting uh groups because most people don't know this. Ontario has a large polar bear population, and at the time when I was minister, there was 25 tags that were uh allocated to the to the uh First Nation communities that lived in the areas where polar bears were. And I spoke to these individuals and I said, look, well, so you get these tags, what do you do with them? They said, Well, we shoot the bears. Well, why do you shoot you know, what's the reason? They said, Well, you know, uh and when you were at I was at Fort Severn, I saw a number of bears were come right into the community, and there's a big concern because, hey, we had one came within half the length of a hockey arena uh from charging myself and the the people I was with uh from killing us because we were a food forage base in the area, and these aren't stuff you're watching at the zoo. This is really uh wildlife stuff. But there was no revenue generated from it. Now, I spoke with um guides who provide a hunting service that work with First Nations communities in the territories, being Inuit and Northwest, I believe. And they generate like those kind of figures you just talked about, the 40,000, and 90 percent of the five. Of that money stays in that local community. So if you had 25 tags that were made available so that other hunters could hunt on those tags, they could generate enough money to give sustaining popular or fund sustaining to help a lot of those remote communities in a lot of ways. But like you said, just because it's a makes a lot of sense doesn't mean it's going to happen. Right? I can't add to that. Yeah, all right. Well, let's get back. So, okay. So how about like deer is another one? Because I recall when I was minister, one of the ways that we used to determine whether we need to increase the population was by the amount of crop damage done by deers and and the number of car collision, vehicle collisions with deer. So when you have an increase in those numbers, it said that they needed to increase a lot of the harvesting of deer in the area. And has that changed much, or what happens with them?

SPEAKER_07 1:06:51

Well, deer, because I you can't really do surveys for deer from the helicopter because deer are just too little and they're too thick covers, so you can't see them. So they rely on a whole bunch of other different methodologies. And some of the depending on what area you're in, uh there's uh different uh ways to figure out what the uh seasons are uh and how to manage deer. And like like you say, in some agricultural areas, it's the uh if agriculture is the biggest thing uh and the biggest concern and depredation of crops, then uh you just try and keep the population fairly uh low, and you just have uh fairly liberal uh seasons. So depending on where you go, you have uh winter severity indices that uh tell you what the overwinter mortality was, and then you keep track of how many are shot. And you see, again, you get all the information from uh everybody who goes deer hunting has to have uh who has to have a license, has to submit a report and tell what their act activities are. So uh again, a whole bunch of different uh ways to kind of sort of get the trend of what's going on with the deer population in different areas. So different methodologies are applied uh in different areas depending on what the landscape is like and what the issues are uh in that particular wildlife management unit or groups of wildlife management units, and then you just kind of go from there.

SPEAKER_08 1:08:24

Right. So yeah, it's uh um but you mentioned something in your blog about um um uh deer uh poop pellet uh uh groups is is one of the ways that they do determining for for uh population counts as well. Is is that something? And maybe you can elaborate on that a bit.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:46

Well, I I've actually participated in some of those, but nobody does these anymore either. Um they don't, okay. It's just too expensive, and uh I again your confidence in how good the survey is is uh not that high. Yeah, because it's based on the assumption that uh an average deer over the course of winter poops about 13 times a day. So you uh again you lay out these transects in areas where the deer are in the wintertime, and that's uh and where they aren't in the wintertime, or they most of them aren't, and you again you apply this stratified random uh survey and you fly uh you do these transects on the ground. But these this time you're you're so nothing to do with um looking for uh deer from the helicopter, although you have to have some information, and it's often with helicopter surveys, so where you sort of uh do track counts and so you delineate the wintering area, so and then you survey the wintering area, and I said the non-wintering area with these ground plots where you have crews on the ground and you lay out a small plot and you count how many pellets, uh distinct piles of pellets uh there are from uh deer on the ground on top of the leaves. So you have to know when the leaf fall. The leaf fall is usually pretty uh pretty, you know, it's down to a week a pretty much of a week uh in the fall where all the leaves all of a sudden they just all fall off the trees. So you have to assign a date, and then you assign a date as to when the survey was uh done, and you take that into account, and you count up all these pellets uh and you try to figure out how many there are based on your knowledge of how big it how many square meters of area you actually surveyed, apply that to how many square meters and square kilometers there are in the survey unit, and you recognize that every day, every deer that was out there pooped about 13 times. So it you you wind up with a number and you say, well, this is so the population's around this. But as I said, it's very expensive, time consuming, and not all that accurate. So they pretty much everybody's pretty much given up on doing that. And they rely mostly on on hunter statistics now. How many, how many deer per day were seen by hunters? So everybody has to say how many days they hunted, how many deer they saw, how many they harvested. And uh you look in the area and you say, okay, well, this year uh hunters, all the hunters together, the average was they saw three deer per day. Uh last year they saw six per day. So it looks like the population's on the decline. Um, and uh harvest was only 10%, and we want harvest to be closer to 20% based on how many hunters are out there. So what we'll do is we'll reduce the number of uh uh uh antlerless tags. So though those are the sorts of decisions that are being made.

SPEAKER_08 1:12:12

So so yeah, it's it's it's it's try to to determine the best way you can to figure out the populations that are out there and sustainable levels as to what level you would like with a lot of these things.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:26

Yeah, so the the main thing is that yeah, you need data and you need information and uh blah, blah, blah. Uh, but it's always been said, and uh I think this is not these days with uh all these computer models, and everybody's got uh a smartphone that can run, do this and do that, and uh you can generate all sorts of statistics with a model and blah blah blah. But the at the end of the day, uh managing wildlife, there's an art and a science to it. So you take the science and you take the data, but at the same time, you have to have a feel uh for it, and you have to have uh in-depth feeling. And uh it's it's uh as I said, it's an art, there's an art and a science to managing wildlife. And uh you have to combine the two to uh be good at it. And uh, if you just rely on uh uh pure data, you're not necessarily that good on it. And if you don't pay attention to data and you just say, Oh, I I know what's going on out there because I'm a smart guy and I really like deer, moose, blah, blah, blah, you're not going to do the be very good at it either. So you have to be good at at least uh be fairly good at both of them.

Bear Counts With DNA Hair Snares

SPEAKER_08 1:13:38

Right. Yeah, and so then you get other species like bears. Like, how do you do bear counts? Uh I I mean, I I recall the East Coast doing uh, what is it, uh a sardine or a tuna can line sort of thing that they did counts with to determine bear populations?

SPEAKER_07 1:13:54

Yeah, so that's uh again, you you have to use harvest data, so you do that, and then you they uh run these surveys where you uh uh have a line of uh 20, 30 kilometers, and every few hundred meters you have uh you tack up and open a can of uh sardines uh uh stuck to a tree, and you put some barbed wire around it, uh, and you capture the hair off a bear that's gone and uh uh visited uh the sardine can, taken out the sardines, and uh you then you do DNA analysis on the bear and you identify the number of different individual bears that were on your line, and again you apply all that into a model as to how big a uh piece of landscape you had the uh line of sardine cans across, and you try to have uh several of those, and uh come up at the end of the day, you come up with uh uh a number. And that's that's that's the best method that's available today, but again, it's not all that accurate in many cases because it is built on a whole bunch of assumptions, and it doesn't work very well in uh landscapes that are fragmented with uh uh farms and uh people living uh in fairly high densities in rural landscapes, uh where you have a lot of private property, where you can't necessarily just go traipsing on and put up your uh sardine can. So there's a lot of assumptions that go into uh these sorts of surveys. Uh so it's pretty limited as to the number, but it uh some sometimes at the end of the day, the main thing is that uh the ministry says, look, we did all this stuff, we came up with a number. Uh it seems that it's uh where we're doing these surveys, that number isn't changing that much over time. So uh what whatever we're doing looks like it's sustainable and uh we're good to go. So that's often the biggest cases. You have to be they have to be able to demonstrate that the population is sustaining itself. And if if it's sustaining itself and everybody's happy, then everybody's happy.

Trappers As Local Wildlife Managers

SPEAKER_08 1:16:21

Yep. Well, and and the the data, as you mentioned, is used in a lot of different ways, whether it's uh because the the firm managers or the trappers in Ontario, uh they get these quotas, and this is some of the ways that they they determine their quotas, is it not, on how much they should be harvesting in order to maintain a stable, healthy populations, as opposed to having peaks and lows when all of a sudden the beaver counts are so high that they they have a large die-off uh rather than have a self-susta healthy population at sustainable levels. Yes? So it's uh used for trappers as well.

SPEAKER_07 1:16:57

Well, trappers uh again, things are changing all the time, but these days trappers sort of manage themselves. Uh in Ontario, they have what they call a registered trap line system. So there's only uh one person who's the main trapper, and then he has helpers, but uh they sort of keep track of what they're trapping on their own uh uh trap line, and they're supposed to by because they're the only people there, they're sort of entrusted with uh uh their own they're their they're the managers on their trap line, put it that way. And uh uh things things are changing in on that as to how uh what's reported and what's uh collected. Like at one time all of uh fur had to be stamped at the district office and every all uh but all that uh none of that happens anymore. So it's uh it's sort of a self-regulated, self-managing system right now.

Bruce Blog And Where To Read

SPEAKER_08 1:18:04

Okay. Well, it's it's important to make sure that we have these healthy and and viable populations of uh many, so many species in Ontario, that uh, you know, we need to do the best we can. And the the ministry is doing a great job in keeping those and has for decades, and you know, in the time that you've been there and all that uh served and certainly see uh a lot of things that have changed. But uh I'm seeing you know going from fixed wing to helicopters as being somewhat beneficial as long along with a lot of other activities that are in those areas.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:37

Yeah, things are always changing. Uh nothing stays the same, and uh some things are improving for the better, and some things may not be uh improving for the better. But uh hopefully uh uh if things are getting worse, uh there's a correction and uh there's enough monitoring going on that says, oh, there's something that's not working here, and a correction will be made to try and improve things. But um, you know, as I said, it things trendle along, and for the most part, things are getting better, but not err not everything is getting better.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:12

So well, Bruce, I I very much appreciate you taking the time to to enlighten us on uh how numbers are counted in the province of Ontario to keep healthy and self-sustaining populations and in order to determine harvest levels along those lines. But uh, Bruce, how can people find out more or where can they read more of your information or where where do they find your blog and that sort of stuff? So if they want to see this kind of stuff that they can have a look see and and get in touch with you if they would like to.

SPEAKER_07 1:19:40

Well, the easiest way, my blog is uh www, of course, worldwide web or whatever how whatever that stands for. But it's wildlife perspectives.wordpress.com. So if you if you just if you go on Google and you type in wildlife perspectives or my name, it'll uh lead you to my blog. I don't do a whole lot on my blog, but the blog, you can if you go on there, you'll see it goes back uh years and years and years, and there's a lot of different things I've published over time. So I haven't been too active lately, but what I try to do now is when I uh say I have an inspiration, uh I'll put something up on the blog. And uh generally after uh I've published something, usually because I'm a columnist for Ontario Out of Doors magazine. Uh generally speaking, after a few months later, after it's been published in the magazine, I'll take what I sent to the magazine and I'll put it on my blog. And it's often different than was actually in the magazine because it doesn't go through an editing process except my own editing process. Whereas when I send it into the magazine, it uh uh before it's published, it goes through an editorial review, and it's often changed I shouldn't say substantially, but sometimes there's quite a few changes that they make. And of course, uh I'll send in uh 20 or 30 or 40, even 50 photographs to go along with the article, and some days they will publish none of them. Whereas on the blog, I'll take a bunch of my photographs and I'll just dump them on. So you get the advantage of seeing the photographs that I think uh are my photographs that enhance the uh uh blog article. Whereas in the magazine, it's what the uh art director thinks uh is best given the constraints of magazine business. So it's wildlife perspectives or my name, uh Bruce Ranta, and uh you'll get to um see what I've been posting on there.

SPEAKER_08 1:21:46

Well, thank you very much, Bruce. I know I I picked it up and uh I saw your posting on Facebook, um, and then I went to your blog and then read it all. I thought, hey, our listeners might be interested in that, so we'll take a we'll do an opportunity and we'll do a podcast on it. So thanks very much. It's uh, you know, more stuff that we're learning out, what's happening out there under the canopy. And for all those listeners, if you want to come down to the Sportsman Show, it's uh March 19th to the 22nd, International Center in Mississauga. I'll be there. We'll be having uh Jagga samples. If you want to try the teas, you're more than welcome to try them. Or if you have any questions or you want to talk to us, come on down and see us at the Sportsman Show. Thanks again, Bruce. Appreciate the time taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Lost Luggage Stories And Goodbye

SPEAKER_07 1:22:30

No problem, Jerry. I just have uh one other thing. I just wanted to I I had to mention it because we were talking about uh flying around uh and losing your luggage. I once flew from uh Sudbury to Timmins. I was going to give uh uh lecture up in that northern, I think it was in Kirkland Lake, but I had to flight of Timmins from Sudbury. I was the only uh only passenger on the flight. I was on a Bearskin flight and they lost my bag. Yep.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:00

Oh, Bearskin. Now every seat's an aisle seat and every seat's a window seat. It's uh usually the beach nineteen's, right?

SPEAKER_07 1:23:07

Yeah, uh no, it was uh uh wasn't a beach nineteen, it was uh I can't remember what it was, but it was it anyway. I was the only one on the plane other than the pilot, and they lost my baggage. Well, there were two of us we hadn't done.

unknown 1:23:25

What?

SPEAKER_08 1:23:27

Very good, Bruce. Always a pleasure talking, and I'm sure we'll have you back again sometime. Thanks, Bruce. Thanks, Jerry. Talk to you later. So we shall bye for now. Bye.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:16

But this podcast will be more than that. Every week on Diaries of a Lodge Owner, I'm going to introduce you to a ton of great people. Share their stories of our trials, tribulations, and inspirations, learn and have plenty of laughs along the way.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:33

Meanwhile, we're sitting there popping along trying to figure out how to catch a bass, and we both decided that one day we were going to be on television doing a fishing job.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:43

My hands get sore a little bit when I'm reeling in on all those bass in the summertime, but that's mighty feel more fishing than it was punching.