Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They're gonna eat it as we would.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: Too, if we were hood.
[00:00:02] Speaker A: It's a free meal, right? They don't have to work for it.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Don't weed. Eat the edges of your yard where it goes into the woods. Let the BlackBerry briar bushes grow up.
[00:00:10] Speaker C: And that was all we ate today is five Snickers bars. We'd all feel like.
For Pennsylvania hunters and conservationists, our roots run deep. The episodes we bring to you on the Pennsylvania Game Commission's podcast, Call of the Outdoors will take a deep dive into exposing the incredible work being done by agency staff and partners, including statewide habitat projects, the science behind wildlife management, and what drives agency decisions. The Pennsylvania Game Commission's mission is twofold. To manage and protect wildlife and their habitats for not only current, but future generations, and to promote hunting and trapping in the Keystone State.
Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today. It's holiday season, obviously, hunting season. Well, not hunting season. I shouldn't say that. Deer season just ended. You know, it's kind of like the super bowl around here. Everybody's back to work and people are frustrated and people are happy. But, you know, as we get into winter, we have a lot of important things to talk talk about. And, you know, with our agency's mission and wildlife coming first, I think one important topic we're going to talk about is feeding wildlife. But before we get into it, I'd like you guys to introduce yourselves to the folks that are tuning in and a little bit about yourself and how you got here and what your role is here at the PGC.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. So my name is Dr. Andrew DeSalvo. I'm the Wildlife vet for the agency. I've been about been about a decade in that career path. And I originally come from New York, so I'm somewhat local. My career has actually taken me all over the place. I worked overseas in Sub Saharan Africa for a little bit, worked in New York City for a little bit, moved out to California. So I bounced around quite a bit. And I've been with the agency since 2019, and my role with the agency is pretty varied. I do a lot of training of agency staff, game wardens and biologists. I oversee all of our pharmaceutical use, all of our animal handling, get consulted a lot with wildlife health issues from the public as well as from agency staff, and then participate in some research as well. So it's pretty much all over the place, but no two days are alike, and that's why I like the job.
[00:02:23] Speaker C: Yeah, a lot of folks don't realize that you know, the importance of for our agency to have a veterinarian on staff. And you know, wildlife health is such an issue and so many times takes a back seat in many people's minds and that's one of the things we want to talk about today. And Dave, welcome back. You got a new role, you know, here at the agency and you know, just about every employee here. The coolest thing about working at the PGC is just the passion every day, you know, in the field that you're in or you know, and trying to learn. For me, I learn every day. Every single day you learn something.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Good, good to be back on the podcast and yeah, new role with the agency now I'm in a deputy executive director role. My path coming through a forestry education and working in the field of forestry and habitat management for the agency for almost 20 years until I'm into this role now. So my job now is kind of morphing.
I focus mostly on the strategic planning, high level budget, long term sustainability of the agency and big picture kind of operation and mission oriented posture.
But I get into a little bit of everything still, which is fun. Like Andrew said, no two days are the same. I'm never doing the same thing twice, which is a lot of fun. And getting to see and work with all the staff across all the different programs in the agency is what really makes this job and this career special.
[00:03:46] Speaker C: Yeah, it is, it's, you know, it's. Everybody has a passion, you know, look, look where your travels have taken you all across the world. And it's because you love wildlife, obviously. And I think your, your spouse is a veterinarian as well, correct?
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Yeah, she is, yeah. She's the more traditional vet in that she works with cats and dogs. Yeah. A lot of people to one of your earlier points are surprised when they hear that state wildlife management agencies have veterinarians. But that kind of goes to your earlier point about these importance of wildlife health. We think about our agency mission to protect and conserve and manage wildlife and their habitats. And part of that is understanding all the behaviors that we do as humans, but also all the other threats that wildlife and their health are facing.
[00:04:28] Speaker C: Right.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: And so a big aspect of my job is managing health, doing surveillance and monitoring of wildlife health, with which to most people is an odd role, an untraditional role for a wildlife vet, but it's a really important role because if you don't understand it, you can't really manage it and conserve it. Well, you need to understand what those wildlife are facing, the threats they're facing.
[00:04:50] Speaker C: Just going back a second when you talked about pharmaceuticals, I wanna make sure everybody knows it's for the animals, not for anybody, not any of them.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: For pharmaceuticals. Yes. Some of the bigger critters, like you can catch some critters, small ones, as well as some birds, when they're molting and unable to fly away without use of any drugs. But the larger ones, like deer and elk and bear, they sometimes require some encouragement with some pharmaceuticals to get them to be knocked unconscious. So you can collar them, collect biological specimens and do so. That's in a safe way for both the animal and for the people that are working on them. So, yeah, it's.
It's a very large aspect of my job because our agency, probably more than any other agency in the United States, we do a ton of wildlife captures. Somewhere on the order of almost 1,000 bears a year, are captured by our game wardens and our biologists, and they're marked for research. We collect samples. And so it's a really, really important part of our job to get our hands on these animals, and when we get our hands on them, capitalize on that moment and do right by the animal and get as much as we can, information and material from those critters. So, yeah, that's. That's my pharmaceutical involvement, nothing more.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: One of the things I think about when he talked about the importance of a veterinarian here, I think about the interactions of people and wildlife now probably more than ever before. You think about how much our population in Pennsylvania is growing, how we're expanding, people moving into new areas, you know, the constant interactions, whether it's, you know, a raccoon coming into somebody's backyard or, you know, bears walk, getting through a neighborhood and understanding the needs to understand safety and the health of animals and how they interact with people now, because we're probably facing that more now than we ever have in history.
[00:06:38] Speaker C: Well, there's so much information out there. You know, you look at the way we get our media today with social media, and the things you see people doing out there with wild animals. I mean, you know, just the video and people are like, well, I can, you know, try to do this and try to do this, and monkey see, monkey do, and really, they don't need us. That's why they're wild. You know, and that's what we're really here to talk about today, is keeping wildlife wild. You know, And I'll be the first to admit, the first thing we're going to talk about is feeding you Know, when I grew up in that era where, you know, you put food out for the deer to make it through the winter, and when I got here, everybody's like, that's bad. You know this. But I want to talk about that and the dangers of feeding wildlife. And you know, there's a multitude and there's lots of rabbit holes we can go down. But you know, let's just talk about the big picture and why is supplemental feeding dangerous to wild animals?
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, before we launch into that, I think it's important to acknowledge that it comes from mostly good intentions.
[00:07:35] Speaker C: Yeah, sure.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: The individuals that are interested in feeding wildlife do it because they think the wildlife need their help. They think they are doing something to the benefit of the wildlife.
And it can be misplaced though. And there are a lot of dangers to supplementally feeding wildlife. For starters, just think of a natural diet of any animal. Are you going to be able to reproduce that throwing out cracked corn, shelled corn, or throwing out birdseed? Unlikely. So you're potentially interfering with their natural diet and their natural way of life. There's plenty of resources out there for them.
But it's not just about diet. It's also about potentially getting animals to congregate at a higher than natural density. And when you have that, you have all sorts of issues that can pop up. I can speak to the disease aspect of that, but there are human wildlife conflict issues that can pop up from that. There are domestic animal conflicts that can pop up from that. I don't have the data in front of me, but we do occasionally have incidents of bear human conflict.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Indeed.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: I don't know what percentage of those are tied into feeding either leaving bird seed out or not being good about cleaning up spilled bird seed or leaving trash out. But I would bet the majority of them have to do with bears that are habituated to people. And I think that's one of the biggest downsides to feeding wildlife is that you're taking these wild animals and they're becoming dependent on you and they're losing that little bit of wild in them and they're becoming almost domesticated. They lose their fear of people, they get more aggressive with each other and then they have all those other downstream effects physiologically with their diet with potential increased disease transmission. So there's all these downsides that on the surface, like I said from the start, good intentioned, you think you're doing right by the critter, but when you actually dig into it a little bit, there's all these downsides that come from feeding wildlife.
[00:09:50] Speaker C: Yeah. The other thing is when you say it's an unnatural number of specific species that come to an area when all those critters are there, the habitat suffers.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: When you think about what happens to the natural habitat around an area where there's feeding going on when you artificially increase that density for that period of time, they're not just coming there and eating the artificial feed that's put out for them, they're also browsing. Like for deer for instance. We'll talk about them. They're browsing that native habitat on their way to the feeding site. And I've personally witnessed places where they have legacy effects and years worth of feeding. Where you can see where the trails come down off the mountain 80 yards wide, where there's zero undergrowth, where those deer just constantly come through the same areas. They browse out all the habitat in the understory. So then you think about the trickle down impacts of that on the grouse or the rabbits or the other species that need that understory layer for cover and, and the shrubs that produce seeds for birds. So they're eliminating those in that concentrated area. So then you have long term impacts from that as well. Then the forest isn't ready to regenerate itself if something like spongy moth comes in and defoliates the oak trees. And now all of a sudden there's no understory there to replace it because we've artificially removed it, but with that higher density of deer for that period of time. And so, so you think about that for the short term and the long term. And when you look at what is artificially feeding or enhanced supplemental feeding of wildlife actually doing, you're kind of artificially increasing the carrying capacity of that landscape. So when you think about any species of wildlife, there's a certain carrying capacity, a certain number of those animals that that habitat on that landscape can support naturally. If you artificially increase that number with supplemental feeding, you're negatively impacting the habitat so that in the long run you're actually supporting less animals. And then you have to supplemental feed even more to sustain that same population. And it's just a con, it's a snowballing effect over the long haul.
So that's why we want to focus and help people find ways to create and develop and enhance natural habitats with native plants that produce, you know, seeds on shrubs and trees for birds and things like that.
[00:12:13] Speaker C: So, you know, we have a whole nother, this could be a whole nother topic at some Point though, with, you know, when, when stuff gets over browsed. You know, we have a lot of invasives out there that really aren't doing wildlife any good at all. You know, in years, like I would presume this year is going to be a tough year for, for especially for whitetails. We didn't have a great mass across the state and you know, some early, really cold temperatures. And you see it now, deer season's over and you see a lot of deer out there feeding heavy in groups, earlier than normal. They're hungry and you know, let's talk about a whitetail for instance. And we can talk about lots of species, but you know, if you would, Andrew, explain how their system works and what they need to digest foods. It's hard for folks to fathom what, how a deer's stomach works and what they need. You know, they think, well, they go into a farmer's soybean field and they get a meal for the day and they're good.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: But.
[00:13:04] Speaker C: But it's way more than that.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So think like forage and high fiber diet grasses, stuff like that. Those are the things that are key to a ruminance diet.
Things like corn. While I would say domestic livestock has kind of evolved to be able to intake more corn products, Highly digestible carbohydrates and things that are fermentable are really, really, really dangerous to ruminants. In particular, we've had cases of deer and elk eating from corn piles. And you get a condition, what's called rumen acidosis. So what happens is cows stomachs are a little bit different than ours. Deer stomachs, elk stomachs, all those ruminants, they have four chambers. Four.
They ferment things in those chambers, anything they intake. There's a natural balance there of ph and bacteria. When you get highly digestible carbohydrates into their stomachs, what happens is you drop that ph, things become more acidic. That acid can then go out of the stomach into their bloodstream, cause a lactic acidosis. It can cause all these downstream effects and abruptly kill an animal in a matter of hours if they intake a lot of corn. So it's super, super dangerous. It's not something they're gonna find naturally on the landscape. And it's one of the reasons that we really discourage feeding any deer and especially any elk on the landscape. Because in a hard winter, you know, this is the natural order of things. Right. Animals are gonna have easier winters and harder winters if you just dump out a whole bunch. Especially during a hard winter, a deer or elk's not gonna know any better. They're gonna go right up to that pile and eat as much as they can because it's survival of the fittest. They're not gonna know any better. They're not gonna say, well, this is an unnatural food source. I'm not gonna eat this. They're gonna eat it as we would.
[00:14:55] Speaker C: Too if we were hooded.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: It they don't have to work for it. They might have to fend off some other conspecifics there. There can be a lot of aggression around some of these bait piles because it congregates animals, but they're not going to turn it down. They don't know any better. We have to know better. Right, as humans to know that this is not a natural part of their diet. It's potentially having these downstream effects for them. So that's the key is that you often find these acute deaths and on necropsy, which is just a postmortem examination of the animal, you'll find corn in their stomach. So it's a pretty obvious threat that most people are aware of, I hope most people are aware of.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: So what about folks that would say, hey, I see deer in cornfields eating.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: Corn or Midwest or out in the.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: Midwest or in some parts of. We're in the Susquehanna Valley here, lots of farm fields and you see deer out in those fields eating corn. How is that different from a corn pile?
[00:15:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I would say that's opportunistic. Right. So a deer is opportunistically maybe raiding a corn field, eaten a little bit, that is, they're going to be intaking far less corn than if there was a giant 40 pound bag that was just picked up and dumped on, you know, in the middle of a field.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: Sure. Think about places like in the northern tier of Pennsylvania where it's mostly heavily forested. You're, you're putting a total change in that deer's diet when they're used to eating acorns and maybe some grasses and goldenrods and things like that. Or. And then all of a sudden in the winter when they're used to browsing on twigs and stems. And now all of a sudden there's this huge shift in what they're putting in their stomach to a corn pile when somebody puts stuff out. And that shock, that shock effect of they haven't had it, haven't had it. And all of a sudden in the hardest time of the year when they need real nutrition, they're getting this, that might fill their belly really fast, but then have all those negative effects.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: I kind of think of it like. And this is totally off the wall, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if we walked out there and there was a bowl of Snickers and that was all we ate today is five Snickers bars, we'd all feel like absolute crap.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: We'd probably become diabetic, too.
[00:17:03] Speaker C: But that's really what to a wild animal.
And I look at birds as. Look at turkeys. And I remember years ago, you know, just sticking back in my head where, you know, we get a hard winter and people are out supplemental feeding corn and turkeys get a hold of it with no way to get rocks to digest it, and could be detrimental in turkeys. And, you know, a lot of folks have stopped that, I mean, because they witnessed what it can do. And, you know, that's another thing we never think about. You know, you'd be better off putting some grit out there so the turkeys can digest or any birds can digest, you know, things like that. But like, like you said earlier, when we think we're doing good, and it is great intention to do this, and that's why we're here talking about this today, is. Is the importance of thinking about it before you go out there and dump something, you know?
[00:17:50] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, so, Matt, it gets people connected to wildlife growing up, right? I think a lot of us probably, admittedly, you know, fed bread to ducks at local parks. And on the surface it's innocent. It gets you connected to the wildlife. But that's another example. And this could happen with growing turkeys. You feed a high carbohydrate diet to birds. They can get something, what's called angel wing. So just basically what happens is their feathers grow at a much quicker rate than they should be growing curves, their wings up to the point where they look like an angel, and that leads them to have an inability to fly. So there are all these downstream effects. Like, you don't think about that if you're a kid with your grandparents in the park, just chucking some bread to some geese and some ducks. But if everyone's doing that, you're not necessarily seeing that. It can lead to all these downstream effects.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: And moldy grain can affect birds well as well. And, you know, oh, you can have.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Funguses, you can have any number of bacteria, molds and stuff like that that can get introduced to an animal system. And yeah, it's just counter to the way that the animal was built. So you think again, back to deer, like, they're used to browsing on stuff that takes a while to digest, right? So they'll shift it between two of their chambers, their rumen and their reticulum. If things are too big, like they stripped off too big of a chunk of food, they'll regurgitate it, they'll chew it some more, then they'll swallow it again. Then it'll get cycled back and forth and slowly get digested. Then it'll get moved to another chamber of its stomach, have all the fluid extracted from it, and then it'll go and have the last little bit of nutrients extracted before it goes down its intestines.
That's not happening with any of these carbohydrate diet. Just like you used the example with turkeys, they're used to. And other birds are used to picking up grits to grind down food as they ingest it. If you're interfering with that, you're going to be setting off all these downstream effects. Because physiologically, these animals aren't built to encounter and consume at any large number the amount of food that you're putting out there and the type of food that you're putting out there. So it's.
It's tough, right? You kind of have to place your faith and your trust in the wildlife to do what's best, to capitalize on the resources. And to Dave's earlier point, like, the best thing we can do is promote habitat that has the resources to provide that natural diet to these wildlife species. It's not to ignore that and just give out supplemental feed and think that we can fix it.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: So when a deer chews its cud, it's usually because they've eaten too much. Is that when they regurgitate or the.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Pieces are too big? So if the pieces are too big to digest, they'll often regurgitate it, chew it up some more, and then swallow it again, and then it's in a more digestible form.
Generally, that's how it works. Sometimes they just have cud that they're chewing on because it's just a bunch of like really woody stems or something that is just going to be chewed on forever. And you're not getting much nutritional value from it, but for the most part, yeah, those larger particles can. It can't get digested. It's kind of like you and I, we're not regurgitating, but we're told when we're younger to chew our food before we swallow. Same deal, right?
[00:20:57] Speaker C: I'm going to try chewing my cousin next Thanksgiving dinner. And Maybe I won't eat so much.
Another potential. When we talk about congregating, we hear this a bunch too.
When we say it spreads a disease, putting the food out there doesn't spread the disease as much as bringing more wildlife to one place and relating that to humans. Where kids go to school, what's the first thing they bring home when they get around all those other kids is germs. And I'm sure it's the same in wildlife and we really need to hit on that with everything that's going out there, especially as we learn more and more about diseases in wild animals.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Not every disease is gonna be infectious and directly transmitted and density dependent. There are some diseases that are tied to mineral deficiencies. That's not an infectious disease. Right. That might be tied to the resources available to the wildlife. But in this case, using some examples that really hit at home, think of something like chronic wasting disease. And those prions are shed in the environment and they're shedding saliva. And what are you going to be doing over a bait pile? You're going to be slobbering and you're going to be really excited that there's all that corn there. And the next year that comes up is not going to pick around the corn that you slobbered on. They're going to eat that corn. And so that's one disease of many that I could provide examples of that can get spread on these piles. And that's with the best quality supplemental feed. To your earlier point, if you don't provide high quality supplemental feed, you can introduce all sorts of other issues that the animal's not used to encountering because they're not naturally found. Things like molds and funguses. So it's, you know, it's problematic, I think, and I don't know if we want to dive into bird feeding at the moment.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: I think we should talk about it for sure.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: But yeah, the same thing happens at bird feeders. So it is seen, I think, is a bit more of a more innocent activity. And it's certainly, you think about the bird. Bird watching and bird feeding industry. It's a massive industry and it gets, you know, there's probably more people that are into bird watching in Pennsylvania than hunting.
[00:23:13] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: And it really, you know, fosters an appreciation of the natural world and wildlife and that's all fantastic. But it also can lead to all sorts of things like finch conjunctivitis. So that's a. Conjunctivitis, an eye disease leads to swelling of the eyes and the eyelids. It's caused by a bacteria that's gonna be found in much higher prevalence in areas where you have higher than natural densities of birds. So they come into feeders. There's a lot of bacteria there, a lot of birds there. It's basically like a super spreader event. Like you mentioned before, you go to daycare. I have a son who's in daycare. He gets exposed to all these things.
He'd be getting sicker more often if the daycare was at double the capacity that they are currently.
[00:24:01] Speaker C: Great analysis.
And that's habitat for us. I mean, when you think about it.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: All the kids are touching the same toys. They're all playing with the same things. They're putting it in their mouth and they're doing the next thing and the next kid's coming by and touching something. And yeah, it's the same with those.
[00:24:15] Speaker C: Well, as humans and where we are, you know, when you look, we have the ability to reason and figure things out. And, you know, that's why we're talking about this today. It's like, we don't want to go, hey, you're doing bad. We're saying, hey, look what happens, you know, and we're fighting an industry too, when you look at it, because you can't go to any retailer nowadays that sells hunting equipment, for instance, and see a bag that says deer corn, you know, and it is with good intention that we're doing that, you know. But like, coming back to your point, I remember the first trip that we went, our beer went with you. And we were looking at a golden winged warbler project. And I mean, there was 50 Foresters out there on the ground with their nose in the dirt looking, what's the regeneration that's coming up? And this project was for specific species, but all the other species that that habitat helped. And we don't think about. Because our responsibility is for 480 species out there. And it's not just deer, although deer get a lot of. Because it's. When you look at whitetails and conservation, without whitetail deer, conservation wouldn't be what it is today. I mean, from.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: And they're the keystone species of hunting, but they're also a keystone species of habitat. There's probably no other species out there, other than maybe beavers that can change the landscape, habitat as much as deer can. And so understanding how they affect their habitat and the landscape around them and what we can do to enhance the habitat in a natural state, keep those deer spread out, providing for all their needs Year round, whether it's cover or browse or whatever the case may be, like to provide for that on a landscape scale, keep those deer in a natural setting is what we're striving for. So a keystone species not only for hunting and conservation and attention by people and buying hunting licenses, but a keystone species for habitat management as well.
[00:26:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, hence the reason that we have to really encourage the use of your antlerless tags. Indeed, you know, to make sure that we have those. You know, another aspect of drawing animals to a specific spot, you know, there's so many negative aspects, but is stress. And as folks that love wildlife, we don't think about stress in the animal side of things. We think about it in our lives. Every one of us here, we get stressed and how it affects your body and how it affects your diet and everything, but it happens. Yeah, or you lose it or you just shave it off.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:45] Speaker C: Then you don't have to worry about any of it. But you think about stress in wildlife. Let's talk about that. Because it's a thing that never gets to the top of the page.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's immunosuppressive. So I used to live in New York City in Brooklyn a few years ago.
I was a lot calmer in the subway when there were fewer people on it. There's a bunch of people in the subway car. You get stressed out, you're getting jostled, you're trying to. You don't have a seat, you're trying to hang on for dear life as the subway lurches forward. Same thing goes with animals when they're in a stressful situation or a dense situation with a lot of their conspecifics around. They're, you know, potentially seeing aggression from other, others of their species. They're potentially seeing this free food source as potentially not going to be available because there's other animals there that are taking it. And so that can stress them out and make them more susceptible to disease. So not only are you bringing them into an area where they could potentially spread disease, but when they're extra aggressive, more aggressive than natural, they're stressed out. That's going to make them more susceptible to actually contract that disease. So it's, it's. Yeah, I mean, I think to one of your earlier points too, people see this as a solution. They see feeding wildlife as a solution to a harsh winter. They're only addressing the wildlife that they're directing their feed to.
If they change their attention to developing good habitat. Think of the number of Species that can benefit from that, as opposed to just that single species that might be feeding off that bait pile. So you promote native plants on the landscape, you're generating seeds for bird life, you're generating cover, you're potentially, if it's going to lead to trees, encouraging larger animals like deer to come in and eat those acorns that eventually drop. So think of all the benefits you can have from addressing the habitat as opposed to just kind of like the band aid, which is just the supplemental feed, which is not a great band aid for all the reasons that we've already stated.
[00:28:44] Speaker C: Right. So let's talk about little things that we can do as like to enhance. I mean, you don't have to go out there and clear cut 100 acres to make a difference.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: You can do. There's a lot you can do just in your backyard with simple things like how you plant a flower garden or something like that, like a pollinators to help the bottom of the food chain, the insects. Well, if you have the right kind of native flowers and things like that, then you're attracting insect life, which then attracts birds, and then everything just compounds from there. So you're really helping the whole chain. And I'll put in a shameless plug for our Howard nursery. We're getting ready to launch our seedling sales program here coming up in January. What a great way to plant some native shrubs that produce seeds and fruits for wildlife. You don't need 100 acres of ground to do something meaningful. And how you arrange those things. If you have some shrubs with some native grasses and maybe some growing fruit trees or things like that, you can create a complex habitat environment in a very small area. And you'll end up with rabbits coming in there and maybe some foxes coming in to chase the rabbits and maybe some deer coming in and maybe they eat your hostas along with your crab apples coming off your crab apple tree. But you can really create a complex habitat in a very small space and provide for everything from insects to birds to deer all the way up. So we like to see folks engage in that way. And something else that's pretty neat about that approach is the passion or the sense of satisfaction you get too, when you plant something and you watch it grow and then you see the birds come to it. It really is a sense of fulfillment that you get it from the planting, the tending, the creation of the habitat, and then watching the wildlife come and use it. It's a sense of fulfillment other than just placing a temporary food source in a spot and Watching a critter come and use it.
[00:30:39] Speaker C: And we live in a world of instant gratification and that's what it is. We had Tim Schaefer on the deputy, excuse me, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. And I asked him what one thing folks could do to make things better for aquatics and he said, don't mow the creek side banks and stuff like that. And same here, you know, if there's a spot that you don't fertilize and don't mow in your yard and let that natural stuff come. It's amazing what it does, especially in the pollinator world.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And don't, don't weed, eat the edges of your yard where it goes into the woods. Let the, let the BlackBerry briar bushes grow up and watch all the berries that come on there and then watch all the birds that come in to eat that. Let those pokeberry weeds come up. They're probably the most nutritious vegetation for white tailed deer to eat. Is pokeberry. Super high in crude proteins. Right.
[00:31:28] Speaker C: Is that why you have a yard full of pokeberry?
[00:31:30] Speaker B: Do I have a yard full my yard. I mow the bare minimum of my yard possible. And you've been up to my house, you've seen all around the hillside. It's grown up, it's thick. It looks like I don't keep care of my, my landscape, but I've got wildlife all over the place at my house because I just kind of ignore it. I mow the bare minimum and I let the rest go in the native habitats. And if I see the forsythia bushes growing up, I get in there with the clippers and I, I take care of them and I let my three different kinds of briar plants grow in there that produce blackberries and raspberries. And yeah, my kids go out and pick the raspberries and they turn all purple when they eat them. But hey, we can eat them too. So, you know, just seeing that and every once in a while my kids will look out the window and they'll be like, hey dad, look at, there's a deer down there just chewing down BlackBerry briars. Most people don't think about that. Deer will eat the BlackBerry canes that they grow all summer long. They produce the berries in the fall and then the deer will eat those all winter long. That's great. Browse for them.
[00:32:30] Speaker C: Which is, which is as important as anything.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: Exactly what they need. Right. So yeah, let the edges of your yard grow up into blackberries and then you can pick blackberries and you can compete with the wildlife for the BlackBerry crop, I guess, or the raspberries. But the secondary effects of, yeah, birds get to seed and then deer browse the BlackBerry canes.
It's pretty amazing what you can see start to happen in a very small space.
[00:32:54] Speaker C: Any other advice you have for folks to kind of think about before they go out and, you know, let's talk about this. Let's talk about food plots, because we hear that argument all the time before we wrap it up. You know, what's the difference between a food plot and, you know, this range of food plots across the country? And I'm one of those people that plant them because I like to see the deer, and if it's bad, I'm going to stop doing it. But the difference between that and dumping corn out, if you will come back.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: The biggest difference is when you're putting out a supplemental feed source, it's temporary. It's space and time. You have to constantly replenish it. When you look at a food plot, if you have a lot of deer, there's some places where sometimes you plant a clover plot, for instance. Sometimes those clovers can't even get a start if there's too many deer there, because they'll browse it down before it even gets going.
But that's something that's a food source that's available throughout the season. They can use it as part of their landscape diet, right? They can mix it in like we talked about. What's the difference of a soybean field or a corn field and a deer that lives in the woods and comes out to that field once in a while. It's just one small part of their diet. Supplemental feed really becomes a majority of their diet in that moment because they see that opportunity and they just focus on it, whereas a food plot becomes part of their diet. They're still out in the woods browsing. They're still eating those blackberries. They're still eating twigs and stems and buds. And then they'll come in and they'll browse on that clover for, you know, half an hour, an hour before dark or after daylight. They're not going to stand there and gorge themselves in the wide open in a food plot all day long.
[00:34:22] Speaker C: It's funny because I've hunted places where you could bait deer, and a button buck will come into a corn pile and like an aardvark, he'll suck every last kernel of it that he can get. And, you know, he's feeling like and it's kind of. When I think about this, and this is total anecdotal, but you'll see a bigger buck come in there, and he'll take a couple bites and move on. You know, he's checking for does that are around. He knows that those does might be congregated, move on. But it seems like when that young buck or that young deer didn't know any better and gorged itself.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And they also, that young buck might have been out competed for some of the natural resources. If you think about that larger buck probably has its pick of whatever it wants out there.
[00:34:59] Speaker C: That pecking order is real out there.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So a question about the food plot. So if a food plot isn't hit particularly hard and you have, you know, appropriate wildlife densities in the area, is that something that can persist over the years, or is that something that you have to go back to each year to replant?
[00:35:13] Speaker B: It all depends on what it is. You know, clovers are usually good for a couple of seasons before you have to go in and maybe mow them to enhance them or the way they fix nitrogen, you may have to go back and rotate a different crop in there to. To change the nutrient content of the soil and then go back in and do clovers again.
[00:35:33] Speaker C: So it can be food plots that look beautiful. Nothing touches because it wasn't palatable.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: They're not pulling the right nutrients. So it all depends on what you plant. Brassicas, turnips. You know, people do all different things. But yeah, I mean, there's again, native plants across the board, provide higher levels of nutrition of the right kinds of things that the animals need in their native habitats over food plots.
But, you know, the food plot industry is big, and it's big for a reason.
It does make wildlife more viewable. Brings those deer out to those food plots from the wood's edge, you know, and depending on what kind of food plots it is, it can be great for turkeys. You know, if you have the right kind of grass mix in a. In a, let's call it cool season forage opening instead of just a food plot. But if you have the right kind of grass mixes, it can house great insect life. It can be good for turkeys to come out and brood and bug in. So there can be other benefits along with that, other than just food plot is feed.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:36:32] Speaker B: So they. Yeah.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: The point I was trying to, I guess, get at, Dave, was just that, like food establishing food plots is a heck of a lot closer to habitat manipulation than supplemental Feeding again, because it's a step in the right direction.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: It becomes part of the landscape that they, they become used to that part of the landscape, excuse me, as part of their natural day to day.
[00:36:54] Speaker C: But the same thing happens in food plots. When you bring deer or animals through an area, the other habitat around can suffer. Natural habitat, because it's increasing the number. Like I look at my little place, it's 15 acres, and you put something green that's out there right now, it attracts deer because there's nothing green left.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: And look in your woods for the.
[00:37:15] Speaker C: First 50 yards, the browse lines over my head. And it's just they're eating everything on.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: The way before they step out there at last light.
[00:37:21] Speaker C: Right, right, right. And you know, when you look at all this stuff we're talking about on the habitat side, as hunters, you go out there and you look at the woods a whole different way. I mean, you have ruined my life. Because between you and Dave Mitchell, when I go out in the woods and look at it, it's a whole different picture that I'm painting in my head when I look at the habitat and what it takes for animals to survive, you know, but you didn't really ruin my life. You made me a lot more aware of my surroundings when I'm out there to try to put that puzzle together, try to figure things out. Whether, whether it's deer, turkeys, grouse, it doesn't matter what it is, everything. There's a puzzle out there that we have to figure and it changes. And I think that when you look at supplemental feeding, we're changing that rhythm or that habit of that animal.
When you do that and when you do that, bad things can happen. There's a lot of them that we talked about. Let's talk about your next subject on urban.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I think a lot, you know, some folks might be raising their hand and saying, well, guys, you know, I live in a city, there are very few green spaces. I don't have large megafauna like deer and elk and bear to support. But we have plenty of birds. We fragmented their habitat. Isn't there something that we can do? And I would say in those situations, responsible bird feeding is a completely different thing than just putting out bird feeders and not paying attention to them. I think if people are intent on bird feeding, you can do so by taking down feeders every couple of weeks, emptying them, cleaning them out with soapy water, rinsing them with a 10% bleach solution, letting them air dry, and then Putting them back up, sweeping up spilled bird seed. Those are the kinds of things that people can do to responsibly feed birds in those habitats where they don't necessarily have an opportunity to put in a food plot or plant native plants. So folks might be wondering, kind of, you know, is it all, you know, negative for bird feeding? There have been some studies that have shown, like during harsh winters, supplemental bird feeding can provide support, but it's also changed the range of some bird species, like northern cardinals and I think Carolina wrens, they've extended their range a little bit further north because of supplemental bird feeding. So we are impacting their behavior at a population level scale, not just like within Pennsylvania, but across the entire population, across an entire flyway. So it's one of these things where I don't think we're, I don't think folks listening to this are going to necessarily be discouraged to feed birds. Maybe they'll be discouraged to feed some of these other animals we've been talking about. But there's a way to properly do that if they are going to pursue that.
[00:40:04] Speaker C: You know, our job is just to raise awareness. And that's what we're trying to do here is talk about it because, you know, yeah, we can all agree to disagree, but these are the facts, you know, and this is, this is why it's so important to talk about. And I'll go back to Andrew's point.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: Real quick about responsible bird feeding too. And if you're bringing those birds close to urban environments, get yourself some of those UV stickers for your windows in your house. Where I live right now, I have lots of windows in my house. That's why we bought the place. We love it. And I was getting a lot of bird strikes at my house, hitting windows and, and it just made me so sad every time a bird would hit a window. And my wife one day looked up this thing. You can get UV reflective stickers that you can put on your windows that'll keep birds from, you know, they'll see it and they'll turn and fly away because they see that reflection instead of the glass which just reflects, you know, the world behind them. So there's things you can do there to be talking about unintended consequences. And there's a way to maybe mitigate unintended consequences. Our building in here in Harrisburg, you know, we have bird strikes on our building because we have a lot of glass in our, the Game Commission's headquarters. So we've started actually placing bird safe glass in our new extension that we're doing things like that, that we have to think about as we impact their native habitats, their native landscapes. How can we do things to help protect them too?
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, absolutely. And keeping birdhouses at a proper distance, or bird feeders. Excuse me, at a proper distance, birdhouses as well. But if you have a bird feeder right up against your house, a couple of feet, two, three feet from the house, that's actually okay. That's okay. Because a bird leaving that feeder will not generate enough speed that an impact is gonna cause negative, you know, negative health effects. If you have a feeder that's 10ft away, 15 away, 20ft away, that's entering more dangerous territory where a bird can leave that feeder. Let's say a hawk comes swooping down.
[00:41:50] Speaker C: I was gonna say a Cooper hawk. It's going to happen.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: It's gonna take off from that feeder and fly right into your window, whether or not you have the stickers, maybe. So kind of the optimal distance, they say, is like within 3ft or at least 30ft away from windows to prevent or it's mitigating it. You're not going to prevent everything, but that's the proper distance. And then in addition to that, all the feeding, putting up stickers, put some cover around. If you don't have anything around these bird feeders, that is going to be easy pickings for outdoor cats, for raptors, you're going to be changing their behavior.
And it is one of these things where, let's say, you're constantly providing feed. Right. And local raptors get used to picking off a house sparrow every now and then, which isn't a bad thing because they're invasive.
And then suddenly you go on vacation and you're gone for a month. You're not feeding anymore. That animal has been used to picking off prey items from that spot and suddenly it's unavailable. You're not always going to be there. If you develop proper habitat and encourage native plants, they're going to live long beyond whenever you leave that area and far into the future. So it's a combination of all these things that kind of go into, I think, being responsible stewards for these wildlife and coexisting with them.
We're habitating their or we're fragmenting their habitat. It's not the other way around. They were here first. And so it's kind of learning about how to live with them and promote habitat to their benefit.
[00:43:24] Speaker C: It's great stuff. I mean, it's stuff that we all need to keep in the back of our minds. Because the bottom line is we're here today and people that love wildlife, we want to see it better for the future generations. And this is one of the things that we're going to have to talk about continuously. And just if we can stop one bad habit out there, it's a success. And we're unfortunately out of time. But any, any closing things that y'all want to talk about before we say goodbye? But before that, I just want to thank both of you for coming out this morning. It, it's important that, that the folks in, in that tune in to call the outdoors or pay attention to the social media on the Game Commission, understand the passion that's behind these walls. And you two are great examples of that passion of the pgc. But anything to close it out.
[00:44:09] Speaker B: Dave no, just say look forward to the late seasons getting started here. We've got, you know, snowshoe hare season coming up. We've got post Christmas flintlock archery season coming up. We get still got rabbit seasons. There's still a lot of hunting to be done when the snow flies. So I look forward to some of those seasons as much as anything.
[00:44:28] Speaker C: Plus, daylight hours start to get longer this month and you know what happens. Yep, turkeys are going to be gobbling here in two, two months.
[00:44:35] Speaker B: I heard turkeys gobbling yesterday. I thought they were crazy, but they.
[00:44:38] Speaker C: Get excited once in a while.
[00:44:40] Speaker A: And just from a wildlife, I've done done enough talking. But from a wildlife health perspective, we are always encouraging the public to reach out to us whenever they notice sick or injured wildlife, to report any mortality events that are unusual.
We have a ton of research going on. We try to keep our finger on the pulse of wildlife health through a variety of species. And so we always encourage folks to give us a call if they notice anything out of the ordinary and we'll do our best to respond, potentially collect specimens if we want for disease testing. But we really rely on the public. They are often our first line of defense in our eyes and ears because we can't be everywhere. I'm one vet for the entire state. I've got a lot of great people that work with me. But we are still limited in our capacity. So I really want to encourage folks to stay engaged with us.
[00:45:28] Speaker C: Great stuff. One question I have for you before we go, and this hit me up front because you've been all over the world. What's the coolest thing that you've had to work on right in front of you as a wild animal?
[00:45:39] Speaker A: Probably handling wild cheetah cubs.
[00:45:42] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:45:42] Speaker A: Yeah. So we had. I was working for the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia, and we had a cheetah that was released in a game reserve that we had collared that we knew was of breeding age. And luckily she was collared, so we knew she was away from the nest. She was exhibiting some behaviors leading up to it that made us think that she had a den or a nest.
And then when we noticed that she took off, we went in there and we handled cubs that were only a few days old, so their eyes weren't fully open yet. And a very rare opportunity. I probably will never get that again.
To be standing kind of on a mountainside in the middle of Namibia in the desert, in like 105 degree weather, handling some cheetah cubs while the biologist next to me was tracking to make sure the mother wasn't returning.
[00:46:29] Speaker C: That's awesome. That's pretty cool. Well, you know, again, thank you, guys. Thank everybody for tuning in. Want to wish everybody a safe and happy holiday season. And like Dave said earlier, get out there and enjoy the outdoors. There's lots of hunting seasons left to come. There's lots of wildlife to take a look at. But thank you both, gentlemen, for the passion and what you bring to the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: Thanks for having us.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Thanks, Matt.
