From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana.

This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kell in now Here's Cal, a fifty seven year old Wisconsin barge pilot caught a fifty seven inch muskie.

For those of you not in the know, a muskelunge or muskie is a big, mean, toothy freshwater predator fish, the largest in the pike family.

They do, on occasion grow beyond the fifty seven inch mark.

The all time tackle record is a sixty and one quarter inch fish.

That one was recorded all the way back in nineteen.

That muskie reportedly weighed sixty seven pounds and was thirty four inches around.

That's a big fish, now, I know what you're thinking.

Must have been one hell of an angler to hold a record for more than seventy years.

If you were to look that angler up, you'd find his name is Cal.

By the way, just making sure you have all the facts.

Is all outside of that smart, kg and probably good looking old angler.

The state of Wisconsin accidentally shocked a larger fish at sixty one and one and a half inches in two thousand nineteen.

That was electric by catch, not a rod and reel record.

To be clear, and just so you know that sixty one and a half incher is still swimming around.

So if that doesn't motivate you, I don't know what will.

Muskies have rows of razor sharp teeth akin to concertina wire, but they don't chew or tear through their prey.

They use them to seize quarry before swallowing a hole head first.

You'd be tempted to think that muski has given their size and lee teeth, would feed constantly, but they actually have relatively slow metabolisms, especially in cold water, which is partly why they're so hard to catch.

They're called the fish of ten thousand casts.

A big, full grown adult muskie may need to eat only a few times per week, or, as common angler wisdom holds, about once every three days.

They do a lot of sitting, waiting and watching for prey.

All this to say, yes, the muskie is cool, it's hard to catch, and yes, it can get bigger than fifty seven inches, which makes them special.

But your general muskie may not be as special as this fifty seven inch caught by Lee Fransom.

Lee is a die hard angler who spends a crazy amount of time on Lake Michigan's Green Bay.

According to Lee, it's both his office and his playground.

Green Bay is, of course the namesake of the football team, the Green Bay Packers, but that's not all.

It's one of the largest bays in the country, at about a hundred and twenty miles long, goes between ten and twenty miles wide.

The Indian tribes native to the area, including the Winnebago and the man Nominee.

The tribes then called the bay is stinking waters, which seventeenth century French settlers would translate to La bay de plants and the serious stink owed to a few different factors.

Over abundance of algae, stagnant water, and a lot of marcias, and marcias are decomposing stuff all the time.

That nice smelling, really rich black muck.

Anyway, Unfortunately, and not coincidentally, the bay got even stinkier as more Europeans filled in the country.

Stinky Europeans is just too easy of a joke, so we'll skip past that moreague.

In seven, the e p A identified Lower Green Bay as an area of concern earned because of the contaminated sediment and the overall poor water quality from agricultural runoff and industry pollution, fish killing dead zones now form in the bay.

One of the largest in two thousand twelve covered forty square miles.

That's roughly a third of the entire bay.

I'm bringing this up to give you even more context as to how special this muskie is.

So stick with me.

Because all the pollution, and because the habitat loss and commercial fishing, the bay's legendary muskie population became all but extinct by the late nineteen eighties.

Nine, the state began stocking spotted muskies back into Green Bay to re establish a self sustaining population.

It is this population that Lee's giant muskie came from.

That's called conservation success after conservation failure, which unfortunately is a well established pattern.

Now to jump back a bit to the subject of I guess not necessarily failure, but certainly rotten luck.

Lee, our angler, has had a terrible run of luck recently.

In January of nineteen he was diagnosed with throat cancer.

Following the diagnosis, he had to step away from his job and undergo radiation and chemo treatments, which I don't know if you've ever had a loved one go through that, but chemo.

You know, I guess if it was fun, everyone would do it.

If that weren't terrible enough, doctors had to remove Frandsen's teeth.

Then, the day after france And had all his teeth yanked, his mother suffered a stroke that nearly killed her.

And we're not done yet.

After treatment, franz And suffered major withdrawals from the morphine and fentinyl that he was prescribed While undergoing treatment, He's toothless and in constant pain.

He's weak.

His weight dropped from one pounds plus.

As he told the Green Babe Press Gazette, the anxiety and panic attacks were unbearable.

I ended up spending a week in the psychiatric ward at Bellin Hospital.

I mean, Lee, friends and I chuckle, not because it's funny, but because I have to, and because you know, if you fancy yourself an angler, everyone Lee gets the last laugh.

As his luck starts to turn around.

He's now cancer free.

He recently returned to work, he's got a full, brand new set of dentures, and most importantly, he's able to fish again.

Friends him, in true Upper Midwest fashion, is you know your standard big walleye and perch angler.

But this past Memorial Day he decided to try his luck at Muskie's again, the fish of ten thousand casts.

He got a bright and early start and out at about two o'clock in the afternoon.

He cast about fifteen times, which again is basically nothing if you're talking muskie, and he got a huge hit in short order.

Friends And reeled in the pound fifty seven inch muskie of his dreams, his personal best.

Got one more quick aside.

If you'll allow me, all of this stuff is fact, but I'll slide in one thing here that that I think was implied, So take it with a grain of salt.

The Press Gazette article about the catch suggests that friends and caught the fish and reeled it in with the same fishing rod that he was sleeping with while he was sick.

I'm not kidding.

He slept with his favorite musky rod during his cancer battle, which kind of makes sense.

It's pert near metaphorical if you think about it.

The rod is tough enough to beat a muskie or a bunch of muskies, so it's tough enough to beat cancer.

I got to hold onto that rod as a big, strong fish can make or run and might slip through your hands, just like you gotta hold on to your health.

Again.

I'm not sure if this one true, but it makes for a better story, so we're gonna stick with it to get back to the fish as it happens occasionally with some of these big predator fish, or any fish we try to catch and release.

This case, the fish didn't read the playbook and something went wrong and the line got caught through its gills or just played too hard, and uh, the fish was bleeding pretty bad, so he didn't release it.

Instead, he ran it over to his buddy's taxi orm shop.

There's probably a metaphor in that somewhere too, Franzen told the paper.

I now hold his shop record for the biggest broad in, which for me is quite an honor.

Welcome back to the top, Mr Frances.

This week we've got more fish, migratory birds, troubled waters, and so much more.

But first I'm gonna tell you about my week, as you know my week, and this podcast is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment, the world's foremost purveyor of chainsaws.

Not only do they make chainsaws, but they make all sorts of handy things that I don't use for their intended purposes.

Power sprayers and tended for peeling paint off of houses or grease off of heavy equipment and mud off.

Eighteen wheelers are great for cleaning up your European mounts.

Their hand shears are great for breaking down upland game birds as well as ducks and geese.

Their pruning shears or loppers can snip through turkey legs or elk ribs or your smaller deer bones when making stock.

And I've even used their quiet, smooth, non stinking electric chainsaws to make difficult cuts in the wood shop at night when everybody's asleep, or even take apart a mule here when the time and the weather made a quick job necessary.

All of this stuff works even better out on the woodlock farm or garden.

That's called versatility, folks.

Anyway, just back from a short vacation Florida's Forgotten Coast, got focused on my Tarpan fishing tarpin as I have and will continue to cover, are an incredibly cool fish that has been around a very long time, long before people were into taking pictures of them with fishing rod in hand.

Their image was preserved in the fossil record that'd be like six million year old snapshot.

On top of that, they're what is known as an obligate air breather, meaning they are obliged or obligated to breathe there.

And what's more, we caught them in nets, dynamited and collected them and ran them through grinders by the ton for the noble purpose of fertilizer until there were almost none of them left in Florida or the Gulf, all because people didn't find them easy enough to eat and found them too much of a pain in the butt when they'd come up and steal your bait.

On top of all this, they don't even live in Montana, so you have to travel to find them, which is getting easier and easier every year at this point due to the fact that the sport fishing value of the tarpan has been very influential in bringing them back from the brink.

Tarpan are an industry.

Whole restaurants, bars, hotels, bars, guides, bars, fly shops, tackle shops, bait shops, bars, marinas and bars exist in large part due to the folks who pursue a fish, a fish that people think are too much work to eat obviously, industry jobs money attention is a double edged sword.

We certainly cover that enough on the Weekend Review.

And this fishery industry still involves a lot of fishermen, and fishermen or fisher people's like to keep things secret makes it a very interesting scene down in Appalachicola.

Everyone knows you're in town to fish because that's what they are in town to do as well.

But there's still like the typical fishing things like not wanting people to know how you did or where exactly you launched the boat or ended up with that boat, and all that stuff.

You could be having the exact conversation on the Missouri River, the Beaverhead River or wherever.

It's just funny to me that the place, tactics and species can change.

But at the end of the day, it's all still fishing and people who try to catch fish anyway, the fun stuff.

We caught a few tarpen, jumped a few tarpan, which is to say that we had them on the line long enough to either pop the fish off the hook on a jump.

You know, their tendency is to go into a series of jumps once hooked.

It's one of the things that makes them so popular to go after.

Anyway, we lost a few on the jump, we snapped a few off, we landed a few, we got a bunch of tarpan to eat, and then we cast like crap and missed a bunch more.

The most valuable thing on this trip is again, tarpin don't live in Montana, so go in someplace and finally getting the right conditions and an abundance of fish to be at the same spot at the same time you're there allows people like me to knock the rust off and actually try to replicate good behavior.

For me, it is even hard to say that I, as in myself, caught fish because of the education I got from my friend Brian Brodrick, who is the dude who happens in days six Arrows and Broadheads, so you know, if you're in the market check them out, and our guide Jero Brewer Jero is a fishy, fishy dude, and uh, between those two, the tarp and catching experience is absolutely invaluable someone like myself.

For instance, the first fish I caught, it took thirty minutes to land, and I was working my butt off at a twelve weight rod that you can almost touch the handle to the tip on.

It was doubled over so hard.

I felt like my arm was gonna seize and all the water was gonna leave my body.

I was sweating so hard.

After we released that fish, Jero and Brian took the time to say, Okay, that was neat.

Congrats on your first real fish.

But here are all the things that you did wrong and why that is wrong, and here's how to do it better next time.

And there was next time and a time after that, so you gotta actually put that up into practice and try to cement that in memory.

Every fish after that first one.

We got to the boat between nine and fourteen minutes with way less effort.

If you ever find yourself hankering to check this game out, look up Jero Brewer and Doug Henderson darn good, knowledgeable patient turpin guides.

You can get to them through GB fly fishing dot com.

That's Jero Brewer fly fishing dot com, GB fly Fishing dot com and Salted Flats fly Fishing dot Com.

Alright, moving on to the bird desk, as in this next one is for the birds.

The US Fish and Wildlife Agency recently released a draft Environmental Impact statement for a Trump administration plan to limit migratory bird protections.

And this is not just another boring bureaucratic report, I promise.

In short, the Trump administration wants to change the Migratory Bird Treaty Act so that oil, gas, and electric companies are no longer fined for incidentally killing birds.

Right now, companies are criminally liable if they kill migratory birds by you know, say, cutting down trees or spraying pesticides where they shouldn't be.

For instance, because the Migratory Bird Act, BP Oil paid one hundred million dollars after the two thousand ten Deep Water Horizon oil spill killed a hundred thousand birds.

The Trump administration's plan would do away with such penalties, scrapping regulations that have been in effect for a century.

Industry would then have nearly free reign to do as it pleases.

This new Fish and Wildlife report states that vulnerable species could decline to the point of being endangered, which I think everyone should find troubling, as even if you don't care so much about the species, you know, if you're one of those people, you should care about the fact that a species, once endangered, can be a real pain in the butt to deal with, as in the convenience factor when playing or you know, building something or doing your work that every human really values and enjoys, gets you know, way, way way less convenient when endangered species habitat is where you want to play, build, or work.

Let's stop and take a step back for a moment.

We know all of these species we're talking about have value, often not represented by the fines that are associated with them.

So as I see it, the question with this plan becomes, is it right to have zero value a value of quantity zero attached to wildlife only for those involved with the development of energy production or mineral extraction.

Say a company kills a million migratory birds in the name energy.

What kind of message does that send about the value of wildlife?

And if we say that that's okay to have a value of zero on our wildlife just for certain players, what does that say about us?

This is, you know, unfortunately not a hypothetical question.

Over the past two months, in Colorado, a coal mining company has bulldozed roads straight into the Gunnison National Forest Sunset roadless area.

Did you get that a road in a roadless area where it wants to use sevred acres to dig up coal.

The company did this in defiance of a recent federal court ruling that you know told them no.

On June twelve, Sonny Purdue, the Secretary of Agriculture, released a memorandum directing the Forest Service to focus its priorities on increasing energy, timber mining, and grazing on the hundred nine million acres of public lands that it manages.

Forest Service land has always been managed for both recreation and for development.

And you know development includes grazing, timber extraction, mineral extraction, that dual function, right, This land of many uses that we always talk about has always been important.

But this directive, as we've talked about before, seems to green light industry, give them the go ahead while it diminishes and devalues the recreational value of what the recreational part of this land of many uses is going after.

Now, we're gonna jump back here to our birds.

According to the Associated Press, as many as a billion birds a year are killed as a result of current industry practices.

That's a billion of North America's seven billion bird total.

You call that a seventh I'm sure many of you are aware of the passenger pigeon.

Right.

We've talked about those birds before the last one of the species died in the Cincinnati Zoo in just seventy five years earlier.

The passenger pigeon was, in all likelihood the most abundant bird in the world.

Their flocks would be so big that from a distance when they flew, people would mistake them for thunder or herds of galloping horses or buffalo.

Widespread deforestation, along with aggressive market hunting, played a huge part in the species demise.

But I'm sure back in eighteen fifty or thereabouts, people would have never, ever, ever thought that the passenger pigeon would ever go extinct.

It wouldn't have seemed possible.

I think about that a lot.

Which species do we take for granted assuming that they'll always be around, even, you know, if nobody steps up to protect them.

As of now, seven states and a bunch of conservation groups are challenging the plan in U S.

District Court.

For you folks at home, call up your local representatives.

If this sort of thing matters to you, as I suspect it does, You can find sending produce order at us d A dot gov.

By the way, read it for yourself.

I encourage you to do so.

If this stuff does not matter to you, in fact, if this seems like alarmist propaganda to you, or even dare I say, anti Trump list, I want you to keep these last couple of points in mind.

One, the Great American Outdoors Act, as I have said many many times, is great, and that will not go into effect until President Trump signs the dotted line.

If and when he does do that, I will be thanking him and singing his praises.

Then the Trump administration is getting actual funding behind migration corridors.

I will sing that man's praises for that.

That does not mean that we are then obligated to give the President or any one of our elected officials a free pass on dtoothing the e p A or the Clean Water Act or anything else that you don't like.

That is our job is voting citizens.

It is not to sit back and say, well, and you know I do vote every four years.

As for this migratory bird situation, I really want to ask you this in your own backyard, your kid, as a red rider, be begun just like he or she should.

You'll shoot your eye out kid and unsupervised.

They're back there trying it out and probably killing every bird that lands at the feeder.

Is it right that that little backyard assassin of yours could be punished and held accountable for the death of a single migratory bird when one energy related industrial operation with a far greater impact, a potentially population level impact, is not held accountable.

Moving on to the invasive species desk, Utah Department and Natural Resources is officially telling folks to get out and get after the bull frogs.

Bull Frogs started staking their claims and still water bodies along the wall Satch front sometime in the nineteen seventies.

Now they are prolific, large, in charge, and tasty.

As we've talked about, bull frogs only limit what they will eat by what they can stuff in their mouths, snakes, mice, birds, frogs, toads, and vertebrates, fish, you name it.

Whatever concoction they inhale makes them very tasty.

Frog's legs are delicious and easy to prepare.

Common ways of harvesting bull frogs include, but are not limited to, hand grabbing.

Uh.

No need to explain that one gigging a pole with a fork or a hook on it is used to impale or you know, hook your catch, and the use of fishing gear to cast and snag frogs is a common one.

Also, we used to use combination be begun to the frog and then use a fishing pole rigged up with a little spinner with a large treble hook to retrieve them.

A spinner seems to fly better than just a bare treble hook, is the reasoning they're you're a little more accurate.

Here's a note for potential frog hunters in the state of Utah.

The use of fishing gear necessitates a fishing license.

If you, for whatever reason that I do not understand, don't want to get a fishing license, don't utilize fishing gear in Utah.

Okay.

Other than that, no license necessary for bullfrogs, So you know, get hopping.

That's all I've got for you this week.

Thank you all so much for listening to Cow's weekend review.

If you are loving what you're hearing, tell a friend or two.

If you don't want to tell anyone, but want to look like you know a little bit about a lot of stuff, go to the meat Eater dot com and pick yourself up a snappy looking pocket tea reusable shopping bag or a hat that says cow's wee.

Can review.

Most importantly, and as per usual, please keep sending me straight.

Let me know what I'm missing and what's happening in your neck of the woods by writing in to a s K, C.

A L.

That's asked Cal at the Meat eater dot com.

Thanks a bunch, I'll talk to you next week.

A W often