Ep. 838: How To Translate Animal Language

Welcome to Meet Eater's 12 and 26

“presented by Multi-Mobile and On-X Maps.”

12 of Meet Eater's biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes, so you get more of what you love.

The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba.

If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree.

Check it out now on Meet Eater's YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. This is the Meet Eater podcast coming at you sure lists a fairly vote bet in in my case, underwear. Meet Eater podcast.

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By George Beumen, who's a sculptor of bronze artist. He's a naturalist, but here's the main deal for our purposes here. He's an animal language and animal intelligence expert. Teach his courses on the intelligence of animals. We'll go to those things in the also national park.

Lead seminars there of helping people understand what they're hearing, what they're seeing about how animals do their business. He's got a new book called "Eve's Dropping on Animals." What we can learn from wildlife, con, versaceans.

Um, we're gonna dive in on all that, but just as little tickler.

Hit me with. You don't need to say a word. Okay, now listen, listen, this is this is George Beumen. No Brody Verify. Yeah.

No diaphragm in his mouth. Nope. No animals in the studio. No animals in the studio. We have some bronze, peat, we have a bronze piece.

We have like the makins of a bronze piece in the studio. So that turkey right there, tap that turkey. So people realize it's not, okay, that turkey is not making this noise. Okay, hit us with, okay. Hit us with the note, hit us with some turkey vocalizations.

No, no, this isn't just just flat out, okay, all right. Okay, hit us with some coyotes, way off. You got a good wool fall? Oh yeah. That's your wool.

Oh yeah, can you do a good elk way off? Beugal? Yarnie does a good bugle, but his yarnie's bugles miles away. Yeah, yeah, mine might be miles away. Yeah, he was a good mile.

A way off elk. That's a lot closer, Nyanies. Yarnie's like, can you tell if you heard or not? Right, we're wondering. You got a good magpivealkalizations?

Ravens anything? Ravens. From you of the Ravens. They've got a lot of, a lot of range, a lot of meaning there. Lemme, yeah, I want, I want to talk a bunch about those guys,

'cause man, he makes me crazy ass noises. And it can't be just that made noise for no reason. Oh no, no, no, no. Okay, here's real challenge in one. And just tell me if you can't do it.

“I wish I could, can you, like, this test your whistling skills?”

Can you hit a black, can you do a black cap chickity? Hmm, not to my satisfaction. Yeah, they're, they're certainly doing out too. Not good. That's a tough one, but you know how good it works though.

Yeah, 'cause people who can do it can bring a man like crazy. Well, that's pretty good. Yep. Man, yeah. All right, we're gonna get it off.

We're gonna, and now that, but what, like, like, here's the main thing I want, one of the main things I want to talk about,

It's not just the noise, but like, there's the, what, like, what they're talking about. Yeah, it means stuff.

Oh, yeah, I can show you things you never, ever have found it.

Yeah, they obviously means stuff, but like, yeah, because they're not doing it for fun.

“No, I mean, it might be fun, but they're not, you know what I mean?”

No, yeah, what it all means, one of the main, the first thing to say, you know, what's gonna come, one of the first things I'm gonna ask you about is, um, you know, a pine scrolls pissed off noise or whatever his noise is. Mm-hmm, yeah. I can't do it real good, but there's a ton of the meaning in that.

Oh, yeah, ton, yeah. You know, he's pissed at his body, he's pissed at you. Pist at the Bobcat. Yeah. Okay, uh, real quick. So there's a new YouTube, the bear breeze YouTube channels become its own thing. Little behind the scenes thinking here, Clay, Clay started a YouTube channel,

million years ago, and it was like the bear journal or bear hunt, because when Clay owned bear hunting magazine, he had, it had a YouTube channel.

So it's always been kind of lurking around there.

That YouTube channel is gonna stay like, that's Clay's baby. But Clay and bear nuke, I'm gonna build out the bear grease YouTube channel. So all about them making them little bows out of sticks, hunting content, mual content, cooking stuff. Okay. And they're also launched in their own Instagram page around bear grease.

Um, and I'll tell you, we haven't gotten into it. I might be the first guy that I've ever mentioned this. Clay's book that's coming out in a long time for now is exceptionally good. It's good. I mean, I've only read the first five chapters. It's a book. It's a book. It's like a

history of the black bear. It is good. Um, including a large chapter on the

“circumpolar bear culture. I don't know if I can, I'm allowed to, yeah, why not?”

Clay just, he's turning his book in right now. There's circumpolar bear culture is crazy because there's like a latitude band all around the continent. So it touches North America, Europe, Asia, or northern hemisphere. It's, yeah, it's a band-aliatitudes, a northern, northern latitudes. Yep. All around the globe. And if you think about the human diaspora, like how people spread around the world,

these are people that split, there's people within this that split apart way longer go. I mean, if you imagine, like imagine as humans, like humans are kind of in the Middle East, humans are in Africa, you know, humans are up in Spain, wherever, and eventually, some of them come around and wind up in Siberia and some come around and wind up in northern Europe. Now, by this point, they haven't been hanging out together for tens of thousands of years.

But you look at their religious structures and sort of like spiritual understandings of bears. And you have this circumpolar bear culture, where people that wouldn't have no interaction with each other, develop or know interaction with each other for thousands and thousands of years, develop the same sort of religious understandings of bears. And how bears fit into their culture, and the shamanistic aspects, and like, motivations that are assigned

to bears, and you cannot explain it. How some doodenseiberia, some doodenseiberia, some doodenseiberia, because some doodenseiberia, because some doodenseiberia, have the same concept. Yep. Of like, how you treat a bear, when you hunt for a bear, what are your obligations to the bear, that you definitely don't want a bear to see you once it's dead. So if you kill a bear,

“you approach it from behind. Like, these dudes around the same trip all over the, do you know what I'm saying?”

No, no, it's so weird, man. I hope he's not pissed that I'm bringing that up. Does he have no bear, my other story in there? Is that that one that goes all over Northern Hemisphere? If it's all over, it's in there. He's got every damn thing in there. Yeah, um, that's neat. No, it's a super cool book available a long time from now. So the bear reads YouTube channel "Be Run by Baron Clay" and "Newcomme."

Yeah. Oh, February 11th. Two days before I turn 52, very auspicious day. Corrections. Here's a great correction. We're going to start a thing where you win a prize for, you know, we're trying to like, in an age of disinformation, shady information, yeah. We're trying to, um, we're going to have a weekly prize called "Correction of the Week" for the biggest fib. So no, rewarding people who catch us being wrong.

this is when we need to talk about stuff. I didn't know well.

“He even has the 37 minute mark at episode 826. Was that episode called?”

Scone smells or first. No, that wasn't it.

House gunks can ruin a marriage. Okay. I said, oh, to my defense. I'm still, this is still a correction. To my defense, I said, I don't think that a human operating word here being, I said, I, on the subject of skunks and skunk essence. I said, I don't think that a human can make then I didn't finish quite than I could. Okay. I said, I don't think that a human could make. I don't think in a lab, you could make as pugnacious or resilient of an order in a laboratory.

Guy wrote in. He's like, you're way wrong.

“They can't humans can and have. And he gets into some of these orders.”

While the skunk order is due to fuels, mercaptons, sulfur containing compounds, he says, there are other compounds, both synthesized and isolated in laboratories that smell much works. I like this one. Cadab. They have a lab based order called cadavirine, which is a lab produced order of decaying flesh. They have pyridine, pure, pure trust scene. And what he regards to be the worst smell of all time, thio acetone, an order so potent that causes nausea,

vomiting, and unconsciousness. There was a lab leak. There was a lab leak in Germany where they had, they had a lab leak of thio acetone and Germany in for a half mile radius around the lab.

“People reported nausea, vomiting, and unconsciousness from a leak.”

Powerful. And what did they use that for usually? I don't know why. I don't know how they

justify their worries. I don't know how that's a great question. This would be one of those things we talked about ridiculous. Maybe when you're like hack and unscience. They spent money on right. Make bad smells. Yeah. That's a good correction right there, man. I said, this is kind of correction. What would be the prize when you get correction in the week? It's got to be something good. It's got to be that we have a lot of it. We're going to maybe, maybe 52 of them. Maybe this will

excite people more. So we will have a segment sponsored by Tacobas. Tacobas is- Well they're going to do the question week. They are, they are non-stranger correction of the week and we will choose the

winning correction of the week. We'll do this for about a month first to see and the correction of

the week winner gets a pair of Tacobas. Oh, so we're going to start out. You get a pair of shit, kickers. And then we'll come up with something comparable every time. Sure. Yeah. That's phenomenal. So send in your correction of the week. Corrections and- This would be a great. This would be a great. This would be a great one. I say, and again, I said, think, I say, you can't make something worse than that in the lab. Guys like, yeah, you can. Here's no correction. He calls it a correction

by omission but I'd like to correct him. It's not a correction by omission. It's just a correction. So I don't think he'd win. Because like, he's saying, hey, here's a correction by omission. And then when I tell you the correction, you realize it's not a correction. It's just a correction. Yeah. He's just trying to super up. I said, we were talking about retrieval laws. We're talking about that in different states. Yeah, these different governing laws about whether you can go and

get retrieved game. Okay. So picture that. You're sitting there. You're sitting there and you shoot a doc, you know, ducks flying overhead. And you shoot a doc and and all of a sudden he like sails off and flump lands over on the neighbors place. States clarify. All states have clarified like, what are you, what are you allowed to do? Some states, you can just flat out go get it. There's a state where you can leave your gun behind and go fetch it. And there are states like

take it up with the landowner and be like, listen, man, I sailed the doc all around your place. Can I

“go grab it? And as terrible as it sounds, I mean, I'm totally like I, I'm like totally fine with that”

rule. Right. But I would like to think that most landowners would would want approached facilitate the recovery. I understand. I'm not condemning the rules. I understand that there are situations

where someone could set up in a way where they just basically know that that's going to be the

out. Yeah. I mean, it could be abused for sure, especially with big game. I feel like, yeah, where you're hunting in a spot where you're just, if you're sitting there going like, well, yeah, I know it's going to run on the neighbors place, but I'm allowed to go get it so that doesn't matter. Like that, that could be potentially problematic. He points out. So I say and sell the code of how it's legal to retrieve upland game, such as Fezans without landowner permission.

Okay. But you have the unarmed. We clarified that. Yeah. Meaning you hit a phasany, you hit a phasany sales off on the neighbors place. In South Dakota, you lean your shotgun, whatever, say your shotgun down, you run over and fetch it. He pointed out and he says that it was correction by omission. He points out. You can't do that with big game. And then weird strange. But I think it might, because South Dakota has that rule where you can hunt in the ditch alongside

roads. So it's like a right away. So I think a lot of those birds that get shot and 10 yards on to, you know, where you're not permitted to go. Yeah. There's doing it because of the rule that you

“can ditch on. Yeah. I, that's what I think. Yeah. But you can't, yeah. So just you can't, you can't,”

you can chase a phasany, you can't chase a deer. But if a buck sprung up out of that ditch. And you are allowed to have your dog run over and fetch it. But check this out. Let's say your dog runs over to fetch it. Flush is a phasany. This is what this guy's saying. If he's wrong, sending a correction, he'll have to give you a prize for correcting him. Um, if your dog runs over, I'll do a, let's say you're hunting your ditch hunting. And your dog runs on to some

dude's place. And flushes a bird off that dude's place. And that bird then flies over you on the right away. You can't shoot the bird. Right. Because your dog can go retrieve, but he can't go hunt.

Yeah. And that's basically having a dog with a shotgun.

Here's their scunk story. Those bad segue. Skye says this. This last week I had been skinned a scunk that caught a coyote trap. I wasn't really paying attention when I accidentally poked a hole in its scent gland. After realizing the terrible crime, well, we're done with corrections. Not right. Yeah. This is, yeah, this is the story. This is just story. Okay. After realizing the terrible crime, I had just committed. I put the scunk

outside to let things air out. So he was skinned an inside. And now we're later the cop showed up. Well, local police showed up in my house to inform me that there was a terrible smell coming from my house to the point that the local middle school had to go into lockdown, because they thought kids were smoking massive amounts of weed. He's word marijuana. They even had the fire department come to the school to test the air for toxins.

Now my whole town has been talking about me and referring to me as scunk boy. I don't think the smell was that bad, but I'm not sure what to do because I make a homemade scunk base lure that I used to catch all my predators. Do I, oh, here it goes into a question. This becomes like a like a advice. This is becoming an advice column. Do I stop making it and risk being less successful? He's low. It is he's leading the witness. Yes. Yes. Do I stop

“making it in risk being less successful on the tramp line? Or do I keep making it in secret?”

And hope there isn't another incident. I think that there is a middle round. Hunter Gregory. See, here's the evidence that name of your kid, Hunter doesn't backfire. Yep. His name's Hunter. Didn't backfire. No names are kid fishermen.

Angler. Angler? Yeah, they probably don't hear it. I don't know. I've never heard it.

Oh, door is a person. His name is Hunter. It didn't backfire. Obviously, he's obviously,

he's like neck deep in the disciplines. He's from Angler. Give us the last name.

“I think you got to take this whole operation elsewhere.”

If it depends, you have the right. Well, what's that machine? And we want to get the founder of this machine on. Oh, the nasal radar. Right, nasal radar. We call it radar, but the nasal. There's a machine that they use that quantifies bad smells. You know about this? No. Called the nasal radar. I don't say nasal radar, but I was just reading it. That's a correction. The nasal radar. It's like when you get a, oh, nasal ranger. Okay, nasal ranger. When you get a

smell complaint, like some dude skin and scones. It's so subjective. Yeah. Right. It's like,

why not bother you? I don't like the lady over there thinks it smells too bad. The guy over here. He doesn't think it smells that bad. So does it smell that bad? The nasal ranger is a machine

“that you put on your nose. It looks like an outbue with contraptions coming off it.”

Can you pull this up, Phil? Just so people could see. If Karen sends it to me again. Yeah. You don't have a little computer over there? And what does it do it? I don't have a picture. I guess I could just google it. It tells you how bad you think it should smell. No, no. The nasal ranger. I want just whole video about it. It's like insane. Okay. Okay. Like, let's say someone's like, dude, the hardfire next to my place is killing me. It's smell so

bad. And you're wise of being like, we're according to who? The nasal ranger, you, it looks like an outbue that hooks to your nose. There's a little nose cut. But it's got filters and shit coming off it. Okay. You go out there and there's a meter that shows like what it, okay, right there. It looks like if a cop was, yeah, clocking you, nasal radar. You wouldn't think that if you saw this, you would think a cop is smelling how fast your car is going. Okay.

There's a whole article in the New York Times from a few years ago, but what is it, like, I'm getting to that, but I want to, like, I want one so bad. Because I want to be able to use it in arguments in my wife. Yeah. Be like, she's not so bad. When she sends me one of her, like, twice a year, I can't live like this. Okay. Oh, yeah, we can, we can invest in one just like we did the Warner Bratsler sheer force. They're less expensive. Oh, wait. That's good.

Like, we bought that. And I don't know. Maybe we spent too much money on that thing for how much we needed it. We're going to keep trying to get our money through it. Welcome to meat eaters 12 and 26 presented by multi-mobile and on X maps. 12 of meat eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes, so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba.

If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on meat eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. Okay, here's my, here the other day here's my wife. My wife has this to say to me. She's going to have a lot more to say to you after you

put this in a pod. My wife says $22,000. By the way, there's $2,000 bucks. Yeah. A little background

of my wife. My wife has always worked. She worked all through having babies. She's taken time off of

work. And now she's like, now that she doesn't have babies, she's not working. She doesn't know what people do with themselves. So it's great. She started trying to, she's like, I'm going to try to learn how to play tennis. Totally great. Started baking. I am at tennis and can't figure out why my ankles are so itchy. I have small itchy bumps on both ankles. If you brought flees into our

“heart house because of the things you trapped, you need to figure that out now like before work.”

I am not going to live like this. Right. I get these all time. A lot of times a half to do with offensive orders. And if I had a nasal ranger, I would be able to be like, well, let's check. You could avoid consultation. I would be like, let's see if it's offensive or not. Let's take the subjectivity out of it. We need to make content out of it. Let's measure and we're going to

range. I think the fact, you can put any kind of ranger on that you want. I'll be like, well,

“you know what, it's actually not offensive. Because I hit it with the nasal ranger and it's”

right in acceptable limits. So now the nasal ranger, you hook it to your nose. And so let's say someone's like, it comes to you with a, they're complaining about how something smells. And they go, just smell. Yep. What do people don't breathe that way? Right. That's, that's not fair. You don't know when comes around going, not just last week. I was, uh, I had already boiled this coyote skull. Great. But it need a little touch up. There were some things that were still hanging

on there. And my wife laughed as like, I'm just going to do it on the stove. Sure. 100%. I didn't smell

a thing. But when she got back, she smelled it. Yeah. And I just like, it smells a little like boiling meat. That's all. Exactly. I'm just a cold-blooded restoration to clear the skulls. Ooh, yeah. We'd

“clean out the whole university building that way. That's, that is a, it's own kind of, that is a”

crazy order. The nasal ranger. You put it up to your nose. And there's a little meter that shows that you're inhaling normally. So you can't go in and not breathe. Right. And say like, I don't smell enough because you're not breathing. And you can't go in an over smell. It, it makes it that you're

hitting like a baseline normal breathing. And it's got these contraptions on it that are sucking

in the air. And it's throwing out a calibrated offensive measurement. So you're going to apply a number to when something wreaks. I love it. So let's say someone in the summer, some guy hits deer and thought by your house, whatever, it's crawling maggots and someone's like, my God, that smells. Imagine if you could just go, yeah, it's a five. Yep. And apply a number to a thing that is just entirely subject. I have a feeling that with 50 years of a life lived, you know, breaking down animals,

smelling everything there is to smell. I have a feeling that the nasal ranger will skew towards the gen pop. And probably, I think everything you are completely dead into will read as offensive

“to most people. Yeah. That's why I need a nasal ranger. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You can tweak”

the settings a little bit. Yeah. So it comes out in your favor. Yeah, like hack into the software, whatever to make it like not. Because yeah, because what if it backfires in your wife's like, no, dude, this is as high as it goes. It's in 11. Yep. It's in 11. Anyway, to this guy making this lure, and I understand, but I don't know why in the world you're making that next to the school. It's like, I feel like you have a right to do it, but take the operation elsewhere.

Yeah. I mean, he did puncture the gland, which I'm sure made it over 800 times worse. Yeah. So he probably knows if he's making this lure, he knows that you go down to Murdox. And you go into the veterinary and care aisle. And you get one of them large gauge hyperdermit needles. I mean, the kind of needle you can look through the son of a bitch. You know what I mean? You get one of those heavy gauge veterinary and needles that they use in jet cattle with. Put that into there and suck that smell out,

elsewhere. Yep. Not at home. Then you mix it in with your Vaseline or your petroleum jelly, or whatever you're putting in, you've got a skunk based paste elsewhere out in the woods. Here's an art tip he might want to know about. And I was turned on to this one that works very well. Get yourself a big sack of kitty litter. Get yourself a little small action pack, or everyone you's out here. This top 5-gown bucket, whatever. Fill it with kitty litter. Once you make your lure,

deep six at net cat litter. Deep six the lure in there. Store it in paste. I got store it in a container. Deep down in kitty litter. For your offensive odors. That won't escape that. No, not when I get a nasal range, I'll prove it. I'll prove it. We'll take a draw some skunk, then we'll put it down in a bottle and kitty litter and take a draw off it and you won't, that nasal range is not going to pick it up. Another guy wrote in about skunks. He's in the

nuisance wildlife removal business. They do a lot of skunks in the spring and summer. He could pick just skunk gets in your house living under your porch. Someone gets upset.

Do you guys remember that we were taught earlier? Do you remember during the pandemic when I had like a northern Europe, they had to kill all those hundreds of thousands of mink? Yep. What they felt, you know, they felt that those all out. They did. Yeah. I thought they would make mink prices skyrocket because they killed all those rants, mink, or whatever, but someone's like that all went to market. Anyhow, what I didn't realize, they got these little

gas powered rigs they drive around in on those mink farms and there's a box on the rig and it's harvesting its own CO2. So like you're driving this little golf cart around and it's harvesting its own emissions to youth in Asia. The whole thing sounds just like not a good line of work.

“Yeah, like a tough business to be in. That's how they do that. They're killing them like that.”

So this dude is saying when they get like a problem skunk, they utilize it with CO2. Well, anyways, and then they throw him in a freezer, which I don't get. But they had a guy in there and he says, I'll put it delicately to say he lacked attention to detail. He pulls the skunk out of the CO2 chamber too early and places it into a freezer. A half hour later, a different guy comes along and opens the freezer and there's a skunk band.

Fine. No. Oh, shut the freezer real quick. I got you. Makes a plan on how he's going to deal with this, but then the skunk is waiting for him. The next time he opens the freezer flop. Yep. Nailed him. He says, you can't get that smell out of that freezer. Oh, yeah, that does surprise me.

“Lastly, I'll see you do want to say this. You're back to wanting to say this.”

Okay. One more launch. We got a thing coming out called 12 and 26. So that means in 2026, we're going to at least like 12 outdoor films. Each episode showcases a hunt from a different meter crew member.

The first episode features Yani's archery black bear hunt in Manitoba, which is out now.

So stay tuned for more and check out these hunt episodes of 12 and 26 series. All right. George. Hit me with. Let's, I don't know. I want to get into the animal communication. And I want to talk about brown sculptures, but I want to dive into the animal communication stuff here. If you could think about from your career and in your study of animals,

“what unless let's keep to what lives around here? What animal do you think lives around here”

has the or not doesn't need to be around here? What American animal? The people will be familiar with. What in your, who in your mind has the greatest vocabulary? Land critters. You know, the probably the one that's been studied that way most. And that's probably because it's only

because that's the one that's been studied that detail is paradox. They have incredible vocabulary

that goes down to the level of there's a guy walking through the colony with a green shirt on and he's tall. No. Yep. He's walking fast. He's walking slow. It's another guy. He's got a red shirt on or a yellow shirt. There's a badger. There's a hawk. Hawks flying fast. On and on and on. Yeah. This guy called. What? Yeah. Yeah. They went down to the level of saying, you know, it, in a certain level, they needed to analyze it with computers because you just can't

hear Perry dog at that level. Okay. So they slow it down. You can see all the bumps and blips and the and the spectrogram on the computer. And these differences are parsing out with their experimental

design. Here. And they even went to the level of, let's put something in there. They've never seen.

Okay. So what they did is they basically put a cardboard cutout or maybe he's plywood painted black. Put it on wire and strung it through, moved it through, pulled through the colony. They came up with a new word. Something they'd never heard him say before. They put it away. Instead of an oval, like the first one, they put out a square. They say something different. They pull it back out a little while later. They use the same word for the oval.

it's just an alarm call. It's just like, like, all right. I'm not getting much out of that. But when

you start listening with a lot of this stuff, you're like, oh, there is a little difference there. And if you could listen with the ears of a ground squirrel or a pocket go for any of these things, you might hear it too. But some of those, they can, like the researchers, it was so funny. They were so accurate that they had different vocalization for dog versus coyote. No, really. So they're sitting there. The researchers can hear this difference. And they're hanging out. And this

this prayer dog says, uh, there's a coyote coming. And clearly, the researchers can see it's a dog they're like, ah, they messed up this time. It's like one example. And it gets closer and it's a coyote.

“They're like, what the heck? Oh, honestly, that's making sense. So they identified this thing right.”

It was a coyote. They gave the coyote alarm. But the researchers, not knowing their language real well. Well, they knew the language enough to say, hey, they're alarming for coyote. Through their eyes, they're seeing what they think is a dog. Oh, so the research is like, oh, it's a domestic dog. Is it domestic dog? It looks like a coyote. They just messed up and it gets closer and like, sound good. It's a coyote. So that stuff, it's actually everywhere. It's

but Prairie dogs have been best studied that way. They're vocabulari. They even say that they,

they have these sound bites that are like, um, phony games. They're basically like,

but to add to, you know, sound fragments that we reconbine into making words and sentences, paragraphs. They have sounds that function the same way. So they can reconbine these sounds to say, dog, coyote, hawk, badger, guy, short guy, tall guy, coming through the colony. I was reading this thing a long ago. It's like one of the dirtiest tricks I've ever heard in science. Um, I don't know where they were doing it. I don't know where's the verb at monkey-loved,

a verb at monkey. The verb at turret, uh, African who's an African. Yeah. They were looking at the vocabulary of verb at monkeys and they were getting this idea that they had and it might be more nuanced in this. But they're like, there's a thing that says threat from above, okay, and it'd be like certain avian predators. Yeah. And they had a noise that they realized

“it meant, um, threat on the ground. And they thought specifically as about leopard. So that's what”

it was. Yeah, leopard's. So they would record these verb at monkeys, making these vocalizations. And you could play it and get the response, meaning if there's a threat on the ground, everyone goes into a tree. If there's a threat from the air, the troop all seeks overhead protection. Yeah. Then they recorded a monkey. They recorded his threat call. And they would play it and everyone would respond. But they eventually burned the guy out where he became the boy who

cries wolf. Poor guy. And they burned him out. Where do they're like, he always does that.

And he's wrong to the point where if he did vocalize, they would ignore it because they're like, that dude makes that noise all the time because they had been playing it to everybody. And they burned the dude out on it. Yeah. But this is like, when you're talking about it's way more, I mean, like way more than, hey, on the ground, hey, in the air. Yeah. That's like, yeah, at deer camp with the kids, like, when you and I walk through the prairie dog town, those things are like, hey,

when they see Jimmy, they're like, oh, it can't. Yeah. Maybe for how we do. Yeah. And he's got a gun. He's got a gun against that one kid. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. It's, I think you're referring to that chaining safer. I did a lot of that work in ambiceli National Park where they're looking at those verbits. And yeah, they had a different call for something in the air. Marshall Eagles, I think they were, that's different one for leopards. And they had a different one for snakes. Okay.

“I remember that now. Yeah. And yeah, and there's, that's a toughy with these animal vocalizations,”

like, how do you know? You don't speak that language. So they had these really clunky, sometimes really, you know, mean ways of figuring out, all right, at least it's this level. This is what they're meaning. Mm-hmm. But in between, like, for me, I listen to ton of ravens. I just

dialects. They've got stuff. You can't even imagine. Well, at what point did you first start getting

“interested in the, just like the vocalizations of animals? Well, I grew up, like you guys said,”

I hunted and fished and trapped for, you know, a lot of my youth because that was, you know, the culture I grew up in. So I grew up learning call turkeys and ducks and gear. And, um, but like, it wasn't enough for me. Mm-hmm. Just me being me. I was like, I want to know more. You know, what do they do now outside of hunting season? What do they say when this happens? What are they doing when nobody else is watching? And, um, you didn't watch birds. Like, nobody,

I didn't know anybody that watched birds telling what to college. And they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to be burning. Yeah, really. You know, my old man, he had an interesting bird taxonomy. Like, as a, as a hunter, you know, it was like, there's this huge chunk of birds that were Tweety birds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's the, like, the ones like, like, the outside of my, there's intensely interested in game birds. Right. There's a handful of other birds that catch my interest,

but then there are the Tweety birds. Yeah. Yeah. I friend has a system. Uh, he has, it's arts and arts for hawks. Arts are a red tail. Oh, yeah. Narts are not a red tail. Well, I was like, Jason, not, you know, it takes red tails to get a couple of years under their belt before they get a red tail. He's like, God dammit. So that throws a whole damn system off. Yeah. I was reading it.

“I think it was in Barry Lopez's Arctic dreams, where I think it was in that book,”

where he's talking about, into its map drawing. Hmm. This is early. Like, he was relating above early, like, early contact with certain, into a hunter groups. And they would draw maps. And they wouldn't do the, the maps would be to the scale of interest. Hmm. So if they're mapping an island, and there's a bay where they hunt ducks. When you draw the map, the island gets really small, because they don't do, it doesn't matter. And the bay is the map. Yeah. And it's kind of like,

here's the part on something. Here's the part of interest. And then I'll just kind of rough in something to suggest the rest of it. Hmm. Right. And I feel like, with a lot of wildlife stuff, it's like elk, right? The bugle. You know, because it's useful in hunting. And you can probably hunt

elk a whole life and never be like, what? Really is going on with that thing. That's the kind of stuff

there. Right. You know, like, it works or don't work. Yeah. But it's kind of, you sort of have a, like, we'll, we'll map it from a hunter's perspective. We'll map its vocalization pattern, and it'll only go as far as what I need to know to satisfy my, like, base plan. You're not really interested in what you might be saying to them. Right. They're worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And that's

“to you and nature. Like, we're, we're simplifying machines. That's what our brains are designed for.”

After sensory stuff, like problem solving, figuring out what those patterns are. You know, what does that mean? And I only pay attention to the stuff that affects me. You know, but

when you start paying attention to what affects them, then the world opens up. What was the first,

what was the first animal? It was a turkey. Like, what was the first animal you kind of dove into? And started realizing you were finding out things that maybe other people didn't know. Well, I was obsessed with turkeys. Okay. Like, I was, like, my career was going to be making turkey calls going around a column, calling contest. We're not going to stop upstate New York. Okay. And they just recolonize that area. So I was taking every spare minute. You could only hunt

till noon, but I was going out before school every day during the season. This is a funny one. That the disciplinary and principal, the vice principal when my folks were in that school had retired by this point. And I called well enough that he's like, "Can you come with me?" You know, skip school. Come with me on Monday and Tuesday. My mom's like, "Hell, no! Frank, don't want you to skip." This vice principal wants you to skip school. So you go turkey call for him.

Like, that's legit right. Come on. We were like, "Mouth calling back, like no call or we're using calls." I was doing now. I was building wingbone calls. I was building slate calls, box calls, using my voice. I was doing all of it. You know? And, um, but it was interesting because sort of like we're talking about. And that hunting scene, you know, there was a, there's a core pallet of sounds that you use. And they do the job. But I hit a certain point and it was actually

when I went to my first calling contest, I'm like, "Wait a minute." This is what the guy,

There's no turkeys in this contest. And there's certainly no turkeys behind the curtain saying,

"Yeah, that sounds like a turkey." You know? That's a great point, man. I was like, "Mmm." What, you know, and there was even a found an article when I was working on the book this guy who was a judge. He said, "You know, if you hear a lot of, um, really bad calling, you know, it's, it's a wild turkey." If you let a lot of really good calling, it's a guy. You know,

“turkeys make a lot of mistakes. And I'm like, "Wait a minute." Do mistakes? I think it costs them.”

It costs them. You make a sound. The predator's got a beat on you, right? You make a sound. It costs energy to make the sound. Like they're not doing it for no reason. Just because we don't

know the reason doesn't mean it doesn't have one. I put, I put, there's the, I get the point.

Yeah. There's no, no, like the point would be this. There's, there's a, there's a YouTube video I love. And it's a hand. Like a wild ass hand. In the woods. And she has the most rockist. Bad, uh, box call, Yelp. Which she stands there and does 27 times in a row. 27 times in a row. If you heard that, there's no way. He'd be like, that's a hand. You'd be like, that is some 12 ass-year-old kid.

With his dad's box call. And he's just going to stand on that ridge and do that.

“Yeah. I would 100% say that that's what that was. I'm like, God, some kid up there.”

It's a handstander. 27 times in a row. Yeah. So the, like, but it, it's something like, if you could interview her, you're like, home, are you doing this on accident? Is this all a mistake? She would probably tell you, no, no, um, what I'm doing is I'm, you should have seen the last time I did this. Yeah. You know what happened? Yeah. But like, I don't know, like, what is she doing? You know, what is she doing? Yeah. How much variability is in there that's acceptable for

purpose X? Like, you're doing a lost call. It does go on 20 plus notes. But like, within there, how much stuff coded in there beyond I'm lost or where the heck are you? That's where they're fine with some of these new studies on songbirds and stuff because they hear differently than us. They're hearing into these sounds stuff that, hey, there happens way too fast or as in frequency ranges that we don't register real well. So it's like, it almost seems in some

“cases like the size of the animal and their metabolism, their pace of life is coded to their”

communication. So like there was a study where they actually took sperm fowl clicks. Let me explain. So like sperm whales, huge animal. Yeah. Hey, communicate in these clicks, travel real well underwater. And somebody had the broad idea, you know, they're trying to figure out what the heck these things mean. You know, one of the reasons is this and they've since found out a whole bunch, but somebody had the broad idea to go in and delete all the spaces in between the clicks.

And lo and behold, it sounds like a songbird. Like you hear all the rising and falling of this, you know, where you're still listening to humans, birds, they're communicating so fast, but maybe those smaller animals, their pace of life, their metabolism, whatever it is that makes them them, they're able to, in essence, from our perspective, slow down that sound of the winter rent or the Magnolia Warbler and here into little tweaks of individual notes. Let's say and get more

information out of that. Welcome to meat eaters 12 and 26 presented by multi-mobile and on-ex maps. 12 of meat eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year, released throughout

2026. These are long form episodes, so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my

baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on meat eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. I remember some, I was reading somewhere where some guys say in like, when you go to like, you're going to, you see a fly and you're

just going to smack them. I mean, to the fly, he might be like, in a minute, I'm going to move because there's this thing coming toward me. Do you know, like his trip, his like trip through life

and he's right, no, it's going. Totally. Yeah, he's like, what they want to burn is just going

ape shit crazy. Yeah, like what, yeah, something else might be like, oh, he's saying, oh,

“kinds of, yeah, it just, there's a great essay written in the 1930s, I think, 30 years early,”

40s about the title is what it's like to be a bat and the clue, you know, even if we could take the best AI and all these models and figure out their language and speak the same language, we still wouldn't have a clue what they're talking about. You know, this when you go to a different country, or even if they speak English, there's culture, there's that culture behind and underneath all that language that when you make a joke among friends, like everybody knows

in that group, what the hell you're talking about. But even if we could know that language for a bat,

for a bird, it takes being able to hear like a bat. Yeah. It's breathed like a bat, you know, all these things that contribute to them being what they are that factors into how they interpret what they hear and say. Yeah, like we've long, I mean, like forever of known that there are decibels, the animals communicate in that we flat out don't hear. So it's like sort of, you start with that like, 100, there's things we don't hear that we know we don't hear. Yeah,

there's research about the way birds perceive, you know, there's so much iridescence in birds. There's probably something in their eye and they see iridescence. It just reads fundamentally different than what we see when we see iridescence. Right. They take it in. Right. And the idea that there are like you're saying that when you're at a turkey calling contest, what we're going when we're saying, man, that sounds a lot like a turkey could be tons of gibberish to a turkey.

Yeah, a great example is like when I, when I do a hen yelp, I found over years, I wouldn't get

“the same responses if I used to box collar or slate. And the only thing I could come to is that”

it sounded good to me, but there was things in my call, maybe it's missing frequencies or something, that made it sound plastic or fake or something, just that didn't get the same response. And literally just go to a box call, you know, you got instant response. That's like, what's up with that? You know, is it, you know, certain frequencies like high frequency drops off real fast? So over distance, you know, whether it's an elk call or what have you,

you're generally picking up the low frequency sounds that travel better. But when you're right at close to something like holy cow, you hear that elk bugle right next to the car, if you're in Yellowstone or something, you're like, whoa, I'm missing a ton of stuff. There's a lot more going on there. What, you know, what are they hearing? You know, they, you know, like a lot of the canines, wolves, coyotes, they can hear, you know, Dave Meach found that in open terrain,

“wolves can you have to 10 miles an open train. And Max, I think for me, unless wind conditions and”

the other things are going on, the Max is about three miles for me. So this is where I often with students and stuff, I'm like, look, you can't ever hear that. You want ever smell that, not even with the nose wrench or whatever. Come on, you ask, he can't do this, he does a ringer. But if you start watching these animals closer, you're like, hey, wait. All of a sudden, they're starting to gather up. There's face in one direction and then they howl, um, instantly, you know,

okay, I'm looking at half of this story. The other half of the book is, I've had this happen, you know, friends with radios. There's six miles away. Yeah, yeah, we got the, I get, we'll pack their howling to the east, you know, you're watching the druids, you're there listening to the west and they're going back and forth having a conversation for hour to hours. We can't hear anything but the individual standing in front of us. There's so many animals do and stuff like this that

we're like getting these fragments thinking that we know it's going on and when they're having conversations over space and in terrain that we don't even know what happened. You know, we'll move away from turkey's in a minute, but you've obviously been super close to hands, like all the, like, I don't know what, I can't think of it. What distance you become aware of it, but they're

always making noises. Yeah, those little noises you wouldn't hear from a hundred yards away,

but in ten yards you can hear it, you know. Yeah. What, let's, let's, let's, let's, I'm taking

like, let me ask you, wrote some real simple, do you feel that a gobble is just a gobble?

Or do you feel that there are, there are different gobbles that mean different things? Yeah,

“I think there are different gobbles and I, I thought for years that gocobles just a gobble”

and a young Tom makes, not as good a gobble. That's the idea, right? He sucks at it. He's just sucks. He hasn't learned how to do it. Because he aspires the one day be like, exactly just blow your hair back. But he's working on it. It was a grad school I was talking to the friend who is, you know, he's really sharp on bird behavior and, and all things, you know, research wise and, and scientific question answering kind of wise. And he, he turned my mind on it

and I thought for years, you know, a young Tom, you know, full on gobble. It looks like a big, full long and then you hear a Jake. It's like, it just chunked up and he's, he's like, no, you got to understand their gobbling in context to who's around them. And then I started noticing

“son of a gun. He's right. If it was just that Jake had many times with that Jake would actually”

give a full on gobble because he was by himself. He didn't know the big guy was over that ridge and Holland asked over to kick his butt. So he could say whatever he wanted to. Of course he wants to sound like the big guy in campus, right? And I'm like, son of a gun. Then I started seeing in the field. I'm like, a gobble isn't a gobble, maybe. It's like a subservient gobble. I loved it, you know, correct me and add to it. If listeners have listened for this kind of stuff more, I'd

love to learn more about that because that, you know, my turkey days are a little further back than some other stuff. Yeah, if you're fascinating, would just think of that. If you could read into a gobble and be like, oh, that gobble, he's like, I'm coming now. That gobble, he's like, "Yeah, I heard y'all may become a gobble. You're like, oh, he's really like a nap call." You know, triple gobble, you're like, he's got to be coming. Do you think he's loving the call when

he hears the dojo gobble? That always to me seemed like a good barometer to how excited they were.

Yeah, they gobble off the ruse and they hit the ground and gobble and kind of gobble along. But once you get them fired up, man, they're, they're double triple gobbling repeatedly.

“And you're like, you're ready, you're ready, you're ready, you're there, come off, you know?”

So, you know, if you look at it, the more I started looking at it from the turkey's perspective, the more I started understanding from my human perspective, you say, you think about, do you spend more time on crows around Ravens? We just have more Ravens around home, so I spend more time listening to them. Okay. Yeah. The other day, it was too long ago, I was watching one and he just seems to be like, from my perspective, he seems to be just wasting energy.

He's flying along, just raising hell. That's just making racket. Yeah. Right. Yeah. At a high way up. And I'm like, he's not with anybody. He's just like, making racket. Like, give me some insight into what, like what they're capable of conveying. Sure. Yeah. And there's got to be something like, I found something to eat. Like, that's pretty clear. Yeah. There's stuff that it'll blow your doors off. And I, you know, I've only scratched

the surface. I've found stuff that researchers haven't found. I've corroborated for myself,

things that they've found that, yeah, that holds here too. And to me, it's always about

starting into these conversations, listening to what's most common. You pick the most common thing close to you and pick the most common thing it says. Okay. So it's like, I don't only have pigeons around. Great. Awesome. Use pigeons. Because the lessons you learn through the pigeons actually are going to apply to the red squirrel, the Raven. Okay. The coyote, all those kind of other things. So you start sensitizing your

nervous system to it. And so when we were living in the park, I purposely, I'd finished my graduate work. I was like, done with academia. I did not want to read another scientific paper. And in that case, I just wanted the Ravens to teach me. It took longer, but I learned a lot more. So the most common thing they were saying was, oh, yeah, they like saying that. Yeah, I like, I'm a little like to be the longest time to realize the ones that were doing that were the ones that were

this is their song. This is their territorial call that they used to keep the riffraff out. Their largest songbird in the world, even though it's not melodic, that's their no trespassing sign. They're largest songbird in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Common Ravens. And so I was like, the least melodic, yeah, I like the songbird. But they're quoting people. You could like, so that's that's

funny because I never thought about that classification. They'd be classified as a songbird. They

are. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they're in the passery and order, which is that all the purchasing birds. Okay. Cordy family, you know, which is Jay's Crow's Jack does, Magpie's stuff. But that gave me a hook.

“I was like, okay, I think I know what that three note thing is now. And then the key and I always”

stress this, the folks is start listening for where it varies and go. So there's one day I was out and you know, the Ravens are out there. Yeah, he would be with the him sitting on a post being like, this is where I hang out. This is my song. Yeah. This is my turf. Does that tell me to give you the noise. Okay. Right. And then this kind of group, you know, your listeners like making animal

sounds is cool. Like in pop culture, like you meet somebody at the dinner party and they're speaking

to one person and Korean and one person and Italian and another person and French and you're like, dude, who's this guy? You know, we see that as sophistication. You know, it's like, you must have all this, you know, worldly experience, but you make an animal sound and they're like, ah, you know, like, you know, so I was trying to practice. I'm like, no, that betrays our bias against

“animals as stupid and under us. You need to start seeing them as those creatures that look into”

the ultraviolet, as those creatures that hear an ultrasonic and subsonic sounds and those creatures that smell at parts per trillion, like they best us in so many ways. So listen from that perspective

when I make animal noises. Because it's a crowd pleaser, but the value in there is starting

to get people to listen beyond, okay, that common call. Mm. Just counting. There's more notes and it's faster. And I discovered that just simple thing alone was happening when the tourists pulled out on the pullout in the road right below the crowd fence and popped out the bag of cheetos. Like they see food. They notes in their territory. I'm going to get it if anybody is and you sure as hell better not come in here and think you're going to steal it from me. So like that

extra energy and repeated notes was almost like a more emphatic mind, mind, mind, mind, mind, right. You know, we've locked you into an area, you know, as a group to go sit down and listen and watch and just us being there. Those ravens would jump off their purchase and start flying over. Do in that. But they're not talking to you. They're talking to other ravens. Like whatever's

“going on here is in our turf. We're on it. That's what it seems like. I got a question for you.”

So that was the situation where there's people involved. They recognize that that's potential food source. Would you hear that? Did you ever hear that same noise like when there were like out in the back country when there was a carcass around or something? That's an awesome question, wrote it because that I've seen that. So it's corroborating the mind, mind, mind, mind, mind, like it. The one I think of most is there was a spot in slew Creek. Big flats, this bystander died.

It'd been dead for a long time pretty much eaten up, but the resident ravens every time another raven came within like half a mile. They were up in the car count. Yeah. And if not flying over toward them to perch and give them another cussing from within the turf. So it's both. Yeah. Yeah. What is they like what are they doing vocally around like we know all these sounds like go back turkeys for a minute? We know all these sounds that in our human understanding we've

kind of got it. Like these are sounds of courtship. Okay. The same way we might look at it out you can be like that's a sound of courtship. What like when you hear a raven you're just hearing like raven noise you don't understand. What is a what what are they doing in the breeding season? Like what what kind of things is a raven want to communicate in the breeding season? What would be the equivalent of how we at least how we perceive to be a gobler going to the

woods goblin, you know, trying to draw hands in? Yeah. I think it's it's different for a reason because they're just socially different. Yeah. You know turkeys are flock creatures,

They mix in mingle and places. Ravens are very much territorial with, you know, kind of a slew of

“travelers and non-residents filtering in and around through there. Except times when somebody”

kills a bison got our way or an elk and those big food sources become big attractions. We know now from the research in the park that some of these birds are coming from Bozeman flying to my house and gardener and Yellowstone to feed on carcasses during the bison. Because the word spreads down the valley. Somehow? Yes. That's wild. You know what man? You know what? Like, we were hunting the area with my kids. We were hunting area this year where there's a lot. There's

a big cow elk harvest in a certain area pretty annually. I was even coming to my kids like

I'm like these things know what goes on here and they're like in town for it. I didn't know they were in town from far away. I thought they were in town from the other side of the valley or

“something. That's what I used to think. No way in hell. These suckers are traveling 20 to 30 miles”

in the morning. So you think of a Yellowstone bird. You're like, oh, that's a big wilderness bird. They just hang out in the park. No, they come up there either feeding at the dump in gardener or West Yellowstone or out Cody flying back at midday. They're commuting. Literally commuting in the morning off the food source, flying back in the day to maintain their territory. It's actually 30 miles away. Yeah. And that's daily. You know, saying that they have their own place. They'll

regard as their hangout, their house. Absolutely. So to get back to that, the call that I learned next in sequence with Ravens was this. And before I even saw them, I knew they were moving. Right? That's the sound they make when somebody's violated the no-fly zone in their turf. So they have to be back there on their territory to hold that space for them. So when the turf season rolls back around and everybody's got frozen pizza and baloney sandwiches and like they don't

have to do any fighting and in border control. They're good to go because everybody knows that's their

“turf. But we're close to loop on the mating season stuff. I think a lot of these big food source”

locations end up being like the bar, the dating scene for Ravens. And so you'll see them displaying they aren't vocalizing as much that we can hear. If you're close and you hang out at the dump for the Ravens, like I do sometimes and not for the trash, you hear all these crazy soft sounds that probably, I don't know if we'll ever figure out what they mean. You probably heard those like a water drop and stuff and they use them in context of getting them to know each other.

And you can tell at times when they display, they're not fanning like a turkey, but they'll puff their throat, they'll hold their beak up, you'll probably see them, especially around like a gut pile or something where the birds converge, look real close because in a general sense, when you see those birds that kind of drop their wings a little bit, they're puffing up, they drop their flank feathers, those are your resident birds. Those are the territorial ones who own that space,

so to speak. The others are interlopers and they'll be trying to run them off. In fact, when I did start reading back into the literature on Ravens, it confirmed what I'd seen in Yellowstone where what Barron Heinrich, one of the world's leading authorities on Ravens, had found near his cabin in Maine, was this dead moose. One dead moose and one Raven finds it. It lands and gives this call and Ravens come out of the woodwork and start feeding on it

with it. And he's like, that makes no sense, right? You like make a beautiful barbecue dinner for you and your family and before you eat, you have the high school football team come over and

die in first. You know, like biologically, behaviorally like that didn't make sense until he started

studying him and marking that. And what he figured out was the ones doing that were younger ones and non-territorial birds. And that call, which is a great way if you ever injure an animal or you've got a down animal and train you can't track them on, you've got to listen to the Ravens because that call doesn't mean food in a generic sense, any food. It means meat. Really? So that bird is calling out to avoid being persecuted by the residents who own that

wouldn't get any food. But by going, it brings in an overwhelming number of other Ravens

“in everybody ends up getting some. You know, that, I think of an analog that a friend of mine”

was accidentally trespassing and found a man with jaw. So he had to go over and say, sir, I was accidentally trespassing on you. And lo and roll up on a man with jaw. What are we going to do about this? And at that point, he called in all his buddies and stained around him to make sure he got the right answer. He's like, he's like that Raven. He's like, dude, I'm like, I know him on your place. It's a big elk. And me help, yeah.

I just would like to know what happens with the thing and just try to be part of this, you know? In a meeting to find your place. And what I'm going to do is calling a bunch of my buddies to help me pack it out. There you go. No way. Welcome to Meet Eater's 12 and 26

“presented by Multi-Mobile and on-X maps. 12 of Meet Eater's biggest and baddest hunts from the last”

year released throughout 2026. These are long form episodes, so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meet Eater's YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26

in the coming months. Yeah. Hit me with Meet Colligan. So let me qualify. It sounds very similar to what young birds do when they're still on the nest and they're fledging. So if you've ever had

a raven or a crow nest near your place, you know they never shut up. Like they just talked and

a lot of that is just great on your nerves and it's supposed to because the nest is what they're saying is mom. Right. So if you see an adult bird in the way you tell on a lot of birds and certainly for Corvids, if you see them call pick up your binocs and look in their mouth. Okay. If the lining of the mouth is black, it's an adult. It's three years or older. We can't agent be on that. We just know that after about two years, the mouth lining is all black. If it's a red

pink, it's a juvenile. So if you hear a juvenile going off like that in August or September, you're like, yeah, stupid kids. I'm trying to get the parents to still feed them. But if it's a black mouth adult doing that, you want to start looking. You want to start looking for the Magpie's going in and out. You want to see there it's seen if that there's a coyote coming over the whole. Oh, you know, it's just a corroborating evidence that there's something there that you're missing

that the eyes and the sky picked up. And do the noise again? And you'll have to hear once. Like I've had guide friends. They're like, hey, there's a new bias in the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. That's it. I don't tell me anymore. I'll go in the park and I'll hang out. I'll go to a real good

viewpoint prominent point and I'll close my eyes. And I'll listen for the first time I hear that call.

“And often because we often bias or other senses sometimes, I'll point in the direction I think it”

is, then I'll open my eyes. And there it is, almost without fail. Because he's making that racket. He's making that racket because it found the food and it's calling in buddies to make sure the residents don't run them out. You can, that's one of the best ways to find that there. Also what he I got mixed up about what he's saying or what you're he's being like, if I go down by myself, I'm going to get harassed and run off. Yeah. So he's basically calling in

like reinforcements. So that they can go in and feed and they've got enough people there where it's not going to be. Yeah, it's like a smoke screen. Yeah, feathered smoke screen to give them the opportunity to sneak in there without getting beat up. And you'll hear it too, like there's an awesome reference. You ever read any of Richard Nelson's ethnography work from Alaska? Yeah. In prayers to rave and there's a passage in there. It's awesome. And there's like a one sense

description in there that I just want to know what he's talking about there. He said when the in native hunters, the kitchen find a fresh bear track in the snow, they hide and they make the

going, I'm like, no, you know, come back there. There's two possibilities. One is that non-territorial

“bird saying, right? That's possible. The other one, which I think is probably more likely”

is the squabbling calls you hear when ravens are on the ground at a carcass fighting. Oh, and they're all duking it out. Do you can it out? Told you. Yeah. That, like, we got a good deal about it. That's interesting, man. You'd go and get a bunch of guys who could do that. Start making that noise and see what shows up. Yeah, I don't know how effective it was, but it's effective enough apparently in their culture that there, it's a known thing. One of my favorite things in the

and make, make prayers to the raven. One of my favorite things that he learns from those guys is hanging out with is, you know, they'd like to den dick bears. Yeah. And um, their take is like, man, anybody can, you know, because we look at that, like, you know, most people look at that, like, a cowardly act, you know, on sportsmen like their take is like, man, anybody can shoot a bear

“walking around. Go climb in there and drag them right. Right. And the old days they're doing it”

with a lance. Yeah. They let the bear charge him, you know, go climb in there and drag them out and tell me about how easy it is. Yeah. Wussy. That's a good book. Yeah. He spends a lot of time on. I mean, obviously, that, that thing of, like, the significance of Ben Bird, which is probably

in some way motivated by it's, it's just incredible intelligence. Yeah, and I could totally see, like,

people will often ask questions like, like, you know, the wolves around, you know, are they leading wolves to kills? And so far as we can see, no, like, there might be one or two instances in the last 30 years where some of you can say, I, I'm pretty sure the Ravens were, maybe go to those wolves over. Uh, friend of mine was watching a, uh, brown bear or tap into the carcass or something. Oh, yeah. Or, you know, here's a weak animal. Oh, god. There's a carcass. Like,

come over here. Yeah. Oh, right here. You know, it's more, they're just like parasites to the wolves. They're just taking advantage of the wolves kill. I've seen times where wolves will be feeding on the back end of a, an old, were out bull elk and the Ravens are literally an antlers like waiting their turn. Come on, man. Give us give us a little space here. But you don't see that there's, like, a legitimate, like, hey, come quick. This thing's no, no, but, like, the northern

“cultures all over the globe were like, yeah, that's how we find the carabou. And I think a lot of”

those signals are as much, uh, behavioral, like, for instance, because we live on the edge of the national forest right north of the park, there's a lot of hunting that goes on. And I can go out for a walk with a dog and I'm like, uh, somebody killed something over by the travertine two miles away, just by the continual, unidirectional flight of every single Raven going mad way. So I think a lot of those early cultures probably were not just picking up on sound, but they are picking

up on directional flight, flight altitude. Um, if you see arrow back, you know, acrobatics in the air, they probably, they're close. There's a certain, I don't know, a number of hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters that you'll see Ravens chasing each other, trying to get food away from each other and, you know, like, so you know, you see that, you're like, oh, we're within a couple hundred yards of of that food source. I was in, I was in Tanzania this summer in the trackers,

use the what oxpeckers doing the morning. It's, it's, it's like, it's diagnostic. I mean, they don't look at, like, oh, maybe, maybe there's something over there that it's going to. Yeah, they're like, he, he's up in the morning when he flies out, he already knows. Yeah, he knows where they're at. The, the Buffalo. Yeah. Like, he knows where they are because he was with him before or whatever and he's going there. Yeah. You know, and so yeah, in that way. And those

messages, they might not go there because of whatever factors, or they're like, at daybreak, when six of them go through. Yeah. And disappeared down somewhere, like, that's not for something else. And bugs. There's a large number of bugs, you know, you probably read Boyd Vardies, you know, line trackers guy to life or something like that. One of his mentors was finding found a line kill from watching the flies. No, right. Same deal. You know, I interviewed a guy from the book,

and he didn't, it didn't end up making it into the final cut, but he and his buddy hunted a lot

in California. Really rocky ground. You know, the first time it happened, they, he shot a buck

it ran off somewhere, could kind of see, you know, ran out of blood, didn't know, just kind of gave up almost sitting on this, this hill or next to this trail and sort of seen, he called a meatbees, you know, shell jackets that you're trying to avoid if you're processing game from getting

thereafter to find down game. God, in places he couldn't track, you know, Tom Petty,

“late Tom Petty. He once said, one of the songs, he says, I can track a single bee to its hive,”

which is how these to find, yeah, stay in there. Some worms and stay in there, wait till one goes by, see as far as it went, go there, stay in there, wait for the number one to go by, you find your buckle like that, man. Yeah, bad ass. So you can. And it's all, that's to me, and I don't hunt anymore, and that's a whole different conversation, but just paying attention and trying to see the world through these other creatures eyes, you start picking that stuff up a lot more,

and this is what our ancestors, all of our ancestors knew this animal language stuff in far better

detail than I do. Like a friend of mine's hung out with a son, people in the Colahari. They are

unfreaking, believable and interpreting non-human communication. And the ones who are the best, you would think are the hunters. He's like, no, actually it's the women. The women are out in the bush, digging roots, they've got kids with them, they've got old people with them, all these people that are very vulnerable, if the Hainas or Leopard or the Lions come through, so they are ultra peaked. And he went out with them one day and they're digging away, and these women just spread out.

You're like, dude, that's not safe, right? From our perspective, hundreds of yards between these different women with the children digging roots and things like that. And he'd walk up to any of them, worth the closest lions without even stopping, they point. How far about this far, walk to another one. Hey, where are the closest lions? They point. Go out and visit multiple women doing this just effortlessly as part of their day. They're absorbing this information as they go.

And in that particular case, they went over a couple hours later in a vehicle. There's the fresh lion tracks. God. And even on down really specific stuff, like he told me this story, they were in this small plot of forest. And they hang out there in the day because it gets really, really hot. And they said to them, the white guys, the tourists do not leave this patch for us. There's momma's out here, there's cobras, there's Hainas, you know, the whole laundry list.

But one of the guys with them there was one of his students in animal language, bird language. And this student of his comes over, he says, hey, I know we're not supposed to leave, but

“I'm hearing this bird do something that I think might be talking about a snake.”

Can you come listen to it? So he goes over there with him at the edge of this little patch of trees. And he's like, yeah, I think you're right. But, you know, we're not going to go out there. Let's, but let's go get the one white guy. He's got a gun. We will check it out. So he comes over three of them walk out. And he's like, yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think it's, I think it's a snake, but let's go get acicoa. You know, this, this native guy, his name literally

translates into cobras. He'll know. So acicoa comes the four of them then walk within, I don't say, 60, 80 yards. And he's like, yep, there it is. It's a, it's a black momma. Don't go over there. So my friend says to his student who we originally found this whole deal. He's like, now watch this. They go back into the trees. And there's like five women sitting around making beads with ostrich eggs shells. And they're just talking. Kids are playing around. People are working on

tan and hides. You know, it's just usual stuff of a community. So they stand their patient. And

finally, there's a break in the conversation. And the translator says you want to ask the question.

So my friend says, yeah, do you ladies hear any alarms right now? And in unison, all five of them point over their shoulder to what is hundreds of yards away says there's a mama over there. Don't go over there. Hmm. So not only through their regular routine, where they hearing it, they also knew exactly what it meant. Have not even seen it with all this other noise and stuff going on like that's the level that not just native Africans, not just native Amazonians like

our ancestors knew that. And it's like so cool that we're discovering it now. It's like, no, it's neat. But this is really old. And it was used because it was so useful. It was retained.

“Because dinner was on the huff. And you need to know it was in there before you even went in there”

to just limit the chaos that that life brings at you. So, and for me, it's like I was guiding a ton.

well, if there's anybody on a carcass that's out there, it's probably going to be a bear.

“So you got to listen to the Raven. You got to watch the duck. So I don't want to see a wolf.”

You know, somebody by the way, I don't care. You got to watch everything here because everything has a response and a relationship with everything else and the more you pay attention to that, the more you're going to see all those connections start on just blossom. And what's even more cool is when you see the position you yourself hold, you're being talked about. They respond to you Steve different than you, Brody. If then the new current, you see in our dogs, dog has a different

bark for the UPS guy because he gives him snacks. Definitely different bark for the Fed X guy,

no snacks there. Different bark for the neighbor knows that guy pretty well. Different bark for

or behaviors when one of the family comes home. So we're not in isolation of this, you know, as it's seen in the wild world like we're doing it, our pets are doing it. It's just paying attention a little bit more so that you start seeing in the places that you want to know more. Our dog has a greeting for people whose house she has stayed at before. What is it? Just a level of like swirling around, making one, you know, that's like rolling over

under back. That means she's been, she's like been dog sat by them. Yeah. Well, the crazy thing is like, if you haven't done it, she's not going to do it. Right. It's true. It's so true. And like

literally three mornings ago, my wife and I are working at the dining room table. In our dog,

we got a black lab, Hobbes starts going bananas. Like, ape shit. I'm like, what, he only does that level of craziness for the UPS guy or if the neighbor's dog comes in the yard, because you want to go play. Right. I'm like, what is it? He's just like bouncing. He almost looked like at Koonhound. You know, it's big, you know, treat a raccoon. Bounce and on his front feet, bark and bark and bark and bark and I look out the front door before I let him out. And here's

a bobcat walking up the stairs from the lower yard into the upper yard. Hmm, 20 feet from the from the door. And then just veers off and through the yard. You'd see those traction like, oh yeah, that bobcat came through the night. Like no dude, it was 10 30 in the morning. We were working. And we would have missed it. Had Hobbes or in other cases, we've seen lines on our yard because the magpie's told us. You know, we had a line with four kittens in our yard this spring and

they disappeared after a while. Didn't think we'd see him again. And we're sitting on the porch, my wife and I and Jenny says, you're that like, yeah, magpies. Magpies when they are social and just hanging out together, let go. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. You hear it in different places.

“They're just checking in. But when it goes, that's like, that's what we heard. And she says,”

there's something down there. I'm like, I know. And she no more than stands up, walks less than the distance from here to Brody, looks over the railing into the lower yard. She says, look at the line. She didn't because of the for warning, he had enough time running the house, grab her camera and got this killer footage of the cat walking like 30 feet from our the corner of our deck and the magpie's right in the afternoon. Yeah. When you'd least expect it. It's like,

when your life is on the line, like a magpie who might be wacked by a wild cat or a raven who might get wacked by an eagle, like look to those things that their lies depend on most. And then you just start seeing this. This whole scene open up is that's why they're talking that way. And you're just, you're just an eavesdropper, listening down is like, oh, whoa. Like ravens have a specific call for golden eagles. Something seemed generic, but some things are extremely specific. And this one,

and I can take a while, like this one took me about five years to figure out what the heck it meant. I'd heard it and like, whoa, that's different. I can't figure it out. Flying high,

“just making noise, right? No. No, that's what happens when there's a golden eagle. What does that”

noise look? So it's a very consistent uniform series of notes to just go on. And it's, it's serious. And I was having lunch with the guy who runs the bird programs in Yellowstone and I'm like, hey, Dave, you did your graduate work on Golden Eagles, right? He's like, do you know this raven call? I've been hearing this raven call on pretty shirts just for gold and he's like, oh, yeah. That's exactly what we listen for to know to get the, the eagle traps ready

They're killers. So gold's will kill him off of them. Yeah, I won't be seeing it twice. I've

only seen it twice myself. It happens more, but it's really infrequent. But he wants to eat it. Oh, yeah. Okay. They're eating them. Got it. It's like a difference between a wolf kill in a coyote versus a lion. Lion eat. Yeah, wolf just kills you. No. You know, it's to the, their level of response is different. That lion is going to hunt you. No. That wolf is going to opportunistically kill you because you're filtering off its kill. And they know these variations. So I asked Dave

“and Mike's to, have you noticed the variation for bald eagles? Because I think I have. And he's like,”

nah, you know, he was doing research on them. So he didn't. But on the spectrum of Raven chasing another

Raven off versus Raven chasing a golden eagle off back from that golden eagle into the spectrum is something that has a few more gaps in it, a few more bits of inflection. And it's hard because you see the value of indigenous knowledge of a landscape because I only get maybe half a dozen of these in a lifetime. Some of these behaviors and calls. But if you've got a hundred other people who listen for exactly the same thing for a couple of thousands years and you're telling the stories.

Yeah, you see why the bushmen are so damn good. But I've been able to call it on bald a few times, you know, you hear it. And I don't know if you can hear the differences in there. It's not that.

“And it's not the Raven chasing another Raven. There's a little more insistence to it. There's a”

little more uniformity but compared to the Golden Eagle. There's still more inflection. There's more spacing in there. And they're doing those things for a reason. It's all this stuff like are you doing all this just kind of based on memory and things you're hearing repetitively out while you're out or are you like are you recording at all to like listen to this stuff and get new ones out of it or is it just for years for 20 plus years. It's been me just listening in ways other people have been

and making some connections and missing most. Right. But what's really cool right now is my friend's kind of at the center of initiating a biocoustics project in Yellowstone, which at the most specific level is wanting to disentangle wolf language. Can you sense this

“wolf population in a place like Colorado? Can you keep wolves out of a place by playing certain”

types of howls in an area. Keep them on a cattle. Right. So they're doing more or less the basic research though, which is based you're putting out all these recorders and recording 24 by seven 365 days a year. But you're not just getting wolves. You're getting everything. You're getting all the Ravens. You're getting all the bison conversation. You're getting everything. And we've got one of them in our yard apart of this project. So what I have now is a spreadsheet on my phone where I see

a Raven chase a gold needle over. I just make them time and date stamp and a note of behavior in my phone. And now I can actually go back because you're, you all have this. If you're trying to take a photo of something you're trying to record something, it's over before you're done. Especially

these things. I only have a few data points ever. But this is not always running. It's always running.

So I can now make a note and I'm like Raven being chased by this or Raven chasing that. I can go back to the sound recordings and listen to it over and over and it's totally. Welcome to Meet Eater's 12 and 26 presented by multimobile and on X maps. 12 of Meet Eater's biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've

ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meet Eater's YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. That's where this AI stuff is really cool on one level with wildlife acoustics and other beavers but you still need the field time. You still need somebody who's

died in the wall in the field and that's all they do to interpret that data. Otherwise just it's just noise. So that's the part I really enjoy and I like I'm really wanting to figure out. I have a

when they find a wolf because they're bad dudes and they're going to tell everybody about it. They

“want them known and they want to avoid them themselves and their families. But I've only had four”

instances where I can verify that that coyote through snow tracking or somebody else's observations, that coyote was barking at a cougar. One data point and I hope this by acoustic stuff is allow us to then go in because like he and I hooked up with a high school honors student kid wanted a project on wildlife so we're like great we need to train the AI model. So we had him go listen to a bunch of stuff and accumulate enough howls to say this is a howl it's not an airplane this is a

howl it's not a truck this is a howl of a wolf not a coyote so that then you can let the machine

listen to a year's worth of recordings without you having to sit there for a year for every single unit you know isolate all the right and you know there's there's been an explosion in the amount of info out there in the research world about this kind of stuff in the last 15 years. I'm like a friend wrote a book and came out in 2012 called What The Robin knows by John Young they had they had a scratch and dig to find any documentation that talked about any of this stuff.

You know everybody's got the app now like here's a song of the Robin you know here's the song of

the Phoebe you know all these both they don't tell you and they can't is what the hell that

actually means and so there's been a lot more research in that field recently which is just it's pointing to the complexity that we've been ignoring as modern humans for a long, darn time and as it's fun you know you don't need expensive equipment to engage with this stuff you know you need binoculars just listen well I don't have good hearing anymore I shot too many guns or like me you know power tools and guns and you know got compromised hearing but

it's not about what you can hear or can see it's what you do with what you can hear and see yeah like I noticed a friend of mine who has had a lot of the same history we pick up on cars on dirt road a lot further off than our wives do I get the dogs get the dogs in out of the road like what do you talk about there's a car coming yeah there's a car coming I don't hear it well just give it a sack you know there it comes so each of us comes to the to the game

“with a slightly different set of superpowers if you want to put it that way and we're tuning”

into things in ways that you aren't or you're tuning in stuff that I don't which is in some ways like I don't like to give a lot of instruction on this stuff because I want to hear what you find and if I tell you what to look for that's all you're gonna see you follow me you know so I read it's like yeah I'm gonna tell you some cool stuff to get you started plant that seed but man I really want you to do this on your own and teach me what you find oh yeah the lions you know the

coyotes do that at the lion but it's when the lions behaving like this so like when that bobcat came through the yard the other day I did get a small recording of the mag pies and it was nothing like what I would point out and say uh bobcat over there and what you start to realize is they're often times talking about sure they're talking about the animal specifically but as well in that mix is them talking about that animal's behavior it's intention you might say so when a cat is hunting

those alarms go through the roof they they light up the woods but if the cat like this one the other day it was just kind of like walking through the yard you know drops off the retaining walls sits down on a log in the little cops a cottonwoods yeah yeah there's a trouble but we're not ratting it out like crazy you know so in many cases you can you can actually read into the behavior you can read into the direction and animals moving like so when the coyote is alarming at something like us naturally they'll

often shadow it as it progresses so be like okay there's a there's a wolf over there and it's going

“right to left at a at a trot I think and if we want to see it we're going to have to go over on a hill here”

where we're downwind you can start doing these predictive things that our ancestors were using intimately because they're hunting with rocks and sticks you need everything and this is one of those tools that helps you on that razor's edge of survival it's like the you know the crow Indian

a crow fair but they're just a few years ago a Twitter with the fact this one elder was coming

out of the mountains to attend and this photographer friend of mine got to meet him and you know he's

“very low key asking questions and the elder asked this friend of mine he's like so you know what do you do”

you know photographer he's like oh what do you like the photograph you know bears and wolves and otters and stuff like he's you want to know every bear is every wolf is he's like yeah he's like in his notebook out he's like you know thinking he's gonna draw him up and you know he's like he says no he says you listen to the birds he says they're like our women they gossip about everything

yeah you know that's some deep wisdom right there because it's going on all the time but we just

don't give it the credit it's due what are what are their animals that people that people listen would know would have a familiarity with the with the vocabulary ready yeah great ones like great squirrels okay well in North America at least you know gray squirrels great one there in Europe

“you know they've been introduced to Europe and they're a plague over there but again nature doesn't”

care whether you're non-native or native sure everybody's contributions to this community conversation is equal and listen to so gray squirrels if you spent time in the woods you know something's coming through when you hear which is in contrast too is it ever hear that one no yeah without the right right yeah exactly look up that is typically for a threat from the air is that right yeah he leaves off the couple like whatever

the chunks are chunks are the chunks that the chunks are typically something on the ground same with red squirrels you know that's him on that's on the ground there's some disc there's some debate in the scientific community over what that actually means and no it doesn't

“mean that means this and we don't know and the bottom line is the squirrels no listen to the squirrel”

spend time with the squirrels because when they go say say say say say say say say say say what is that right because it got a version that just means I'm mad at another squirrel there is that yeah you can't discount that that's for sure like dude get out of my mid I wish I got all that I wish I could isolate the one because I'm real interested in the one where he sees something but this lot has to be watching him from afar and he'd be like he's fired up because he's fired up at

that squirrel yeah you know he's not telling about some elk coming down the trail he's like pissed at a squirrel and what's really crazy cool is not only is it are most of these things innate in these species so like those berbet monkeys they are wired from birth to yell at

the leopard like they do you think so we know so what they don't always have learning language well

yes and no what they need is refinement of how to use that so like young ones they've seen in those birds like adults basically like cuffed the kids like shut up that is a root it's a tree root it's not a snake oh all right so there there are these innate tendencies there's these innate alarms but then there's also training that comes with the social arrangement that that helps them refine it so that the group can agree right and that's also where you end up with these dialects you

know the ravens on Vancouver Island like too they say stuff I've never heard before from here okay totally different accent in California oh dude he's almost so hard you know it's like miners you know those ravens have different sounds same in Alaska like you can see then it's like there are these pockets of agreed upon sound culture yeah and um they're talking about things and berity complex ways they're talking about us too which I don't think a lot of people realize

they're talking about us in ways that these wild communities are actually across species not just across species across genera family order of organism that are all listening to each other simultaneously so the link is listening to the frogs the frogs are listening to the um the you know the the owl is listening to the jet going overhead you know there's this this whole hierarchy of of order that they that's a great point that you're that like as much as you talk about trying to like

something it's interesting to get into like what are other animals so here you are human here you are

“one species hearing an elk beetle drawing conclusions from that but that elk is listening to a pine”

squirrel drawing conclusions from that none of them are in isolation we are the ones in isolation where the ones out of the out of the continent and it's not like you got to go into a wild place to hear this no like literally I'm gasing up here and bows me before I got here in the chicketies pissed off it's something I didn't see what it was but I least knew something's going on over there I've done enough times walk over and be like oh I bet nobody in this neighborhood seen

that owl hmm it's been sitting there probably live there it's whole life years and nobody's

known that it's sitting right there we had one hanging dead in that tree there it is it's really

right we emailed or I texted one of the game wardens he said there's so much avian influenza right now it's hit the holes hard enough where they don't even they're not even testing all the birds anymore that's sad and that's he was gonna come by and grab it but he was like he's like there's a lot to share it overwhelmed and that's yeah that's the trouble there's too many to

“check them all right now that's what I lament is as we see biodiversity tanking around the globe”

is we're losing these informants we're losing these community members who are more than happy to welcome us in and share information with us if we slow the hell down like something I do as

students have done for years is I'll take them out somewhere in the park and I said everybody put

your phones your watches everything in a bag pull out a note pad or a piece of paper in a pencil that's all you're allowed to have spread out you know so we'll have everybody spread out for you know few yards between everybody over let's say an acre and we're gonna sit for an hour 60 minutes that's it 60 minutes and then I just want you to look for any animals you see any sounds you hear just and jot them down and we come together at the end of that and I keep time and they have a crude

“way for them to keep rough time stamps of of one we're out there so they can correlate certain”

things and I'll say to them what what did you hear nothing man there was nothing for like I thought I heard a chickety like maybe minute you know around minute 40 or when you made the signal for the fourth quarter or something like there was nothing and then there was stuff all over I'm like anybody else noticed that like yeah actually the nut edge came down the tree I saw coyote like all these things start happening as it do you think us going in there

screwed things up did they know we were coming and you see the the wheel start turning the answer to that is absolutely yes the same signal system that's riding out the Cooper's Hawk coming through the neighborhood or the owl perched up in the spruce is the same system that's telling everybody else about us that's super interesting from the hunting perspective because like you could be glass in some mule deer that are say a thousand yards away and you're like they

have no idea we're we're here but maybe they do and they're just not worried about it yet you know they know the proximities they know the priors they know that squirrel isn't going to do that until it sees something of trouble but they're 300 400 yards down if we see the coyote hauling ass up through this metal pastus we know that trouble's gotten about another hundred yards closer you know that that ghost buck that nobody could ever harvest they at a very fine level at that

age had to be half to be tuning into these ultra fine details of alarm in their environment and every species have it has a different threshold you know so towies for instance they're out of there so fast or like ninjas you just notice like they're gone like where the hell they go right in the sparrows you know pay attention and they make a couple chip notes and then they take off you know a couple minutes later here comes the dog has followed your trail into the woods

yeah when you're sneak it along thinking that the thing that's a learning stuff is you crunch and leaves and you think about and you get it's like like the forest is alive with bird calls and whatever in squirrels and stuff you think it's like you stepped on a twig yeah it's a good point they might have been taught about you for forever man the turkeys turkey step on twigs

pissed is a kid like watching these birds on my grandmother's feet are like a woodpacker

“coming in and flush everybody or a jay or you know squirrels signals up I walk out everybody takes off”

I'm like I'm not bad I'm a bad guy like come on let's you know hang out show me some stuff and no it's like you screw with a calm at least come into nominator as a hiker a dog walker a beach coma and you scare everybody that's the piece we don't get is if you scare the robin you've already been blown for everything you scare the brown creeper you scare the mink you you know it's like and then there's this beautiful this is like gourmet level stuff where you

start getting into secondary alarms so like as you slow down I'll back up just a second so that one

exercise of making everybody sit for 60 seconds or 60 minutes I'll say how many times have each of you gone out in the woods or somewhere just wildish and sat for 60 minutes and done nothing but pay attention ask that yourself like you you know hunters but some but yeah our tree white hill hunters yeah

“that's how I learned it a lot that's when you see everything what you got like you got to go sit there”

like an hour in also you're like where's all this stuff normally think of stuff everywhere it's normally exactly like you see after that hour and that's what this lesson conveys them is like

I've never sat anywhere for an hour and so the result is the reason we don't pick up on so much

this stuff is we have never ever seen the environment we live our home the place we think we know the best in anything other than a state of alarm and disruption right alarm and disruption that we have created ourselves but the beauty is as you start to pay attention to that they recognize it in you and it's very simple slow down walk without an intention photographers you know even the photographer not hurting anything doing anything the behavior most people take on when they're trying

“to get a photo it's predator like yeah I see you I'm focused on you I'm that is scary as hell”

to wild animals what's it saying is I'm gonna get you I'm getting you yeah I like I'm acknowledging that you're there right so like if you yeah I'm gonna tell people if you're trying to get up on a content tell be like last thing you do don't look at it exactly look at it up the corner you're

I never aim your eyeballs at it because when you aim your eyeballs that it knows you're aiming your eyeballs

that exactly exactly it's that language so as you slow down and as a friend calls it I love this term that the honoring routine you start to honor their space you very quickly can tell what the squirrels personal space extends to you respect that you give them a little bit of room oh crap you know I'm just trying to get to the store like I'm not walking around every pigeon well that is the barrier that's gonna stop you from moving through the woods like that ghost back like that lion

you follow me they are paying attention to the signals in the environment and working around them and using environmental components to their advantage so there's some places they're our worthless to try to hunt until it's just a south wind right you got to wait till the winds right you see certain birds and predators hunt when it's pouring down rain they're their survival is so narrow on that that that razor edge and they've got this huge neighborhood watch trying to disarm

them and keep them from killing you they're prey and so they're doing all these different things to try to subvert the community of communication that's busting them that's busting you it's busting you you step like literally you got two minutes usually this is a fun one to play with tell of buddy to meet me at this trail intersection at 11 o'clock let's say except you get in there at 10 so I mean you leave your car or you know do whatever you have

to be sitting down by 10 and let things go back to normal mm-hmm and then which is 30 minutes whatever yeah yeah it's not funny it's usually more like 40 to 60 minutes and then as you're sitting there the birds are feeding and they're preening and they're singing you hear the most common alarm in the woods what is it silence um silence is the most overlooked and most common alarm in

you see a couple birds like Colin asks going from the parking lot area past you set your watch

“two minutes so you get two minutes to figure out you want to scare the tarar to you're”

you know my buddy you want to hide or do you want to you know go to somewhere else where I can watch him and screw them this is what the quiet this man this is what the lion or the deer nose of you is it's got two minutes through the robins through the sparrows to do a wide loop out listen about your progress through all the other birds and animals and then you've had I know you guys if you spent any amount of time in the woods you come back the same trail you went in on

like son of a bitch there's bear track right on my tracks are wild tracks or coyote tracks are the deer you know it's because they walk around you they're listening and monitoring you through the animal language in the environment so like oh yeah okay he's still going he's going left over

“that ridge and this stuff is is of such high utility that um it's one fella mentioned in the book”

interviewed him he was training special ops crews and um he had a guy he trained in bird language as well as tracking and they had a humvee um ran over an ied you know in the road just made a mess this thing and they sent him this this student the the fella I knew in to find the the bomb layer and he does a few loops around the humvee site you know just chaos bleeding guys screaming guys smoke fire he picks up a single set of tracks leaving same set came in one way left another

so he starts sign cutting you know something you might know that term or you you're moving fast but you're you're periodically rechecking that you're on the prince okay a broke a branch over there you know just trying to catch up and he gets to a certain point where he's this is Afghanistan there's this waddy is little ravine and he hears the alarms he's like that guys he's over in there and as he's standing there trying to figure out what to do he starts here in the bird alarms

go up this ridge beyond the waddy and based on what he learned he went the opposite direction so he'd get over onto another point get a clear view of that ridge and ends up taking the guy out

hmm never saw him up until that point but he was clearly delineated in his movements and

direction and speed even through the bird conversations and that's the thing he didn't know any of the birds you don't need to know any of the birds you learn the birds at home and the pattern you find anywhere you go are the same they're gonna be filled by different species but like I've heard so many people say hey you know I never were to see that mongoose we're in Africa but it's responding exactly the way the sparrows do at my place along the river when the wind comes through

the painted dogs oh my gosh they're like we never would have seen them but those birds whatever they are are the height off the ground they're excited in the same way the birds are in my yard when the neighbor's dog gets loose and comes over so that's the the universality of that concept is fascinating to me that we all are operating on the same level of awareness and use of sound to know what's going on sometimes miles beyond our own sensory abilities like I

know there's wolves in the park two and a half miles away if I'm walking my dog I hear oh yeah yeah this point it's it's not even a if it's just where so I'll find that that signal maker the coyote or whatever and I can just set up the scope and from the deck of the house you like oh yeah there they are it seems like magic to people but it's not it's just paying attention better people and then when you pay attention better you get treated different that's the real beauty to me is you

start getting to know individual wild animals and they at the same time they've always already

known you oh yeah it's like why certain people can be on their yard and have self come into it absolutely that kid is the one when he comes to the prairie dog communities town he's he can pop in our buddies

“off that guy he doesn't even care and they remember real well whether you've been nice”

or especially if you've been naughty so they're like even pigeons let's go back to pigeons like they

there's some there's study done in Paris that affect one done in Philadelphia where they guessed that

“the pigeons rocked up might know and remember thousands of people remember who's a regular”

who's a tourist you know and log all this stuff we are being patterned all the time welcome to meet eaters twelve and twenty six presented by multi-mobile and on-ex maps twelve of meat eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout twenty

twenty six these are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up

is my baited bear hunt in manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meat eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more twelve and twenty six in the coming months there's probably some dude listening who's thinking like I am that there's probably some

like if you think about like trying to call mallards or something that like that there's like some code that you can crack do you mean like that to a duck when duck comes over and it's clearly looking for other dogs and it's like the dog's like I know that that's not right the problem right there's some thing that's not right yeah you're doing some thing that's not right everybody's just bobbing or something yeah there's something or like there's something you

could say you know there's something you could say that would just make it the absolutely that

duck would have to come down but you'll never well you'll never learn it you know I mean you'll

never learn like when he goes like not not buying it yeah that speaks to another point where I don't sometimes share too much because what these animals offer you when you are letting into their world is to see their strengths they're incredible talents but also regular abilities but you see their Achilles heels too and that I don't it's throwing around so cliche but sacred that to me is there's a sacredness in what they have shared to them betray that like a great

example you probably know this from your bison work is bison have this Achilles heel of following the matriarch yeah and those bison hunters and partly annihilated them because of their allegiance to the matriarch no they don't move anywhere I watched them for years exploit that she was the god so she can't move and everybody mills around and you just mow the rest from down anybody else tries to take off and start a new course you bust them through the gods

“everybody mills around and you you know you and one stand you can get a dozen or a hundred I think”

there's one record of like a hundred or something bison and one stand then a mixed myth go over hundred one time so to me when you're led in it's it's changed the way I there are things I couldn't reconcile hunting and part of that was there are there things about hunting you couldn't reconcile or there are animals that you couldn't reconcile hunting for it was the former okay like I didn't know what it was but there was an honoring piece a recognition a

sacredness that got clouded over in me trying to get that turkey that tom that specific tom there that block or something like that that I missed I found now and for me this is just me it took me stepping away from hunting to really soak into their world on their terms mm be following that you know and so they share things like there's a there's a meal to your dough model model model mama just we called her um

mama here and she she always brought off on she was amazing and one year she had triplets

“actually no no I think it was tried quadruplets which for meal drum was never happens like she”

knew where to feed build up those reserves could handle that many kids and lo and behold we started into that winter and it's a bitch and one by one we start seeing those bonds not show up on the yard and pretty soon um it's down to just one and then we don't

enough understanding that I would walk at that time our two black laboratories each about 70 pounds

“and I'd go get the mail the mailbox like 10th of mile up the driveway and she'd be their grazing”

you know off a distance but in the meantime she might come like right along the driveway and I would put my hands on the shoulders of dogs not they weren't even they weren't leashed near dogs run but to her this was my gesture of it's okay there with me and I'm not gonna let them bother you and there are times we could walk within 12 feet of her in the farms like I go sit in the yard sometimes and she was so comfortable that she would walk between me

sitting on the edge of the retaining wall and the edge of the decking which was like

at most 30 feet. She'd walk through like we had an understanding it wasn't she wasn't my pet I didn't you know but we gave each other this space and understanding of each other's boundaries well that hard winner that she disappeared we assumed she was just gone and lo and behold like mid-bebbewary maybe early March who shows up on our deck but mama deer and she's just emaciated she had this huge patch of hair missing on her back right side like her lumber lumber

vertebra I don't know if she'd been hit by a car you could see her ribs and what does she do she

came up and bedded down on the welcome mat to our front door she came up on the deck which is

“you know like a eight inch step up and she bedded down there every night for I think it was”

three or four days until she eventually went under the deck and died because she knows nothing and get her there exactly she and I and our family had put in the time for her to see us as in her worst hour her worst time she knew she could find refuge with that with us like to me that was like one of the most crushingly heartbreaking but also beautiful things at the same time that we had made enough of a connection that she felt that she could live out her last hours in our company

and that I can't now look at another deer and not offer them that same capacity to reproduce what mama deer did yeah not that I let's say wouldn't hunt again but the way I would hunt and view

“that is and the the author Jojo put it really succinctly nicely this way it's not”

was that the dude did all that work with turkeys he did my life as a turkey if you see did and he wrote he did a great film and book called touching the wild on these meal deer down in land and Jo says he's still around he is he moved back to Florida he you know I keep touching now and then and he's such a wealth of I like to get back to know the show sometime yeah I don't know if he does that kind of stuff going on so I don't know how he's doing right now

but I would he he he's another one that's put in the time to see all these other facets that most of us overlook when we say I'll look at deer you know and in the way he sort of describe what I'm I feel is like yeah I'm gonna go hunt again but now I have to reckon with the fact that it's not what I'm killing as much anymore it's who yeah who am I choosing to take out of this population is this the the the matriarch mama

is this a fawn a fawn that has a certain spark and talent that none of the others do your leg it's it'd be very hard for me to go into hunt the way I used to when I was younger and when I did kill something if I did kill something I would it wouldn't be with high fives anymore you know I mean like get that big buck or something like that it would be you know silence silence with that understanding that that it was a who there's a who

yeah yeah and just every single day of our lives is enriched by paying attention to these conversations and having these individuals coming in and out of our world because they are our best teachers when you have a shit day at work and your family is pissed about something or you know it's like

you know and it's it's not making excuses it's still keeping up with the pack be it a little

slower you know listening to nature at that level is you start seeing issues and trends that magazines and the popular media want to make into you know the save the whales kind of a approach it's like top down big stop you know it's like to me this is the groundswell of where caring for your environment's real stewardship real conservation takes places you through these

“conversations and over over hearing what matters to them let's you into their world to know”

what you're doing that is harmful that you weren't even aware of like oh shit I guess I

shouldn't know the grass there now because those that's where the bunnies that's where the

litter's coming off is that whole underneath that long grass okay I won't mow there for a month more like simple stuff sometime don't cut down that dead tree that's the woodpecker nest site yeah that is that is the Sentinel location for the principal players in your neighborhood wildlife alarm system you take that one seemingly useless dead tree out and all these animals can't get a view now of what's coming before it's on them you know it's like so you have a true bottom up level

appreciation and interaction that makes you a better neighbor I think I feel that way I'm still

“feel like a fool I still feel ignorant and like I'm making so many mistakes but I feel and I know”

when you enter into those spaces with that sort of humility nature's pretty resilient it gives you more latitude than you would have otherwise like people ask me well should I make animal noises when I'm out you know I see some deer when I'm out for a walk or I see the fox do I make fox noises like no do not I don't imitate animals in the wild anymore because the reason is I want to see them do what they naturally do and once you inject yourself it's game over it's like pulling

the trigger almost you change the entire equation I've been with people we've actually killed animals through making noises in interrupting the situation I want to see them do what they naturally do so I have a better sense of what they have to teach me and um use your own voice lot of indigenous cultures will say when we talk to the animals in our native town they treat us like family and so other people are like well I I'm American I speak English and you know like

you speak in the most expressive language you have and be sincere and you'll start having experiences like you know the deer jump up on the morning walk with the dog and say hey wait wait it's us it's us and they stop and they go back to grazing let me even bed back down like that but if you bring a

friend with you to watch it doesn't work because they're always responding to the lowest

common denominator you bring in somebody that's not paying attention and we give up infinite amount of micro signals and they know whether you're paying attention or not there's stories like the horses that can do math until time and read calendars and stuff and they find out they can't do that stuff what they're doing is queuing off of their handlers at such a fine minute level that it gives the impression that another another you know another species has these capabilities when they're

just it's called the cluger haunts effect they're paying attention to you so well better than most humans pay attention it's like how are we missing these cues well your life doesn't depend on it when it does you start paying attention to stuff you know we all have the capacity like oh

“the furnace shut off you know you look to the things that are important to us we still have”

those capabilities we just have directed them other places right like something there's something screwed up with that trailer got pull over pull over we got to check the change there's a bearing going out you know like we are laser focused on those kind of details but the power of our brain to do that can be used then to go back into the natural world like our our people did in deep time and no stuff that is magic seeming but in ways that's really damn fulfilling

you know when you get you know it's like I love to see about mine at all like oh we get we get

that you wouldn't have otherwise tell me about the artwork you do real quick you know I always say

“my artwork is kind of my um tourist trinkets or my souvenirs from living so every piece is not just”

done to make a turkey or make a bear it's done to tell an individual story that I've been letting on some of these animals I've known for an hour or two some of them I've known for years some of them I've known for generations and so I feel that the artwork to me is the a focal point to spend a ton of time figuring out what the heck that experience meant to me if that makes sense and it forces me to see details I wouldn't miss otherwise and she knows that

but that bull has a knot in his lower you know metatarsal he broke that you know at some point or oh there's people who say oh there's that that cow elk is you know walking across the lawn and mammoths she's in she's limping no that's actually part of the normal gate but that one over there

“she's got she's got a tooth infection look close see that little swell here”

not not not not the bulge that's the the mass at our muscle or the the buccanator muscle on her cheek but right below that's a little you know it's like it deepens further still my experience with the wild so that turkey is a turkey that's a specific one as inspired by I gave a couple of talks at a nature center in Utah and they had three tombs Tom Tommy and Thomas and after I was done with my my obligations I just followed him around with some clay and sculpted and

you know it's just I was just so taken with that that a dexterity in their tail it's like a geisha you know they wave that tail back that thing off it's so beautiful you know and um when you enter into these spaces you find that words don't really work and I guess that's I

“grew up around sculpture try like hell not to do it but it came back around in a way that I could”

do it my way and for me it picks up where the words sort of trail off you know like that just that

curve of the Achilles on the bear or that shin bone that line of always love bones and skulls and

like it it was a place to put it my love that stuff like knowing every bone every muscle from the inside out then seeing the overlay of the behavior and when they do this how that bone articulates this way so I don't use photos so I don't use video I used to take a ton of that stuff and I found I didn't use it I got a roadkill kit I got a talk tackle box full of calipers and dissecting knives and rubber gloves and my own data sheets I made up one for birds and one for mammals so

I find a moose or a grizzly bear that's something to legal to have I can take a full set of measurements and have that archive in my studio to go back to but more accurately what it does for me is you know on a on an elk I find a dead elk I might take 50 measurements but in stretching the tape measure or the calipers that number of measurements guarantees I have my hands on the animal at least a hundred different ways so when I go to work on a sculpture I'm working

from more of a felt sense of of the creature I see just a momentary pose that a fox or badger an otter might do or something like I can freeze that in my mind and I can feel in all the details of what was where to make that happen you know does most your income come from the art from your work as a natural as to guide yes art by far yeah we're starting to do like occupationally an artist yeah yeah but when you just kind of follow your interests you kind of start screwing up

the ability to be defined like I love a love since I was a time of the kid loved stone tools

an ancient technology you know it took me 30 years than flew to Clovis point but like always

as a kid there was just time I was young a desire to have a felt sense of what it meant to to make that to I was able to do it because I had a tea to form it to do it to give it the final little flap I know it's all teed up yeah yeah I did a flute but I took a dirty way to get there that's dirty dude because the whoever made the preform for you will tell you the flute's nothing no I just had the preform a little final little thumb the blue or flute off right so I was like on it

and I find a flake of obsidian on the ground near the house or something like I know almost exactly

“what that what size and dimension that thing would have been off of I know what direction the”

blow came from I know it was trying to do to take off that lump on whatever the preform it like

just that's always really been gratifying to me to have that bottom up inside out kind of look at

things and the art and the educational programs they're just kind of you know the live veneer at the top no and then how long the one is the book out available right now it is it's available now wherever books are sold you can find them all over Amazon and beyond the local book stores can order it through a gray stone books okay the title is "Eaves Dropping On Animals" what we can learn from wildlife conversations by George Beumen got a four by John Young anywhere books are sold yeah

“thanks coming on man thanks for having me now can I get one plug what do you mean for something”

other than the book oh yeah we're doing right now it just went live we got a online event that's

for some of our educational stuff we got the note sorry no oh no that's fine we have an event for people who love nature and the elstone park called the elstone summit and it brings together we have this year over 30 world expert speakers as we have for the last five years on yellowstone talking about everything from filming mountain lions the history of beavers in the park to population senses of moose geology native american history if you are thinking of coming to the park

and want some insight on what to do and think about mmm join us if you long time yellowstone or

“want more deep stuff join us if you're from the region there's nothing that thrills me more than”

run into some of you from billings or beauty you know i hope falls or something is like oh my gosh is that like a song going thing or is it like so time or yeah it's um it's online so anybody with internet can get involved watch it anywhere in the world it's uh registration just open so by the time this airs registration will still be open it goes live on February 19th through the 22nd of this year and um yeah it's cheap we try to make it affordable for 15 bucks you can get to access

for 24 hours oh okay all those programs or if you want all access which which means you can like it's great because it's online there's a live component too you can watch you get a ticket watch so like deputy superintendent uh Mike Trinnell of Yellowstone will be given a park update and you can show up and ask him questions yourself so like yeah since the flood you know what actually he's going on with the road and and things like that we've got folks who use it for homeschool

curriculum we've got folks who use it to train their park guides so this is a training tool for them we got park service people who watch it for their own training so it's a very high level but also has entry level basic stuff for anybody interested whether they actually ever make it here or not and um just check it out at YellowstoneSummit.com god so YellowstoneSummit.com and he's dropping on animals what we can learn from wildlife conversations with George,

human nature coming out man my pleasure guys thanks for having me welcome to meat eaters 12 and 26 presented by maltree mobile and on x maps 12 of meat eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long-form

episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba

if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meat eaters youtube channel and be on the look out for more 12 and 26 in the coming months this isn't iheart podcast guaranteed human