Speaker 1: Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys
Speaker 1: are your fave. It's so like, say subscribe and rade it.
Speaker 2: I'm starck s and me.
Speaker 3: Grates on us.
Speaker 2: Today listening watching lim always keep its watching.
Speaker 1: And now your host's Cliff Berrickman and James Bobo Fay, Hey, Bobs,
Speaker 1: excuse me, it's like he's here. Actually Bobo is not here.
Speaker 1: That's Robo Bobo. Hey, Robo Bobo. For you, it's like
Speaker 1: he's really here. Yeah, okay, but for real now hey,
Speaker 1: everybody that's Cliff and Bobo is not here today. But
Speaker 1: Matt pru It is, Hey, Matt, how you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm good. How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Oh I'm hanging in there, Amanda super busy as usual.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Bobo is tied up unfortunately right now, so he's
Speaker 1: not going to make it tonight. He had something to
Speaker 1: do with like some sort of like pigeon calling contests
Speaker 1: or whatever, some underground pigeon calling contests. I can't really
Speaker 1: talk about it. Bobo couldn't talk about it, and he
Speaker 1: didn't hear it from me. So anyway, Yeah, something weird
Speaker 1: is going on. So he's not going to be here tonight.
Speaker 1: That's all right, that's right, we got it covered. This
Speaker 1: isn't the first time, it won't be the last one,
Speaker 1: for sure. It's like he's here. It's just like he's here.
Speaker 1: But anyway, we do have somebody here. We have the
Speaker 1: lovely and talented Shelley Covington, Montana, who's a super citizen scientist,
Speaker 1: nerd into gathering all kinds of evidence. She's a trained tracker,
Speaker 1: a trained naturalist, super fired enough about doing anything outdoors
Speaker 1: at all and gathering information on it. So we're super
Speaker 1: excited about that. Now. I don't know if Bobo would
Speaker 1: mind if I do this interview by myself whatever, Cliff
Speaker 1: can have it. Thanks Robo, Bobo. I appreciate it. And
Speaker 1: with that, let's bring in Shelley. So, Shelley, how are
Speaker 1: you doing today?
Speaker 3: I'm doing great? How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Doing all right? As usual, as all my listeners are,
Speaker 1: all of our listeners know, I'm always spread too thin.
Speaker 1: But such as life, Such as life. So I saw
Speaker 1: you a couple of weeks ago in Ohio. How do
Speaker 1: you think the gig win?
Speaker 3: You know what? It was great.
Speaker 4: I was very impressed by the audience and everybody there
Speaker 4: were so nice, and it was just an opportunity for
Speaker 4: me to get on the other side of the country
Speaker 4: and you know, fresh fresh ideas, I guess for people.
Speaker 4: I had a lot of great feedback. People were very
Speaker 4: very receptive about my techniques and you know what, I
Speaker 4: like to share and hopefully, you know, some of those
Speaker 4: guys and ladies will come well. Actually I did have
Speaker 4: a few tell me that they were they were highly
Speaker 4: influenced by ideas of nature journaling and getting into the
Speaker 4: tracking field and to better educate themselves on how to
Speaker 4: read you know, disturbances and things like that that can
Speaker 4: help us.
Speaker 3: You know, maybe figure out a little bit of what
Speaker 3: isn't bigfoot?
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that that seems to be the challenge for
Speaker 1: a lot of people because if they're going bigfooting and
Speaker 1: anything happens, they find anything, they see anything, it is
Speaker 1: a big foot. And the number one thing you should
Speaker 1: do is kind of eliminate that possibility, or eliminate every
Speaker 1: other possibility I suppose before you come to the bigfoot
Speaker 1: conclusion exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's you know that right there says it all.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's bigfoot last, you know, and in my world,
Speaker 4: and I feel that I'm just too old and I
Speaker 4: just don't have enough time to play around with, you know,
Speaker 4: one hundred different possibilities. How about we just get rid
Speaker 4: of the most probable and then narrow it down.
Speaker 3: To a few possibilities.
Speaker 4: So these things that I love, as far as wildlife
Speaker 4: tracking and DNA collection and thermal work and all of
Speaker 4: that kind of stuff is really kind of you know,
Speaker 4: in my in my mind, it's it's tools for my
Speaker 4: tool build because I feel like we can always.
Speaker 3: Have better tools.
Speaker 4: You know, Whacking on trees and doing calls and stuff
Speaker 4: is fun. But unless you see that that entity doing
Speaker 4: those things, we still we still really can't assume that
Speaker 4: it is one thing or another. And so I'm just
Speaker 4: really interested and passionate about that citizen science stuff. It's
Speaker 4: just way fun and it gets you connected to everything,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we can all use we can all use
Speaker 1: better tools, as you said, because I've been called a
Speaker 1: tool lots of times, which means I should be doing better,
Speaker 1: I think, well.
Speaker 4: I've been called worse. I don't know that I've been
Speaker 4: called a tool. But it's okay, you know, it's okay.
Speaker 3: We are who we.
Speaker 4: Are, and and I think you're a great tool.
Speaker 1: You're a great tool. You're a good bad asset asset,
Speaker 1: that's right. That's better than ass hat. I'm usually only
Speaker 1: half of that, right, right.
Speaker 4: But there are things like so one of the things
Speaker 4: I'll always remember you telling me, or say you weren't
Speaker 4: even telling me. I think you were giving a speech
Speaker 4: at a conference or presentation, and I remember you saying
Speaker 4: to put your game cameras near the people's stuff, you know,
Speaker 4: the human stuff, and like not out in the middle
Speaker 4: of the woods, per se, because it doesn't.
Speaker 3: Belong there and things will know it doesn't.
Speaker 4: And I always resonated with that, you know, I felt
Speaker 4: like that's really a great that's just a great tool
Speaker 4: for me, you know, is to think along those lines
Speaker 4: of And that's one of the things that I wanted
Speaker 4: to talk about today as we get into whatever you
Speaker 4: all want want to talk about, but was why aren't
Speaker 4: we getting better pictures, you know, with game cams and thermals?
Speaker 4: And I'm kind of dabbling in some things that I've
Speaker 4: been thinking about for years and years and years that
Speaker 4: have bothered me, or I've questioned why why do they
Speaker 4: do this?
Speaker 3: What is you know? From signings?
Speaker 1: Before we get to that, it just occurred to me
Speaker 1: that we're just hanging out because you and I know
Speaker 1: each other. We've known each other for years, you know,
Speaker 1: but there's probably some listeners who don't know you. And
Speaker 1: I very often forget if I don't know all of
Speaker 1: our listeners have heard me say this lots of times.
Speaker 1: I forget anybody else's listening, but for the sake of
Speaker 1: the people who actually are listening, because I just remember
Speaker 1: that some people are actually listening to this. Can you
Speaker 1: give a nutshell version, like a brief paragraph, tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about like who you were, and then
Speaker 1: I want to know about how you've grown since last
Speaker 1: time you were on the podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So my name is Shelly Covington, Montana and I'm from Texas.
Speaker 3: I'm not from Montana. I get that a lot.
Speaker 4: But and I've been married for almost forty years to
Speaker 4: my wonderful husband, Don Covington. He is wonderful, yes, yes,
Speaker 4: And he had an encounter in the eighties here in Texas,
Speaker 4: and I've known him all my life since I was fourteen,
Speaker 4: and I kept hearing this crazy story how he got
Speaker 4: ran out of the woods by something. He really wouldn't
Speaker 4: speculate too much about it.
Speaker 3: But finally I.
Speaker 4: Figured out what he was talking about and asked him
Speaker 4: if it was bigfoot, and he said, well, I just
Speaker 4: didn't want to think it was crazy. So that just
Speaker 4: kind of launched me into this world of what the
Speaker 4: heck is this because I knew he was telling me
Speaker 4: the truth. And you know, by that time, this was
Speaker 4: like two thousand and ten ish, I think, and by
Speaker 4: that time I was our children already grown and gone,
Speaker 4: you know, to college and.
Speaker 3: Out of the house, and I had my background.
Speaker 4: You know, I consider myself, while laft enthusiast, I don't
Speaker 4: like to call myself a researcher. I don't know that
Speaker 4: I've earned that, but I am very in tune with
Speaker 4: the outdoors. I consider that more of a place I
Speaker 4: love and feel comfortable. And then, you know, the big city,
Speaker 4: even though I lived near one. I was a cosmetics
Speaker 4: vendor for years and a flooris before that, so I
Speaker 4: kind of did my big footstuff in the summers. My
Speaker 4: job allowed me to where I take off for the
Speaker 4: whole summer and I go to the Pacific Northwest year
Speaker 4: after year, and eventually it just got to where I
Speaker 4: just quit doing the cosmic thing. It just was too much.
Speaker 4: It wasn't my passion anymore. So I really focused on
Speaker 4: what could help me do what was because what I
Speaker 4: was saying before there, I just felt there were no
Speaker 4: real tools for people like us that, you know, other
Speaker 4: than maybe some game cameras and hitting the tree and
Speaker 4: recorders and such.
Speaker 3: But I felt like it just needed.
Speaker 4: To be more, especially for me, because I wanted to
Speaker 4: find answers. And so my dad is a retired law
Speaker 4: enforcement officer, and I knew you would be expecting, you know,
Speaker 4: factual things for me.
Speaker 3: Why am I doing this in the first place.
Speaker 4: So I really just delved into wildlife DNA keds and
Speaker 4: what was out there and what was available because everybody
Speaker 4: was talking about DNA and collecting DNA, and I noticed
Speaker 4: that people were doing a kind.
Speaker 3: Of a crazy job at it, like picking it up
Speaker 3: with their hands and such, and so I delved into that.
Speaker 4: And that's been kind of the hill I've been preaching on,
Speaker 4: I guess since around twenty thirteen or fourteen, and.
Speaker 3: Today the kids are able to collect.
Speaker 4: Any kind of DNA really and I'm still learning and
Speaker 4: it's really pushed me into just being more educated. But
Speaker 4: in the sense of this also led me down the
Speaker 4: path of getting certified as a wildlife trucker, and.
Speaker 3: I'm a level two. That doesn't mean much. That means
Speaker 3: I'm mediocre.
Speaker 4: I'm no expert, but my mind and my eyes can
Speaker 4: see detail that I was walking past every day in
Speaker 4: the woods, and to help me just sweep out what
Speaker 4: the most possible is and focus on things that are
Speaker 4: different or even new. Let's say I'm a known species
Speaker 4: doing a known behavior behavior in a different region.
Speaker 3: And then nature journaling I got.
Speaker 4: Really into that and how that is a form of
Speaker 4: data collection where I sit down and I draw tracks
Speaker 4: so that I can memorize facts of tracks. That way,
Speaker 4: I can tell you if you know, or tell myself, Okay,
Speaker 4: this is what I see, and this is why this
Speaker 4: is not a dog man track or or a wolf
Speaker 4: track or.
Speaker 3: Any of those things.
Speaker 4: But also nature journally, let's say, uh, you're really into
Speaker 4: tree structures, which you know, I don't know, but a
Speaker 4: nature journal los And what that does is it starts
Speaker 4: to get your mind to notice detail, to ask better questions,
Speaker 4: Like you know, there's three questions you should ask.
Speaker 3: Yourself when you're journaling in nature.
Speaker 4: Because those are those are things that will start to
Speaker 4: move you outside of what you already know, which is
Speaker 4: I wonder I notice and it reminds me of and
Speaker 4: so I do these these tree structure journaling things, you know,
Speaker 4: and maybe let's say in ten years we discover that
Speaker 4: sasquatch is proven. You know, it's proven, and they have
Speaker 4: no data. Well what if they do make tree structures
Speaker 4: or if they don't, there's your data, you know, no
Speaker 4: matter what. If you're making, you know, journaling things like
Speaker 4: this that you believe, let's say it's it's it's sasquatch
Speaker 4: beds or nets or whatever.
Speaker 3: If you're finding those.
Speaker 4: In journaling them and asking those three questions, and just
Speaker 4: continue pushing yourself to ask better questions, it's gonna be data,
Speaker 4: whether it is sasquatch or not.
Speaker 3: It's data of something. I mean.
Speaker 4: We have a friend, Kim Morale, his wife Miriam, she's
Speaker 4: a retired firefight and she is she nature journals almost
Speaker 4: full time. She's written a book about it. But she
Speaker 4: natured journals fire and wildlife fires and what causes them,
Speaker 4: what the effects are, how they work. It is amazing
Speaker 4: and no one's ever done that. So these basic tools,
Speaker 4: getting back to the basic citizens science arts, which is
Speaker 4: you know I believe tracking was the very first science
Speaker 4: and art. I think we probably were scavengers before we
Speaker 4: were hunter gatherers, and we had to follow animals the scavenge.
Speaker 3: Off of them. And how did we do that?
Speaker 4: We tracked them and we learned the morphology, and we
Speaker 4: learned how they moved, and we learned the behaviors. And
Speaker 4: when your mind starts opening up to those things, you
Speaker 4: see a whole new world. And I can never learn enough.
Speaker 4: And where I was when I first started, when I
Speaker 4: first did your podcast and today is just that I'll
Speaker 4: continue to go out educate myself. I continue to go
Speaker 4: and be certified over and over and learn more things
Speaker 4: in different regions.
Speaker 1: When you stay certified over and over, do you mean
Speaker 1: re certified or certifying in a higher degrees in that
Speaker 1: same skill or what do you mean by that both?
Speaker 4: I mean so in the certifications, there's level one, two, three,
Speaker 4: and four, and then there's professional and there's specialists, and
Speaker 4: then there's what we call trailing certifications. Now, trailing is
Speaker 4: when you actually follow tracks and sign and you only
Speaker 4: pass when you find the animal that's made those tracks inside.
Speaker 3: So at the end here he is.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 1: Bogo will be right back after these messages. So three
Speaker 1: to six months doesn't seem like a long time right
Speaker 1: in bigfoot Land. It's not very long because we've been
Speaker 1: looking for sasquatches for decades and decades and decades. But
Speaker 1: when you think about what can happen in three to
Speaker 1: six months, like, what would you do in three to
Speaker 1: six months? I'm going to give me six months go
Speaker 1: squatching squad of course, of course, And how much do
Speaker 1: you think is going to get done during that time?
Speaker 1: In squatching you're going to see one in six months?
Speaker 1: Probably not, But in three to six months, what you
Speaker 1: can see if you're not going to see a sasquatch
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Speaker 1: You know. And something about the nature journaling that I'd
Speaker 1: like to put in here, and I'm sure I mentioned
Speaker 1: it last time you were on, is that you know
Speaker 1: science as a as a very very broad field, shall
Speaker 1: we say, is fairly new. Two hundred years ago there
Speaker 1: weren't scientists. They were called naturalists. I think we often
Speaker 1: forget because we have iPhones and computers and we think
Speaker 1: we're pretty fancy, but we're not at all. You know,
Speaker 1: two hundred years ago we didn't know germs existed. One
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years we didn't know germs existed. We
Speaker 1: are in our infancy of scientific understanding. But before that,
Speaker 1: the baby steps of getting to the point where humans
Speaker 1: could be considered scientists, that was all. They were naturalists
Speaker 1: at the time, and can you image where we would
Speaker 1: be without Like Charles Darwin's journals, he was basically nature
Speaker 1: journaling essentially is what he is people. And I think
Speaker 1: that's a stumbling block for people in the Bigfoot community
Speaker 1: who want to be more scientific. They think that it's
Speaker 1: all XL sheets and numbers and stuff, and sure that exists,
Speaker 1: but the nature journaling side is truly the root of
Speaker 1: all that, and that is extraordinarily useful and valid data.
Speaker 1: I think of Tom Shae for example. Tom Shay has
Speaker 1: several piles of two to three feet tall of spiral
Speaker 1: notebooks and when he goes out he writes the day,
Speaker 1: the temperature of the weather, if you find something or not.
Speaker 1: It's set very very basic stuff, a treasure trove of information,
Speaker 1: and anybody can do this. People say, what's the most
Speaker 1: important piece of gear I can get, thinking that it's
Speaker 1: a thermal No, it's a spiral notebook or something that's rights.
Speaker 3: And think about it this way.
Speaker 4: All the pictographs we see throughout the desert that was
Speaker 4: nature journaling.
Speaker 3: So you're exactly right. And the nature journaling and.
Speaker 4: The tracking it can be as elementary as you want.
Speaker 4: Anybody can do it. You know that the master trackers
Speaker 4: that the group I'm working, I work with or I'm
Speaker 4: certified by, is called CyberTracker dot org and the cyber
Speaker 4: is kind of misleading because this was all created by
Speaker 4: gentlemen who realized that the tracking art master tracking art
Speaker 4: was dying and we needed it for conservation all over
Speaker 4: the world. So he went to Africa and learned from
Speaker 4: the last of the last, who still don't actually read
Speaker 4: and write, but track.
Speaker 3: Because that's how they live every day.
Speaker 4: We don't live like that, right, And so he was
Speaker 4: trying to help with the sense of them being able
Speaker 4: to collect data because they knew the landscape, they knew
Speaker 4: the region, they knew everything that was going on in
Speaker 4: their countries, and to help with poaching, you know, to
Speaker 4: stop poaching and conservation.
Speaker 3: So they gave them these little units.
Speaker 4: That were they call them cyber units, that had just
Speaker 4: little icons on them so they could press in the data.
Speaker 4: So it is for anybody, you know, five year old
Speaker 4: up to one hundred and five year olds. Everybody and
Speaker 4: anybody can do this and it is essential. Like you said,
Speaker 4: I mean the most some of the most important discoveries
Speaker 4: to this day are done by people like us who
Speaker 4: are not sitting behind a cubicle or you know, in
Speaker 4: a in a university who those are great and very
Speaker 4: needed individuals. But we're not held by bounds of how
Speaker 4: to ouput it, rules and grants. You know, we're free
Speaker 4: and the government needs this.
Speaker 1: You know, imprisoned by what is going to make somebody
Speaker 1: else money and that somebody else is paying them to
Speaker 1: do the research. That's one of the neatest things about it.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's one of the things that initially drew
Speaker 1: me into the bigfoot field. Is that back in the day,
Speaker 1: you know, when I was twenty two years old or
Speaker 1: twenty three years old, however, it was when I started
Speaker 1: taking this seriously, I was an amateur and still am
Speaker 1: an amateur astronomer. I've got a pretty nice scope and
Speaker 1: everything else, you know, I love, and the vast majority
Speaker 1: of new comets and asteroids are discovered by amateurs. And
Speaker 1: because the professionals will telescope time is expensive and grant
Speaker 1: money is hard to get and all that sort of stuff,
Speaker 1: And the sasquash field is exactly the same, exactly the same.
Speaker 1: There's way more amateurs like us, like me out there
Speaker 1: and you doing this sort of thing than there are
Speaker 1: primatologists who take it seriously and can spend time in
Speaker 1: the field. It's up to us because they can't do it.
Speaker 1: It's not some weird conspiracy where they're ignoring and they're
Speaker 1: trying to hide this and they're misleading you and they're
Speaker 1: lying to you, like some of the crazies are saying
Speaker 1: out there. But it is just a matter of facts,
Speaker 1: like those people are busy and we're the ones with
Speaker 1: spare time, and so we can go do it, which
Speaker 1: is all the more reason for us to up our game. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And this is what my I feel like. If
Speaker 4: it fail her to, you know, pass.
Speaker 3: Tomorrow, what would my legacy be?
Speaker 4: And I would hope it would be that I helped
Speaker 4: influence the younger generation or anybody to look at what
Speaker 4: we do as the scientific side in the citizens science
Speaker 4: field or whatever you want to call it. I've heard
Speaker 4: that's even an offensive term, but I don't care to.
Speaker 4: Where we are just benefiting the possibility people getting out
Speaker 4: and making discoveries of their own, and that's what I want.
Speaker 3: I want.
Speaker 4: You know, nothing is more exciting for me than an
Speaker 4: individual that comes up and says, hey, Shelly, I got
Speaker 4: my eye naturalists masters. I'm a master naturalist now because
Speaker 4: of you expressing how fun and.
Speaker 3: Important this is. Because I love nature.
Speaker 4: You know, most of these people that do what we do,
Speaker 4: they love nature, right, They're always out in the woods,
Speaker 4: you know. They tell us they're boosts on the ground
Speaker 4: all the time. And it's like, okay, well you can
Speaker 4: make that benefit you in the long run to where
Speaker 4: you're gathering more information.
Speaker 3: You may even get a job. I don't know, you
Speaker 3: might want to be a bark ranger. Who knows.
Speaker 4: But I love that idea of us getting away from
Speaker 4: our computers and the II and our cell phones and
Speaker 4: all of that and getting back to wilderness therapy. That's
Speaker 4: what it is for me anyway. And it just adds
Speaker 4: to the bigger picture. I mean, there's gonna be other
Speaker 4: discoveries besides sasquatch with people like us, and that's exciting too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they just won't be as important.
Speaker 4: Right well, yeah, you know, the great North American Sasquatch
Speaker 4: is our national treasure.
Speaker 3: In my eyes, I'm one behind that.
Speaker 1: So how about a book? Have you thought about a book?
Speaker 1: Like a just real simple you.
Speaker 4: Know, yeah, And there may be some other things coming
Speaker 4: soon with like field guide kind of things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff like that, because you know it's
Speaker 1: one thing to say, yeah, everybody go nature journal it's
Speaker 1: fun and cool and easy. But when you go buy
Speaker 1: a spiral notebook, like when you sit down at the
Speaker 1: pen in the woods, like I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people might run into some resistance within themselves, like what
Speaker 1: do I do here? And it might be good to
Speaker 1: have an example like that out.
Speaker 3: There, right, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: And that's that's you know, some of the things I
Speaker 4: wanted to talk about today. At the end of the podcast,
Speaker 4: I'm going to be giving out some reference material and
Speaker 4: some uh like Facebook pages like animals Don't Cover their
Speaker 4: Tracks is a fantastic Facebook page. It's all it's filled
Speaker 4: with doctor Melm's even there and there I think it's
Speaker 4: filled with a certified cyber tracker specialists from all over
Speaker 4: the world. I'm telling you, these people are so smart.
Speaker 4: I'm I talk a lot, but I don't talk in there.
Speaker 3: I listen and I naturally dot org see.
Speaker 4: Cybertreker dot org and people I encourage people to go
Speaker 4: and find in their areas, like in the if my
Speaker 4: next certification I want to take in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 4: and you can go to CyberTracker dot org and find classes.
Speaker 4: If there's somebody giving classes or certifications and you don't
Speaker 4: have to. You can take a certification and not know
Speaker 4: a thing and but will give you a very, very
Speaker 4: in depth taste of what this is all about. It's
Speaker 4: a two day process and they'll tell well, the people
Speaker 4: I took my certification from the head biologist of the
Speaker 4: Texas for Endangered Species, he's the guy that gives me
Speaker 4: my test. They were just like, well, you're going to fail,
Speaker 4: so just be prepared.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, no, I'm not.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, no, you know, I'm going to study.
Speaker 4: I don't want to fail. I mean, it's a little expensive.
Speaker 4: It for two days, it's like three four hundred dollars,
Speaker 4: but it's intent and it is a plethora of knowledge.
Speaker 4: If you went to YouTube and just type in nature journaling,
Speaker 4: there's a plethora of nature journaling tutorials to get people
Speaker 4: started on that. Like I said, sit down, nature journal
Speaker 4: whatever it is, even if it's a flower or bird,
Speaker 4: or just to get you to start seeing detail, detailed detail.
Speaker 1: One of the things I always ask witnesses to do
Speaker 1: is draw, which is essentially a type of nature journaling,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't take literacy. You don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about your grammar or punctuation. You don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about spelling in any of this nature journaling stuff at all.
Speaker 1: The point is to get your thoughts on paper. But
Speaker 1: I find that when I ask somebody to draw, that
Speaker 1: are automatically resistant to it. Oh, I'm not an artist.
Speaker 1: It's not going to look like blah blah blah. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't matter, and I don't think that's the point
Speaker 1: of nature journaling either, and correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: But it seems to me that whenever I have somebody
Speaker 1: draw something that they have observed, new details emerge. And
Speaker 1: I think it's such a good exercise for anybody to
Speaker 1: do draw a picture of what you think you see,
Speaker 1: because you're going to learn something about what you're observing
Speaker 1: just by making that connection between your visual stimulus and
Speaker 1: the kinetic motion of moving the pin around on the paper.
Speaker 1: It engages multiple modalities of learning, and going back in
Speaker 1: my elementary school teaching days, modalities are how you learn.
Speaker 1: I am a very visual learner. I learned by looking
Speaker 1: at things and listening to things, what probably explains my musicality.
Speaker 1: You know, but quote unquote bad kids in class. There
Speaker 1: always the kinesetic ones that have to move around, and
Speaker 1: they're only the quote unquote bad kids in class because
Speaker 1: they can't sit still and the teacher doesn't recognize that
Speaker 1: that's how they learn. But by engaging multiple modalities, you
Speaker 1: you engulf just so much more information. And that's exactly
Speaker 1: what this nature journaling sort of thing does for someone.
Speaker 1: Whether you're drawing or writing or stick figures, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I can't sing your praises high enough for bringing that
Speaker 1: to the attention of well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and nature journaling is for that individual. It's not
Speaker 4: for if you want it to be for the world, sure,
Speaker 4: but it's not. It's for you first and foremost and
Speaker 4: what you're observing and for your memories and down the road.
Speaker 4: You know, I look at all of my you know,
Speaker 4: I write things down and books. I have tons of notebooks,
Speaker 4: and I also take notes on my iPhone and I
Speaker 4: take you know, I take notes everywhere in a nature
Speaker 4: journal and I've got years of stuff and I go back.
Speaker 3: I even do voice journaling, like I'll just.
Speaker 4: Talk into my notes and record myself and what I
Speaker 4: observed and how I feel about it. And there's nothing
Speaker 4: more interesting than to find something you wrote or drew
Speaker 4: or thought and recorded ten years ago and you revisit
Speaker 4: that it brings you back. And like you said, you know,
Speaker 4: I and Down talk about this a lot. We call
Speaker 4: it old timer's. It's like Alzheimer's, but you don't really
Speaker 4: have Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's. You have Oldheimer's because you're forgetful. And
Speaker 4: it's wonderful when I go back and I read or
Speaker 4: listen and it brings me back to that place and
Speaker 4: it brings up memories I forgot before.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 1: Bogo will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 3: It helped.
Speaker 4: I think it really helps, like you said, our cognitive
Speaker 4: resources if we're not using them.
Speaker 3: This truly like nature journaling. It makes me ask.
Speaker 4: So if I'm journaling a tree structure, because that's what
Speaker 4: people are interested in, and a lot of times will
Speaker 4: ask and what do you think of these tree structures?
Speaker 4: And I'll say, well, who told you they do that?
Speaker 4: And they're like, what do you mean that's a known behavior?
Speaker 4: And I'm like, I don't know of any recorded data
Speaker 4: or encounters or experiences where someone saw them build a
Speaker 4: tree structure. Maybe there is, but I don't know, But
Speaker 4: so what I look into is when I'm nature journaling
Speaker 4: those tree structures, I start to ask myself, up.
Speaker 3: Okay, what does it remind me of?
Speaker 4: Well, it reminds me of a boy scout TV, right,
Speaker 4: So what kind of wood is that?
Speaker 3: Is that the same all the same wood? Or is
Speaker 3: that is that pine? Is that? Oh?
Speaker 4: Or is it a multitude of different kinds of wood?
Speaker 4: Is that type of tree growing all around here?
Speaker 3: So? If this is pine, how close am I to
Speaker 3: the nearest stream?
Speaker 4: When was the last flood? Okay, when's the last flood?
Speaker 4: So all right, we've got pine, we got oh, we've
Speaker 4: got cedar. How long does it take for these different
Speaker 4: types of woods to rot in certain environments? So what
Speaker 4: I'm doing is just starting to train my mind to
Speaker 4: just look for something different and ask questions of myself
Speaker 4: that maybe I didn't ask before. And that right there
Speaker 4: is going to get you on your phone. People will
Speaker 4: go home and they'll start to google those things if
Speaker 4: they don't know that answer right then, and then it
Speaker 4: just leads you down a queerly cool rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: That's how I learned about lollipines and how incredibly important
Speaker 4: they are to the ecosystem. And that lolly pines are what,
Speaker 4: you know, what they make turpentine out of, and they
Speaker 4: only grow from Texas to basically Mississippi and just a
Speaker 4: little bit of Florida. But the lollipine needs fire to germinate.
Speaker 4: So that led me down that path. And so then
Speaker 4: it's like, Okay, what what areas need lollipine? Or what
Speaker 4: what species need lolllypine? You know, it just gets you going,
Speaker 4: and then your life becomes overwhelmed with new ideas, new
Speaker 4: maybe hobbies that you become interested in. You know, maybe
Speaker 4: you want to learn more about the indigenous you know,
Speaker 4: flora and fauna in your area. So what do what
Speaker 4: have in my area? You know that that's what I do.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm just so ecstatic right now. I've bland
Speaker 4: in Oklahoma and I have sassafras trees and hickory trees
Speaker 4: and maple trees and you know, persimmon trees. And now
Speaker 4: I'm I'm trying to collect native persimetry sepling so I
Speaker 4: can plant more. So I believe those you know, persimon trees.
Speaker 4: They everything in the woods eats a persimon. So I'm thinking, okay,
Speaker 4: how could I make my area more you know, animal
Speaker 4: friendly and the fact to bring in more wildlife, which
Speaker 4: might bring in more bigfoots possibility. So just for nature journaling,
Speaker 4: that's what how it affects me.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, one last thought on nature journaling before
Speaker 1: we move on to other topics here is and I
Speaker 1: find for myself when I'm walking around in the woods,
Speaker 1: I don't really want to sit down and take fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes out of my time there to write some stuff
Speaker 1: and do some stuff. And I know that's probably a
Speaker 1: bad habit or whatever. But one of the one of
Speaker 1: the tools that I've been utilizing lately is I happen
Speaker 1: to have an iPhone instead of an Android or whatever.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure there's equivalent apps or whatever out there.
Speaker 1: My iPhone came with an app called Journal, and it
Speaker 1: does I think GPS stuff and you can just talk
Speaker 1: into it and it transcribes it and you can export
Speaker 1: things into like word files and various other formats. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of a new fangled way of doing these
Speaker 1: nature journals. It might be something that is more up
Speaker 1: some of the people's alleys. You know, you can't really
Speaker 1: draw in it or anything like that, but you can
Speaker 1: attach photographs to those same journal entries. So there's there's
Speaker 1: a modern equivalent of doing this in case someone doesn't
Speaker 1: want to take the time. Like when I'm out in
Speaker 1: the field, I got to cover as much ground as
Speaker 1: I possibly can, you know that sort of thing. That's
Speaker 1: how I feel about when I'm doing those sort of
Speaker 1: things until I find something. But I keep track of
Speaker 1: a lot of negative data that way, Like I don't
Speaker 1: have to say the date, it's already there. But today
Speaker 1: I'm walking the mud road. I walked up and down.
Speaker 1: I didn't see anything at all, But there's some bear
Speaker 1: tracks over here, you know, on the puddle road today,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing in the puddle today. Maybe I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go try so and so you know that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So that helps me a lot.
Speaker 4: Well, that's exactly right. And a lot of times it's
Speaker 4: same as you. I don't want to sit down, and
Speaker 4: you know, I don't always carry a big notebook or
Speaker 4: my journaling book with me, depending on how much time
Speaker 4: I want to spend out there. But what I'll do
Speaker 4: now that I have ideas of what I'm interested in
Speaker 4: as far as questions, I'll go and take pictures.
Speaker 3: I'll take a plethora of pictures.
Speaker 4: And then or even video and then go back and
Speaker 4: start to journal it, maybe revisit again later and journal
Speaker 4: more of that same thing. So yes, definitely. But just
Speaker 4: getting your mind's eye to start seeing things differently than
Speaker 4: you did five years ago, or let's say, or whatever
Speaker 4: is the biggest focus for me.
Speaker 3: So yeah, but.
Speaker 4: I didn't know about that journal thing because I just
Speaker 4: got a new iPhone the other day, so I have
Speaker 4: to look for it.
Speaker 3: That will be a great asset.
Speaker 1: You get the scan a Verse app yet, I.
Speaker 4: Will definitely get that because that will help with all
Speaker 4: the tracks. Because I even taught one of my track
Speaker 4: classes that I attended, I'll go to like trips in
Speaker 4: the tracking world where we'll go to you know, certain
Speaker 4: areas like the desert, and we'll be there for four
Speaker 4: days and just learn, you know. And I taught them about,
Speaker 4: hey man, I'm going to cast these tracks because I
Speaker 4: don't know that it's this or this. Everybody's indifferent right now.
Speaker 4: And they were just really impressed because we're like, oh
Speaker 4: my gosh, the bottom of the track reads so much
Speaker 4: better out here. And I'm like, yeah, so that will
Speaker 4: be great. I'll have to share that with my group.
Speaker 4: They will love that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my protocol now because I'm out there tracking a lot,
Speaker 1: so next time you're in Oregon, let me know, I'll
Speaker 1: bring out to the spot or whatever. But my protocol now,
Speaker 1: like what is if I find a maybe or something
Speaker 1: like that, or maybe a definite you know, I take
Speaker 1: I always say, take a minimum five photographs of each
Speaker 1: track with a scale item. With a scale item, of course,
Speaker 1: I talk from directly above it, from the left and
Speaker 1: right about forty five degrees in the front and back
Speaker 1: about forty five degrees maybe a foot or two out depending.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not super regimented about any of this,
Speaker 1: but so I take minimum five photographs, try to take
Speaker 1: a video if I possibly can, and I also am
Speaker 1: now scanning it, and if I think that anything is
Speaker 1: going to come of it, I will also cast it.
Speaker 1: And it is a good thing up just like literally yesterday.
Speaker 1: Maybe we can probably talk talk about this maybe on
Speaker 1: another episode or maybe the members sing. But yesterday I
Speaker 1: found a very odd looking track that I couldn't make
Speaker 1: sense out of. But it didn't make sense to be
Speaker 1: anything else except for maybe a human or a sasquatch.
Speaker 1: Because I had a nice big Alex, a big toe
Speaker 1: had a nice broad keel, but the rest of it
Speaker 1: was missing. It was very weirdly shaped. And so I
Speaker 1: did my my thing, you know, And and the cast itself,
Speaker 1: the cast, it makes a lot more sense than the
Speaker 1: photographs did. It looks it makes a lot more sense
Speaker 1: in what I saw with my own eyes. The cast,
Speaker 1: you can see like, oh, that is a big toe
Speaker 1: and there are at least three other smaller toes next
Speaker 1: to it, and it was a it was a beautiful heel.
Speaker 1: And yes, the fact there's dramatoglyphics on it, it's it's
Speaker 1: an extraordinary cast that I almost just passed on by
Speaker 1: if I wasn't so stubborn and determined about this sort
Speaker 1: of stuff about wasting plaster on a regular basis, pouring
Speaker 1: it into holes that don't make any sense. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think it's a great habit.
Speaker 4: Let me ask you this, do you do you carry
Speaker 4: your headlamp with you during the day?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So, yeah, because I never because you never know
Speaker 1: when you're going to be stuck out there after dark.
Speaker 4: Right, So here's a fantastic trip, So the best in tracking.
Speaker 4: And I want to get into depth about some gates
Speaker 4: and about misconceptions of bipedal trackways and what to look for.
Speaker 4: So when you're tracking, always have a lamp hanging around
Speaker 4: your neck during the day because the best time to
Speaker 4: find tracks, like we're talking like, you know, the minuscule
Speaker 4: whisper of a track right like, you wouldn't see it
Speaker 4: unless it's early in the morning or late in the
Speaker 4: evening because of a cast of a shadow from the side.
Speaker 4: When you're looking at tracks, take your take your headlamp off,
Speaker 4: turn it on whiteline, put it at the you know,
Speaker 4: at basically ground level, and go around that track and
Speaker 4: you will see a whole new world. It will just
Speaker 4: jump in your face like, oh my gosh, look, there's
Speaker 4: all the tolls, there's.
Speaker 3: All this, there's all that.
Speaker 4: That is one of the best tools ever is just
Speaker 4: a simple flashlight. You can even use your phones flashlight
Speaker 4: or your headlamp. That when I go and take a
Speaker 4: certification or if I'm on any tracking event, always got
Speaker 4: a headlamp around my neck and that way I could
Speaker 4: really focus on is digit number one, a digit number two?
Speaker 3: You know, even links how, and you.
Speaker 4: Will start to see pembricks of claw marks from other
Speaker 4: animals that you never saw before.
Speaker 3: You'll start to see insect tracks that you've never noticed.
Speaker 4: So one of those tools that is just phenomenal is
Speaker 4: a white piece of paper, a headlamp and a stick,
Speaker 4: and those things can show you a bunch of things
Speaker 4: you never would have seen without them.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 1: Bogo will be right back after these messages. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about gate. What do you want to say about bipedal gates?
Speaker 4: Okay, so when i'm on it, let's say I'm on
Speaker 4: a test, a certification, and you know as well as anybody,
Speaker 4: when we're out in the woods, we will see maybe
Speaker 4: one good track of an individual and then a bunch
Speaker 4: of sloppy mess or you may not see any at all,
Speaker 4: and that is more often than not, and a lot
Speaker 4: of times animals, particularly very There's a lot of variations
Speaker 4: in gates.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, the define gate, right.
Speaker 3: Okay, yes, let me define gate.
Speaker 4: Gate is really the definition of gate is how the
Speaker 4: body moves or how the legs move. In let's say
Speaker 4: a walking gate. There is a walking gate, there is
Speaker 4: a trotting gate, there is a running gate.
Speaker 3: And then those are broken down into.
Speaker 4: Body scissoring, like if the body of a canid is
Speaker 4: full extended. We're only one foot's touching the ground like
Speaker 4: they're running. They're in a full run. That is a
Speaker 4: full scissoring body gate. And to know those, there are
Speaker 4: a few things. You'll see their tracks in clumps like
Speaker 4: broken Like you'll see four tracks four tracks, four tracks,
Speaker 4: that is like a lope or a run. They're moving
Speaker 4: at a fast speed, and you'll see bigger distances between
Speaker 4: one group of tracks and the other group of tracks. Now,
Speaker 4: if you're in a walking or a trotting gate, let's say,
Speaker 4: well specifically, let's look at deer, kyote and feelids, because
Speaker 4: there are big culprits. So if you see a very
Speaker 4: straight line of tracks, let's say coyote canid tracks where
Speaker 4: they're just one right after the other like in.
Speaker 3: A tie line, that's a trot.
Speaker 4: And what's happening is they're moving to where only two
Speaker 4: feet are hitting the ground at a time. So they
Speaker 4: are also moving fast enough. And this is with humans
Speaker 4: as well. The faster we go, the tighter the width
Speaker 4: of the trail is meaning the trail width meaning from
Speaker 4: hip to hip, the width of a When you see
Speaker 4: a deer trail, it's kind of thin, and long. That
Speaker 4: is the width of the trail the gate, the width
Speaker 4: of the gate. So as animals and humans move, our
Speaker 4: gate becomes very narrow, meaning like when you and I'm run,
Speaker 4: our tracks are one ride in front of the other.
Speaker 4: When we walk, our tracks are hips apart. So when
Speaker 4: deer are in snow, they will move at a slower gate.
Speaker 4: All animals do, and a lot of times they will
Speaker 4: step into their own tracks. They'll do it indirect register
Speaker 4: or direct register, and that's to save energy, but it's
Speaker 4: just to help move through the snow easy, easier. And
Speaker 4: so what happens is a lot of times deer especially
Speaker 4: because they're not trying to be quiet. They're prey, they're
Speaker 4: not predators, whereas a kyote, you know, put your mind's
Speaker 4: eye into the idea of watching a coyote trot through
Speaker 4: the woods.
Speaker 3: It's like he's tippy toeing, you know, it's like to to.
Speaker 4: If that's what a trot were to sound like, that
Speaker 4: was what it would sound like. It is like, well,
Speaker 4: only two feet are hitting the ground at a time,
Speaker 4: whereas deer do the same thing, but they're not quiet
Speaker 4: because they're trying to warn others or they're moving away
Speaker 4: at night. So a bipedal sounding gait can really be
Speaker 4: a quadrupedal gate, which is a deer that is doing
Speaker 4: a direct register in the woods because there are boom.
Speaker 3: Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I think you also hit on something very
Speaker 1: important as well as far as bipedle gates go. Everybody,
Speaker 1: this whole tightrope walking thing with the sasquatch gate is overblown.
Speaker 1: There is always straddle, which is the side by side
Speaker 1: you know distance. I guess you know there is, but
Speaker 1: and and people say, well, as a tightrope walk, look
Speaker 1: at look at the distance in between the footprints, the
Speaker 1: step length. In other words, it has to be a sasquatch. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be a sasquatch because a human
Speaker 1: wearing stompers or otherwise or something you know, trying to
Speaker 1: replicate a sasquatch trackway will probably run to increase the
Speaker 1: step length in between the footprints and there when they
Speaker 1: when human runs functionally, it narrows the straddle. So you're
Speaker 1: going to get a more tight rope walking. I saw
Speaker 1: what the London tracks. I've seen it with a lot
Speaker 1: of different trackways that are misidentified or hoaxes.
Speaker 4: And that's everything that's that's all of us that run
Speaker 4: animals included people that it starts to narrow into that
Speaker 4: straight line, like you're saying, and that's exactly true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's just and I see. Oh and then
Speaker 1: of course snow prints is another whole bag of soup
Speaker 1: that you got to get into there, because you know,
Speaker 1: animals hopping through the snow are going to be in
Speaker 1: a straight line, and you can't hold up the tightrope
Speaker 1: walking thing as evidence of it being a sasquatch print
Speaker 1: in my opinion, right.
Speaker 4: Well, deer the biggest culprit, Dearrin Elk, you know, the ungulants,
Speaker 4: they are the biggest culprit because they are doing a
Speaker 4: indirect registered trot through snow most of the time. Now,
Speaker 4: now there is a difference, like you've got black tail
Speaker 4: deer up there. We have white tail here in my area,
Speaker 4: but we also have mule deer. Now there's a different
Speaker 4: Sometimes deer and black tail deer will do what is
Speaker 4: called a promking, where they bounce you know, all fours,
Speaker 4: whereas here white tail deer do not. They can do that,
Speaker 4: but it is so rare that they do not prompt. So,
Speaker 4: but what I see all the time is the snow
Speaker 4: tracks where it is an ungulant it's a deer or
Speaker 4: an elk or moose where they're doing an indirect, indirect
Speaker 4: register trot and.
Speaker 3: It looks like a bipedal walk, you know.
Speaker 4: And because the faster they move, now maybe you're only
Speaker 4: seeing two tracks. They're straddling that line. Let's say they're
Speaker 4: straddling a line. A slower trot will be a straddle,
Speaker 4: whereas a full on trot. If it's a full on
Speaker 4: direct register where the where the track goes directly into
Speaker 4: the other track, they're moving faster and that's that's going
Speaker 4: to be a very straight line. If they're moving in
Speaker 4: a little bit slower trot where it's an indirect where
Speaker 4: you see like you know, like bear tracks, when the
Speaker 4: bear steps on the other bear track, it's front fall.
Speaker 4: That is a little bit slower for a deer, but
Speaker 4: that is their most common way of movement. People I
Speaker 4: don't think people understand like so like mountain lions, mountain
Speaker 4: lions most common way of movement is walking and it's
Speaker 4: an overstep walk. So when you see their tracks, their
Speaker 4: back seat step in front of the front track, it
Speaker 4: lays down. Every animal has very specific gates on the
Speaker 4: way they move because of the morphology of the body.
Speaker 4: And like you said, there's so many times when I
Speaker 4: see these snow tracks and it looks like a bipedal
Speaker 4: walk when it really is just deer.
Speaker 3: And but yeah, I don't even say.
Speaker 1: It, oh ya, you gotta you gotta see it, you know,
Speaker 1: because it's I think the most respectful thing you can
Speaker 1: do is pop somebody's balloon.
Speaker 4: Sometimes, well it's true, But this is what This is
Speaker 4: why I encourage so many people, and I have a
Speaker 4: lot of reading information that they can go to and
Speaker 4: learn on their own. But when people send me a
Speaker 4: picture and I was telling that this earlier of a track,
Speaker 4: I will always say, Okay, tell this is what I'm
Speaker 4: going to tell you. I see in this track. I
Speaker 4: see symmetry, I see let's h let's say I see pinprick,
Speaker 4: mail mark seven sixteenths of an inch out, or maybe
Speaker 4: I see all these different things.
Speaker 3: What do you see?
Speaker 4: And I want you to take your phone that you've
Speaker 4: showed me this picture on, and I want you to
Speaker 4: go to edits and I want you to play with
Speaker 4: the contrast and the and bring out all the shadows.
Speaker 4: And then I want you to tell me what you see.
Speaker 4: And then they start seeing things and I'm like, now
Speaker 4: I want you to turn it upside down, and then
Speaker 4: they start seeing more things because a lot of times
Speaker 4: trackways aren't just one animal, they're many. I had a
Speaker 4: gentleman to do this exact thing where he was trying
Speaker 4: to show me this track and gravel and I'm like, sir,
Speaker 4: I didn't see it, but I'm going to tell you
Speaker 4: what to do. Come back and tell me what you see.
Speaker 4: It turned out to be a horse and a deer
Speaker 4: and a coyote track all.
Speaker 3: Mixed in one.
Speaker 4: And so what happens in that moment for them is
Speaker 4: I didn't tell them what it was. They figured it
Speaker 4: out on their own, and I just gave them the tools.
Speaker 4: So then they get on that path that we want
Speaker 4: them on of Oh, let me see if I can
Speaker 4: figure this out. It's not always going to be, you know,
Speaker 4: I'm that hunter dude. Yeah yeah, yeah, okay, whatever, you know,
Speaker 4: educate yourself more.
Speaker 3: So that's where instead of saying, hey.
Speaker 4: That's a wolf, because I say it's a wolf, I'm
Speaker 4: gonna say, hey, these are the things I see, and
Speaker 4: these are the things I don't see what do you see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a lot more constructive than this yelling
Speaker 1: the word balderdash and moving on right right.
Speaker 3: But people get so offended, and especially I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: I've never been a feminist in the sense of oh
Speaker 4: I'm suppressed or you know.
Speaker 3: I've always been.
Speaker 4: Treated very equally by the people I'm surrounded by. That
Speaker 4: I love my family, my friends, my husband.
Speaker 3: Until I got into the bigfoot world.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, it's crazy that, you know, being a woman,
Speaker 4: I'm not smart enough sometimes for them, But I'm interested
Speaker 4: in them learning for their own so that they can
Speaker 4: figure this out and then we don't have all these
Speaker 4: crazy videos and pictures online of.
Speaker 3: This is what this is, and that's what things like.
Speaker 4: There's some field guides that are so great, like Animal
Speaker 4: Tracks and Scat of California. It's a Pacific Northwest book.
Speaker 4: It's written by the same guy I took my certification with.
Speaker 4: It's a great little field guide that people can get.
Speaker 4: There's the Facebook page animals don't cover their tracks.
Speaker 3: That is so great. People.
Speaker 4: You learn so much in there, and they're very, very
Speaker 4: very adamant about how you post.
Speaker 3: And you can't just post something and say this is
Speaker 3: what this is.
Speaker 4: You have to tell them why and using that same
Speaker 4: type of information that I'm talking about today. There is
Speaker 4: Mammals Tracks and signed by Mark Elbrock. It is the
Speaker 4: Bible of the tracking world. There's a volume one and
Speaker 4: volume two. I mean we're talking about all the way
Speaker 4: down to which Okay, what al puked up this alpellet?
Speaker 4: Because what you're going to do is you're going to
Speaker 4: open it up and find the specific rodent skulls in
Speaker 4: there and tell us what rodent that is, and we'll
Speaker 4: tell you and then you can figure.
Speaker 3: Out what out that is.
Speaker 1: Everybody's idea every good time.
Speaker 3: Well it is of mine. I can assure you.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
Speaker 1: Will be right back after these messages because we're coming
Speaker 1: around for like the final approach, so to speak, at
Speaker 1: the end of the hour. Here, I know you wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about some DNA ideas real fast, So why
Speaker 1: don't we get that in before we have to close
Speaker 1: down shop here?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 4: Perfect, So you know that I have this DNA kitt
Speaker 4: in the last you know, this last conference, I just
Speaker 4: like beef them up. I mean I really wanted I'm
Speaker 4: always looking for improvements. And one of the things you
Speaker 4: know that I've been, you know, talking to a Darby
Speaker 4: orth Cut and Haskell Hard, you know, the guys that
Speaker 4: are really like moving into DNA testing and writing peer
Speaker 4: previews and such, and has Heart's working in or testing
Speaker 4: and working in water, you know, DNA collection and things
Speaker 4: like that. And so I thought to myself, Okay, so
Speaker 4: what can I do for these kids?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 4: What has school's doing I think is really in large proportions.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure. I got to talk to him a lot,
Speaker 4: but I was thinking. So what I did is I
Speaker 4: went online and I looked at water collection e DNA
Speaker 4: water collection in wildlife for fish. And it wasn't really
Speaker 4: about rivers and streams for me, is because bigfits don't
Speaker 4: live there.
Speaker 3: In my opinion, I don't know. But if we were
Speaker 3: to collect water, where would we get it? That might
Speaker 3: show something? How would we collect it?
Speaker 4: So I put together a little minikit of collecting water
Speaker 4: DNA or DNA from water through a process of how
Speaker 4: they do it with fish. But you know, there's many fish.
Speaker 4: But I don't know if it's gonna work. But this
Speaker 4: is my thought process. So when we're out looking for
Speaker 4: tracks and let's say which people have done. We see
Speaker 4: a trackway in the snow, and we're for sure that
Speaker 4: that's sasquatch. Why could we not collect the snow from
Speaker 4: the track, because we know that dogs could smell it
Speaker 4: if they were trained to, you know, track sasquatch or
Speaker 4: bear or whatever. Those tracks hold DNA of some sort.
Speaker 4: We collect that snow, melt down that water, plenty of it,
Speaker 4: and then we put it through my DNA collection filters.
Speaker 4: That is one of my new thought processes. And the
Speaker 4: other is when you're seeing trackways of sasquatches on the
Speaker 4: beach or let's say near a river and it's not
Speaker 4: water in it. Now we've got to pull the water
Speaker 4: out to cast it. Why not pull the water out
Speaker 4: and see if we can collect possible DNA that's been
Speaker 4: trapped in that small amount of water sitting in that
Speaker 4: track and send that in through those filters that I provided,
Speaker 4: or you can. You know, people want to do it,
Speaker 4: however they want to do it, But that's what I'm
Speaker 4: looking at.
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting because I've had long conversations with
Speaker 1: Darby because of the presence of some snowprints up in
Speaker 1: my neck of the woods about how snowprints are probably
Speaker 1: one of the more promising avenues that we can retrieve
Speaker 1: e DNA because unlike the woods, I mean, the woods
Speaker 1: is full of DNA, of everything that lives there. That's
Speaker 1: what DNA is all about. But the thing is on snow.
Speaker 1: If you have a nice sasquatch snow track, the only
Speaker 1: thing that really came in contact with that snow is
Speaker 1: sasquatch foot especially it's fresh enough, so I think that
Speaker 1: would probably be amongst the higher probabilities. Because the cards
Speaker 1: are so stacked against us finding unknown DNA strands, it
Speaker 1: is extraordinarily difficult, next to impossible at this point until
Speaker 1: there's a target species. If we have the target of
Speaker 1: this is what sasquatch DNA looks like, then you can
Speaker 1: look for that. But otherwise you're looking around in the
Speaker 1: sky looking for a bird you don't recognize when it's invisible,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, And as far as the footprint in
Speaker 1: the standing water in the footprint, I think that holds promise.
Speaker 1: The question is, I guess how do you collect it?
Speaker 1: I guess you'd have to sterilize some sort of syringe
Speaker 1: or something like that. But is that going to be
Speaker 1: enough because the conversations I've had with Darby about snow tracks,
Speaker 1: as he says, is probably going to take close to
Speaker 1: a gallon of water to get an amount of genetic
Speaker 1: material necessary to analyze appropriately. So I don't know about
Speaker 1: I would have to I'd have to talk to people first,
Speaker 1: hatter than me. You know about that the standing water
Speaker 1: thing in prints.
Speaker 3: Well, this is the thing.
Speaker 4: You have that equipment because I gave you a kid,
Speaker 4: and it has a sixty mil syringe, sterile syringe that
Speaker 4: you so when I researched the fish, you know, you know,
Speaker 4: the water for the fish DNA out of a running river.
Speaker 4: They extract three times a full syringe of sixty mil
Speaker 4: and then run it through that filter and then you
Speaker 4: go back. You pull water, You keep pulling water. I
Speaker 4: would assume if you, I mean, I don't know. We
Speaker 4: got to try it, that's all you know. For me,
Speaker 4: I'm going to try it if I ever come across it.
Speaker 4: I may even tried on just some random thing and
Speaker 4: see like bear and see if it comes back bear.
Speaker 4: But anyway, you want to do that. You want to
Speaker 4: extract as much water as you can till the filter
Speaker 4: won't take any more of the DNA or whatever it's
Speaker 4: it's I would if it was dirty water, I would
Speaker 4: do a little bit of a of a filter like
Speaker 4: a coffee filter first, but anyway, then I put in
Speaker 4: there a preservative of ethanol, so you shoot that preservative
Speaker 4: inside the filter and then you leave that syringe on.
Speaker 4: It comes in another sterile syringe and then a cap
Speaker 4: that's provided for you, and then you can send that
Speaker 4: in and it's good. You know, it's not gonna deteriorate
Speaker 4: or anything. But I'm super curious. I'm gonna try. And
Speaker 4: that's what I provided my new kids with is for
Speaker 4: people to try.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I mean, like I said, I don't know much about
Speaker 4: much about after all that and how that's tested or done.
Speaker 4: But I feel like this is the best we could do,
Speaker 4: and maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But if I
Speaker 4: were gonna find e DNA as far as water, you know,
Speaker 4: holding any kind of odd DNA or unknown DNA, I
Speaker 4: would think it would be in the snow tracks for sure,
Speaker 4: it'd be clean, but possibly in the tracks of a print.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: But that's just where my mind leads to me. For me,
Speaker 4: it's just about better tools. Where can cause you know,
Speaker 4: even and I knew, well, I don't know if this
Speaker 4: is going to work or not. Nobody does really, But
Speaker 4: in the sense, will it lead to someone thinking of
Speaker 4: a better idea?
Speaker 3: That's what my goal is.
Speaker 1: So you obviously have a lot of information in your head,
Speaker 1: you're very enthusiastic about what you're doing. What about people
Speaker 1: who are out there and want to contact you, maybe
Speaker 1: with questions or ideas or collaboration or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Where can people get a hold of you?
Speaker 4: I am super easy, peasy when that could just my
Speaker 4: Facebook page, you know, Shelley Kevington, hyphen Montana, just message me.
Speaker 4: But I also want to encourage people to go and
Speaker 4: look at There is a new YouTube channel called Study
Speaker 4: Sasquatch and it's run by our friends Bartkatino, Kirk Brandyberg
Speaker 4: and then Nathaniel Grons and they're really focusing strongly on
Speaker 4: thermal imaging. And what I love about it it teaches
Speaker 4: you One thing you need to know about using thermal
Speaker 4: is that thermal will help you learn how animals move.
Speaker 4: So if you're looking at a coyote or an image
Speaker 4: at one thousand yards, by the way that animal moves,
Speaker 4: you should be able to differentiate whether it's a cougar
Speaker 4: or a coyote.
Speaker 3: By the movement. That's what Gates also teach you.
Speaker 4: I mean, I could go into ten hour talk about Gates,
Speaker 4: but we don't have that kind of time.
Speaker 1: So if they have questions, they can go to your
Speaker 1: Facebook and talk to you there. Are you going to
Speaker 1: be doing any live appearances for the rest of the summer.
Speaker 1: I know you're going to be in the woods a lot,
Speaker 1: but are you going to do in any other appearances?
Speaker 1: Because I saw you last week in Ohio Bigfoot Conference?
Speaker 1: What else? Anything else?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Well, the next one I have scheduled so far is
Speaker 4: the Texas Bigfoot Conference in October.
Speaker 3: And I'll be there.
Speaker 4: And then I just bought a start link, so I'm
Speaker 4: hoping to maybe start doing some like streaming in the woods.
Speaker 4: I don't know, we'll see. But as far as any
Speaker 4: of any live stuff, not really this summer. I'm hoping
Speaker 4: just to be in the woods. I'm hoping to get
Speaker 4: back to the Pacific Northwest maybe for a short is it.
Speaker 4: I'd like to come see you. I'd like to come.
Speaker 4: I'd like to go visit a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: But yeah, well, very good. Shelley, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on Bigfoot and Beyond. I'm sorry Bobo couldn't
Speaker 1: be here today, but you know, he has a much
Speaker 1: more complicated life and schedule than I do, even though
Speaker 1: I'm extraordinarily busy. It's Bobo. He has a lot of
Speaker 1: things going on. But anyway, I want to thank you
Speaker 1: for your time. And I don't know everybody. I guess
Speaker 1: keep it squatchy is what we say here. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond. If
Speaker 1: you liked what you heard, please rate and review us
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