wildlife protection

A Redditor proposed a quick fix to one of humanity’s greatest threats. But the real threat may be our fixation with quick fixes.

Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson are the co-hosts.

(Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

Marshall writes "My friend and I went walking from his family farm across the road to his grandfather’s hunting land which was formerly a dog training area, high fences, used for training dogs to run foxes and coyotes. They would trap them and then have the dogs trail them.

That all stopped many years before we came along. My best friend (I’m gonna call him Chad to protect his real name as he is now an army sgt and I don’t want this to have an effect on his career, we also no longer speak much it’s been more than a year since we last spoke.) Told me that we could go into the old fox pen to squirrel hunt that day. So we took off with a single shot 20 ga and a pump pellet rifle. We noticed several things were very wrong once we got in there. Firstly, there was absolute silence throughout the forest. We’re talking about a 20-30acre tract of land that again has 8ft fences all the way round and three main lanes that meet a fire lane that encircles.

There were no birds, no crickets no nothing. If I remember right it was early in the year march I think bc squirrel season had just reopened. It was cold and overcast, still we expected to see at least a bird but nope nothing. After about an hour of walking around, we came to the third lane (we went down the first, turned and walked up the middle lane, and then proceeded down the far lane which usually the deerhunters that since the fox pens closure don’t even hunt) about 5 minutes into our slow walk, we both had this electric feeling… seriously we thought lightning was about to strike nearby or something we were totally wigged out. We looked at each other and suddenly smelled the most godawful stench waft through the trees on a breeze. Within a minute of smelling that we hear/see what I can only describe as Paul Bunyan pissed off knocking down a tremendous pine tree.

It started with a roar , I mean “RRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHH” with the sound of the wood splintering started about 1/3 the way through the roar. We could only see the top of the tree from where we were it was I’m guessing about 200 yards away from us in the deepest part of the area near the border fence. We watched/felt the tree fall and went into full panic. We ran the half mile back to the farmhouse where his grandfather lived and we were so scared we were in tears. That was it for the first encounter. His grandad laughed at us saying something like “yeahhh heeehee , told y’all bout the woodboogahs”

Fast forward about 2 years and a couple months, I believe it was early spring – we were having abnormal flooding in the swamps due to torrential rain for days at a time. Everything was coming out the swamps, and our favorite passtime in the afternoons and nights was riding up and down the dirt roads of the local hunting clubs with buckets – the back creeks and ditch lines all ran together with the flooding swamp waters and pushed crawfish and catfish- etc up into the middle of the roads. We’d ride along with spotlights and jump out in our boots to catch them and then use them as fishing bait later on. One such night, we decided to walk up to the edge of the main road from his trailer house on the dirt road. It bordered a cotton field that split and became a soybean field.

We were walking back from spotlighting the soybean field and I had to pee, Chad told me he was feeling uneasy and wasn’t waiting for me so I started literally peeing as I walked backwards behind him. Midstream- something …MUCH bigger than a cow or deer EXPLODED out of the ditch line to my right. It was so heavy we felt the footfall all the way to the middle of the cotton field. The trees and brush erupted and we heard something exhaling super hard like “WOOOHFFWOOFFFF.”

It was cloudy and raining lightly but the moon was near full so there was some ambient light, enough that the cotton was illuminated in the field. When this thing took off it went straight across the cotton and what we saw from the road (we froze in fear for enough time to see it then bolted for his front yard about 300yards from where we were) was a HUGE black silhouette on two legs sprinting faster than Usain Bolt. We felt it’s footfall even as it reached the tree line on the far side of the field.

Tonight I will be speaking to Matt and Eugene. In 1985 Matt and a friend were hiking in California. Matt said "I thought they were hikers, the man was really tall. As we got closer to where we first saw them I realized they were not hikers, whatever it was one was male and the smaller one was female."

Eugene grew up hunting and fishing his whole life. Eugene said "I live out in the middle of nowhere. I have always loved the outdoors and I hunt to feed my family." Eugene first sighting happened in 2014 while fishing with his son.

On this week's episode of the Friday Five, Liz chats to landscape architect, Alex Bell, who founded agricultural project, Ecoscapes, located on the stunning shores of the Lake Naivasha in the heart of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.⁠

They discuss sustainable and nutritious food production, as well as organic and regenerative agriculture. 

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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