Let’s Hope The Weather Holds – Details, episodes & analysis

This podcast is another collaboration between myself and Ryan O'Connor from the Stag Roar podcast.

In this episode Ryan talked to Ben who previously worked as a hunting guide/culler in Scotland.

Ben's instagram page is a way of getting people to appreciate the necessity for responsible wildlife management and that hunting maintains healthy animal populations for future generations.

Thanks again to Ryan for the collaboration.

This podcast is from two interviews I did with local Land Search and Rescue team members based in Queenstown. I spoke to Tarn Pilkington, a volunteer with Wakatipu Search and Rescue Alpine Cliff Rescue team about a rescue he was involved in when two climbers needed help on the Remarkables in poor weather. I also spoke to Chrissy Schreiber who is a volunteer with Wakatipu Search and Rescue, about what Land Search and Rescue does, lost person behaviour, the challenges of a volunteer organisation and more. They both tell me about their own outdoor adventures and Chrissy gives me advice for the upcoming Luxmore Grunt. I made attempts to contact the two climbers that Tarn helped rescue, but after speaking to police and mountain clubs I was unsuccessful, so Tarn's story will have to do. Link to a story about the rescue. A special thanks to Johnny Franklin, General Manager Partnerships at New Zealand Land Search and Rescue for organising the interviews.  

Research Fellow in Marine Science, at Griffith University in Australia Olaf Meynecke talks to me about tracking a whale carcass around the ocean to map how wind and tides affect its movement.  

This research will hopefully be used so that beached whales are not taken to landfill but that they can be towed to out to sea and their nutrients returned to the ocean without colliding with ships.

He talks about his latest paper 'Dead on the Beach? Predicting the Drift of Whale Remains Improves Management for Offshore Disposal', the role the nutrients of a dead whale plays in the ecosystem, the challenges they faced, why this cheaper option is not the current way of doing, he tells me about sitting in whale carcasses for arthritis treatment, the software they used to map the whale's 150km drift path, the sharks that fed on the carcass and more.

His paper https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/12/7/1156

 

All music by Jacques van Wyk

In this interview Hans Eisenbeis, Director of Mission & Messaging at the Non-GMO Project talks about farms and farmers in the US, how the Non-GMO Project operates, disagreements in science about the health of GMO's, how systems transitions look, he talks about the unique position New Zealand is in as a Non-GMO nation, soil health, externalising costs from GMO's, he asks if we are short-cutting our way out of existential crisis, the innovation fallacy and more.

Have a look at their work on https://www.nongmoproject.org/

Associate Professor Nic Rawlence, director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory, talks to me about the extinct fish eating merganser duck and Takahe research, dodgy museum collecting practices of the 1800’s, how New Zealand has a much more cosmopolitan makeup of biodiversity than previously thought, how the data we have make us form weird relationships that seem implausible, population bottlenecks and more.

In this episode Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Kent State University in Ohio, USA, Metin Eren tells me about how he, his department and the Meateater crew slaughtered a bison with clovis tools.

The trial was followed by a paper that describes their techniques, questions and results in depth.

Metin tells me about flint knapping, new ideas in archeology, clovis people, life 13,000 years ago, what we know, what we thought we knew, what we don't know...you'll get it once you listen to the podcast.

We agree that the clovis story is the story of all of us.

For images go to my Instagram account.

I speak to Roy Sloan, General Manager of the Fiorldand Wapiti Foundation about the lawsuit Forest & Bird has brought against the foundation and against the Department of Conservation, and about the consequences it might have for all hunters in New Zealand.

All deer species are introduced into New Zealand.

Hunters say they have to be sustainably managed, with lobby groups saying they have to be removed as much as possible, often via poison bait or by helicopters operators who shoot them, as they destroy native flaura.

FYI folks, we had connectivity issues and the sound is quite poor at times.

I speak to Gwyn Thurlow, Chief Executive Officer and General Counsel at the New Zealand Deer Stalkers, about new DNA evidence on the origin of New Zealand chamois, and new historic finds on the history and practicalities of their translocation after local and Austrian newspapers were digitized.

Gwyn is working on a book he hopes to publish in a year with the evidence and his years of Chamois hunting as topics.

We speak abou local herds, how they were caught in Austria, how they were shipped and almost perished on their trip, what they were fed and loads more. He gives me Chamois hunting tips.

 

 

 

Podcast live. The campaign against meat.

In this episode I speak to Prof. Dr. Frédéric Leroy about the campaign against meat.

Frederic is part of a research group in industrial microbiology and Food Biotechnology at the Department of Bioengineering Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels.

He talks about the the intricacies and politics of the EAT Lancet diet and its stakeholders, he tells me about one liners, hyperbole and simplification of the meat and livestock argument, climate and the vilification of meat, we talk about why he took to Twitter to tackle misinformation about meat, how studies about meat’s place in healthy diets have been inaccurate, why a UN environmental group says meat is our most pressing issue, we talk about fermented meat, issues with the Global Burden of Disease study, why the fight against CO2 has left the building, and the influencers in the campaign against meat.

Frederic on Twitter/X @fleroy1974

In this episode I talk to Sean Andrews, founder of the New Zealand based Category 3 Fly Company.

C3 supplies flies world wide.

He tells me about ice fishing for trout with flies and a hand line in Sweden, how he learned to fly fish on chalk streams in the UK as child on the same rivers Frank Sawyers was a river keeper, how difficult it is to find a tying partner, who the greatest fly tyers in the world are, why tying a hare and copper commercially is difficult, he speculates that the 101 is the perfect fly, recruiting people for fly tying who needs a leg up in life, paying royalties for new fly patterns, how you get space in a fly shop, the politics in the fly industry and the challenges the industry faces.

https://www.category3flycompany.com

For those interested to read on some of the UK father of fly fishing Sean mentions go to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sawyer_(writer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._E._M._Skues