Main Street, Wyoming; 114; Dick Randall, Wildlife Photographer

Graham made possible by a grant from U.S. energy encrypted Bude corporation part of a family of companies in the mining and mineral business providing jobs for Wyoming people in 1966. Welcome to Main Street Wyoming. My name is Jeff Aguero. In 1990 nearly 30 million was spent in western states to control predators that sometimes prey on livestock. Some of that is done for bounty by independent

trappers. Some of it's done by predator control agents working for the federal government or the state's conservationists don't like it. They say it's cruel ineffective and kills other animals such as eagles that feed on coyotes carcasses ranchers on the other hand say that we want to keep sheep and cattle on the range. We've got to have predator control. My guest tonight is Dick Randall a Wyoming native who used to be a predator control officer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now he's a wildlife photographer and an opponent of the trapping shooting and poisoning of coyotes and other predators that he once did. The ranchers used to call Dick Randall a good coyote Hunter. Now what they call him can't be repeated on television. Welcome Dick. Thank you Jack. Why don't we start with Dick Randall the one who used to lean out of airplanes and fire away at coyotes. Tell me how you got into that life. That's been a while back but that one time I believed in what our government was telling me that there are bad animals there are good animals.

You need to help out your country. And I signed on with Fish and Wildlife Service to kill predators all kinds of predators. Black Bear and badgers and Fox and especially coyotes and other animals. And I was good at what I did. I've got towards from Fish and Wildlife Service for above and beyond the call of duty and so on. And when I think when you live in a and a community when you're next door to ranchers sometimes you don't have time to think for yourself. It took me a lot of years to back off and stand on the hill and take a look at Dick Randall and see what I was accomplishing before we get to how you changed. Tell me how successful you were what would what kind of bounty were you collecting. Nobody I was just drawing wages plus for Diana and of course the more you killed the larger the body count the better you were as a trapper. You know in the first years I put in the fish and wildlife for five years. We had to show proof of guilt that is we brought in the scalp of the animal. Later

on they did away with that. But I always was one of the top trappers in the state as far as killing coyotes. What kind of good do you think you do. I educated a lot of coyotes. They got a whole lot smarter with my sign I have guns at one time I had about a thousand of these in one line from my bags Wyoming up over the Rams through bitter crick. And as the years went by coyotes learned what these were all about if they didn't adapt coyotes would be exterminated. But they're one of the smartest animals that we have as far as adaptation. And they got to where they would have urinate and defecate on my side and I had guns to let me know up your bucket. I know what this is all about but you are still putting away a lot of coyotes and when I see how well did you do it I'm really thinking of how effective were you for the ranchers and the livestock that you were supposedly supposed to be protecting. Well I think the winter of 71 72 is a good example in that this

was a tough winter we had lots of snow and at one time we had three aircraft flying out of Rock Springs killing coyotes. I set a state record I think it was forty six in six hours in one day. And when spring came the next year it was very difficult to even find a track. In April we started bending that is looking for a dancer we could kill the pups and the adults if possible. There were hardly any coyotes and yet according to my records. The reported predation by ranchers was as much or more as it had been the year before. Which leads me to believe that the reported predator kills are highly inflated. But when you say report of predation you mean the killing of livestock by predators Yes. OK tell me some of the techniques that you used to get your coyotes. Well most of the time I work for fish and wildlife except for the last couple of years. We use lots of toxic inspirations. We used to sell himself a compound

10 80 strychnine. Sodium cyanide in the cyanide guns denting in the spring tracked the coyote to the dam killed the pups get him out of the den any way you can with barbed wire with treble hooks kill him with fire whatever. Lots of aerial hunting. Especially when the toxicants were phased out. In 1972 they went to aerial helicopters and fixed wing and of course a lot of cats were killed by calling. You call a man and shoot him and that's a darn good way to do it if you have trouble in a certain area. If you can take out the predator that's causing the problem you've solved the problem. And sleeping out with the sheep a lot of times and watching for that coyote or calling a man you can solve somebody's problem. You don't solve the problem from a helicopter killing 30 or 40 or 50 coyotes in a day. All you're doing is slaughtering wildlife. Now you have some fairly major accidents yourself when you were airborne trying to catch

guys you want to tell us a little bit about that. Well we had one there was a midair collision near bitter Crick Wyoming and that one airplane he was father and son one was running in horses we were hunting coyotes. Usually we followed the aircraft that was running in the horses and that the horses would spook out coyotes would kill the coyotes. We got near the corral and the two planes came together and I don't remember anything after that except a rancher L.Z. Ebersol tried to lift me out of the plane and he said he couldn't lift me and told me to push in. I helped get myself out and when he came back to the plane he'd prop me up against it. I was in the cockpit trying to cut the harness top of my pilot who was dead and I don't remember a thing about that. And you had other accidents as well we came in upside down on steamboat mountain one day and I wiped the aircraft out and walked through three or four feet of snow to get down to the children ranch. We were broke up pretty good on that one and they hauled us to town and they patched back up.

Tell us a little bit about the evolution of your thinking obviously you had to get from the point of being a fairly enthusiastic and capable coyote hunter to being a fellow who'd rather just photograph them. One thing that really turned me off as to predator control was the talks against the poisons any trapper that has taken time to walk or ride around his poison stations finds lots of dead animals that are not target species. I learned once in a while I'd find a golden eagle and close to a poison station. But I found that when they start to hurt they'll love they'll head for the nearest roost which maybe two or three or four miles away. So when I started looking for the dead Eagles that's where I'd find them. And of course all kinds of other wildlife anything that eats meat that would eat the poison the carcass baits the strychnine baits whatever which would die. And that's predator control. And that obviously is what effected eventually your decision too. That was one of the things and many other things strapping leg hold traps. Sometimes

I would put out a hundred hundred fifty traps. The call to another county because of some problems up there get back 10 or 12 days later and take a look at what you had in your traps. Dead and dying and Star and on and on like that and the government's paying for this. You stop controlling predators back in 1973 is that right. Yes I retired from the service now. Could tell me if you can what has changed since then about the way in which we control predators it is the same practices still pursued. All except the toxic and A for saddest animal and plant husbandry Inspection Service which is a branch of the Department of Agriculture now as charge of predator control. Fish and Wildlife used to. And nothing is changed except you cannot use toxic unsetting or accept cyanide guns. You can plant those all over the public land. But the the theory behind the thing is still the same there are bad animals which should be destroyed and there are good animals which should be protected. Cows sheep and so

on. However a fist tells us in their environmental impact statement that they do selective predator control which is a bunch of nonsense. An airplane takes out of Rock Springs or a helicopter. And if there's a coyote inside it's going to get killed. That's selective control. I don't think so. It will tell me tell me a little bit about the character of coyotes who probably studied them from more different angles than just about anybody else in this area. I think they're a remarkable animal in that when we were spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the West since 1915 to build a coyote when they decided to migrate to the eastern states where they never lived before Away they went and we couldn't cut them off at the pass with all our technology. All we've done since 1915 is kill coyotes. Just the war on the species is never solved. Legitimate sheep mans problems and never will. And the coyote adapt so fast to what we try to do doing that.

He just makes an ASS out of the controllers I think a lot of the time. Well I know from experience we have coyotes suburban coyotes now outside of Los Angeles. Actually in neighborhoods they show up and they survive they seem to be able to adapt to just about anything. Yes there used to be a Fish and Wildlife Service trapper in Beverly Hills who would put his traps out at night and cover him up with a garbage can in the day. And of course the coyotes are attracted to the garbage into the. People feed the coyotes bring a man. Yeah well what about the problems though that the ranchers bring up the Clearly they do lose older and younger livestock to coyotes occasionally. Yes. Do you. Do you accept the dimensions of that problem what do you see any way of dealing with it other than predator control. I don't accept the numbers that they say that they lose each year because it's difficult and many times to find out if a coyote or some other animal killed a sheep. There's lots of reasons why lambs die why sheep die. But it's never solved the stockman's problems. There's other

ways to go about it. Guard dogs some people that are using nos. These guys have three or four thousand years of genes guarding livestock in the Asia and other countries and people are using those now have really good success with them. I think rather than the taxpayer footing the bill for protecting someone's life stock on our public land and going to the grazing fees on public land or next to nothing. Why don't they have to do some of their own protection better herders. A lot of Livy give you the ranchers argument in return. One argument would be that you can't find herders you can't find people anymore who will spend nights out on the range day in day out for long periods of time. The other would be that it's a marginal pursuit in this particular region. And if they don't have help controlling predators and with other things low grazing fees they will survive and then people will say this is an important part of our lifestyle here in the West we don't want to give it up. How do you respond to people who argue that.

I agree that good good herders are hard to find any more. Seven days a week night and day a lot of the time for not very much money and it takes more than somebody that goes out there and raise their arm to be able to herd sheep there's a lot to it to learn. And so if we don't have the sheep herder's one thing that ranchers would like to do is hook onto the fences that are already out there and create pastures for the sheep and turn them loose so they don't have to have herders on our public land. I don't go along with that it impedes wildlife that people can't get in there very much. It's it's not good. So I think that the sheep industry more or less has to take a look at it and see can we compete in a free market. And if we can't wait let's do something else. OK. Speaking of doing something else you made the switch from really one side of the fence to another if I can use that word from being a predator control agent to being a photographer of wildlife. How difficult a change was that how did it actually happen in your life.

It was a darn difficult change in that. When I retired from Fish and Wildlife I had too many broken bones I couldn't keep on with what I was supposed to be doing. My wife and I sat around for a year talking about this. I wanted to tell my story. And one thing that helped me a great deal when I started telling my story is that I've been to a couple of photography schools before I signed on with Fish and Wildlife Service and I carried a hostile blood camera which is a darn good camera. Most of the trappers had little black and white cameras. I had all these things on film and we knew if I went with Defenders of Wildlife which I decided to do that we would tear out a lot of our roots. We would lose a lot of our friends. And when I did it sure enough I lost a lot of friends but at the same time there's still a lot of ranchers I can sit down with and have a beer or a cup of coffee and will agree on 90 to 95 percent of the things we talk about. So I don't regret it at all.

Now you've worked for some time as a field representative for the defenders of wildlife which obviously is a wildlife conservation group. Did you have trouble convincing then with your change of heart. Oh it was quite interesting. I wrote the president up and Mary Hazel Harrison told her that I would like to work for them and send her some stitchers. And she hired me immediately in fact gave me a month's back wages and a few months later a guy from Arizona comes in one of their field represented and said he'd like to go to Yellowstone with me to get acquainted and we had a nice trip up there and photographed grizzly bears. And it turns out the board of directors had thought perhaps I was a Fish and Wildlife Service plant and they'd send him up to check me out and they found out I was for real creative. I want to get into another area of your life now. You live in Rock Springs. Yes. You spend a great deal of time in your various lives in the red desert north of Rock Springs and south of lander. And I think a lot of people you're identified with Rock Springs. I mean I'm so used to the Red Desert. So tell me a little bit about your love affair if you will with the

Red Desert. Well it used to be part of my old trapping ground and of course I worked at Ariel a lot but it's one of the largest and fenced areas we have in the lower 48 and. Has there been progress. Very much. No condominiums no oiled highways things like that. It's a fabulous place. It's contains part of the largest migratory herd of prom or an antelope in the world and that I don't know if you know is our only native hoofed mammal. They didn't come across on the Bering land straight with the moose and elk and so on the adults were already here and prairie Falcon and all kinds of raptors out there prairie dogs in 1968 I saw a black footed ferret part of the Red Desert. So it's a fabulous place and a lot of people look at it and say it's a vast wasteland. We should develop it because all kinds of things out there that are good oil and gas and coal and on and on and on.

And I walked out there with you in the Red Desert occasionally and I remember once being near the honeycomb boots and you just getting out of the out of the truck and leaning over and picking up a rock and splitting it and showing a fossil. Yes there's that value as well in the red desert which I think is kind of extraordinary. I think people are becoming more knowledgeable about the Red Desert. Many years ago a lot of us. Felt that these were our little secret places out in the desert we didn't tell everyone where these places were and we found out later on that if we don't have friends for the desert people that are knowledgeable about the desert we're going to lose the desert. So right now we have a lot of people that are think the deserts are very precious place and should be preserved. Describe some of the details of the Red Desert for us a cool picture sand dunes is one example of something that's fairly unique there. That's usually when I take tours out there is where I start people. These are the longest moving sand dunes in North America if you get in an airplane. You can follow them into Nebraska. They'll disappear and they'll reappear but they go clear in there and they're

one of the few. The sand dunes that have buried ice shelves the snow gets deep out there. Well it has been for five years because we are in a drought but the cornices on the top of the dune blows over on the east side is covered up with snow like an old ice house. And in June it turns into ice and you can dig out these ice sails and as the snow melts it feeds during pools which just support spade put toads and salamanders and nesting waterfowl and come down and cavern around the dune pool sometimes. So it's it's a fabulous place. A lot of people don't take the trouble to stop as they go through the red desert but I think some resource development companies have taken the trouble to stop. Tell me a little bit about the threats that you see to the Red Desert at this point I think the largest threat that we have is the development of methane gas. We're having a meeting. On the six. Of February in Rock Springs concerning Triton who wants to develop methane in the area under steamboat mountain

this would entail 93 Well 52 miles of roads a plant they were talking twenty three evaporation ponds. Because you have to drill holes to pump the water out from above the coal bed or in the coal bed and get rid of the water. Billions of gallons and then the pressure from the methane is released the air pressure from the water and they can harvest the methane gas. There's a wonderful tax subsidy that goes with this. So. According to the experts that they can produce the methane for no cost given the subsidies. This is on public land. In addition this is the issue of Land Management land big checkerboard. This is a checkerboard Yes look at Union Pacific part Rock Springs grazing and park. You and I both like you. So it's a I think a very serious thing in that they're going to disrupt the steamboat elk herd which is one of the very few sagebrush l courage in our country and many nesting Raptors out there. You take this many miles of road in a small area. Triton is

just the tip of the iceberg. Bill there's three other companies that have leases on the red desert who may want to develop methane. So I think it's up to the BLM. They're doing a habitat management plan on the entire area. This should be finished before they allow methane development. Plus we should have an environmental impact statement that covers the entire desert. If we don't have that why have we're just going to piecemeal the whole desert to death. Are there any other projects ongoing or earlier that have been a threat to the desert that have actually taken place. Well there's been a development out there. The coal companies they've done a pretty darn good job I think of doing as good as they can to protect the environment I know they're helping us a lot with birds of prey Raptors and. Some of the replanning they've done out there has attracted some of the wildlife species antelope and deer. So I don't bitch at some of the development but the one we're looking at is massive.

OK. Let's talk a little bit about the way you use the Red Desert yourself. Use is probably the wrong word but the things that you do when you're in the desert you're primarily a photographer now although you spend a lot of time I think at public hearings and things as well. Talk a little bit about how you work as a wildlife photographer. Well one reason I love the desert is that you're out where it's real and you're away from the TV set you're away from everything. It's honest out there. I love wildlife photography because you can make an appointment with wildlife. No way they're out there and you have to know quite a bit about them unless you just luck out and get a picture to be able to create something that is meaningful. And I use all kinds of techniques I use calling. Use radio controlled cameras sometimes where you don't want to bother. Say eagles up in Eagle Nest so you hide a camera and trigger it with the radio control. Long lenses and of course the closer you can get to wildlife the better the picture is. The long lenses will get your picture sometimes but they're not as good as if you're in close.

Now we've been we've been illustrating this conversation with some of your photographs and we've got one sitting right here. I don't know if this would be a good example to use to describe how you actually took this picture which appears to be within touching distance of the Golden Eagle Viken called Golden Eagles in them but they never land they come over and they squawk at you. So this morning I picked up a roadkill jack rabbit. I put it behind this sage bush. And I was going to call magpies and magpies are easy to call. And I got all set I squirmed down in the sage brush and had a strobe on the camera because the Magpies would come in and land on this sage brush and look down at the rabbit and then start feeding. And out of nowhere this golden eagle drops in and took a bite of the rabbit and I was so shook up. I took three pictures and I got one good one. But these things make it all worthwhile. When you finally come up with something that looks good you can look at the next picture that you go to here. This is a bobcat. Is there any story behind this particular picture.

This one was called in also. When it came in close Bobcats are sneaky as the devil it takes them a long time to come in usually a coyote may run right again or he may be an educated guy never coming out. But this one guy didn't close he was sneaking up through the through the grass and I squeaked on the back of my hand. It's similar to a mouse. And he perked right up and looked at me and I snapped the camera got the picture. That happens once in I don't know how many times it works out. What other methods do you use to call. Well I used. Commercial calls and I make my own calls some sound like rabbits some sound like birds. One of the old oldest calls I read this in in a history book somewhere that the Indians used to take a blade of grass and bend it over hold it up and blow through it. And that works. I hope you can do the same thing with the rubber band over a piece of wood. You get the squeak out of that.

Tell me a little bit how these two careers fit together I mean some of the skills that you're talking about for drawing in animals you learned as a predator control officer. Now you were both an activist I think is the right word in the conservation field trying to protect wildlife and of the target for a nature photographer. How do these two things fit together. No I think they fit together wonderfully in that I did learn a lot about wildlife with Fish and Wildlife Service and I learned that. All coyotes don't kill livestock. Very few coyotes do. I remember 20 years ago reading minutes from the. Cattle growers association that they they like coyotes they wanted coyotes on their property because they control the rodents. So many sheep man have went out of the sheep business and become cattle man that they've carried their predator control philosophy with them. And now you'll see the Cattlemen's Association along with the Wool Growers Association wanting to get poisons back wanting more money for predator control which is never never solve their problems.

Why would you say that they so vigorously continue to turn back to that desire that that way of controlling their problems I think. After several decades of walking back and forth in a trench. You're down so damn low you can't even see the sign anymore. This is the way we used to do it. Never solved our problems. But this is the way we should keep on doing this got to be some changes people are becoming more educated about predator control and I think the public is getting a bit down as far as contributing money for mostly a war on a species on the other hand I think a lot of the members of the public don't really know the extent to which we do in fact pay for that predator control. Now of course they don't but they're learning and you continue to lobby in Washington and work on these issues in more than just good ways like this. Occasionally I'll go back and talk to people. I think. Some of my slide shows have been out in San Francisco San Diego here and they're putting on side shows concerning predator control and believe me I'm not down on all ranchers I know some very good

ranchers that. I have think the world of. But the whole philosophy behind the thing is wrong. We're running out of time. I'd like maybe one more time to hear you call in a bobcat or some other animal with the one call that you can do simply with your own equipment. You made a little you made that little squeak noise to try and bring something into when we go on if you do one more. And as the animals gather around the television sets will thank you for joining us here on Main Street and thank you to. Well thank you for inviting me. Oh good. Good night. I am.

I am. Program made possible by a grant from U.S. energy and Crested Butte corporation part of a family of companies in the mining and minerals business providing jobs for Wyoming people since 1966 a. On the next main street Wyoming will meet one of the best predator control agents and coyote killers who ever worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Only now Wyoming native Dick Randall is a wildlife photographer campaigning to end the slaughter of

predators on the open range. We'll look at his photographs and talk to Randall about wildlife on the red desert. Another stop along Main Street Wyoming. Monday night at 7:30. Tyrese you may have seen it all before. Have you ever seen it this way. I'm John Hemenway. Be with us for the next hour. 7 3 0 8 Canadian residents and four dollars for shipping and handling U.S. dollars money order only. And please be sure to specify Book 22. For a professionally produced video cassette of this program. Send 95 to the address show Canadian residence in twelve ninety five U.S. dollars money order only shipping and handling is included. Please be sure to specify program 22 0 0 2. This program is brought to you by north light book's publisher of over 200 held two books and videos for a fine

artist and graphic designers and by lying nickel manufacturers of selected artist brushes. Is. It. Here's a typical bunch of kids getting some good healthy outdoor exercise while at school.

What will these kids do for fun when they get home this afternoon. Odds are they'll go inside to play with one of these things and intend to Gameboy or in any turbo Express. It's hard to find a 10 year old boy who doesn't love to play video games. Today we'll take a look at the fascination and the technology of.