Arizona Game and Fish Department

The parasite, which can burrow into the flesh of warm-blooded animals and be deadly, has not been reported in Arizona since it reentered the US for the first time in decades this past summer.

But the Arizona Game and Fish Department warns that recent detections of New World screw worm in Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico pose a risk that the parasite could arrive in Arizona.

Reports of the parasite have been growing in Sonora, the Mexican state south of Arizona.

Nina Kravinsky, KJZZ News, Hermosillo.

But I want to get to it before listeners, you're getting to hear Nick's personal story, all that good stuff.

And then in this next episode, we're going to unpack a little bit about what you're doing in Quail Forever, Arizona Game and Fish Commission, and some of the things you're seeing.

So stay tuned for that.

But a few more questions on the personal side.

This is Earth Notes.

Every hunting season since 1998, the Arizona Game and Fish Department has asked hunters to bring them elk and deer heads to test for chronic wasting disease.

The condition causes proteins in the animal's brains to fold abnormally into so-called prions, leading to cellular death.

This highly contagious and deadly infection can be transmitted by nose-to-nose contact, grooming, or direct transmission from mothers to their young.

We thought it was much more reasonable.

And we worked very hard with Sinema's office at the time to make sure that you know that human element the it was intact within the monument right so we work to keep hunting and angling in the monument we work to keep wildlife management uh in the capable hands of our arizona game and fish department so yeah it's a big misnomer that we're locked out of these lands that's not true at all they're simply protected and i can tell you Right now, I'm working on a mule deer hunting film.

That country up there protects the most magnificent mule deer herd on the planet, right? Those tags are very hard to get.

We're working on a film up there with a 15-year-old girl and her father who have that tag.

That's where the majority of the Mearns quail are located in.

You could look at Arizona Game and Fish Commission for a map and kind of see that, or you could pick up a copy.

I think it is a small game birds or whatever.

Let's see who wrote it.

And it's good.

Yeah.

Randy Babs, a longtime Arizona Game and Fish game biologist, now retired.

Randy wrote a book called An Introduction of Hunting Arizona Small Game.

Well, I thought it was really interesting that President Trump was willing to show how little he knew about what his own government is doing by issuing this executive order.

Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Game and Fish Department both put out statements and letters in July of this year saying that they were going to start looking at... whether or not the wolf warranted delisting or downlisting.

So this process was already started.

And what President Trump's executive order did was kind of meaningless.

There are 1.28 million cattle with 97 confirmed predation from wolves.

According to Arizona Fish and Game and U.S. USFS Forest Service, that is a statistically undetectable amount.

So the numbers are so low, less than 1%, that they don't even matter.

It doesn't even matter.