Mar 19 2024 33 mins 14
Learn more about fish management in Yellowstone at go.nps.gov/YELLFishMgmt
View definitions & links discussed in this episode at go.nps.gov/WhatWeDoPodcast
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Brett Raeburn From Yellowstone National Park. This is what we do. I'm Brett Raeburn.
Jake Frank And I'm Jake Frank.
Brett Raeburn So I have a question for you to kick this off. What's the, What's the biggest fish that you've ever caught?
Jake Frank The biggest fish I've ever. I was. I used to live in Alaska, and I went halibut fishing, and I caught, like, a 40 pound halibut. That's the. That's the biggest I've ever caught.
Brett Raeburn It's a way bigger than you're gonna say I was expecting.
Jake Frank And that's like, a.
Brett Raeburn Much less impressive size.
Jake Frank Well, that is a, that's a fairly unimpressive halibut. So for that species anyway.
Brett Raeburn Well you've got me beat.
Jake Frank Are you, are you, are you big into fishing.
Brett Raeburn No, about the only fishing I do is when I'm fishing through the freezer for frozen cod that I get from the store. So that's about. That's about as much as I do.
Jake Frank Before you cook it. Do you, like, hold it out in front of you and have someone take a picture so it looks better.
Brett Raeburn I have been known to do that. Follow my Instagram for all that content. Yeah. I also I also want to I want to start off with a trivia question, too, just to see. So you've caught you've got some pretty impressive fish, it sounds like.
Jake Frank Not really.
Brett Raeburn If you turn, you turn over that paper in front of you. There's something on there that I would like you to try to pronounce. You have not seen this before. So this is.
Jake Frank Alright? Let's see. Can I. Can I sound it out? So, Encore, Hankis, Clarki Lewisi?
Pat Bigelow Was that.
Brett Raeburn I was. I was. Well, I actually don't know. This is like one of those trivia questions I don't even know the right answer to. So. Sure you did. Well, all right, That's better than what I would’ve done.
Jake Frank But my guess is that this is the is this the binomial name for the Yellowstone cutthroat trout?
Brett Raeburn Yes, that is the scientific name for the West Slope. Cutthroat trout.
Jake Frank The West Slope. Not that. Not the Yellowstone. Okay.
Brett Raeburn All right. And so today we're going to talk to somebody who probably can pronounce it better than you just did, although I still think that was a pretty good pretty good guess. Our guest today is Pat Bigelow, fisheries biologist who spends a lot of her time on the waters of Yellowstone National Park. So welcome, Pat. How's it going?
Pat Bigelow Hey, Brett and hey Jake. Great. Beautiful day today.
Jake Frank Yeah, it is.
Pat Bigelow And You did pretty good: Oncorhynchus.
Jake Frank Oncorhynchus.
Jake Frank All right. So I was in the wheelhouse.
Pat Bigelow Yeah.
Brett Raeburn I love the Lewisi Clarki.
Jake Frank Is that how you see it? Or is it a line that that works?
Pat Bigelow Yeah that works, Lewisi Clarkii.
Pat Bigelow Yeah.
Brett Raeburn All right. I wonder where that came from.
Jake Frank I don't. I don't speak a lot of Latin.
Jake Frank So.
Brett Raeburn So I guess we'll just jump right into it. How long have you been working as a fisheries biologist? Well, as any job. How long have you been at Yellowstone National Park?
Pat Bigelow I've been here in this job for 23 years.
Brett Raeburn Wow.
Pat Bigelow I've been working in fisheries for 36 years.
Jake Frank Probably so. Fresh out of middle school.
Pat Bigelow Yeah.
Pat Bigelow Exactly.
Pat Bigelow Yeah.
Pat Bigelow I was really fortunate that I got some great opportunities early in life.
Brett Raeburn Very cool. And so how did you get your start here? 20, 23 years ago.
Pat Bigelow Actually, my first job was here in 1979. I was in Bozeman working a summer job, and I went down to the unemployment office to see if I could just give something better. And there was a poster up on the wall for a young Adult Conservation Corps in Yellowstone National Park, and I jumped at it. It sounded interesting.
Pat Bigelow I came down here. We had a I don't know if you guys are familiar with the YCC camp, but when we were actual Corps members, we had a girls dorm, boys dorm and a dining hall and six Corps members to a room you each had a bunk bed, a foot locker and half of the clothes locker and no dividers or anything like that.
Pat Bigelow You know, you definitely felt like you had just been recruited into some kind of institution. [laughing]
Brett Raeburn In some ways that is that maybe.
Pat Bigelow Yeah.
Pat Bigelow But it was great because we had 100 Corps members who all worked for different offices in the park, and I was very fortunate. A friend of mine and I that started at the same time to work with Fish and Wildlife Service and back then Fish and Wildlife Service did the fisheries work in Yellowstone.
Jake Frank Well, when did that change? That went from Fisheries.
Pat Bigelow To Park Service?
Jake Frank Yeah, to Park Service.
Pat Bigelow I think it was in 96.
Jake Frank Okay.
Pat Bigelow So the Fish and Wildlife Service started here even before the Park Service because of the unique fisheries opportunity and the Yellowstone cutthroat in particular. And then they established a research station in the fifties. They had a hatchery here early on, early twenties, thirties into the fifties. And then after that, they kind of went more to a research station, and then they had a management office, which is who I worked for that advises the Park Service, kind of like a fish and game agency.
Pat Bigelow You know, advises the state on how to set their regulations. Fish and Wildlife Service. And kinda kept the Park Service up to date on there.
Jake Frank And my my history is not great, but I if I remember reading, it's even before the National Park Service, there was, like, the predecessor to the Fish and Wildlife Services who stocked the lakes and did a lot of the fisheries stuff in Yellowstone.
Pat Bigelow Correct US Fish Commission back then as early as 1889. Yeah, we're doing some stocking in Yellowstone National Park.
Jake Frank Wow. Yeah. A lot of history.
Pat Bigelow Yeah.
Pat Bigelow Yeah, yeah.
Pat Bigelow Fisheries history in the in the park is really kind of a reflection of fisheries management history for the country, really.
Brett Raeburn Yeah. Yeah, That's awesome. So when you started, did you know it sounds like you kind of just saw a poster and. And got a little lucky in that way? Did you know that there were jobs where people worked with fish in national parks?
Pat Bigelow I hate to say I probably shouldn't even tell you this, but when.
Brett Raeburn We can edit it out if we need to. [laughing]
Pat Bigelow When I first moved to Bozeman, one of my coworkers said, Well, have you been to Yellowstone Park yet? As I was trying to figure out what to do for the weekend. And I said, What do you mean, a park? Is it, you know, like ferris wheels?
Jake Frank Yeah, does it have slides? [laughing]
Brett Raeburn I've had visitors ask me where the zip lines are. So, yeah, I think I think that's a well.
Jake Frank To be fair, they’re in West Yellowstone. So.
Pat Bigelow And I want to say I was very young then.
Brett Raeburn Sure. Lots to learn. Yeah. So. So you hadn't you, you were pleasantly surprised that there were actually jobs where you could do that, then?
Pat Bigelow That was awesome. And one of my first full weeks working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, they were doing their annual survey on Yellowstone Lake of the cutthroat trout. And so it meant spending a week on a boat gillnetting on the lake. And we spent a night in in the Park Service cabin on Peel Island because we were doing work in that area and we wanted to stay close to it.
Pat Bigelow And unlike typical weather on Yellowstone Lake, it was Bluebird days and flat, calm water the whole week and then the cutthroat that we were catching. If you haven't ever seen cutthroat trout, they are beautiful fish.
Brett Raeburn Can you describe them for those of us who haven't seen one.
Pat Bigelow So, so. So they're called cutthroat because they have a red slash under there on either side, under their jaw. And they, you know, a kind of a typical trout. They have the same, you know, body form and then black spots more on the tail and you get less as you move forward toward the head. But, they can get really brightly colored and they tend to be olive yellow, brown.
Pat Bigelow And they can, especially during spawning season, they can get this brilliant red sides and a circular plates and stuff. They can they're just beautiful.
Brett Raeburn That's cool. That's cool.
Jake Frank Well, yeah. When we came out on the boat this summer, when you guys were doing your research, you were pulling out some hogs that were huge.
Brett Raeburn Yeah. Yeah. So you've got a fish bigger than Jake's 40 pounder?
Pat Bigelow Not a cutthroat. [laughing]
Brett Raeburn It's all about competition here. So. So describe to us like a typical day. So obviously, there's going to be a lot of variance. But if you if someone asked you what your typical day like is as a fisheries biologist, what was it like? What would you tell them?
Pat Bigelow Well, so it really it does really vary a lot. You know, obviously in the winter we're not doing a lot of fieldwork. We are in the office kind of processing everything that happened last year and trying to plan ahead for next year, which includes hiring, which can be a lot of work, doing a lot of presentations to let people know what we know and where we think we need to go next and all that kind of thing.
Pat Bigelow But the field work in the summer, all my work is on Yellowstone Lake and it's a beautiful lake. I have, I oversee some contract work on the lake, which is 3 to 4 crews, sometimes five of netters, to try to depress the lake trout population. Lake trout are an invasive species on Yellowstone Lake, and they'll eat the cutthroat trout.
Pat Bigelow And so we're trying to eliminate them. We're not likely going to eliminate them, but hopefully we're going to suppress them to the point where they're no longer having an impact on the cutthroat trout population. And so we have these gillnet crews that will put out miles of gillnet and lift it every day to remove the lake trout. We also have a telemetry operation where we purposely put acoustic tags in male lake trout and let them go and then kind of relocate them so we can give that information to the netters to help zero in on their day on, you know, where to put their nets and stuff.
Jake Frank So that that term I've heard that I heard it with something else. So it's like invasive species. You can like you put a tracker on them and they go to where they, like, you know, betray their friends. This whole idea of like a Judas species, like can you talk a little bit about that? That's like, that always made me laugh.
Pat Bigelow The idea of of a Judas fish is you would put a tag in them that you can follow and they take you to where their friends are.
Pat Bigelow [laughing]
Pat Bigelow Betray their friends. And it's not you know, we kind of know we pretty much know where all the habitat is, but they move around a lot. And depending on the time of year and the water temperatures, they’ll be at different depths. So a lot of times the that Judas fish helps you really zero in on the depths to be fishing at, which also helps you avoid the cutthroat trout if you know exactly what depths the lake trout are at.
Pat Bigelow And so like so if I'm on a boat where we're doing the tagging, we'll collect lake trout from the netters that are still in really lively condition and do surgery and the implant first, make sure they're males. We don't want to tag the females because they're the ones with the reproductive potential. so we want to make sure we kill all the females and then implant tags, make sure the fish recover so that they'll behave normally when we release them and let them go.
Pat Bigelow Or if it's actually tracking the fish, we’ll we have to hydrophones in the water on either side of the boat, which helps us give a direction to find the fish, so we can zero in on their location. And so then you're basically on the lake driving predetermined transects all day until you pick up a fish and then you zero in on that fish and then you continue on your way.
Brett Raeburn And for like the listeners who haven't seen Yellowstone Lake or been to it, it's it's a huge it's a huge lake. So that's not an easy task.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. So it takes us about four days to cover the whole lake. Yeah.
Brett Raeburn Wow.
Pat Bigelow And we don't actually even cover the whole lake because we avoid the really deep habitat, because we aren't expecting to see any lake trout out there. And we're not going to set nets there anyway.
Jake Frank And then and then I think a good back story is like we talk about lake trout being invasive versus the Yellowstone cutthroat. I mean, I guess is is there a reason why we as managers prefer one over the other? Like, why like, why are we trying to get rid of lake trout?
Pat Bigelow So the cutthroat trout, Yellowstone cutthroat trout, like I’ve said already couple of times they're just beautiful. But they are the native species in Yellowstone, Lake, Yellowstone Lake is the most important population of Yellowstone cutthroat trout for that species. And just sheer numbers. And they evolved with only one other native species, which is the longnose dace that is, you know, gets to maybe six inches and is very much along just the shorelines.
Brett Raeburn That's the fish I would catch. [laughing]
Pat Bigelow So they're just the cutthroat trout are naive when it comes to larger fish, predator spore and the lake trout are native to the Great Lakes area and they're also beautiful fish, but they are a voracious predator. And so you take a really naive fish and then I really excellent predator and put them together. And it's just not good for the for the cutthroat trout and the lake trout,
Pat Bigelow I think the oldest one on record was 62 years old.
Jake Frank The lake trout?
Pat Bigelow Not from Yellowstone. But yeah, species wise. So if we weren't out there taking out the lake trout, nobody else would be either. There they reside deeper in the lake. They live longer, they get bigger. They have a lot higher reproductive potential than the cutthroat trout. And if left unchecked, they would decimate the cutthroat trout population.
Jake Frank And when you say, like no one else would get them, you mean like other predators, like bears and fish or bears and birds and otters and all that kind of stuff, right?
Pat Bigelow Like birds and they tend most predators tend to target the fish when they're shallow and the lake trout don't spend much time being shallow. And then when the lake trout get big, they're too big. Like an osprey might try to grab a big fish. And then we've...I haven't seen this personally, but one of my coworkers has seen an Osprey grab, even a cutthroat that was too big for it and then it wouldn't fly off and it actually drowned.
Brett Raeburn wow.
Pat Bigelow Because they have they can have a hard time letting go of a fish once they get their talons through it.
Brett Raeburn It's like like the monkey with the banana in the barrel situation.
Pat Bigelow But yeah, lake trout. Well, they're impressive in their ability to eat other fish and can eat a fish, the only thing that stops them is how wide they can get their mouth open and they can eat a fish two thirds their own size.
Jake Frank Holy moly.
Jake Frank Yeah.
Brett Raeburn Can you do that, Jake?
Pat Bigelow [laughing]
Jake Frank No. That's like a it's like a 150 pound fish.
Brett Raeburn That's a big burrito.
Jake Frank Yeah.
Brett Raeburn So you obviously know a lot about fish, and so that's an important skill to have as a fisheries biologist. What aside from that, what are or maybe not even aside from that, what do you think is the most important skill for someone who thinks that that's a really cool job and might be interested in applying for jobs like that?
Pat Bigelow You know, it's probably similar to most jobs. I think the most important thing is to have a passion for what you're doing and positive attitude and be flexible in what you're doing day to day. If you want to actually go into fisheries. Bachelor science is an important aspect of your education. typically you're going to want to end up going back to school to specialize and get a master's degree.
Pat Bigelow I would highly recommend for anybody thinking that way to get a lot of, get a lot of experience or as much as you can between your master's before your master's and after your bachelor's. It helps you get a better idea of what's available, what kind of work you can be working in, and gives you really good skills.
Pat Bigelow So and when you do go back or get your master's degree, you are a better candidate because you're not learning everything all at once.
Brett Raeburn That's great advice and you probably want to like, go out on a boat and make sure you don't get seasick, right? Because, I mean, do people get seasick on on the lake?
Pat Bigelow They have.
Brett Raeburn Yeah, I'd imagine it gets choppy.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. And it's.
Brett Raeburn That’d be tough.
Pat Bigelow It's we we have had a few volunteers come out from different places, even other fisheries biologists that come out and you know, they're really excited to give you a hand and be helpful. And then they’re not. [laughing]
Brett Raeburn Then they’re looking for the horizon.
Jake Frank Then they’re a liability.
Brett Raeburn I've been there.
Jake Frank And a quick follow up with the Masters. If does it matter if you're specializing like, say, if somebody's like, my goal is to work in Yellowstone, do they need to get a masters related to the species that are here? Or can you like if you happen to be, say, getting your masters in some other fish species, does that you know, does that qualify you like can you learn what you need to on the job or does it really help to focus in on the like the actual species that you'll be studying in the park that you want to end up in?
Pat Bigelow I think the broader the education you have, the better. And you can focus in when you get the particular job. The other thing is e you know, even though you also might be your goal, that might not be your next step.
Jake Frank Gotcha.
Pat Bigelow So yeah.
Jake Frank That's good advice.
Pat Bigelow And then also, it's good to think outside of the box sometimes too. And if you have more familiarity with other habitats, other species and stuff, you know, you can bring in maybe a new perspective that somehow is different than what people have thought of before.
Brett Raeburn Yeah. Well, and it sounds like your typical day is is pretty cool, especially in the summer when you're out on a boat. What is your favorite part about your job?
Pat Bigelow I you can probably tell I love Yellowstone Lake. Being on the lake is awesome, but I think the most rewarding. Well, two things are most rewarding, but one is I work with amazing people and being able to sit down with a coworker and talk about strategies and you know, how things are going, what happened over here, how we can pull that together, how we can best use our crews and to just keep making things move forward is super rewarding.
Pat Bigelow But then also taking somebody like we typically have student volunteers every summer and, and they typically don't have much experience. So taking somebody who really knows nothing about what we're doing and seeing, bringing them through a season and seeing them increase their skills and increase their confidence and get more sure about what they want to do and be excited about protecting a resource, that's pretty awesome.
Pat Bigelow But then the other part is actually seeing the work that we're doing make a definite impact on protecting Yellowstone Park resources. That's really rewarding as well.
Brett Raeburn Yeah, well, and we'll let you slide. Even though you gave us three favorites.
Jake Frank Yeah, we said one, but we got three.
Brett Raeburn It's okay. That's your one Mulligan for this podcast. Okay, So with that, what would this is the hard question. What is, is the toughest part about your job?
Pat Bigelow That's a really good question, too. You know you can get frustrated with the inability to do things as quick as you want because you have to go through proper procedures to make sure, you know, just because I think something's really good to do doesn't mean it is. So there's a lot of checks and balances.
Jake Frank In the government?
Pat Bigelow [laughing]
Brett Raeburn Red tape?
Pat Bigelow Yeah. And then so that can be really frustrating. And then also supervision can be really challenging, but it's important to be able to work well with people and not just work well with them. But communication is such an important aspect of all parts of life. And even though everybody communicates every day, it just amazes me that we all have so much more to learn on how to communicate better.
Pat Bigelow So if I have an employee, for instance, how to get the best, how to help them be their best and get the best out of them can be really challenging, especially if for some reason they shouldn't have taken the job and don't really want to be there.
Jake Frank And and you mentioned earlier that you're doing hiring right now. How many people are a part of your operation?
Pat Bigelow So in the fisheries program, we have Todd Koel is our leader. Brian Ertel and I are both the fish biologists that have been here quite a long time. Andy Pochany is a new streams biologist, is doing great work. And then right now we have two student biologists, they're in the Pathways program, Cody Vender and Drew McDonald And each of us hires with the exception of Todd.
Pat Bigelow But each of us that are in the biology series hire two technicians and one intern during the summer.
Jake Frank So you guys are a big operation.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. And then on top of that, we have the contract crew that does a lot of the suppression netting, not all of it, but most of it. And they will have up to 20 people.
Jake Frank Yeah. And that there's so there's a lot of time effort and money that go into the fisheries program. Yeah.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. And Cody and I work, and Andrew, work on the lake mostly Brian, Brian Ertel and Andy cover streams outside of Yellowstone Lake.
Jake Frank Is that kind of how you like, you divide it up, it's like the lake and.
Brett Raeburn They’re the ones that get seasick.
Jake Frank Then everything else is at the how you like divide your guys work as the lake and then everything that's not Yellowstone Lake, that's kind of the dividing line.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. And Brian focuses more on Yellowstone cutthroat or and he focuses a little bit more on the West Slope cutthroat. But since they're both doing river stream work, they work together a lot.
Brett Raeburn So you talked a little bit about kind of the tougher parts of the job. So what is it about the Park Service that that keeps you here and brought you here and keeps you here, I guess.
Pat Bigelow Well, it the just the protection of the natural resources, you know, keeping the environment in it as intact as possible and just the ecosystem function and all that. It those are all great buzzwords, but it's the beauty of everything working together that really draws you in and makes you really enjoy it.
Brett Raeburn Yeah, and some of our listeners might not be super familiar with the National Park Service mission. We all had to get it tattooed on us when we took the jobs and Jake's is on his lower back, I think. Right. It's still there.
Jake Frank I can neither confirm nor deny.
Brett Raeburn But but essentially, essentially the mission is preserving the natural and cultural resources, like you said, for the enjoyment education and inspiration of this and future generations. So and you've touched on this, but how does your job contribute to this mission? It seems like a pretty direct and easy to see thing.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. yeah. We're we're spending a lot of time and effort suppressing the lake trout population so that the cutthroat trout population in Yellowstone Lake can thrive. And because that's the major population for that species of fish, it helps that whole species thrive. And it's a beautiful fish. Did I say that, already?
Brett Raeburn Yeah, yeah, you can say that one twice. That's okay.
Jake Frank And then what I've learned here, like not being a big fisherman or person who fishes, I don't know what the non gendered version of that is, but people love to fish. It's like crazy how many people are here in the summer. So it's like, you know, and the whole idea of being the like the, the homeland of the Yellowstone cutthroat trout, I mean, it's like this is like the world's largest population of that fish, right?
Jake Frank So, yeah, people come here to catch that. And it's it seems like, you know, you know, protecting it. And then people have that directly, that direct enjoyment. I mean, it seems like everybody appreciates being able to get out there and catch that big fish and put it on the gram.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. And not only we think about going out on Yellowstone like this is a huge lake and there's, you know what, three buildings on that entire lake. I mean, maybe a couple more, depending on how far away from the water you want to measure. But it's spectacular.
Brett Raeburn Yeah, You're out there. You're out there. All right, well, before we wrap up, we're going to get into what we call the nitty gritty here. So I don't want to scare listeners away. There's this is a fair warning. There's going to be some government jargon, but fear not. We've got your back. So we have an introductory episode along with some links that we're going to put in the show notes that will explain all this in detail.
Brett Raeburn So that said, for people interested in this type of career, career and you've kind of already talked about the education aspect of it. So if I want to be a fisheries biologist, what's your what's your job series in USA Jobs? Series and GS level and all that nitty gritty?
Pat Bigelow So my GS level is GS-11 and my job series is fisheries biologist 0482 and then like a lot of the seasonals that were hiring the summer, they are fishery biological technicians, parentheses, fisheries and there because there are a lot of different biological technicians and they're all in the GS 0404 series.
Brett Raeburn Awesome. And aside from the education aspect, is there any other formal training that someone needs to have to apply for this position or.
Pat Bigelow Not formal You know, a bachelor's is great, but like I said, the more experience you can get, I with different agencies, different areas, the better off are going to be.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
Brett Raeburn Do you have any other advice for people interested in that career path, aside from what you've said already?
Pat Bigelow it's a great career. It's really fun. I've worked, you know, when I left here in from my first four years that I was here with the Fish and Wildlife Service, I, I did some work with the State Wyoming Game and Fish. I worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service in California, northern Idaho, Washington, every job I've ever had has been really fun.
Brett Raeburn Come work with Pat is what she's saying. All right. Well, before we let you go, we like to ask everyone that comes on the podcast. One final question. This one's my favorite. So what is your favorite story or memory in a national park? It doesn't have to be in Yellowstone, although you've been here a while, so there's a good chance it will be.
Brett Raeburn But it doesn't have to be. It can be, you know, a trip you took in during annual leave or something. But do you have any defining story or memory from a national park?
Pat Bigelow There's so many to choose from. This one is really fish related, though, so I'll share it. We were doing a snorkel survey on the Olympic Peninsula and we were snorkeling. Chinook salmon which get quite big, spring Chinook salmon in particular. They they like to hide their head. Their kind of like a little kid in that their eyes are covered, they think you can’t see them.
Pat Bigelow And so when you're snorkeling for them, you got to really look at the root wads and things because they they kind of stick their head in the root wad, and and and then you might miss them if you're not really looking closely. So I was coming down the stretch of stream that was actually pretty wide and flat and no cover.
Pat Bigelow And this spring Chinook, I could see him. He was just in the mid-water column in front of me over this gravel bar, and he saw me and he just sunk down and sat on the bottom. And I was getting closer because I was coming downstream. And as I got closer, he like got as close to the bottom as he could.
Pat Bigelow And then he actually rolled over and laid on his side.
Brett Raeburn Played dead?
Pat Bigelow Yeah. Until he went by. And then he took off.
Jake Frank If he was wearing a turtleneck shirt, he would’ve slumped into it.
Pat Bigelow It was just so funny.
Pat Bigelow To see him actually, like trying to hide where he had nothing to hide.
Brett Raeburn That's amazing. And you'd never heard of that type of behavior before, or is that just something you hadn't seen before?
Pat Bigelow I had not heard or seen it, so it was it just made me laugh.
Brett Raeburn That's awesome. So you're making scientific observations on your on your vacations, even.
Pat Bigelow Actually, that was work.
Brett Raeburn That was work? Well, work, vacation, sometimes the line gets blurred.
Pat Bigelow [laughing]
Pat Bigelow Can I tell you my favorite question?
Brett Raeburn Yeah.
Brett Raeburn That you've ever been asked? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pat Bigelow Somebody at once asked me why all the Civil War battles were fought in National Parks.
Jake Frank That that. That is a great question. What does that is that's a causation. What's the what's the whole thing. Correlation, not causation.
Brett Raeburn Yeah. What was your, what was your answer?
Pat Bigelow I honestly thought they were kidding. So I started laughing and I said, well, you know, people were very civil back then. And then I could see by the look, you know, he wasn't kidding. And I got real apologetic real fast.
Pat Bigelow [laughing]
Jake Frank I think that happens to all of us. You get caught off guard with the question because people joke with us all the time. They ask us silly questions.
Brett Raeburn But especially like the people with dry humor that's like really hard to tell. You know, It's like, I don't know what to do with that.
Jake Frank Yeah.
Brett Raeburn Awesome. Well, Pat, thank you so much for joining us. It was it was really cool hearing about your job and learning a little bit a little bit more about fish, too. So I'm I'm excited to go fishing. I think when the season all starts.
Jake Frank I think, I think I am also excited to fish. But I have this weird I like the touching of fish. I don't know how hard to grab them or not. I feel like I'm like strangling them. Yeah. And I don't want to like, mess their slime up, but then they know when I'm not holding them tight enough and then they flop around and then I drop them.
Brett Raeburn So what’s the the safe? Can we get a an extra credit question here? What's the safe handling for someone who's fishing? Do you wear gloves? Do you not wear gloves?
Pat Bigelow We wear gloves. The water is really cold. Yeah. No other reason, but yeah, yeah, it helps protect the fish and it helps give you a little bit milder grip, but. But you don't want to grip them tight.
Jake Frank That's. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to squeeze the life out of.
Pat Bigelow Yeah. And if you're angling.
Brett Raeburn Don’t grip it like a burrito, do it like a baby.
Pat Bigelow Your angling if you maybe keep them in the water while you're handling them, that keeps them calmer, too.
Jake Frank I've seen this hashtag. Keep them wet. Yeah.
Brett Raeburn Yeah. Okay. And grip it like a burrito, not a baby. Yeah, right. Which. Yeah. Anyways, we'll leave it there. Anyways, thanks for joining us.
Pat Bigelow Yeah, it's been awesome.
Jake Frank Yeah, it's great talking to you, Pat. Thanks for joining us.
Brett Raeburn That's it for this week's episode of What We Do. Thanks again to our guest, Pat Bigelow. And if you like what we do, rate and review the show wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. So we really appreciate it. If you have questions or you want to learn more about a particular job, contact us using the form at go.nps.gov/WhatWeDoPodcast. Thanks for listening.
