(bright music) - [Narrator] Coming up on an all new "Prairie Sportsman", host Bret Amundson tags along on a northern Minnesota elk, hunt.

(elk bugling) And we learned the impact of PFAS, known as Forever Chemicals on the Environment.

And we'll join Nicole Zempel for a fast forage.

- Welcome to Prairie Sportsman.

I'm Brett Amundson.

We got a great episode for you and it starts right now.

(bright exciting music) (exciting music fades) - [Narrator 2] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web@shalomhillfarm.org.

Live Wide Open.

Western Minnesota Prairie Waters and the members of Pioneer PBS.

(upbeat guitar music) - [Bret] Minnesota, a state rich with abundant hunting opportunities ranging from big to small.

Ducks, geese, pheasants, grouse, black bears, whitetail, deer and elk?

(upbeat music continues) Minnesota has elk.

It may be news to you, it's news to a lot of people, but not just elk, but some really big ones.

It's a once in a lifetime tag to hunt in Minnesota and we're here near Lancaster right now in search of some giant animals, like that one.

- So this corner of the state is very unique because we, we have elk up here in the northwest corner in the Karlstad work area, and it's historically elk range.

We still have a remnant population that has moved in from Manitoba and established a group of elk up here, which we manage actively.

- [Bret] Elk used to live all across the state, but due to loss of habitat and over harvest from market and subsistence hunters, they were nearly pushed to extinction in Minnesota.

They received protection from hunting in 1883, but it was too little, too late.

And the last native of elk was seen at the northwest angle in 1932.

However, in 1913, state legislation approved $5,000 to be used to ship elk from the western United States and a captive herd in Ramsey County to a captive pen at Itasca State Park.

Then in 1935, 27 elk were moved from Itasca to the Gridley area where they started to reproduce and continue to live there to this day.

In the 1980s, elk from Manitoba started to cross over into Minnesota and Kittson and Roseau counties forming two more herds that the DNR manage.

- Population management of elk in Minnesota has always been a mix of both biological and social tolerance.

Biologically we could carry, you know, x number of animals and the social tolerance of animals out there on the landscape is another one.

So you have to kind of find that happy medium, keeping both native elk out there on the landscape, for future, and keeping the locals and landowners satisfied with the number of elk.

As the population of elk and Kittson County in my work area has increased, we have had to come up with a way to keep that population in that goal range.

And hunt management is our number one tool.

- [Bret] To Elk hunt in Minnesota, you have to be drawn for a once in lifetime tag.

This weekend we'd be tagging along with Scott Moon, who drew one of the cow only tags this year and got ahold of us after hearing we wanted to film this hunt.

- Oh, I haven't slept in weeks.

I'm way excited.

Very excited.

- [Bret] And he has good reason to be, only 17 lucky hunters got drawn out of thousands of applicants and he's been trying for this tag for a long time.

- I've been applying since, well, the first one was in '88 and then back in two thousands when they started.

I've been applying ever since.

I have nine days to hunt.

I took the time off from work.

Like I said, I've been here six weeks, I've been coming up here.

If I go home next Sunday and I don't have one, at least I know I did my work.

I have my brother Steve, he's going to be helping, so hopefully he's got a sharp knife.

Yeah, I heard about this through my Aunt Ruby that she's the one that had me give you a call.

Hey auntie, you got a second?

- [Ruby] Yeah.

What?

- Hi, I'm looking for the agent for Scott Moon.

Is that who I'm talking to right now?

(Ruby laughs) - Is this a joke?

- This is Brett Amundson actually.

- [Ruby] Oh, well hi.

- How's it going?

How, how you doing?

- [Ruby] Pretty good.

I listen to you every Saturday morning.

- Well, thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

So you're the one responsible for setting this whole thing up, I hear.

- [Ruby] Oh, yes, yes I am.

I got Scott right away when I heard you on TV.

- [Bret] Scott had one last evening to pattern these elk and we wanted to tag along just to see a few.

So we hopped in the truck for a quick scouting mission.

- [Scott] Oh, there must, is there a couple of them?

(crickets chirping) Oh, just one.

(upbeat music) (Scott bugling) (leaves rustling) (elk bugling in the distance) We just meet there at six and then we'll just go from there.

And Dan and I can get up in the blind up there and you guys just do what you're gonna do.

- [Bret] All right, well- - All right gentlemen.

- [Bret] Get a good night's sleep.

- I haven't slept in weeks.

(laughs) I'm serious.

(upbeat music fades) (wind blustering) - [Bret] Scott and Dan Amundson would sit in the blind this morning while Steve and I decided to hang back and do some more scouting.

(Scott bugling) - [Scott] That wasn't a very good one.

Nice.

- [Dan] So, right now, looks to be a cow coming towards us.

There's a lot of bugling going on back in the trees back there.

That's where we saw the elk last night.

And we saw a big bull in this field last night too.

And I thought this was the bull at first, but I think this is a cow.

Okay, now that I had a better look at it through the binoculars, it's definitely a bull.

- [Scott] See these two bales right in front of us?

He's just to the left on the other side of the road.

(bright music) (Scott elk calls) (bright music continues) - [Dan] Well, that was really cool.

That bull came fairly close to us.

Probably saw the two vehicles here.

Got a little nervous, started running, but he's running right at the blinds.

- [Bret] One elk hunter Scott had met this fall, Evan Bernstrom, was hunting just across the section.

- I got you.

That was a shot I saw at night.

Oh yeah.

Hello?

- [Evan] Hey, Scott.

- Hey, congratulations.

- [Evan] Thanks, man.

- Would you mind if we come take a look at it?

- [Evan] Yeah, sure.

- I think we'll just- - [Evan] yeah, I'll send you a pin of where we are.

- Yep, please.

And then I'll just have him come pick me up and we'll head over there and I just want to get my hands on one, (laughs) just getting excited.

- [Evan] (indistinct) Yep.

- All right.

Thank you.

We'll be over shortly.

(bright music) - [Bret] So how's it feel?

- Absolutely incredible.

- [Bret] Nice.

- Yep.

The greatest experience ever.

- We spooked a couple out here, but it was pitch black.

We couldn't see anything and We had to wait until it got a little lighter and then we slowly just army crawled quite a bit and- - [Bret] Awesome, ah what a hunt.

That's cool.

- It was.

That's that's what he wanted.

He wanted a hunt.

- We knew he was just to the east of us and about I don't, two, 300 yards.

And when we got to the willow, we couldn't see him anymore.

So we let a couple cull calls go and he came out of the woods and walked straight at us.

Finally shot him at over a hundred yards.

And then he came off the beans and ran into the willows, came outta the willows and was running right at us.

Shot a couple more times.

I wasn't sure if he was going down or not.

Ended up dying 17 yards from where we shot initially.

(laughs) (bright music fades) - [Bret] While a once in a lifetime harvest makes for a special hunt in itself.

This one had a much bigger meaning for Evan, who recently lost his dad.

- Only wanted one photo of this whole elk trip and was to recreate his photo of the one he took 10 years ago.

And he got his cow, and we lost him in December unexpectedly.

So this hunt was for him.

And last week we lost another good friend in town, Bruce.

He was our teacher in Taxidermist.

So this hunt, this was his bear claw, he gave our kids.

So we went out for good luck charm and brought a picture of my dad and the last picture Savannah and I took with him before.

(gentle guitar music) - [Bret] That afternoon Scott decided to leave the blind battle the rain and try to sneak in a little closer to where we saw elk last night.

- Why don't we .

.

.

I just think if we can get out of the wind on this side we can keep watch up here a little bit.

(bright music) (Scott bugling) That's the herd bull.

(indistinct whispering) He's where?

- [Bret] He's at the gate, wherever that is.

- Where's the gate?

(somber music) There's two bulls.

Oh.

And a big one, he's raking the ground.

That's him.

Steve and Dan were to my right and they were hunkered down.

I had stood up, I had had my gun on the sticks.

(somber music continues) I bugled all the way until he probably got about a hundred yards away.

But he kept looking at us and the wind was blowing real hard, so it was going to the east so he couldn't wind us.

(somber music continues) And we were pinned there, I couldn't move, nobody could move and none of us did.

When he got up to 40 yards there, even my brother said he was kind of worried about getting run over.

(elk bugling) (somber music continues) Was absolutely, I mean, just an absolute gorgeous animal.

(bright music) - [Jason] The elk in this area are world class animals.

The genetics is here, the habitat is here, and the age structures here.

So it's, it's very common to have very mature big animals, big antlers, big bodies.

(bright music continues) - [Scott] Until he finally couldn't figure out what was going on and slowly turned and kept walking.

And he'd look back and he'd raked the beans and he'd look back and move a little farther while until we are finally able to get outta there without spooking him out of there.

That was probably one of the highlights of this hunt.

If I don't get one, I'm already successful.

And at this point I couldn't ask for anything better.

The only thing I could is if I was to get a cow down.

But at this point here, just being with you guys has been something I'll carry with the rest of my life.

- [Bret] Dan and I couldn't stay the whole time.

But it wasn't long after we got home that we got the message, "Elk down".

(bright music fades) - [Matt] If there's one thing you shouldn't buy it's microwave popcorn, the chemicals that are used in the bags are not necessary.

You can take a brown paper bag and take popcorn and put it in your microwave and it pop's just fine.

- [Nicole] We are standing next to some wild grapes - [TV Narrator] And you will know the benefits of the many industries pioneered by science.

- A recent government study estimates that nearly half of America's tap water could contain toxic forever chemicals known as PFAS.

- [Matt] PFAS are everywhere because they were used in an awful lot of things.

So they were in firefighting foam, cosmetics, fabric protectors.

So think the 3M Scotch guard, if you've had your couch or your carpet treated with that, food wrappers, microwave, popcorn bags.

It wasn't until they were found everywhere that people said, "Well, how harmful are these things?"

(bright music) PFAS is a term for a large group of chemicals, thousands.

And it means per and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

And that's just a fancy way of saying that chemists have taken hydrogens on hydrocarbons and replaced them with fluorine.

They've been around since the late fifties, mid sixties era.

But I would say the general public probably didn't hear about them until the last, say, decade or so.

For the history of industrial chemicals, since World War II, what tends to make these chemicals really good at what they do tends to make them really bad for the environment.

It just happens with every chemical we've looked at.

You'll go back to DDT, PCBs and now PFAS.

These things were great for their intended consequences, but not so great for the environment.

Originally, they thought that these chemicals wouldn't go very far because they're, quite water soluble and they're not volatile.

They don't associate with the fat in our blood like other, other chemicals do.

PFAS are weird.

They're strange in the environment.

They're strange in my lab.

They're strange in their intended uses.

And they also tend to be strange when we talk about toxicology.

They will bind to proteins, which is different than other chemicals we look at.

They associate with membranes of cells, which is different.

They actually affect the lipid content of our blood, which can be really important in fetal development.

Some of the associations people are finding are with immune system responses in children.

So my biggest fear is that the issues we might find with developing children.

(bright music) They don't stay where we want them to stay.

They tend to end up in our waste stream.

Brita filters will remove these chemicals.

The longer chain ones, more so than the shorter chain ones.

When these PFAS were found all over the world, they stopped being produced in that formulation.

They started making shorter chain molecules because they're more soluble figuring, okay, these will not accumulate in people.

They won't be as big of a problem.

Unfortunately, they're harder to remove from the environment because they're so soluble.

A wastewater treatment plant's job is to remove three things, organic matter, solids and pathogens.

They're really well designed to remove those things.

They're not well designed to remove micro contaminants, things that are at parts per trillion, parts per billion, parts per million levels.

And unfortunately these chemicals, because they're so soluble, they won't stick to those particles in organic matter that we're trying to remove.

They'll stay and they'll move their way through the plant and end up back out into our system.

(bright music) So we started investigating.

So by we, my lab and my colleagues have been looking at trying to remove these contaminants from the environment.

We took a little bit different tact versus destroying it because these things are, again, they're called forever chemicals for a reason.

They're very difficult to break down.

They don't break down in the lab very easily.

They're not gonna break down underground very easily.

What we propose to do, is make them stickier, make them stick to the soil and let the water flow through cleanly.

We'll trap 'em all in one place.

They can come in later and try and figure out how to destroy them, because it's very, very difficult to do.

And we started getting funding about 10 years ago, mostly through the Defense Department because these PFAS chemicals were used a lot in the aqueous film forming foam.

These film forming foams do a really good job of putting out fires.

And what the military likes to do is practice.

So you have hundreds and hundreds of sites around the country that have fire training activities.

All of this foam now seeps into the ground, it contaminates the groundwater and the defense department wants an easy way to find, to destroy these underground so that they don't have to excavate the soil, pump out the water and treat it that way.

The one technique that we demonstrated on the east coast was, I liken it to a Brita filter.

We put in a well and we pushed our material out into the soil around it.

And that sort of acted like a Brita filter as it came back up in.

Unfortunately, we're a ways off from the, any implementation of our methods in a wastewater treatment plant or landfill.

Luckily we have some very forward thinking operators at some of these plants that are really interested in removing these contaminants, even though they are not yet regulated for them.

For the last 10, 15 years, the water supplies have been required to monitor for these chemicals.

They're under what's called the, "unregulated contaminated monitoring rule".

There was just a lawsuit settled between wastewater and water drinking utilities with the manufacturers of these chemicals, because they said, look, we have to meet these standards.

We didn't produce them.

Our customers are flushing it down the drain and it's coming to us.

We need help getting rid of these things that you created.

Some of the folks that are in the industry are fighting back against that, because they're afraid that they're not getting enough money to actually adequately deal with this problem.

(bright music) The more we put out there, what we're being exposed to, the more people will start to question, is that okay?

And if not, how do we get rid of it and what else do we use in its place?

And if you're interested in removing it from your home, the easiest way or the most effective way, is to use a reverse osmosis system.

I have people say, "Well, what can I do?

I'm just one person."

and I say, "Well, you're just one person, but you still vote in presidential elections, right?"

I say, "We vote every day with the things we purchase and the things that we do."

So if we're conscious of the products that we're buying, and understand throughout the entire lifecycle of that product, does it have any unintended consequences, then maybe we can find something different.

If there's one thing you shouldn't buy it's microwave popcorn.

The chemicals that are used in the bags are not necessary.

You can take a brown paper bag and take popcorn and put it in your microwave and it pops just fine.

Fortunately with the announcement from 3M that they're not gonna produce these anymore, that's a huge step.

That doesn't mean there aren't other companies around the world now producing them.

We do an awful lot of business with China and we don't have any control over the manufacturer of that, except through what we purchase or what we allow into our country.

We don't want kids closed catching on fire, but we also don't want 'em exposed to these chemicals.

So that's where it falls back to the synthetic organic chemist.

Come up with something that's better, that still is retards flames, but doesn't pollute our children.

I don't think we should be conducting a huge uncontrolled experiment on ourselves.

In the United States we produce things and make a lot of money off of it until somebody figures out it's bad and then we stop it.

We should prove things that are safe before we're allowed to produce them.

And so that we're not creating issues for my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

(bright music fades) (upbeat music) - [Nicole] We are standing next to some wild grapes, always a treat, usually towards the end of summer into early fall.

So I've clipped a few off.

As you can see, this vine is huge and it is behind me.

But also there's just a nice, beautiful, just vines everywhere of these wild grapes.

And once you know what you're looking at, you'll actually see them kind of everywhere, growing on other trees, growing on fence lines.

So we have the leaf and it's got three lobes to it.

And actually in Mediterranean dishes, people will utilize the grape leaf because it is edible as well.

You can stuff it with cheese, rice, peppers, whatever you wanna stuff it with.

And then of course, the beautiful wild grapes, they taste kind of tart.

But I love that grape for making wild grape jelly.

You can make a spicy wild grape barbecue sauce.

You can do all kinds of fun stuff with wild grapes.

Also, something to note, while these berries are actually edible as well, oftentimes you'll find these vines growing, could be on buckthorn, buckthorn berries are a deep, dark purple black in color, much like these beautiful wild grapes.

So just always make sure that the berries you're picking is coming off of the same vine and you're not mistaking 'em for other berries that could be growing along with them, alongside them.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Funding for Prairie Sportsman is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.