Name: Arctic Biologist Seth Beaudreault | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #221
Uploaded: 2019-08-08T13:00:12.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Arctic Biologist Seth Beaudreault | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #221' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-08-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Arctic Biologist Seth Beaudreault | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #221' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-08-08. Transcript available.

Arctic Biologist Seth Beaudreault | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #221

Today's guest is an Arctic biologist who has come down directly from the great
white north
to let us know exactly what's going on and to answer some questions we have
about, well, all sorts of stuff.
We're going to get into nature. We're going to get into the depths of the cold
and Alaska.
Today's guest is Mr. Seth Boudreaux.
So do you just come from Alaska?
Right now, coming from Costa Rica back up to Alaska.
I just went down to see my lady and spent some time at my place, kind of in the
middle of the work season.
Okay.
So basically five months a year in Alaska, May through September, studying migratory
birds and wildlife,
and then the rest of the year I'm down in Costa Rica.
Yeah, because you sent me a picture one time of lunch, I guess it was, and it
was some iguana claws.
You guys had a batch of iguana.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I was like, dang, bro.
Yeah, my lady's dad traps them in the yard and cooks them up, and it's not that
great.
Yeah.
Yeah, if you're in a tight spot, some iguana will get you through.
Well, yeah, I saw it looked, when I looked at them, and we'll have Nick put the
picture up too, but they looked,
I'd have thought you'd have eaten a different part of the iguana.
I'd never really considered really the claw.
Yeah, it was kind of all chopped up in there, but they're mostly bones, so it
probably looked like a pot full of claws.
Yeah, that's what it looked like.
Yeah.
When you cook them up, how do you even cook those?
I think he cooked them in a pressure cooker with like a chopped tomato and some
garlic and onion maybe, some chicken bouillon.
Pretty simple.
It's just kind of, you can cook it the same way you cook chicken.
Yeah.
But it's like, it's not that great.
Is it like an island treat kind of?
Is it pretty common there in Costa Rica?
No.
I think a lot of rural people eat it occasionally, but a lot of people think it's
gross and definitely don't eat it too.
Oh, yeah, it's kind of interesting.
Like, it's almost like when I was growing up, people would eat a lot of like
hogshead cheese and stuff.
And, you know, where my sister lived, they cooked cracklins a lot of times
where they'll just, you know, take a bunch of fat and put it in a pot.
That's the best.
Yeah.
At the beginning, you're like, where's the meat, you know?
And then by the end, you're just like.
Left with these pieces of fried leather.
Oh, and they look, yeah.
And they're just so dang tasty, really, and airy.
They're almost just, it's almost like, they're almost like cotton candy, like
the inverse of cotton candy.
Oh, yeah.
Cracklins.
Pretty far on the other end of the spectrum.
So, when you go up to, when you go to Alaska, what part of Alaska are you in?
In the Arctic, so north of the Brooks Range.
I'm at a science station.
Can you pull that up, Nick, the Brooks Range so we can see that?
I just want to have an idea where you are.
Yeah.
About 370 miles north of Fairbanks.
Yeah.
And I don't even know where Fairbanks is, dude.
So, how far from Phoenix is what I want to know.
Give me an idea.
So, the state looks like this, you know.
These are the Aleutian Islands.
Okay.
Fairbanks kind of right in the middle, and I'm up towards the top there.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, I'm above, north of that mountain range.
Oh, wow.
So, that's called the North Slope up there.
That's where there's a lot of oil business going on, and the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge.
So, it's, I mean, you are up there.
Yeah.
It's about a 10-hour drive to get up to where I work.
And if you go off the top, say you get to the top of Alaska, and you take a
boat north, what do you hit?
The North Pole?
Eventually, some ice.
Really?
Yeah.
And you can't really access the coast there without paying for a permit from
the oil company to go on a tour.
You can go on, like, an hour-long tour where you get to dip your toes in the
Arctic Ocean, but they don't want people messing around up there.
So, you can't just access it on your own.
They kind of own the whole north coastline there.
So, it's private property?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a town called Dead Horse up there.
It's not really much of a town.
It's, like, an industrial outpost where everything's made of metal and there's
just testosterone in the air.
Dang.
It's a rough place.
It's ugly.
But you can see some cool birds up there, spectacle eiters and phalaropes and
king eiters and stuff.
It's pretty cool.
Now, are those birds that are only there?
Spectacle eiters, yeah, are real Arctic specialists.
They didn't even really know where they spent the winter until pretty recently.
The whole population goes to, like, an opening in the ice out in the Bering Sea,
I think.
How do you say it?
Spectacled eiter?
Spectacled eiter.
E-I-D-E-R.
And when you're up there, like, how close are you getting to these birds?
Like, what are you doing?
Too close.
My job, I'm a naturalist for this science station up there.
And so, every day I'm out there just trying to document what's happening with
wildlife, when the bird species arrive to the area, when they leave in the fall.
And then other wildlife, you know, there's bears and wolves and wolverines and
stuff up there.
So, I'm just out there spending time trying to see what's going on and document
it just for posterity, basically.
Oh, wow.
Isn't that crazy looking?
Bird, yeah.
Yeah, so it's a sea duck, and they just breed on the coast in grassy ponds and
then spend the winter out among the sea ice and openings.
Can you get a picture of the head again, Nick?
Look at that thing.
Wow.
Yeah.
And so, what is that?
Coming off the back, it almost looks like gills up there by its head.
Is that?
Or what is that?
Is this feathering?
Yeah, just weird feathers.
And can you have one of these at the house, or these more, these are-
These, you got to get some special permits for that.
Yeah, they don't take kindly.
I think it's a threatened species, probably.
Wow.
There's just not that many of them, and they breed in really specific areas.
And can you watch them fight, or they don't fight?
What do they do?
They seem pretty docile to me.
They're just kind of sitting around in the water, minding their own business.
Yeah.
You know, Arctic summer is really short, and so the birds kind of have to get
there and get on with it,
get the breeding done, and then get the hell out of there.
So, and that's when a lot of them do breeding, is in the summertime?
Yeah, pretty much only then.
So, we have like 110 species of birds we've observed in the area that are
coming from the lower 48 states,
Central America, South America, even all the way down to Antarctica.
Wow.
Some of them spend the winter down there.
So, birds kind of just come, like everybody's kind of popping in.
Yeah, yeah.
Who's kind of the randiest group, you know?
Because sometimes you're like on a plane to Vegas, and you've got different
groups.
You've got a couple of German guys, you know?
You've got one guy making his own cocaine in the backseat.
You know, you've got a bunch of Italians just drinking DECA 200.
You've got guys really, what kind of group gets up there and just really just
turns it out?
There's a bird called the blue throat that is mostly a Eurasian bird, and the
population just barely extends over into Alaska.
So, you have, if you want to see them in the United States, you have to go up
there.
And they, yeah, look at that.
They sing bird karaoke.
They do like imitations of other bird species, and they'll do this repertoire
that goes on for,
they can imitate up to like 25 species of other birds.
So, you hear it, you hear them singing all this stuff, but it sounds a little
off, like karaoke,
where you're like, I don't think that's really the white-crowned sparrow, and
it's that guy.
Oh.
And so, they're just kind of, they're like impersonators on those.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
And, yeah, the females seem to get a kick out of the male with the biggest
repertoire.
And, oh, wow.
That's pretty cool, huh?
Yeah, it's cool.
So, bird watchers.
That bird's going to be like, I'm going to go up there.
Now, will they tempt other females from other species to come on over, since
they're using different people's songs?
I haven't seen them tempt females, but other species will definitely get agitated
if they hear another bird singing their song,
because when birds sing, they're basically advertising their territory.
So, they sing on the edges of their territory, and then the bird with the next
territory over will hear it,
and he'll kind of establish his border.
So, if they suddenly hear their own song in a place where they thought they had
their territory staked out,
some of them definitely respond aggressively.
So, when a bird, like, sings, it's always to let people know that this is my
territory?
That, and I'm available.
So, they're singing to let the females know that they've got this pad, and they're
ready to roll.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So, I've got a comfortable place here.
I've got a little spot at the Days Inn or whatever.
Yeah.
Got me a little spot at the Hampton Inn.
Got it for the summer.
Oh, wow.
Got to get out.
Yeah.
So, those are the only two reasons.
If you hear a bird, they're letting somebody know about their territory,
or they are letting females know that they're available.
Yeah, pretty much, yeah.
And do, is it just male birds that sing or female birds also sing?
Mostly just male birds sing and females do little calls that they use to keep
in touch with each other
and to warn each other of predators and stuff, yeah.
Yeah, I'm waiting for this one bitch to text me back right now, dude.
It's only been two weeks, so she's probably busy, you know, traveling or
something.
How cold, so when you get up to Alaska, man, how cold is it like, because
people think of Alaska,
and, you know, like a lot of people, you think of like gold country and that
sort of thing.
You think of it being cold.
Is there a level where it doesn't matter that it's cold anymore, that you can't
even, like,
we can't even really feel a difference between, say, you know, 20 degrees below
and like 80 degrees below?
20 degrees below is not bad at all.
When you get down to 40, I think 50 below is the lowest I've experienced.
Then you're just in pain.
You just don't want to be outside at all.
And, yeah, so down to minus 20, it's very dry up there, at least in Fairbanks.
And so you can still go skiing and stuff and have an all right time.
But when it gets colder than that, like, you can feel a breeze coming
underneath the bottom of your cabin door
just because the temperature difference is so great that the air is just like
blowing in, trying to equal it out.
So explain that to me.
Like, I don't know what you're saying exactly.
When there's differences in temperature, the air, wind is basically air moving
from one place to another, right?
That's kind of a ridiculously simple way to describe wind.
Yeah, I get it.
I think we all understand that.
Now we do.
But, like, when there's a big difference inside and outside, the air is trying
to equalize to normal it out.
Okay.
So you have these, like, 10-inch thick walls of a cabin or even the doors
usually have several inches of insulation.
But just at the bottom, the only space where there's a little bit of air, it's
just blowing in like your pants will go like this in the wind if you're
standing near the door.
Because the air is coming in.
It's so much colder outside than it is inside if you have it, you know, 60
inside that it just creates wind just trying to...
Rush that close to each other.
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
But when I get up there in early May, and that's when it's still winter a
little bit.
There's usually a few feet of snow on the ground, but it's already full
daylight, so I don't see the sunset until September.
So the sun's up the whole time you get there when you get there from May.
Yep, yeah, which, yeah, as I get older, it gets harder to be used to that.
Like, we have blackout curtains, you know, to try to make it dark in my room
and stuff, but you can't keep it out the light a little bit.
So, yeah, it's kind of still