The Ketchum Report

[Guest LAL]

Resting, without hibernating, would conserve energy in winter.

[bipedalist]

Torpor like a hummingbird, or like the adaptation of hibernation for alot of black bears around here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpor

[Guest]

That is what I don't get about the claims of sasquatch back east. In the Pacific Northwest there are great forests that almost never accumulate snow because of the moderating influence of the ocean. In those very rare instances when there is some accumulation, coastal California, Oregon, Washington and BC have what can be described as an impenetrable foliage that hides everything from plane crashes to large herds of Roosevelt Elk. How does a sasquatch hide in Ohio or Kentucky or Indiana as they roam for food? Are they always home and in the den before the snows come? Are they never caught out? Where do they go that snowmobiles don't? Where in those states does it not snow? In light of habituation claims coming from Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, how is it that the snows don't give these guys up?

Good point, a huge part of why I can never accept that BF could live anywhere out east and remain a mystery. It would have been proven long long ago. In fact, it is almost ridiculous to claim a population of BF could exist out there and never make it onto a camera phone, or some other devise. And then there is the first day of hunting season, when millions of hunters invade the bush, where do all these BF go then? One really needs to set aside all logic if one wants to believe BF roams around in places like Ohio or New York or Pennsylvania. There is a ton of seismic exploration going on in the 'bush' of Pennsylvania right now, crews have to pretty much shut down for hunting season because hunters are EVERYWHERE!! Just sayn'.

Edited May 20, 2012 by summitwalker

[Guest LAL]

You're not including Western North Carolina in that, right?

[chelefoot]

Or East Tennessee?

[Guest]

The point is.......where are the remote, heavily forested areas where man seldom if ever goes... and it doesn't snow? I am from back there and I can't picture the wilderness area that would allow such a creature to roam around leaving trackways in the snow without being hunted down. I suppose there is the possibility of a remote nook in Appalachia,

The Appalachians are HUGE, dude.

but I am directing this question to the midwestern states, a place that gets real snow, sometimes for extended periods of time.

To give you a more meaningful answer, I need to know what you are referring to as "midwest". I'm in MO, for example, and most of the southern 1/4 to 1/3 of the state is covered in one type of conservation lands, including the Mark Twain National Forest. We are within the Ozarks mountain region, and geographically speaking within "spitting distance" of the Kiamichi mountain region.

There was a huge debate about developed vs undeveloped landmass in the US in another thread awhile back. The simple fact is that the overwhelming majority of the population lives in about 5% of the N American landmass. There are millions of square miles of undeveloped land, esp in and around the mountainous regions, where bf can be and rarely if ever encounter man.

Good point, a huge part of why I can never accept that BF could live anywhere out east and remain a mystery. It would have been proven long long ago. In fact, it is almost ridiculous to claim a population of BF could exist out there and never make it onto a camera phone, or some other devise. And then there is the first day of hunting season, when millions of hunters invade the bush, where do all these BF go then? One really needs to set aside all logic if one wants to believe BF roams around in places like Ohio or New York or Pennsylvania. There is a ton of seismic exploration going on in the 'bush' of Pennsylvania right now, crews have to pretty much shut down for hunting season because hunters are EVERYWHERE!! Just sayn'.

Nonsense.

This notion that the East is so heavily developed that bf would have to be discovered if it were present. is just more Skeptical nonsense.

Firstly, there are a ton of reports of them being seen, and even dashboard cam footage from police cars of them. So there's THAT out of the way.

And the Eastern US still has enormous stretches of undeveloped land, particularly in the various mountain chains.

Edited May 20, 2012 by Mulder

[Guest LAL]

Forests in this area are still being allowed to recover from overcutting in the 20s and 30s so there's much less logging than I saw in the PNW despite Weyerhauser moving to the SE

Eastern Tennessee? Are we counting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park?

[bipedalist]

Yeah, around here it's not like you jump on your four-wheeler and cover everything between here and a mile as a crow flies by ground-truthing. Your four-wheeler would flip or bog down, you'd have to literally crawl through some of this temperate rainforest I call home.

[chelefoot]

The Smokies along with the Cherokee National Forest:

"Located in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee, the Cherokee National Forest is divided into northern and southern sections by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The 650,000-acre forest is the largest tract of public land in Tennessee and adjoins other national forests in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia."

[Guest BFSleuth]

There seems to be a popular misconception that humans have been everywhere and seen everything on this continent. This is simply not true. As noted above humans live on about 5% of USA landmass. Even avid outdoorsmen stay close to roads or ATV trails. Hikers tend to stay on marked trails. Hunters rarely go more than a few miles from motorized transportation for good reason, packing out hundreds of pounds of meat after a successful hunt precludes packing it out for long distances over difficult terrain on foot.

Just because you hiked up a valley on a trail, or drove up a logging road, doesn't mean you saw the whole valley. Far from it, you only saw what you could see from a very narrow point of view. That leaves the majority of terrain and cover for BF to roam.

During hunting season it would be reasonable to expect a sentient BF to understand that certain areas during daylight are going to be over run by hunters. Most states I'm aware of have laws against hunting at night for deer, elk, etc., so that leaves the night time free for them to range through those areas and during daytime all they need to do is retire back deeper into the woods, hills, and mountains into safe havens.

Resting, without hibernating, would conserve energy in winter.

Torpor like a hummingbird, or like the adaptation of hibernation for alot of black bears around here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpor

I doubt that they hibernate or enter a state of torpor, simply based on sighting reports and trackways found in the middle of winter. The Minnesota trackway was found in February and seems to indicate a high rate of activity.

The BF that dragged away the road kill elk was observed in January in Montana (not Wyoming as I posted above) in temperatures that were -40ºF:

http://www.bfro.net/gdb/show_report.asp?id=33257

The BF trackway followed by a Special Forces team training above the Arctic Circle in deep snow was observed in March:

http://www.bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=6486

Going through sighting reports it seems that BF are just as active in winter time as in summer time. It simply may be that sighting reports are more numerous during seasons when more humans are out and about in their areas. There just aren't that many folks out snowshoeing or cross country skiing in the backcountry compared to hiking during the summer time.

If they did indeed hibernate then we would expect to see no sighting reports in the winter. But that is just simply not the case.

[Guest]

I apologize for contributing to the hijacking of a thread. I also think it has spurred some really good discussion all around -- I think many of the explanations for theoretical problems in bigfoot diet are very plausible! But I would like to reiterate that my initial point about diet was simply in response to the "no evidence against the existence of bigfoot", and I think the level of discussion and the good points on either side do show that theoretical bigfoot diet is at least something warranting good discussion on either side and therefore -- just like photos, tracks, hair, sightings -- constitutes evidence. Whether that evidence is strong enough to overpower counter evidence... well, there's the rub. But I really think to say there is "no skeptical evidence for the non-existence of bigfoot" is not true. There are basic physiological "rules" to animal survival, and bigfoot (likely) subscribes to these just like any other animal.

I would also like to ask a genuine question.

As we've already pointed out, there are more or less two possible eating patterns for large mammals on either ends of the spectrum. They can hunt, expending large amounts of energy but gaining large amounts of calories from the kill; or they can forage, taking in smaller amounts of calories but expending very little energy to do so. Yes, the lines blur. At any rate, I've only thought of bigfoot as foragers, because that closely resembles the survival model of other large primates (orangutan, gorilla, even the jaws of gigantopithecus imply foraging). Of course, as has been pointed out, that isn't necessarily the case. My question then is, how do bigfoot take down elk/deer? It seems like anything with bipedal locomotion would necessarily be much slower than these quadrupeds, but I haven't thought about it very much...

[Guest LAL]

The Smokies along with the Cherokee National Forest:

I was going to say my Nantahalla is bigger than your Cherokee but it isn't.

This is a poplar grove in Joyce Kilmer. Looks squatchy to me:

[Guest MikeG]

Folks, I know there isn't much of substance about the report to talk about at the moment, but I would like us to stick just a little closer to the subject please.

There are a number of existing threads on the various other questions that have arisen in the last few pages, so I'd appreciate it if you would take these off-topic conversations off to a more appropriate thread.

Many thanks

Mike

[HOLDMYBEER]

Back to my original point, the Ketchum Report is said to make use of DNA samples originating from sites in the midwestern United States. Specifically, and I don't remember the precise source, the Ketchum Report is said to feature sasquatch DNA originating from locations in Ohio and Kentucky. In light of what has just been discussed about possible wintering habits of said creatures, their likely caloric needs and the range they might need to gather adequate food, I ask how they manage to go undetected in regions that regularly receive substantial winter snows. This goes directly to my earlier questions about the degree of vetting performed on the samples featured by the Ketchum Report.

[southernyahoo]

I gather you are recomending throwing out samples collected where it snows, because the snow would have given them away by tracking, and they would be found or seen more? So would you then be dismissing the sightings of them during snowy conditions, and the fact that this may have lead to finding the samples?