Episode 71: Glacial Lake Iroquois, Adirondack Muskox & How to Butcher Your Next Deer

East to West Hunting Podcast

An Introduction to Glacial Geology & Deer Processing with Special Guest Dr. Brian Bird

We're having a great conversation this week with geologist Dr. Brian Bird from Whitehall, New York. Brian has an extensive background in GIS mapping & glacial geology and currently manages the Local Butcher Shop. We're talking about Glacial Lake Iroquois & how glaciers impacted Pleistocene animals & hunters. Brian walks us through New York's glacial footprints, finding muskox remains in the Adirondacks and more. he then provides his deer butchering & processing advice from a lifetime of processing over 3,500 deer.

Background Brian Bird earned his PhD in geology from Western Michigan U in Kalamazoo, MI with a focus on on glacial geology. He is originally from New York and moved back here in 2004. Brian was an adjunct at Skidmore in Saratoga for a few years, then started working at the NYS Museum in 2011. He left the museum a year ago and became manager of the Local Butcher Shop in Whitehall. While at the museum, Brian focused on GIS and mapping the glacial sediments and structures in the Finger Lakes Region, specifically, Cayuga County. One aspect he focused on was identifying and dating the retreat of glaciers across NY. He's worked on projects like the Great Gully, a deep canyon like gully that runs east-west from Cayuga Lake near Union Springs, NY. His team found a moraine where the glacier stopped during a re-advance about 12,800 years ago. To their surprise, they found wood and peat that was radiocarbon dead - meaning that it was so old the radioactive carbon 14 had basically all decayed. It takes about 50,000 years to do so. Brian worked extensively on recreating the shoreline of glacial Lake Iroquois. As ice retreated north it restricted water flow to the east through the Mohawk River until it retreated north of the Adirondacks. During this time glacial Lake Iroquois flooded the lowlands along Lake Ontario all the way to Cayuga Lake. This covered much of the lowlands along the St Lawrence seaway. Using high resolution LIDAR elevation maps, he recreated the lake shore taking into account the subsidence of the earth imposed by the massive weight of the glaciers. For more background about Adirondack glaciation, check out the paper "Late Quaternary History of Northeastern NY and Adjacent Parts of Vermont and Quebec HERE