Dr. Doug Osborne & Cold Front Mallard Movement

Do you have your own water cooler and chat room theories about what is happening with mallards and why their behaviors and migration paths are changing? Dr. Doug Osborne of UA-Monticello and the graduate director at the Five Oaks Ag Research & Education Center joins the show with a very candid look at the waterfowl science community, sex and age ratios, game farm genetics, when duck season should end, and most importantly...what happened with this latest cold & snow front—a must-listen-to separate fact from fiction plus a new keyword, another TSS hat drawing.

Listeners interested in entering the drawing for a The Standard Sportsman hat should hang into the episode for the keyword and instructions on qualifying.

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Transcript

Since 1937, Ducks Unlimited has been the leader in waterfowl conservation, with over 16 million acres of habitat conserved. DU's supporters and volunteers have led the charge to fill the skies with waterfowl, today, tomorrow and forever. You too can play a role in leaving a legacy for the future of waterfowl hunting. To find an event near you, or to join our volunteer team, go to www.ducks.org/volunteer. Ducks Unlimited, Conservation for a Continent.

Welcome to The Standard Sportsman podcast. The show features trending topics, touching all aspects of duck and goose hunting, in an effort to motivate others to leave the resource better than they found it. Hosts Cason Short and Brent Birch are lifelong Arkansas hunter conservationists, delivering thought-provoking discussions with engaging guests before, during and after duck season. Thanks for spending time with us today. Now let's jump into today's show with the guys.

Hey everybody, Cason Short here. Welcome back to another episode of The Standard Sportsman. Join us always with Brent Birch. Brent, how are you doing? You survived all the snow and freezing weather?

I did, I did. Luckily, despite the 10 1⁄2 inches of snow we got in Little Rock, I was able to make my way to the farm and experience a couple of really good duck hunts. As most people know, hunting the thaw is usually pretty good and we were able to find them and keep a little bit of water open and had some really good hunts, which lifted the spirits a little bit. After a kind of a run of not as successful hunts as I like, this weekend kind of made you feel a little bit better about things even if it's just temporary.

Yeah, it's always good for morale. It is for mine anyway.

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You know, some interesting takeaways and we'll dive into them here with our guests in a little bit, but did you see the giant push of ducks? You know, everyone keeps telling me that we're just a cold front away, but I'm not buying it.

No, I don't. I would not qualify these as new ducks. I think these ducks, and this is something we talked on before the show, I think these are ducks that have been concentrated all season and the weather made them get out and move a little bit, and forage for open water, try to find some food, all the other things, because we were locked up. I mean, the Grand Prairie was ice skating rink, and then you throw a little bit of snow on top of it. Different areas got different amounts. If you got down to Pine Bluff, they just got maybe a little bit over a dusting. We're a little bit north of that. We've got about three inches, and then you get up. If you're in the band that goes east and west off of Little Rock, you're getting 10 inches. So we were kind of in between. But yeah, no, I didn't. And I've talked to enough people, nobody felt like they just saw a lot of ducks. Even after the big front and snow hit Missouri, and you gave them a few days to maybe figure out, OK, this place is going to be frozen for a while. Our food's covered up. Let's go. Didn't see it.

No. No. And you keep seeing these images coming out of northern Missouri, a bunch of ducks rafted up on the river, and there's all these claims that, oh, we've got them. All the ducks are here. There's plenty of ducks. And that's great. I'm happy to see those concentrations. But at the same time, you look at the midwinter survey here in Arkansas, and we mentioned it before we hit record, we're missing close to a half million mallards in the state of Arkansas. I just don't think those ducks are being hidden in some concentration somewhere. They just simply don't exist. We know the population is down. To argue that point is futile, I think, at this point. I think it's kind of what you and I are trying to get at on this show. We know the population is down. Arguing against that is silly. Let's talk about the things that are driving the ship now that it is down. What age ratio, sex ratio, all these other things genetics, stuff we are going to get into in today's show that are having an impact on the success of your hunt in these conditions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we talk about it all the time, offline. Just think how much better we would feel about things if we had three, four, five million more mallards in the flyway or in the breeding population, because breeding population is all we count anymore. As far as from how is the population doing? We're short a bunch of ducks and that filters down to every duck hole and every block of public woods and everything else you see and we're short and that shortness is causing some level of panic, some level of disappointment, some level of blame game, a lot of that and we'd all feel a lot different if we had a population that was on the uptick, which it has not been in quite some time. I mean, down 44 percent since 2016, I think. I mean, we're missing a bunch of ducks. The Standard Sportsman is brought to you by Perfect Limit Outdoors, the creators of the designated puller automatic jerk rig. This is one product creating motion throughout your entire decoy spread. Check it out at perfectlimitoutdoors.com and make the water move.

I was talking to Adam Campbell last night. He called me and was talking about that stat specifically. He was like, let's say we're talking about your take-home salary each month and you make $10,000 a month. He's like, take $4,400 out of that and see how you feel about life. I'm like, it hurts, right? It stings. So to be dismissive about that decline in ducks is not... You should not dismiss that. It is significant. And you're right to your point. If we turn loose 4 million more mallards in the continent, we wouldn't be complaining about flooded corn and all these other boogie men to the north of us or heated ponds. None of that stuff would matter. They would consume resources and they would migrate. And I think that's the problem we're facing today is low population. Now, I think you and I kind of have the stance that maybe some other regulations could be reined in a little bit, maybe in the downtrend of population, we shouldn't be harvesting or pressuring or doing all the things we're doing, business as usual. I think that's kind of where you and I stand.

Yeah, that's right.

Hopefully, I'll let you introduce him. Hopefully, I guess, can kind of shed some light and some data on some of the things that you and I talk about a lot.

Yeah, always interesting discussions with this guy, and we do talk frequently. We're not hitting a record button, getting insights from what he and his students are doing, and what we're hearing as hunters and feeding back to him as well. But we've got a repeat guest on the show, usually very popular. Some of his stuff got released last week and created quite a bit of buzz because of what we were seeing and where ducks were or were not. But we do have Dr. Doug Osborne on the show, and I appreciate you coming back on.

Yeah, guys, I always enjoy talking to you. Thanks for having me.

Well, let's start off because if people are newer to the show, since the last time you were on, I think you've been on twice before, if I recall. But maybe talk briefly about what you've got going, where you are at the University of Arkansas Monticello, get the Five Oaks Ag Research Center, but what you and your students are doing and solutions you're trying to come up with by backing it with some solid science, and maybe share, at least give that background to where people understand when we get into some of these topics where you're coming from and what your motivations are for being so passionate about ducks and mallards in particular.

Man, I appreciate it. Appreciate the opportunity to talk about my lab, my students, because that's really, that's where the mallards and the ducks are my passion. That's why I got to where I am now, but it's kind of, I went into wildlife, studying wildlife, because I didn't like people. And here we go to this kind of turn the tides, where the students have really been fun for me. It's been a fun challenge for me to learn their personalities and their skill sets, and their career goals and those sorts of things. And how can I, who do I know? What sorts of things can I do? Experiences, can I get them to help them get to that next step? So that's been a fun challenge for me since I've been in Arkansas here. My wife and I moved here with a two-year-old daughter in 2012 and been here in Lovin It. Arkansas has treated us well. And we've, you know, I've had a blast in the lab, of course. And, but the foundation is a lot of stuff that I talk about and a lot of stuff that I present. I do a lot of seminars and that sort of thing. All this stuff really comes from the students. It's me mentoring the students and their ability with data management, with analysis, with thinking through some of these critical questions that we're trying to answer. So it's kind of a sort of a neat circle, like I'm involved with the Mississippi Flyway Technical Committee. So I go to those meetings, I hear the technical council and the states and representatives that are on that, that are dealing with the sort of the policy end of things and the local management at the state and federal level. I hear the concerns and questions they have, and then I say, I have that data, I can answer that question. And if I don't, then being involved with the people that are making those policy and management decisions, and listening in their questions and concerns and their steps forward, helps me design what the research questions are that we need to be focusing on. The research is a blast. It's fun. The field work is fun. The students love it. It's a great experience. But if we don't take this science and put it to work to drive better policy, to make better management decisions, then we're all wasting our time and money, because I've raised over $6 million in funding since I've been in Arkansas in the last, whatever, 12, 13 years. And if we don't use this money to make effective decisions for the resource moving forward, like I said, it's a waste of everybody's time, money and energy. And so that's what drives me is being involved with those agencies and those groups, like Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture. I'm on their science team helping them derive sort of their science objectives. What data are we missing and lacking to inform management? And so that's what helps me think through what's the next couple of projects that we need to be focusing on here. And then, so I write grants, get funding to provide students opportunities to come to my lab and work in the lab as a group. They're working towards a degree, a master's degree, in waterfowl management or it's a natural resource management degree with an emphasis in waterfowl management. And so that's kind of like the circle. And if students get the data, I put them as involved, as much involved as they can in sort of the everyday management of the project. We're building the next generation of professionals, so we need them to have good critical thinking skills, good organization and communication skills. So putting them in charge of hiring technicians, putting them in charge of thinking through the design of the study and the timing and deployment of the devices and all these sorts of things. So I'm sort of a hands-off. Well, I guess I wouldn't say that. I'm not a hands-off advisor. But I've gotten, I feel like I've gotten over the years pretty decent at sort of giving them some slack at the beginning and learning the students' skills and their abilities and what they need help with. And then I sort of step in and make sure that we're not sort of behind and help them in the areas they need it. And help build their skills up in those, in those, in that aspect. You know, at the end of my career, I think, you know, I was talking about ducks. But at the end of the career, what's really sort of driving the beans that I'm counting at the end of my career, I guess I may have said this before on here, is the students in the agencies they work for, right? Like, I got students in Ohio Department of Natural Resource, Washington State Assistant Waterfowl Coordinator, the Fish and Wildlife Service, six or seven students in Ducks Unlimited now. And so that's, you know, that's sort of my legacy, I think, and leaving behind sort of that next generation of students that's passionate about waterfowl as I am. So, like I said, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the lab and, you know, I love where I do. And I have four incredible, talented master students right now, and a research associate. His name is Craig Casto, and he came out of University of West Virginia, and he was down in Florida for a little bit, but now he's working for me as a sort of my wingman. And, you know, these kids get working on this data. They get, they're all sort of similar, somewhat working on similar projects, so they can complement each other, help each other out on various things. Some of them are very good with, you know, R and data coding and statistics, and others got spatial skills, so they're good in the field. They just, they all complement each other. And it's, I just, I give credit to the quality of students that I've had over the years. Of how effective this lab has been, because it's like a well-oiled machine, when, you know, when everybody, when everything's ticking. And so it's been real fun, and I'm excited about the things that the students are doing now. Just real quick on that, three of them are, three of them are working with transmitter data, specifically. Two of those transmitter projects are deployments in November, December, so that we can get movement data during winter. Both of those are focusing on forest restoration. In the southeast, we're concerned about the quality of the timber, the dying of the trees, individual tree biggers going down, the health of the trees is declining. We're seeing shift in the species composition of trees from less tolerant, water-tolerant species to more water-tolerant species. Basically, losing our red oaks, gaining more white. The state and a lot of the southeast region is focused on restoring bottom-end hardwoods and thinking about long-term health of these systems. Two of these students are focused on that exact issue. We're using transmitter data to try to help us learn at the very fine scale, what are mallards looking for when they select for holes in the timber? Then at a larger scale, how impactful is forest restoration on duck habitat and use? Somebody has got to play devil's advocate, and that's me. Should we be reforesting the stuff we're worried about reforesting? Should we just cut it down and put more soil? Or should we have other diverse habitat types? Of course, nobody wants to cut trees down. But somebody, and that's somebody's me, has to think about that because that's where these research questions generate. So they're looking at restoration at a large scale and how impactful that is. Five, 10, 15, 20-year-olds are stored wetlands, and how are ducks using them on the landscape. And so both of these are Mallard movement-specific, but the sort of the mission or the goal is sort of to help. What can we learn from the movements of these birds, into and out of bottom and hardwoods, and among other habitats, of course, components of the landscape? What can we learn to help inform what that restoration of that hardwood looks like? And so that's where those two projects are going. The other one Pasqual is working on, he's been here a bit longer, and he's deployed his transmitters. He's working on the Missouri, what I call the Missouri-Arkansas project, and all his devices were deployed in February, the last two years, and I'm happy to say that we're actually going to carry that project on one more year, so there'll be another year of that. Deploying devices in February, all the devices will be deployed on hen mallards. His questions are really focused on sort of distribution and movements and importance of spring staging areas as those birds move north. Where are they staging? How many stops are they making? How is that related to arrival date to the prairies? And then when they get to the prairies, how many wetlands are they visiting before they finally settle down in the spot? The quality of these wetlands may be telling us, you know, if she's visiting a lot of wetlands versus a little bit of wetlands, you know. Of course, it's the early bird gets the worm, right? So the first hen mallards that are getting out there may stay playing to these wetlands first and be able to occupy these sites. How much movement of the early ducks that are getting up there early, right at the peak of the ice out? How much movement do they do before they settle in versus the ones that get there later? Those birds that get there later, can we find patterns in their age distribution? Can we find patterns in the farm genetics of these things? Are the farm genetic birds getting there earlier or later? What can we learn from that? His whole study is really focusing on an mallard. Hopefully identifying areas, maybe there's areas, the hypothesis, maybe there's areas, maybe all the true wild mallards that are using the flooded timber in Arkansas, maybe they go to one part of the priorities, maybe the birds that have maybe 15, 20 percent game farm genetics in them, maybe they're using different parts of the wetlands up there. If they are, how does our funding priorities for funding wetland restoration in the prairies, are we funding and we focus this on areas that have game farm genetic mallards or true wild mallards? It doesn't matter. Those are sorts of things that we're trying to dig into. But we have to understand what's going on with the populations, as you all mentioned earlier. They're down and we're worried, I'm worried. I've yelled about it on this podcast. The last time we talked about it and I'm concerned about the population, mostly because I know the condition of the prairies. We're trying to make a better link between wintering grounds and prairie nesting locations. Then last thing I'll say here and I'll take a breath. This Pasquale is using some of these transmitter data too to identify known incubation attempts. These ducks are going to go lay an egg, leave it there and leave, come back next day, lay an egg, leave. But once she lays that full clutch and starts incubating that thing, then we can detect that she's sitting on that nest for X number of days. We have quite a few transmitter marked birds that nested last two years and we're excited about what it's going to tell us. Those are other things. And so, yeah, we can talk about some things, what I want to do moving forward related to that. But I'm going to try to take a visit to the prairies this summer and I'm going to go see and identify some of these transmitter marked mallards sitting on nests in the prairies. So we can try to inform and look at and have a better understanding of the dynamics that's going on in these populations.

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Okay. I could say, I think I can inform the sex ratio thing a little bit better. I think I got some ideas on the age ratio with some research questions. We probably have half the data for it. But I'm going to start with these sex ratio things. We've been kind of looking at this since the beginning of our banding program, which started about 2014. And the ratio back then was one and a half to two hens per male. And we were catching them in the trap in February. So this is after we've been shooting them for six months, right? Since September 1st, all the way down to the end of January, we start catching them in February. You know, back in 2015-16, right in there, we were close to one, between one and a half or two hens per male in our traps. More recent years, say, you know, eight, ten years later, we're closer to six hens, you know, males per every one hen. And so we're slowly, in our capture efforts, we're seeing more and more Drakes being caught. Now, there's some potential bias in that. That's not saying that's what the landscape looks like, because when we get, we got more efficient at catching ducks. And so when we, when we first start, we're putting 30, 40 ducks in a trap at once. Now we're putting 90 to 120 ducks in a trap at once. And when we catch those bigger wads of ducks, we've watched on camera, the hens move off of the band site, right? They are not gonna sit there and get hammered by 90 mallard Drakes trying to get every piece of corn out of the throat of that trap as they possibly can. So there's a potential little bit of a trap bias in that. This is why I don't trust the data. Or excuse me, the numbers, I trust the trends. All right, so our trend is going up and up and up and up and up. Every year more Drakes per that ratio is continuously climbing. But the slope of that line, the rate at which it's growing, is not the same rate that we're seeing them harvested. So we would expect to see about the same sort of ratio of the band harvests. And so what we're seeing is a very steep incline. We get reported back to us during the following hunting season upwards of 16 to 18 males for every one female band gets harvested. Back in 2016, it was like three or four male bands to every one female band. Now it's 16. And so, you know, those that relationships not grown parallel to each other. So it tells me as, you know, from 2014 to now, we've seen quite a decline in our population overall. Every year that sex ratio gets wider and wider and wider. And so this is telling, this screams to me that we are losing hens on the breeding ground, probably at a higher rate than we know. And so that's what really initiated a transmitter hens study, looking at those nesting questions. And so as you think about, as we lose a quarter of our, you know, whatever, however many wetlands we lost, we're condensing, consolidating our nesting birds in the smaller areas, you know, predators in the smaller areas, you know, the grasslands around the wetlands that they're moving into are shrinking a little bit because we've had years of drought, you know, up there, sort of extended growing seasons a bit. It's allowed people to drain wetlands, convert some more grasses, you know, they're planting new crops in Canadian prairies that they've never planted before. And so we continuously sort of or shrink in the size of the nesting pot. And it shrink, it shrink ins, it also ultimately increases the rate of natural mortality. If you spread everybody out, their ability to survive and hide for 24 days or whatever on a nest is going to be better. You start crunching them all in the middle, in smaller areas than their ability to survive. So I think natural mortality, in short, I think natural mortality is increasing as the wetland numbers and populations decrease. And so I think we have a major hand mallard on the prairies issue. And so that's what my sex ratio stuff tells me. That's just, you know, that's just obviously from band data. The age ratio stuff, and also what I need to do, and I haven't yet because I don't have the student, I need, this probably needs to be the next funded project, is I need to look at the wing survey data that the hunters send in their wings from the, from the, into the wing bee. I want to see, you know, we need to, we really need to look at that sex ratio, age ratio data in terms of how it changes latitudinally. As the migration continues from north to south, how does that sex and age ratio and the harvest look relative to our bands? And so, remember, we're, we're banding in February. We're banding at least birds that have made, that flew the gauntlet for a year and avoided all those hunters. And so, they, they, they got a little bit more smarts. And the prairies, they're banding everything they catch, and a lot of those are juveniles. And so, I think even a simple analysis of looking at band harvest by latitude, and sort of, you know, relative to age class and compared to, you know, the breeding season banded birds versus my banded birds down here in the winter, you know, are those distributions sort of different? And I think that will start to get at, are we killing more females and youth up north? We know we are. The data exists. I'm not sure why we sort of, we as in a whole science community, sort of don't take that into consideration more, because I know the data exists. I haven't really seen a heavy analysis or exactly a simple analysis. To look at the age, sex ratio of harvest from the north to the south end of the flyway. I mean, it's been done. I've seen it at conferences and that sort of thing. But if we are truly hammering the youth bird, young birds up north, what sort of things specifically in Canada, right? Because they're harvesting seven a day. A lot more hunters up there now are harvesting a lot more birds, and they're shooting them longer now. That hunting season up there is no longer just a short little hunting season. Those birds stay up there longer. And so that's, you know, I think there's some considerations to be had. I think the data exists to look at the age and sex ratio, harvest distribution on the landscape, and that should be informing harvest policy. And it's not inform harvest policy right now. Those things need to be taken into consideration. The crime scene doesn't take half the information and knowledge and data from the crime scene to make a decision. They take every single little piece of information available. The adaptive harvest management is using two pieces of information that we know has some inherent biases to them. So we need to take all of the pieces of data available to reform harvest management policy, I think. I think harvest management policy needs a reform. That's where I'm at on some of that stuff.

Well, yeah, you have hunters that don't even really understand it, kind of asking for the same thing. They may not directly say, we need to modify AHM or we need to do this or do that, because they don't know enough about it. They just know something's not right. And so, what we've discovered, we've had guests on the show before, and some of the things we bring up, we're probably about as nerdy as anybody that's not trained biologists about all this stuff. And at some level, well, not even at some level, there's some guys in the waterfowl science community that are completely dismissed or ignored when they raise these same questions, or raise questions that, are we really looking at all the data? And is the data, is it good? And how could it be good when there's this or that tied to it? I mean, do you sense that being in, I mean, you are within the waterfowl science community. Do you sense that there's some, I don't know if ostracizing is the right word, but some people are dismissed because they just, they push too hard on stuff people don't want to talk about?

Yes. Yeah, I would say yes. I think there's just a lot of respect, and there should be, for some of the early waterfowl scientists that derived these mechanisms for taking some subjectivity out of harvest regulations. That's what it was. It was, you know, do we want all the waterfowl biologists sitting at a table, fighting over what they think the rules should be, or do we need to come up with some mechanism to take the subjectivity out of it, and have an objective decision, and that's why this policy happened. And so I understand, I think there's an age of people in a profession that really just thinks that all that early science is it. Like we know everything about a mallard duck now, right? Because we've banded 100,000 mallards across the prairies for a couple, three or four years in a row, and we got all these harvests and survival rates. Now we don't need to band anymore because we know what they are, but things change constantly. In a minute we think we know something, there's two more things we don't know. I think to answer your question directly, I'm starting to get down a rabbit hole. But to answer your question directly, there's, I think the people sort of hang on to the tradition, and the old traditional science and stuff that came out of some of the early population modeling and that kind of stuff. And it was great, but I think there's just not enough people open-minded, being willing to at least listen to somebody's suggestions and thoughts. And let's think about how we can determine if that data is good or not, or how can that data help us with the decision, or, you know, help us inform this decision. They're just, I don't know how to say it nicely, but they're stuck, right, in these old ways of doing things, of doing waterfowl management. They're stuck in this rut, and they don't think they're not open-minded enough to listen to some of the newer scientists in the arena. I wouldn't say I'm new, but I do, I'm not in the old, I'm not in the historical, like, I'm not that type. I just, I'm providing some newer references. I'm trying to push new data and to think in different ways. And people are starting to, I will say, the science community is starting to open up to this stuff, but it's slow.

Well, I would hope so, because it is, from my chair, it is completely reckless to rely on, this is how it's always been or used to be, because we all know things have changed. Habitat up and down the flyway has changed. There's places in Arkansas that I've driven by my entire life, almost 50 years of duck hunting and being on the Grand Prix of Arkansas, that I do not see ducks in anymore, ever. They used to be full of ducks. So how you could take and try to... All these other inferences that are out there in these data points that we believe are going on, how could you not adapt and modify and look at it from different angles and try to produce better data to where you could make a decision versus going, oh, no, this is how this out's done. This is what I was taught in school way back when, and this is how our agency ran it forever, and so this is what we're doing. And part of that makes you really question, being a hunter going, okay, you guys are making the... You're putting the data out there that people are gonna craft a... Because our Arkansas Game and Fish Commissioners aren't scientists, and I'm not making, pointing fingers at Luke Naylor or Brent Leach and saying, they're just giving them, you know, stuff to make a decision on, but it's not any good. But if that's what the overarching Mississippi Flyway technical councils handing down, how do you kind of go against that? And, because that's what it is, and that's where it makes you go, well, is that part of the reason we're at damn near half as many mileage as we had eight years ago? Because that's where we are. And yeah, there's other factors, of course there is. And you alluded to it before the show, the conditions of the habitat in Prairie Canada is pretty dang poor. And that's a huge, huge factor. But then you can back in all these other pieces of the pie and go in, and how could we not make adjustments in the way we're looking at it? And I know they changed the AHM and the way it calculates some of the numbers, but there's like three people on the planet that understand it and know what it is.

But you know what the change did, right? Like we were fixing to go into like a moderate season.

That's right.

And all of a sudden, it changed. Oh, we're still in the liberal. Like we were almost ready to back the regulations down to that moderate package. And they changed it and then we're in, which kept us in the liberal.

Yeah.

I'm glad you said that because I got kind of called the task last year for questioning that, you know, like how dare you question their intentions? I don't know what the intentions were. But when you're looking down the barrel of a potentially restrictive framework and suddenly everything changes to keep us in liberal, as a hunter, I can't help but wonder, why did you do it? I mean, you go back to the 04, we said in the last episode, you go back to the 2004 framework and we'd be in a restrictive season right now. And yet everyone's telling us, it's fine. There's ducks out there. Everything's fine. Well, 20 years ago, we wouldn't have considered it fine. Why do we consider it fine today?

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Listen, I am in the habitat camp. Like, I know habitat drives us. And that's where most of people are hung on the regulation, saying, harvest doesn't matter.

It's all habitat.

When you start reversing the habitat trends, then I'll believe that we can leave the hunt alone. But until we can reverse the habitat loss trends, it can't hurt, is my opinion, on a two-hand. And I don't want to see... I don't hunt 60 days a year. I can't. But I also don't want to see us lose any days because the days that I do get out... And, oh boy, I hunted here the other morning. There was a couple of days of clouds. And then the clouds broke free and that moon was near full two nights ago or whatever. Yesterday morning, we had a pretty good moon. And wherever I was hunting there, I heard tornado ducks get up about 20, probably 15, 20 minutes at least before shooting night. Never seen them again. They left. They got up out of the rice and left. And they were probably feeding all night. And then we didn't hardly... I mean, we had a nice little hunt. But seen a lot less ducks than I expected. And I know it was that moon completely the random thought. Sorry about that.

No, you're good. I mean, we've said it here before. We know it. Days kill ducks, not numbers. You know, and, Brent and I, neither one want to see a shorter season. It's already, you lose days to the moon, to the freeze, work, whatever. I don't really want to see a shorter season. But I'm with you. Going to one hen is not, I mean, what could it hurt? Who's it gonna hurt? It's not gonna hurt me. You know, it's like I'm feeding my family off of hen mallards. I mean, man.

I don't think most people, I think most people are being the same boat. That's what's so, so head scratching about it. People aren't out there shooting hens. Even the guys that get online and make their smart ass comments about if it's brown, it's down. They, in reality, they probably don't mean that. You know, they're just trying to take a stance that there's some badass hunter. But people are, green head, that's, that's the thing. So yeah, we're not always out there targeting them. But in this, in this current era that we're in, where a limit is so important and the picture to put on the internet is so important, you're going to, they're going to get shot on days. In the other days, you wouldn't have done this in a different era. And that's what makes it tough. And just to say, we can shoot two of them. It doesn't matter. At some point, some of these data points got to start stacking on top of each other to add up to our populations down a lot.

Yeah, I think there's been enough noise made on the hens this year that I think people are probably, this year, down here, at least, I think they're doing a lot better at letting the hens pass, instead of shooting a pair or shooting one.

Yeah, I agree with that.

So I think maybe it was just the noise need to be made. And, you know, it ain't, like you said, it's not going to make a huge difference in population. But why not? Why not let them go? Because one year coming off here, we may get a bumper year and water up there, and we may get a slight rebound and the more birds we got, I think the better off we are, of course. But, so anyway, I, yeah, I think guys are at least, you know, it's in the back of their mind that they're trying to do their best on not passing on hens if they can. And so that's the best we can do.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

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I would say no push. I would say if they didn't move before the freeze, they didn't move at all. We published a paper a few years ago on this. We had that big freeze in February and we wanted to see. We thought, okay, now we got early January. Let's see if there's a difference in that movement. Maybe the birds got a different mentality if they get a big freeze up north in January or February or wherever else. But in short, we had maybe 25 or so birds north of the Arkansas-Missouri border, probably 25 that were deployed last February. Half of those birds were from Arkansas, deployed in Arkansas. Some of those were deployed in Missouri, but there were still a good number of birds north when we thought most of the landscapes froze. They, you know, like we mentioned, some of those were on some power plant discharge ponds and some treatment ponds and sitting probably in some of those large giraffes of ducks that we've been seeing on the internet. I probably had transmitters sitting in a few of those large giraffes up on the Missouri River, on the Illinois River in Central Illinois. Up in Minnesota, we still have a couple of devices. And the birds are moving decently well during the day around the local area there, so we know they're still alive. And so really, I mean, that, you know, my student put a nice little summary together of the pre-freeze right before that freeze was coming, where the devices were, what they were sitting on. And I thought I kept calling them over the weekend, and, you know, any update up. And he says, there's nothing, there's no update. These birds are, there's nothing significant to report. Like, they're still sort of just hunkering down. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, we just didn't see, we just didn't see it from the transmitter birds. I'm talking to my friends throughout Arkansas, you know, I just, I don't know all that many people that really picked up masses of birds. I know, you know, we talked before the show, sort of recorded, started recording there that, I just, I feel like there's large concentrations in Arkansas in a few spots. And then everybody else has this sort of enough birds for a teaser, you know? And it just, it just seemed like there's a large concentrations in smaller number of areas now. And they're just, they're just not dispersed and scattered everywhere in large numbers. We got those big groups, you know, when populations down this low, you got a lot, you know, a couple of big groups and a bunch of scattered birds. As populations grow, obviously, those big groups of birds can't get much bigger. They're competing for food amongst themselves, especially in areas that may food later in the winter. When food starts getting depleted, they got to start spreading out, right? They're competing against one another. I just think we just didn't see a migration with this. We just didn't see it was a big movement from our transmitter data, for sure.

With these large concentrations of ducks, I would make the assumption, given how dry it was at the beginning of the season, these were some legitimate gold star habitat locations that the ducks that did get here have assembled on and just haven't left. We had pretty mild December weather-wise, so they weren't mowing through the food that was there. They didn't have to unless the geese got on it, which we've talked about that at plenty of times. But from the concentration standpoint, is that what you're seeing? You're seeing ducks bunched around some legitimate known big habitat providers, big early habitat providers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I mean, I don't know all the dynamics of the water around the river systems this year, but it seems like kind of like inside the Arkansas River Levee, closer to some of the rivers. I mean, I know we near got out of our banks in the White River. I'm not sure, did it ever get out and really flood good? I'm not quite sure. But it just seems like the birds historically are associated with getting into this prairie and once that river comes out, falling down in it, leaving the Grand Prairie and falling down in those river systems as they flood it out. It just seems like there were some pretty decent concentrations earlier in the year around rivers, right? Like the Black River and hurricane areas appeared to have good ducks early, and talking to people last week, they were gone. Then some people further down the river, the Mississippi River levy anyway, appeared to maybe had picked up a few more birds. But I think it's just the locals that they started to consolidate and concentrate in some of that really, really good habitat that's not hunted real hard.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, yeah, and that's, you talk to people that have had good seasons and have hung on to ducks and will comment, you know, they're doing really well hunting-wise. They're maybe not seen as me ducks or holding as me ducks, but they've got them and they've been able to hang on to them. Every single one of them to a T is uber sensitive about the amount of pressure they put on them. And that's that's connecting those dots. And you talk, you mentioned it earlier about the Black River losing their ducks. That place was under immense pressure early on because it's the only public ground that had water. And those ducks didn't stay very long.

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely what happened. We got, I mean, we, our numbers are shrinking and we got to take care of the ones that we got.

Yeah, well, yeah.

All right.

So how about this? And see if you think this matters in where some of these ducks pushed to and how far they went or didn't go. You know, the uptick in the mallard breeding population count was very far north. You know, the, you know, Prairie Canada was pretty much across the board. It was down everywhere they counted. But this uptick that we got was well to the north of where these counts usually have the best numbers, best number of potholes, all that. And it's pretty much known that the farther north they go, the less productive they're able to be. The habitat is not good. You get into very heavy predator areas, conditions aren't as good. But that's where they had to go to find water. Do you think as far north as they had to go, some of those ducks had to go, that's going to lessen the amount of what they want to go south. They're only going to go so far. Like some people don't want to take vacations to Europe because they don't want to go that far. They're just like, well, I mean, going to New York City is far enough for me. Do you think that relates to what we're seeing this year with these ducks that have hung up so far north? Because everybody wants to point all these fingers at Missouri and get in it because there's been the stuff put out there. And yeah, there's big rafts of ducks on those rivers with floating chunks of ice on it. But there's still a lot. I've talked to people in the last week in Montana, South Dakota. They still got a lot of ducks hanging around. So is any of that a byproduct of how far north some of these ducks had to go? And they're only going to go so far south before they just say, I'm not interested in going any farther.

Man, so I'm looking at this incubation attempt map that Pascual Palombo put together, my grad student, and all of our birds that we have detected a nesting attempt were inside of that prairie pothole region. So that's, you know, eastern Alberta westerns is always across Saskatchewan into sort of southern Manitoba and then south through Dakotas, of course, and then into a bit of Iowa. So that traditional sort of outline of the prairie pothole region. All of our birds are inside of that dot or shapefile except one. We did have one that was deployed in Arkansas that's clean up in northern Alberta up into what we would consider the boreal, our parklands, even further up into the parklands there. But so most of our birds did nest attempt inside of the prairies, and a good bit of those birds are still within those northern states now. Try to how to answer this question. You know, I used to think, you know, migrating from Prairie Canada to Arkansas was a long distance. It's really, for a bird, for a migratory waterfowl, I just think they think the landscape of us, like me driving to Little Rock, right, is like an hour and a half. That's like, God, it's like kind of annoying a little bit, but it's really not that big of a deal. Maybe that's how ducks are. And, you know, I got a perspective a few days ago. I was talking to a guy that's involved in some tracking of blue marlin in the Gulf of Mexico. And he's showing me, once they get these devices back, they pop off the fish after so long, and they float to the top, they go get this tracking device, they download the data. This, you think of the Gulf of Mexico as this enormous, huge bay. This blue marlin used the entire Gulf of Mexico over a very short amount of time. You could not believe how much travel he's doing. It's just like a daily occurrence that he's using the entire bay. And then, and I'm taking that in this perspective of the duck, and I'm like, how big is the landscape to a mallard? You know, how big is the, like, is it not that big of a deal to fly all the way to Arkansas? So why would you not fly all the way to Arkansas? But now we are seeing these shorter migrations, and why is it the case? Why are they fighting seven-degree temperature up there right now? It makes zero sense to me. And so, you know, the minute somebody, a scientist thinks he knows something, he doesn't know three other, like he just, he doesn't know. I don't, I don't, I don't know, I don't know why, what's driving these birds to just have these shorter migration events. So I get this genetic data back. On a Sunday afternoon, Phil's at a conference, Phil's, you know, doing all the genetic stuff, Levetsky out of Texas, El Paso, he sends me his genetic data yesterday. All these birds that we still have up north, most of them were marked in Missouri. There's a couple Arkansas marked birds still up there. And I'm just like sitting in a recliner chair on a Sunday afternoon, just kind of thumbing through the data quick, not really digging in too deep, half asleep after a hunt. And I look at this and all these birds have slight genetics of, you know, 15, 10 to 15, 20 percent game form genetics in them. And these are a lot of the birds that aren't migrating. A bunch of the birds that were marked in Arkansas, for the most part, are south of the, at least, central Missouri and south, whereas we got birds from marked in Missouri that are still in the Dakotas, on the river, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in urban areas. So I just, man, I just really, I keep getting pushed into this game form genetics that continuously, potentially, is increasing its prevalence. We don't know if it is, you know, but if it is, and the birds are getting bigger bodied, and shorter wings, like, they're just, they don't need to migrate as far. And so I just, I'm, I'm, I'm hung on this genetic, game form genetic thing right now. And I, and I truly believe with the longer, you know, the changes in the weather patterns and that kind of thing, I truly believe that the game form genetics is a big influence on the lack of migration that we're seeing south. Because my band data analysis a few years ago, I hadn't published, showed a northern shift in their distribution of mallards. And some work that came out of University of Missouri that was published two years ago, showed the same exact trends that we're seeing the shift in, or as north, just, you know, averages aren't good numbers to look at a lot of times. But there's a statistically supported shift north in the distribution of mallards and even some other species that they detected out of Missouri. But I'm telling you, I'm concerned about the game firm genetic influence on the distribution and the migration moving forward.

We know so little about it. We're just starting to figure out that those genes exist. Is there any information or any understanding of what it's going to look like or what can be done about it? Or even what the impact could be?

Man, I'm so new in this as well. I tell you, your viewers that listen to this can get on. And there's a few YouTube videos, seminars, that Phil Levetsky from University of Tennessee, El Paso has done that's recorded and is on YouTube. And you can look at the genetic, a lot of the evolutionary history that he presents in there. Phil has genetic samples of mallard-like ducks all over the world. And they're linking and the genetics, the game farm genetics that he's finding here is matching up and linking to European birds. And so it's that same European-influenced species that bird was brought over here. And so, I've heard some chatter and probably, you know, some of this, you know, Phil is the expert on this. And I do, I know he would be happy to chat with y'all. If you hadn't, I hadn't heard him on here, I may have listened to it. I think I'll listen to everyone in your podcast, except the ones that I did, because I hate listening to myself talk. But I do encourage you to reach out to Phil. I think he'd be happy to chat with you. And he would fill your ear. And I don't want to give any misinformation. But from what I gather, if they can reduce releasing of this sort of thing, from what I gather, that the true mallard, the wild mallard genetics will persist. And they will naturally selection will take care of, take care of itself in this case. But...

Well, so I've got a little bit of another question. This is something we talk about here on the show, or I talk about. My father and grandfather really, really believed in this. They called it their midpoint theory. And they talked about how in the midpoint between the equinox and the solstice was kind of the peak of the migration here, at least on our farm. And it seems to hold true year in and year out. The species composition will change, but the overall number will never really surpass what we have at that midpoint. So I wanted to ask you, your thoughts, having watched these birds and these transmitters, as it relates to the solstice, because I'm a pretty big believer, you know, you hear all these reports of people starting to see pen tails around Christmas, okay, well, that's after the solstice days are getting longer, spring migration is being initiated, these birds are headed back north. Do you think the timing of these fronts, you know, we had a good front last year, a little bit later, we had this front right now. Would these be more impactful before the solstice? Is this kind of a, once we get past the solstice, they're not going to move, they're going to hunker down and ride it out?

I think that's completely accurate. I agree with that 100%. You know, when you think in terms of energetics, like as those daylings get longer, birds need to conserve energy, they're thinking about breeding season, you know, the big freeze that we had, whatever, two or three years ago in February, you know, a lot of our birds just hunkered down, like I said earlier, some of them, we found teal frozen in the ice, it didn't want to migrate in the south. But if that freeze would have happened in December, would they have been more likely to move on to different areas as opposed to it happening in February when they're trying to get north, you know? And so I think there's a lot of truth in that. And I do believe that day length is a huge driver of this. And in terms of ducks, I've studied sort of energetics, right? For a while, looking at body condition, lipid store, you know, fat stores, protein builds, and that sort of thing in these ducks. And so I truly believe you're spot on there with your assessment.

Well, I mean, it makes total sense. I mean, I think, you know, a little alarms go off in their head that, you know, they know to start pairing. I mean, we saw all ducks worked this past week and were paired ducks. But now there might have been four or six of them, but it was Drake hen, Drake hen, Drake hen. Yeah. And this year, you know, anecdotal evidence to this point, I haven't seen the huge ratio differences between Drake's and hen's. Maybe that has something to do with the number of ducks that are around. But in years past, I've really, really noticed it. And it hasn't seemed to be as prevalent. But all these kind of little, these little alarms go off. And one of them has to be these days are getting longer. Why would we want to get any farther away from where we're going to breed than we already are? And that has to be a significant factor as to why the timing of last year's front, which produced no ducks, at least pushing south. We've mentioned it before. The hunting picked up because the birds got active. Cold weather makes them have to eat more than once a day and pushes them to maybe not move so nocturnally and things like that. So hunting picked up, but there wasn't any new birds. Terrible, lowest of all time since 2009, aerial survey count by the Game of Fish. Well, we're probably going to, they're flying. In fact, I reached out to Brett Leach this morning just to get an anecdotal, I mean, what did you see? Because they flew last week and I haven't heard back yet, but I'm not expecting him to say, oh yeah, all of a sudden there was a bunch of ducks. Because you talk to hunters and people that are holding a lot of ducks, usually hold a lot of ducks, all those things, some of the places they should have shown up, those ducks should have been in those Cache River bottoms if they were around, or if they moved into the state and they're not there. They're just not, and not like they should be. So it makes total sense. The timing of when these fronts happen are huge. Yeah, because a ton of ducks died that February. Yeah, they got so brutal, really tough on them.

Yeah.

But they were not moving.

Yeah. Yeah, we, I had that February, I had more five, six, seven-year-old bands from our winter band program Harvested than I've ever seen. Like, they were falling left and right for that week. I had so many band returns, we were just smashing old birds. During that freeze, and that's the hard part about those freezes. I mean, yeah, hunting could be good, and guys are going to get on them and all that kind of thing. But boy, is it hard on the population, especially because there was no juveniles that year either. Like, we had a huge down reproduction year that year, and then we had that hard freeze, and adults just, they just took it under the chin. And that was, that was, we had a high harvest rate that year of our bands, higher than any, any other year I've seen.

Are you seeing, maybe we can talk about this real quick, but it made me think of this, these older birds, are you seeing, or how big an impact, I guess, is, you know, when we do shoot these hens that have these, these phylopatry bonds to, to Arkansas, and we start thinning that population, I mean, is that a, is that a bigger, bigger risk as we think it is, or is it, you know, not so much in these down population years, where their broods aren't as big, and?

Oh, I don't know. How do I answer that with data? Yeah, I'm not sure I have, as a scientist, I have sort of data to support my claim. But, you know, as the everyday, as the everyday hunter is concerned about all the things that hunters are concerned about, it makes sense to me that, you know, the older ones are coming back because they got their tune, they're homed in, and those older ones aren't bringing the young ones back the next year. Like, when, you know, how are they going to find it if they, you know, but again, it goes back to how big is the landscape. And maybe it's easy for birds to get back here. I don't know. I'm rambling on on that question, but I don't know. I don't know if I have, I'm not sure how to answer that, because, you know, from our standpoint, with data to sort of support it.

Yeah, I know just looking at, look with us in the white fronts and the stuff that Paul sends us, and you look at the way these birds return, when they return, and how dependable they are, and the mallards are very similar, there's clear bonds that file a patch with you there. Like, that's well established. And particularly, again, on white fronts, when you're talking about family groups, you know, so you've got a family group now bringing their clutch with them, you harvest an adult bird, she can't bring her clutch back the following year. So, I mean, I get it. I don't have any data to back that up other than just kind of common sense opinion. I don't know.

Well, we're also, it's just two years in a row that the quote unquote Halloween Mallards were late. So, I mean, some of that makes you wonder a little bit, too. I mean, what's changing there? Because they really haven't been here in October, like a typical number we would see. And it would be two, three. And the snows have been the same way. And, you know, snows and the Mallards kind of seem to kind of line up together as when they show up here. And this is two years in a row. They've been late. Yeah.

Well, what else has coincided with that time frame in Arkansas the last two years? More than the last two, but. Yeah. The early spec season. I mean, I talked about this with a biologist this morning, actually, that, you know, that early depression. There's an increase in birds in Mississippi this year, right? So the Mississippi Delta has an uptick in birds. All right. Why? They didn't have more rainfall in the fall than we did. So there's not a habitat difference. The only difference that I can come across is the early pressure. You apply, you go to these oasis in the desert and you apply this hunting pressure, the birds aren't going to tolerate it. They pick up and move. So I believe that uptick that you're seeing is birds that were pushed out of Arkansas over to the Mississippi Delta where they weren't getting shot.

Yeah. They're not even getting shot. They're not even getting shot.

It's in the vicinity of...

In the noise, the cone of shotgun is going off. And buggies and just humans. Got to be a factor.

It has to.

All right, Doug.

Yeah.

Go ahead.

Take it, Brent. No, I was about to steal your question. Go, Brent.

Okay. All right. Well, yeah. And this is kind of a, this, you know, maybe make you think a little bit, but maybe not. Maybe you have a stance on this. I'm just not aware of it. But, you know, yesterday was kind of the last Sunday before the middle of January, which back in the day, that's when the season ended, you know, before the whole Trent Lott hunters were whining and complaining that they needed to hunt until the end of January and so on and so forth. From your chair, should our duck season have ended yesterday?

You're going to get me killed. Man, I don't want to see our opportunity go away, but I do think that there's a lot of validity in the pairs that we watched yesterday. I mean, I think we let four hens out of the hole yesterday. And so there was just three of us hunting, but those four hens are not paired anymore. Shooting was pretty good. And so, I mean, we know we got to think about the biology of these species. I don't want to lose days and all that, but I do think I get bored in early December when there's 10 days that I can't hunt. I'm like, I'm not going to hunt now and not later. I mean, I understand everybody's got their own opinion. In the North, people do good in the early year. In the South, everybody's got their opinion on this deal. But, boy, I think we could be just a little bit, maybe just a little bit different on our splits and stuff and all that. And I'm not here to tell the game of fish. I mean, I know a lot of the commissioners and I know the waterfowl biologists, of course, and all that, and they're doing the best they can to keep all their constituents to try to, you know, they should be like elected officials, like, hey, we're from this region, this is what we want, this is the policies you need to push for us type thing. But the problem is, I don't think across the state we could come to agreements on those sorts of things, so.

It's gotta be.

But man, it is hard. I mean, it's just, it's hard on them this time of year, for sure, and we hope that, you know, these hens have the capability of pairing again. I wish we had a way to study that, right? Like, I wish I could have caught that hen yesterday that we shot the Drake Hunter, and, you know, and had a chance to track her and see if she ultimately, you know, pairs up and she ends up on a breeding ground on a nest or not. I mean, it'd be nice to figure out how to, you know, have the data to support that, but right now I'm not sure how.

Yeah, I mean, it's, I think ultimately you have to make the decision on this topic from the biology standpoint, you know, what's, what is good for the resource, because the differing opinions are never going to agree. Somebody wants opportunity, somebody wants opportunity late, somebody wants the opportunity early, you're never going to make everybody happy. So I think as long as we're making decisions simply for the resource, everybody else can pound sand. I mean, it needs to be about what's good for the ducks.

Yeah.

And that would be great, something to study to see what kind of impact that has. So would love to have more information on that.

But yeah, and I, you know, like you guys, I have a lot of conversations about this, people that have more, to have a business, you know, their business is the con. And it's like, they're trying to justify why they think that we shouldn't go to one hand to me. But I can see right through their justification. I can see, you know, I can see the business side of the man behind the scene, you know, arguing that he doesn't want his client, cause his client that he brings in, you know, can't pick out hens and dregs very good, you know, as much as I respect. And the people I talk to, I want to tell them, then you need better guides.

Exactly. I can tell you that. Look, when we limit out on pen tails, we stopped shooting pen tails, right? I mean, plain and simple. It happened the other day. We killed all the pen tails we could and we stopped shooting them. Same thing for hen mailers. That's your job as outfitter or guide, is to identify and help control that situation. So that's a poor excuse.

Did you see the, let's serve discussion about the pen tail limit? Maybe we should put one hand on that. Why does it matter for pen tails? Now it's not a nailer.

Yeah. There's so many things that come across that deal that are confusing and contradictory to me. That it just, I'm like, what are we doing? But that's another story for another day.

That's why I think the average hunter...

I'm sorry to open that can of worms.

Well, no, the average hunter, he hears one or two things and it's trust the science and they accept it like it's hard data and hard facts. But the truth of it is it's really opinion based. I mean, yeah, we've got data, but we have to interpret that data. I mean, there's nothing that says, stop hunting here, only kill this, like it's interpretation of data. And when you see that list, some of those comments and opinions that come out there, there's a lot of different opinions. And hopefully through this show, people will hear different opinions and maybe get some different insider form their own opinions on some things. But, Brent, before you wrap us up, I do want to say one thing. I know our show covers more than just Arkansas, but to all of our followers and listeners out there, you guys say a prayer, please, for Ben Wharton, a young man who was hurt in a boating accident here in Arkansas recently, I don't want to get in the details of it, but a pretty traumatic brain injury is doing better and on the men, but could use all the help he could get.

Yeah, well said. Well, I guess we need to do another hat giveaway, correct?

Oh, I almost forgot. Yeah, hat giveaway. We're going to spring this one on Doug real quick.

Yeah, that's right. All right, Doug, so we, you know, last week's episode, we had some hats we gave away with the Standard Sportsman logo on a real leather patch. Really nice hats. I got a lot of response from that. We've got some more to give away. So from you, we need a keyword that the listeners will take your keyword and tag three friends and they'll be in the running for one of the Standard Sportsman hats. So give us a keyword. Last week it was cold front, so don't use that.

All right, Hanmallard. I'm not very creative when it comes to those kind of things.

We weren't either. That's why we said cold front.

Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Topic du jour.

Yeah.

All right. Well, I guess we'll see how these last few weeks end up. You know, we got another super duper cold blast, coldest of the winter, I guess, coming a week from today. Some are timing around there. I don't know that it's good. We're not counting on a push of Ducks. Anybody that rallies around that's probably just super hopeful or dreaming.

They had been under a rock this last week if they're still holding out hope.

Or two seasons in a row. This wasn't quite the anomaly that many people want to believe. It didn't happen last year either. But we'll see. It freezes and thaws. It can have an uptick in the hunting. So maybe we'll see what that does for us with the birds we already have. Because I don't expect any more to get here. But once again, thanks for coming on the show. We obviously enjoy visiting with you. I think our listeners do, too. Kind of hearing your perspectives and takes. Somebody that's more in the know than all of us listening and hosting the show. So much appreciated, Doug.

Yeah, guys. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah. All right. Well, good luck the rest of the way. We'll see what all this weather does. Appreciate you listening to all your friends. Get them to tune in, start sharing some of the knowledge that comes through on the show, whether you like it, agree with it, dislike it, whatever it is. We still appreciate you listening. So we'll check in next time. Thanks.

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Duck Hunting Podcast, Arkansas duck hunting, waterfowl conservation podcast, outdoors podcasts