Bradley Cohen, Cohen Wildlife Lab (FULL VERSION)

There were Technical Difficulties with the early AM upload, so please ignore that version and listen to this one for the full interview.

Bradley Cohen, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology and heads the Cohen Wildlife Lab at Tennessee Tech University. Cohen and his team of students have and continue to shed a lot of light on modern-day mallard behaviors. Cohen talks through landscape conditions and habitat management practices impacting what hunters see afield, including telemetry data, migration timing, refuges, and responses to human interference.

Visit the Cohen Wildlife Lab online at https://www.cohenwildlifelab.com or follow their work on Instagram @cohenwildlab.

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Transcript

Since 1937, Ducks Unlimited has been dedicated to conserving waterfowl habitat, from breeding grounds and migration routes to southern wintering areas. Thanks to the efforts of our volunteers and supporters, we've conserved millions of acres. However, our work is far from over. You can be part of our next million-acre year. Visit ducks.org/volunteer to join the team making a real difference. Your opportunity to help plan the biggest conservation party in town is waiting for you. That's what we do at DU. Ducks Unlimited, conservation for our 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, it's Brent and Cason back with another edition of The Standard Sportsman podcast. Kind of excited about our topic today. I know it's a hot one, not just here with us in Arkansas, but it's even our surrounding states, any of the waterfowl heavy states. We're talking a lot about the word pressure and we've got a guy coming on the show today that knows a lot about it. I can't wait to get into the conversation, so I'm going to kick it to Cason and let him introduce our guest.

Yeah, it's always cool when we can get guys like this on, that are really involved and hands-on in winter banding efforts and telemetry data that's coming out of the wintering ground. Yeah, it's always cool. We've had someone in the past. I'm excited. We've been trying for a while to get him on today. Joining us today is Bradley Cohen from the Tennessee Tech University, Cohen Wildlife Lab. Brad, welcome to the show.

I appreciate you guys having me here today.

Yeah, man. We're excited to, as we said before we started, I've seen a lot of your posts and followed along with a lot of data over the years. So I'm really excited to get to ask some questions now. But I guess I'll start with, tell us a little bit about your background. We were talking before the show about where you hunt. So how did you get started in hunting and what led you down the career path of academia?

So I grew up with a dad. My dad liked to go fish and hunt. He was much more a fisherman than a hunter. But I grew up deer hunting with him and deer hunting was everything to me. I went to the college that was right near my deer hunting spot in New York, six hours away, but that was the college I was going to no matter what. Then I put in the Google Scholar, Whitetail Deer, and found the first professor whose name came up was Carl Miller. I went and got a master's degree with him at the University of Georgia and I had no clue what a wildlife biologist was. Then when I realized what a master's degree in wildlife biology got you, it meant I'd be working at a check station during the opening of hunting season. So I was like, no, that ain't going to happen. So I went and got my PhD. I have worked on a variety of different animals and different topics. Right now, my lab works mainly on waterfowl and other game birds, like turkeys and even rough grouse and quail a little bit. But we also do some work with state agencies like TWRA, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, helping them with their deer management season structure. So we had a hodgepodge of things, but basically, you know, I take my passion for hunting and the outdoors and kind of just funnel it into the best research we can do to inform wildlife policy.

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That's a great question. I had been working with Mike Chamberlain over at the University of Georgia, doing a lot of Turkey telemetry work. I was a research scientist at the University of Georgia. So what that meant was I was on with HALT soft money. So I basically had to do research and as part of that research, get grant money to fund my own salary. Well, about seven years ago, I had a daughter and I was between the stress of a new kid and stress of trying to find my own salary. I was like, I'm not doing this anymore. And so I knew the folks over in Tennessee and I got a job at Tennessee Tech. And I made quick friends with some of the biologists there. In particular, I made a really good friend with Jamie Feddersen. Jamie Feddersen is the migratory waterfowl ecologist or migratory bird ecologist, I should say, for Tennessee. And him and I were just sitting around eating lunch one day and I was, you know, just trying to build a lab at that point. You know, you're just trying to be like, you know, you go to state agency and say, what questions do you have and how can I help? And he's like, you know, we really want to understand the role of refuges in Tennessee. You know, Tennessee is kind of unique in that they have a bunch of federal refuges, but they also have a lot of state owned refuges. And these are areas where they're prohibiting people from access during the winter. He's like, I really want to know, you know, can we allow access? Should we not allow access? What does that look like? And it kind of spiraled from there. You know, it went from being a small project where we're just going to put a little bit of a couple GPS backpacks out and on Mallards and see where it went to TWRA funding for past six years, a study where we've done a bunch of different things, but, you know, we put out about 200 to 250 transmitters a year as part of that effort. So we have a lot of data. We've done a lot of unique things. They've given us access to their refuges so that we could disturb them and see what happens to the birds. We've surveyed a bunch of different places. We've built a little community over there. It's been a really great experience.

Yeah, it's pretty fascinating stuff. Because I'm like Cason, I've kept up with it, you know, through the social media channels and I saw the Shin film that they did under pressure, which was a good piece. And I kind of want to dovetail off of that, at least to get us kind of talking about this telemetry piece and this pressure piece, you know, what y'all have been seeing. You know, we've had Dr. Osborne, Doug Osborne, has Osborne lab here at University of Arkansas, Monticello does similar. I would put, to my knowledge, between the two of you, you're kind of at the forefront of this winter banding effort and then tracking these mallards as they move about up and down the flyway, even though the research is here in Tennessee and in Arkansas, you're seeing Ducks as they return home in the spring, had they come back in the fall, as long as they survive and all that. So it's kind of fascinating, you know, but we see it in these one or two Duck movements, or maybe it's a dozen. You know, we don't have enough transmitters out there to see just huge movements, but you've got to assume that some Ducks are moving with the ones that have transmitters. But to start, what kind of survival rate are you seeing with some of these backpacked Ducks? And are y'all doing something similar to Osborne and trying some different methods to put these on the mallards and track them?

Yeah, that's a great question. So Doug and I work really closely on a bunch of things. We're close collaborators. And so, you know, when you're putting out these GPS transmitters, what you're trying to do is minimize any type of effect you can have by capturing the animal, by putting something on them, so you get realistic data both in movements and survival. We have an actual pen, an aviary here at Tennessee Tech. So whereas Doug is doing some studies that basically, they affix different styles of transmitters, different ways to the birds and then kind of compare across groups out in the wild. We take ducks into the aviary and have tried, oh, you name it, every different type of transmitter and attachment method we could come up with to, and then we study them and their behavior and their weight gain and all that in the aviary. And really, the other thing we do is, you're tying something onto a duck, and it's kind of weird to explain, but imagine I'm tying your shoestrings. You know, every time if I just am tying your shoestrings onto you, the tension matters probably for how comfortable that shoe is for you. Well, unless I do that like a couple hundred times or a couple thousand times, every time I tie that tension, it's going to be a little different, a little inconsistent, and that's the worst thing that we could do because that inconsistency affects how we can compare across data. So what we've done is using that aviary, we basically have one person who's put out all of our transmitters and he's practiced on thousands of aviary ducks too, or well, I should say several aviary ducks, thousands of times. So yeah, we try and get as consistent as we can to make sure that our data is really as solid as it can be, and we feel pretty comfortable that at least in our wintering data that it's pretty good. We just published a paper that showed that we banded a bunch of ducks, didn't put GPS transmitters on them, and then we put a bunch of GPS transmitters on other ducks, and then compared harvest distributions, like where those ducks were, compared to where just the banded ducks were shot. And yeah, long story short, to no surprise, the ducks that were banded and the ducks that had GPS transmitters moved about the same.

That's really fascinating to me, and I think it sheds some light on just the depth that you guys are going to get as pure a data as you can, because I'm sure a lot of our listeners would never think about going to those links to, like I said, to get a really pure sample. So that's always cool to hear people talk about that.

And well, it's also, you know, for better or for worse, you know, within the scientific community, you know, you're also being kind of, people are keeping a close eye on what you're doing to make sure that what you're doing and how you're collecting the data is truly representative of the population. So, you know, I stay up at night making sure that, like, not only am I trying to do as little harm to the ducks as possible, but I'm trying to collect this data and as effective of a manner as possible so that my own peers, when the time comes for peer review and everything like that, truly believe that what we're measuring is representative of the real world. Does that make sense? So, like, it keeps us up at night. And plus, like, I can't even explain, you know, the nuances and goofiness that you have to become an expert in. Like, I've become an expert in solar panels because now I need to know, like, okay, some solar panels are really good at collecting blue light. And that's really prevalent when it's cloudy. And in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley in the winter, there's a lot of cloudy days. So I need the one. You see where I'm going with this? Like, I could talk to you about trickle charges and all this other stuff for hours on end. And that's the level, I guess, of passion you have to have to make these projects successful.

For sure. So I kind of, my first entrance into any kind of research projects was helping out with Paul Link. And Paul is similar in terms of even, you know, I think had access to an aviator when he was experimenting and just, you know, no stone left unturned trying to perfect that craft. So it's really, it's really cool. And I know talking to him, I'm curious what your thoughts are experienced, but has there been a struggle or maybe even kind of an uphill battle to get your peers to accept some of this telemetry data?

That's a really good question. I think that there are some people that might, the short answer is no. I think most people accept the data, especially because no matter, the trends that we're measuring seem to be consistent across study areas. Some of the things that we're finding with like very localized movements, not very large migratory movements after a certain period, sometime in November, December, these things are being measured by multiple people and being seen. There's always gonna be within any type of scientific community, those that are more skeptical of it. And I think that's a good thing. You want those skeptics out there a little bit, but we've had no problem obviously getting our stuff published. Everybody's been really positive of our work. And having just kind of entered this field, basically let's say a little less than 10 years ago, it feels that they've been relatively welcoming to these advances. So I feel like it's been a really good experience all around.

Well, that's good to hear because you hear some things in the waterfowl science community that almost seem to be very siloed efforts. This guy's working on this and he holds it very close to the vest. And I don't know if it's an effort to be the guy that makes the next big discovery or something to hang their hat on, but it's good to hear. And I think we knew this already, that you and Dr. Osborne were heavy collaborators. Because it's always, there was, I know there was some early questioning or some raised eyebrows over the winter banning efforts. Because we'd always done so much traditional on the Prairie Pothole region, the spring and the summertime banning. Local banning in the southern, in the flyway was very rare. Even though the very first Mallard banded Drake I killed, I was 13 or 14 and it was banded in Ethel, Arkansas, which is in the edge of the White River National Refuge. But that was way back in the early 80s. And now you're seeing it more prevalent. I think the last four I've killed were all banded in Arkansas, all wintertime banning. So, you're seeing a lot more of that because you're seeing such a huge decline in the spring and summertime banning due to, I guess, funding. They built these big banning research stations and the ducks aren't really around those places anymore. Maybe speak to a minute about why the winter banning nowadays is so immensely important. And the way it factors in to harvest data and everything goes into that.

Okay. So, there's a couple of things here. The first thing is that if there's one point to get across to all your listeners is, they should be very concerned about the, even before the recent cuts to federal funding, the levels of federal funding for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, they are severely underfunded, understaffed, underappreciated. And so, the, you know, decline in banding and, you know, the quality of the data, theoretically, that we're getting in is a direct result of that, you know, US Fish and Wildlife Service hasn't seen a meaningful raise in its budget in many, many, many years, despite large changes in inflation. So, yeah, having individual states being able to possibly chip in and or the southern part of the flyway contributes some kind of meaningful data like banding is going to, it could be super important in the future. Right now, none of that southern banding data is used in any of the decision-making frameworks, but there is a project going on here shortly, I believe, to look at what we call these two-season models. In other words, you know, birds that are banded in the winter and birds that are banded in the summer, and eventually get to some kind of, now, this is a long time in the future, I mean, I'll be honest with you, my kid might have a kid at this point, but to use banding data from the winter to inform our federal frameworks. You always got to remember that in the end, that the federal government is slow to move on everything, and if it's not broke, they don't want to fix it. Maybe don't want to isn't the right word, but they don't have the time or money to fix it. And so, I'll be honest, this decrease in federal funding that's coming through right now might be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and we might have to more rapidly move on these two season models. We don't know.

Well, that's interesting. Yeah, I wasn't aware that the wintertime banding wasn't put into the pool and collected in that way. So that's eye-opening to me. But I guess in some ways, it makes some sense.

Well, they don't know. The whole thing is, okay, this is to get, I'm going to get into mechanics here a little bit, but just stay with me. You have biologists and statisticians at the federal. Remember, it's all federal. So at the federal level, they're putting together these quantitative equations that are trying to model these systems in like guesstimate harvest rates, quantify all of these different things. It's hard enough to study a wild population that lives like in a small part of your state, let alone like trying to quantify these phenomena that are happening at a continental level, right? So let's give a little bit of grace to them. But like, you know, it's hard enough to like make a model that you think is pretty decent to just be like, okay, here's what we think harvest rates are based on just, you know, fall or summer banding data. And that's easy because we know, hey, we banded them before the hunting season. And this was, you know, this was their exposure and they got killed. It's really hard to be like, okay, well, we actually are going to band them before they even get to the breeding season. And the breeding season is when a lot of hens die. And like, how are we going to... You see where I'm going with that? It's like a lot of different levels. And so it takes time that people just don't have. It takes staffing that the US. Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't have to get there. Our hope is like, I hope eventually there's a big outcry in like the under staffing that exists so that we can get these types of models to be made so that, you know, if you wanted to change in something that is actually meaningful to our waterfowl management, it just takes a larger investment from the federal government.

No, definitely. It definitely does. And you kind of keep up with all these things going on with federal spending and the cutbacks, everything else. And, I mean, they start talking about pilot biologists for waterfowl cuts. They start talking about all these other things that are related to how we come up with how to manage waterfowl. And it is, it's scary to think that they could even do, there could be less funding for the US. Fish and Wildlife Service. And yeah, it's going to make the research you guys like you and Dr. Osborne are doing and at some point that's going to be extremely valuable. And I don't know how we would get away from not using it at some level and restructuring how some of these calculations work and everything else.

So it'll take us, I mean, I'll be honest with you, it might take us going into a conservative season for a couple of seasons for people to, for the, I think we've become too comfortable on this, in the Mississippi Flyway at least, with the, you know, six, 60 days, you know, six bag limit. You know, I think it's, it was supposed to be dynamic. And so it might take us, you know, hitting the bottom of the barrel before everybody realizes that, like, we might want to really invest in the federal government and conservation programs and things that actually change duck populations.

Oh, I agree with that completely. But one, I hope we don't go to that point. Obviously, you know, being a hunter, you don't want to revert back to like it was when I was in college when we were hunting 30 days and all that, because the season sure went by fast. We've debated that ad nauseam on this show and made it very clear. You know, we have concerns, but we don't want to go to 30 days. So what can we do to avoid that? But I think there's a lot of things, waterfowl management wise, that are kind of hanging on. And well, we can maybe do this when we get back to a restrictive season. Because it's really hard to hit the 45 day season, as far as how the matrix works. And so it's either, it's kind of all or none. And it seems like there's enough things floating out there that, that's something we, maybe we should wait off, wait and hold back on that until we go to a 30 day season, then we'll just rip the bandaid off. And I mean, I don't know. I don't know if, when, when and if we get that, even with the, the matrix changing and the way HM now works. You know, who knows if we can get to a 30 day season. It's, it's, it's all changed. And we only have, I guess, two seasons worth of the new model to do all that. So yeah, I hope, I hope it doesn't take too long to figure out, you know, really where we are. Because I don't want to dig a bigger hole than maybe we already have while we're waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. But you've heard us talk about Tom Beckbe and their classic hunting gear in fall and winter. Now that warmer weather is here, Tom Beckbe is rolling out a full line of lightweight shirts, shorts and travel gear. Check them out at tombeckbe.com or any of their four stores in Birmingham, Oxford, Mississippi, Middleburg, Virginia and Tuscaloosa. For over 30 years, Lile Real Estate has been connecting land investors and outdoorsmen with sellers. Whether looking to invest in an income producing farm or recreational land, the Lile Real Estate team has the connections and the expertise to help. They work with tracks of all sizes and specialize in agricultural, timberland and recreational properties. New listings are hitting the market almost weekly, so head on over to their website to learn more. www.lilerealestate.com. But all right, let's kind of shift gears, and it still piggybacks off of this conversation. Let's talk about pressure and some of the work that you've done there, which relates to your telemetry work and what you're seeing ducks do. I think the analysis that you did of purposefully bumping ducks and seeing how they react to that is pretty fascinating. And I don't think a lot of hunters connect those dots as to why they may or may not see ducks on a given day, especially say it's a spot they got. They saw a lot of ducks in, ducks are in there. We go in there to hunt and they don't come back. What happened? So maybe start talking through some of that and we'll see where it goes.

So, you know, a lot of this research started with the idea that like TWRA is getting the question of like, why won't you let us hunt the refuges? All our ducks are on the refuges. You won't let us hunt these refuges. You know, what can we do? And so we go out there and we put all these GPS transmitters out. And so we have the duck movement. At the same time, we put out these autonomous recording units. They're called ARUs and basically they just record ambient sound. And what we use those for is we put them up all across our study area in western Tennessee, basically from Realfoot Lake all the way to Chickasaw National Wildlife Refuge. So a pretty good study area. And we have these things just listening. And what we use them for is as they're recording, we just are going to quantify the number of shotgun blasts that occur. And because people in Tennessee mainly hunt out of blinds, it's easy to basically pretty consistently get good estimates of like the spatial distribution of shotgun blasts. And we'll use that as a surrogate for hunter opportunity. At the same time, we're actually in planes and we're flying our whole entire study area and we're quantifying where water is on the landscape. And then we're also, I'm telling you what, you can see mojos flickering from up in an airplane, no problem. And so every time we go over a blind that has a mojo on, we keep that data so we can actually figure out across our entire study area, the space and time use of hunters. So when are they in the blind? And so we have all this data, and I'll hit it on high notes, and then I'll talk about the disturbance. But the first thing that kind of was crazy on the hunter part was our blinds were hunted about 80 to 85% of the time. And it didn't matter if it was a weekend or a weekday, it didn't matter if it was at the beginning of the season or the end of the season. Our-

Is this on public?

No, this is public and private. This is just everywhere.

Observation area, okay.

No, so on our open public land, it's the same. We have a couple places that are quota hunts. That's not this, like, you know, we have a couple, like you can wade into the pools, you know what I'm saying, and hunt there on a Monday or I should say a Wednesday, and then a Friday, Saturday, Sunday hunt. No, but everywhere else, about 80 to 85% of our blinds are occupied. So it's just intense and chronic pressure because our blind density was anywhere from one every 50 to one every 100 acres. So, like, there's hunters everywhere on our landscape, and they're always hunting, and they use mojos. I mean, that's just only people using mojos. Who knows if what of those 15% that weren't there, how many of them were not using mojos, and we just couldn't see them. The other thing was that, like, our mallards never really left Tennessee after we got... They never really do. Once they set up wintering spots in Tennessee, they like something about it, their home, and they spend the rest of the winter there. The kind of crazy thing, though, is that our ducks generally used only one refuge the entire wintering season. So, we ran, like, some kind of analyses, and basically, long story short, you know, about 70% of our ducks use one refuge the entire winter as their home base. And that refuge is home base because nowhere else is safe, right? So, the refuge is just stacked full of ducks because everywhere else is being hunted. You know, kind of makes sense, right? Okay. So, then we're like, all right, well, let's go in there, you know, that's why everyone's complaining that, you know, hey, just bump those ducks for us. Rally those ducks. Do something. Get those ducks up so we can shoot them. It was, you know, a terrible day hunting. And so, what we do is we go in there and we disturb these ducks, and we disturb them a bunch of different ways, everything from just walking around, kind of imitating birders, to rallying them as much as possible. Now, we couldn't actually shoot the refuges, and I'm glad we didn't in hindsight, but we did everything we could to get every single duck up and out of there. And what would happen is our GPS data shows, yeah, they would move more, they would vortex around, they'd fly a couple of miles around, but our GPS data shows they would eventually, whether it's an hour or a couple of hours later, land right back on the refuge, and then they wouldn't move for like several days. Basically, you know, kind of like, this is my safe spot and you scared the crap out of me. I'm not moving again until I kind of figure things out. But what's crazy is we saw this also on our hunter opportunity data. On days that we disturbed the refuge, hunter opportunity, in other words, the number of shotgun blasts that we heard. Now, let me just explain what a blast is. It's like, you know, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, that's one blast, right? That's just like one event. It decreased on days we disturbed anywhere from 30 to 50 percent. So when you mess with the ducks on the refuge, you mess with your hunting. So the only reason you have decent hunting is because you have a refuge. It's not the other way around. The refuge isn't taking from you. It's actually putting ducks on the landscape for you to harvest. Does that make sense?

Well, yeah. You're going to blow some people's minds.

So let's talk about this idea of disturbance. You know, it's important to understand then that like, you know, in the end of all things, actually the most impactful disturbance that we had was when people were walking around on the refuge. Ducks are scared, you know, crapless of people. They know you're going to shoot them. And so like, we shouldn't be surprised that when you find a bunch of ducks, they're there because it's safe. They're just loping and they won't be left alone. And then you bump them. They're not coming back. They're going back to the refuge to where they know it's safe. So we shouldn't be surprised when, you know, we bump a couple of hundred ducks out and then like, you know, two or three come back in. They're just there. You know, we can see it in our ARU data. We hear mud motors in the background, you know, revving up and going down the river. And right before I hear the, like mud motor, I hear the whistling wings of ducks flying away before people get there. Like, so our ducks are on a very strict routine. They fly out at about 15 minutes before sunrise, or sunset, I should say, 15 minutes before sunset to where they're going to eat. They stay there the whole night. And then they just wait for somebody to bump them. And they fly right back to the refuge and they get on these crazy patterns because it's the only thing that's safe. They, once they learn how to interact with their world and what's safe, they're never going to break that pattern. And that's why days that are like, when we get a lot of ice or cold spell, we shoot so many ducks. It's not because we get new migrators down. In fact, when we could talk about this more, our data suggests that more or less the migration is done by Christmas time. Instead, what happens is things lock up and the ducks that were already there get off their pattern. So we get people that shoot our ducks all the time in January or during cold spell, they go, we finally get that push we've been waiting for. Well, we know that that GPS duck that they shot has been there for two months and just finally got bumped off of its pattern. So does that give you a good kind of idea of some of the high level stuff?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've heard it referred to, especially the white fronts, as being boringly predictable. They find a pattern of survivability and they do not deviate from it until maybe a rain event or something gives them access to some different habitat.

It just makes so much sense. It only takes one mistake. You shouldn't be surprised that these ducks are incredibly boring. We put it, our presentation is ducks fly far, but sit still. It makes sense. If you were going to get shot almost everywhere you went, you probably wouldn't do anything that exciting. It's the only way you survive.

Yeah. It's amazing to me. We bump into people all the time that are taking pictures, whatever, driving on the highway, and they'll stop and get on their vehicle, and ducks fly off, and you pull up and talk to them, hey, if you'd stayed in your truck, you could have taken that picture from the seat of your truck. Why are they scared of me and not the truck? Because the truck doesn't shoot at them. Right.

Exactly.

And it's much, just on our own observation, much less disturbance to be in a vehicle than to be out on foot. And that's interesting that your data has really, it's not interesting, I guess I should have expected it, but maybe it's gratifying that your data backs that up.

Yeah, and I mean, I can't stress that enough, is that like, you know, what ducks really want is a place that they can't see people, can't feel people, don't know people exist. Like, you know, that's what the refuge serves, you know, and, you know, our ongoing research is trying to understand the role of like, you know, food versus safety and what matters most. But, you know, in the end of all things, the number one limiting factor on our landscape, at least, is safety. You know, they just don't have enough places to be safe at.

Yeah, so, all right, my ADD is kicking in. Brent, you may have to take the migration movements here in a minute, but I want to talk about that since you mentioned to not be seen and be safe. I know we want to follow up with someone you know that has done a lot of research on corn and how that impacts ducks, but I'm curious as to your thoughts in regards to standing corn. Do you think that ducks using standing corn is more about the food source or the vertical cover and sanctuary that they're finding in it?

So, we've done a lot of research with flooded corn, which is the predominant food source for a lot of our mallards. And, you know, looking at depletion and other things, you know, you got to understand something. You know, our ducks are so centrally tied to our refuges that about 85% of our ducks at any moment in time are within two and a half miles of a refuge. That doesn't matter if it's nighttime or daytime. And that's just because we have so much flooded corn on the system that, like, they never run out of food. At least our mallards don't. You know what I'm saying? So, there's always food to be had, and our ducks are using it most of the time. They're using corn that has seeds still available, right? So, the second that the fields are depleted, they switch to another field. So, that tells me they're using it for food. But that's not to underappreciate the idea that, like, I think three-dimensional structure is, like, super, super important for safety. And, you know, there's a lot cheaper ways to create that than using corn, but I think that's why they continue to use it when all the food, you know, eaten out of a general area, you'll still see ducks sitting in that corn because that safety and that windbreak is super important. But, you know, our ducks, there's so much corn here, let me put it this way, there's so much flooded corn on our landscape that ducks select flooded corn at equal intensity to our managed moist soil. In other words, even though managed moist soil has less energy, it's actually more rare on our landscape than flooded corn. And they would rather, they use that preferentially because it's so limiting, those vitamins and everything else, those macronutrients, those invertebrates. So I'm in a system where food definitely isn't limiting. In fact, just a variety of food is.

Wow, that's interesting. A lot different than over here. They've got a little more variability.

And I would think that, and I think it's, if you look at somewhere like Louisiana, and you talked about Paul Links, we work with Paul a lot too. And so we talked about, our ducks don't have to fly very far to find food. A real far flight foraging flight might be four or five miles. On a landscape like Louisiana, where there's cannons kicking up ducks, there's all this safety and food might be 15, 20 miles apart. I mean, I'm being serious. And it's definitely landscape specific, but the theoretical and ecological principles remain the same. You have a duck that is limited on where it can be, even not all waters created equal because there's every, it considers any type of disturbance to be somewhere that doesn't want to be. So you've got to find a place where it has to find a place, I should say, where it won't be bumped. And if that place is 15 miles or 20 miles away from where food is, well, now we've set up a really bad situation because eventually that is going to just be too taxing for them. And one day they're going to make the mistake of, you know, I'm going to go only 5 to 10 miles back from my food towards my refuge. I'm just going to, this will have to do. And wherever this will have to do, they better hope it's not where a hunter is. You see where I'm going with that?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we we've talked about a few times on this show. My older son shot a GPS Drake during the freeze this past season. And it was a Ryan Askren, Five Oaks, you know, deployed Duck. And it was a high-tier bird. So it had shown up at Arkansas in early November and did his thing and made it, you know, almost to, this was mid January. So made it that whole time without, you know, getting shot until the earth froze over and he got desperate. But it was interesting. Doug sent me the the KML file on that. And so you plug it into Google Earth and you can see all of his movements of where he checked in and it was note to no surprise at all. Much like your refuges system in Tennessee, obviously Arkansas, especially the area where where I hunt, is littered with refuges, private rest areas, plus by me to wildlife management area rest areas. And that, that duck spent all of its time on those places, even though he was a new, you know, he'd never been to Arkansas before. And he figured that out. And including hopping over by me to wildlife management area, never setting foot down inside the woods of that place. So I mean, it speaks volumes as to even a young, inexperienced bird figured out pretty quick, that's not some place I need to go. So it was pretty telling. Obviously that is one duck, but I've seen the same files, you know, groups of ducks that those same guys have put transmitters on and they have very similar behaviors. But you have clubs managing so intensely, managing their pressure so intensely now, because if you're not, your odds of success are going to be pretty slim. With today, with the modern Mallard and the modern amount of people that are in the woods, especially in Arkansas.

Yeah, our ducks take about three days or so to settle. So the first day after a migratory event, that's the day they're going to die, more or less. And then by day two, they're kind of getting the pattern, and by day three, they figured it out. And so that just tells you, you know, how much do we really have, you know, can we rely on migration to make it a good season? And like, you know, a lot of our ducks only make two to three migration events a year. And so, you know, if you do the math, there's only a couple of good days in a season that that really can occur. You know, probably back in the day, our good seasons were because the weather was a lot colder, and ducks were moving a lot more in response to that, and locking up stuff. And if we don't have that, we don't have a good season. If we don't have an early freeze to push ducks down, we don't have a good season. There's a lot of things that are working against us. But, you know, one thing we've been thinking about is, you talked about all these small private land rest areas. Well, you know, our ducks were only using one refuge predominantly, and so they began to, like, just learn their landscape so well. Like, okay, there's Jimmy's decoys, and there's John's decoys, and there's Timmy's decoys. And, you know, they never were going to get killed because they knew, you know, I've hunted right next to the refuge and watched them hit what I call the wall. You know, they're flying right out of the refuge, right to you. And then all of a sudden, like, I'm only, like, 80 yards off of the refuge, and they hit that wall of where they know their refuge ends, and they just fly straight up. You know what I'm saying? And so, we've actually been, our phase two of the project has been working with private land cooperators in Western Tennessee to kind of create these more smaller patches of rest areas to kind of move ducks up and down these river tributary systems, to basically make it so that they don't just use one refuge all the time, but maybe they use this rest area too, or another rest area, and basically redistribute ducks up and down, because right now we have such a small portion of our hunters that are seeing the majority of our ducks. Moving these, creating these private rest areas allows the ducks to be like kind of more distributed, and also by moving more, they're less familiar with their settings. They relocate and you get those two or three days again. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So we've seen a pretty good response. We're still analyzing the data, but the preliminary data is very promising that these small private land rest areas that are close together and connected really helped improve hunter opportunity.

Yeah, that makes total sense. I can say from sitting in my blind, I see it firsthand how that activity goes, and it depends on a lot of who your neighbors are. Because my particular neighbors, I can't outcompete them on food. I probably really even can't outcompete them on the ability for the ducks to spread out on our property. Our property is much smaller than two of the adjacent clubs, but both of them hold a lot of ducks. We get the ones that trickle off and manage our pressure accordingly. They manage their pressure super intensely. So it's a formula that works. You take our farm and you pick it up, you put it somewhere else away from those two places, it's probably not very good.

Yeah, a big part of the questions I'm interested in are like those really high-end duck clubs, and I'm talking the ones that are a big acreage, manage everything really well. What impact do they have for hunters across the area? It's kind of like the refuge system. You love them and you hate them all at the same time, right? They're holding all of our ducks, they're killing all of our ducks. They might be the only reason you have ducks. You know what I'm saying?

No doubt, no doubt. All right, well, let's circle back to something because we talked about the migration piece and that's something we've talked about on this show quite a bit. I don't know if you know this, Cason's grandfather is in the Arkansas Waterfowl Hall of Fame, done a lot for ducks in their part of the world, but he had a theory called the Midpoint Theory and what you got there is that, Cason, maybe explain it. I'm drawing a blank on the specifics. I don't want to say it wrong.

Yeah, it's all right. So it was basically the midpoint between the Equinox and the Solstice, which typically really kind of coincides with the first week of November or what most people I think are right here would call the Halloween push or Halloween ducks. But essentially, that was almost the peak of the migration for them in terms of what they consider to be the majority of the birds that were arriving. That's really what things ramped up. And I think as far as he was concerned, really was almost as good as it was going to get. You could tell what the year was going to be by what was here at the midpoint.

Yeah, and it wasn't necessarily... Your species composition may change, but the volume of ducks you had in the landscape at that time, that's a pretty good indicator. But we're also convinced that after the winter solstice, as you just mentioned, around Christmas is when you're seeing with what you're tracking, we don't really get a push after that. And we see activity usually due to a weather event. This is two years in a row. We've had a mid-January super hard freeze that the hunting escalated, at least here in Arkansas. I'm sure it did there too, because the ducks get more active, they get desperate, all that. And there's, but everybody, not I shouldn't say everybody, but there's this movement you see amongst outfitters here in the state, you hear amongst influencers, whatever, the ducks are coming. Now this, we got this cold front that's gonna hit us in mid-January and here they come. And we're not seeing that. And in the Game of Fish's aerial survey, Arkansas Game of Fish Commission's aerial surveys support it. We had almost a 200-something thousand duck drop off between the midwinter survey, which is in early January, and the late January survey, despite a mega, mega cold front two years in a row. So maybe speak to that and what you're seeing with your transmitter birds and the other observations y'all are making there in Tennessee, because you're slightly more north than Cason. You're in the ballpark of the northeast part of the state, which holds a lot of ducks. Maybe speak to that. What you're seeing with this migration timing, the volume and when all that's happening and when hunters need to be more realistic about this is what's really going on as far as a migration movement.

Sure. So this fascinates me, because I guess I would never have really thought of this, but I want you to think about it this way. We have weather that's pushing them down, and then theoretically, the whole time, they're kind of trying to be pulled up because they want to get back to breed, right? And at some point, the pull outweighs the push, and they're going to stop moving because they're getting ready to go back north. And so what we have is we have in our data set clear what I'll call behavioral syndromes or personalities, but we have migrators that are more time-influenced, like they're going to migrate no matter what, and they're going to migrate very quickly and get down to their wintering areas as fast as possible. And those are our Halloween ducks. It's a pretty significant portion of our sample. I would say something like, I tell people this all the time and kind of they roll their eyes, but I agree with what you were saying, that I would say 50% to 60% of the birds that we're going to have are here by Halloween, give or take a week. And then if we get some cold weather in November, we might have more ducks than normal, but otherwise what our data shows is that a majority of our ducks are definitely here by the September 1st, and our ducks are done migrating by the winter solstice. We have almost no more migrants and no more migration that occurs. And they're not pushing north, per se. Like we don't, you know, in January into February, we don't have ducks that are pushing down or pushing up. They're kind of just sitting still and waiting. And so all those ducks you see at the end of hunting season that you think are like fresh migrators or ducks that are moving with a south wind back north, not really. They're just, there's no more hunting pressure. So they're just redistributing to where they want to go. But you know, our ducks migrate, go through like two, some only do one migration, like straight from the prairie, straight down to Tennessee. And when I say straight down to Tennessee, you got to understand that about, oh, I don't know, like 50 percent of our birds come back to like really close to where they were. We have very high fidelity. So like half of our birds come back within a stone's throw of where they were the previous year. And they're going to leave the prairie potholes, and some of them will come straight down. Some of them, the max number of stops we'll have is like two or three. The reason we have max two or three is, you gotta remember, every time they relocate, every time they migrate, they gotta relearn the environment. And we have structured hunting seasons to be open at the peak time of migration. So every time they migrate, it's a super risky event. So we don't get more than two or three migration events to occur because usually by the fourth migration event, they're gonna get shot. You see what I'm saying? Like they gotta settle down as quickly as possible. And I think people don't really appreciate that, that it's really adaptive to be like, to get to where you're gonna go and just sit there. And so we see that all the time. And winter solstice is definitely like the end of the migration, you know, around Christmas time. Yeah.

I mean, that backs into what my father and grandfather always said. And I think we're seeing a lot of this telemetry data kind of start to back that up. But it suggests that really it's the photo period that causes migrations. Weather events can move ducks locally as energetics demand it. It's really photo period that drives this ship. And when we talk about the solstice, you know, for those that are listening that want to kind of understand exactly, I think what's at the heart of that is once you pass the solstice, now we have days that are getting longer. And it's my opinion, and Brad, you may speak to this, you may agree, you may disagree, but it's my opinion that once that day starts to get longer, those birds know that, and that's when they may not move, but that's really what starts to initiate their spring migration, because they know, based on energetics and survival alone, that the quicker they can get back to the nesting ground, the better real estate they can add to nest in, the better success they're going to have.

Bingo. So, what we see is, so, you know, we see that we're actually in the process of getting this manuscript published right now, but basically, not that weather doesn't have an effect, it just has a much less effect than I would have expected in the fall migration. You know, real strong cold events definitely can push a migration event. Ducks, you know, if we look at an individual level, ducks migrate on a really strong tailwind. You know, we have ducks that go as fast as 100 miles an hour for eight miles, or eight hours, I should say, so they'll cover 800 miles in a migration. But obviously, the tailwind is like, you know, 60, 50 miles, you know what I'm saying, per hour. So they need a strong tailwind, and I don't know how they sample for it, but once they get a strong tailwind, they'll migrate. But what's interesting is on the spring migration side, weather is super important, and that's because, again, they do want to get back up north as fast as possible, right? The goal isn't necessarily to get to, isn't just to like get on the breeding grounds, it's to have the best choice that you possibly can. So they'll follow these warming spells up really tightly. You know, they're writing that ice line, quote unquote, to get there as soon as possible, but not so much during the fall. So it's really interesting.

Yeah, I think at least two years in a row now, I've set some videos to Brent of light fronts moving through our farm, really just flying over. Right at the end of March, 1st of April, you know, long after what I consider our white fronts have gone. And my only wild guess there is we're looking at probably poor body condition birds from somewhere south of us, potentially Louisiana, that did not have the body condition to go fight that ice line. So they held back and got as healthy as they could before they initiated their spring migration.

Well, always remember that, you know, what's interesting, and I, you know, I work predominantly with Ducks. I don't work with geese at all. But, you know, depending on their strategy, like, you know, grubbing versus grazing, you know, it is possible that, you know, they just found this with, like, past serene, like, songbirds, that a lot of birds will actually, like, ride that green wave, you know, the kind of beginning of spring north, but they'll be delayed about a week. You know what I'm saying? So they don't want just the sprouts to come up, but they want the bugs to follow or whatever. So, you know, it might be also that geese are just riding that green wave up. Ducks, they don't care about that green wave. Just don't give me any ice, and I'll be okay. Now, what they got to change, what they got to be reacted to is they can't overbent themselves and wind up in the prairie potholes in March and then get frozen out and have to fly all the way back down. You know what I'm saying?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, because like you mentioned ice or even the ice storm, it'd be devastating that time of year to those birds.

Oh, yeah. Oh, very much so. When we had an extreme climatic event, I think it was in 2022. I don't know if you guys remember, but it was that big, big ice storm that came through and Texas had no power. But we published a paper with Cornell and Mike Brasher at Ducks Unlimited and looking at all these different like duck species and how the event changed their distributions. And most ducks actually somehow like they didn't care. They just stayed still. Like they were like, I'm too ready to get up and get moving to the breeding grounds. But you know, what were affected were anything that relied on wetlands like gadwall and northern shovelers. They got pushed out and then and then our geese actually got pushed out because the ground was frozen and they had to go looking. But otherwise, most of our ducks stayed still.

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All right. So if I have 1,000 acres to manage, all right, people are going to scoff at it, but the beginning of it is it starts with putting 600 acres in refuge if not more, and I would split it. Let's just say it runs north to south. My north side would have 300 acres and my south side would have 300 acres or 400 acres each. I would put almost all of it in refuge. Then I would just hunt the middle and I would run traffic. In between the middle of it, so I'd hunt very, very little of the property, and most of it would be in refuge. Then I would put all my food, whether it be moist soil or flooded agriculture, and all my cover, whether it be bottomland hardwood, or buck brush, or whatever. All that would be mixed in my refuges. The best quality would be my refuges. And not that my hunting spot would be poor quality, but I wouldn't care nearly as much. I would just run traffic on ducks. There's your answer.

And I like that. We flood, I don't know how to really do the math, I don't know, 2,500, 2,700 acres of water up here, and hunt probably that same percentage you just described. And we'll bounce around a little bit, but we don't come anywhere near to hunt half of it, nowhere close. And we met, we were talking before the show about how our duck season was, and I think I've said this on the podcast, I've talked to friends about it, we had a really good rice crop last year, we cut our rice really early, put water back on it, and had a really good crop of ratoon rice. We didn't hunt it at all, had no plans of it. A lot of friends and they saw it, oh man, you're gonna really kill ducks in there in January. I'm like, no I'm not, that's not my plan. Right. But it worked for us, we hunted adjacent to it, we hunted around it, and it held ducks, and we shot ducks and ran traffic, and we had a pretty good year. And a year when some other people didn't, and that was our saving grace, and it really opened my eyes to, we've always had pretty good habitat, but that was a really big game changer for us on the commercial ag side, was what we were able to do if we got our crop in early. So, say that to say that, I guess, I tend to think like you, I would also have lots of sanctuaries.

Well, when I work with landowners, they scoff at that idea. They're like, wait, wait, wait, you're telling us we're going to have better hunting and you're taking the amount we can hunt and decreasing it by 70 percent. And the truth is, and then being like, and then you're going to make us do the most amount of work, habitat-wise, on the places we can't hunt. And it's like, well, I want to set up these beautiful tropical islands of just relaxation for the ducks. I want them to just come here and be happy, because happy ducks will maybe come back. Happy ducks will make happy hunters eventually. It might take a couple of years for things to pay off in the full extent, but like, I know what we're doing right now ain't working. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, oasis in the desert is what I use to call those places.

That's exactly it. That's it. That's what I say, too. Oasis is what we're trying to make.

Yeah, I like that tag of happy ducks, because that's, I mean, that's what we're dealing with now. You can't, you kind of can't think back to, you know, how it used to be when I was a kid, you know, whatever, even 10 years ago. It's just the modern day mallard is just different. And if it's a stressed or fearful version, they're hard as hell to hunt. That's why we see that in January. And if it's not for these these last two years with these epic cold fronts, I think our Januaries would have been even tougher than leading up to that because of just how stressed these ducks get. And then as we mentioned on this show too, they've been here for a while. So they figure out where they can and can't go until a weather event causes it to do something different. So yeah, if you're not keeping them happy, you got a tough road to hoe in modern day duck hunting.

Yeah. I should mention that we've had three PhD students on this project, which is Corey Highway, Nick Masto, Abigail Blake Bradshaw, and we've had three master's students. So Corey Highway, he's a PhD now with a master's student. We have Lydia Holmes, we have Nate Steelman. So six total people, all right, and a bunch of products that have come out of it. And underlying all of it is that it's not rocket science that what makes a happy duck. What makes a happy duck is safety with food adjacent. Well, that's a simple recipe. The key is remove the hunter from it, and they'll be pretty happy. And they've done outstanding, these students have done outstanding work for me to come and talk to you about this. But really, you know, underlying it is, if there's a lot of common sense involved, start appreciating the role that hunters and disturbance play in the behavior of the game that we chase. You're going, you're trying to kill them. They know it. They don't want to be killed. And so they're going to act accordingly. If we can just appreciate that, we'd probably have a much better situation, better habitat for the animals we hunt, and probably better hunting.

Yeah. I think that's, it's so simple, but it almost bears repeating, you know, just, and again, it comes back to, you look at so many conversations going on in the duck hunting world right now with different states trying to regulate pressure. I mean, people are starting to really understand how pressure impacts waterfowl on today's landscape. And I don't think, I don't think we can stress that enough.

Well, you know, and it goes back to, you know, not to get on my soap ops here, but one thing that I would love to see is, I would love to see in the future some kind of exploration or experimental move with, you know, if we're given 60 days, you know, right now we can only take so many breaks in between those 60 days. You know, there's only so many that are allowed by the federal government. I would love to be able to mess with that. I would sacrifice 60 day, you know, a 60 day season. I know this wouldn't be popular, but, you know, I would love to see what it would look like if, even if it was only 45 days long, but we optimally spaced out those breaks to really give us, you know, kind of rested ducks, quote unquote, ducks that didn't know the safety environment as well. I think everybody would be a lot happier, but, you know, you talk about in January, unless we get that cold spell, and unless, or unless the food's completely depleted off landscape and they got to make those risky decisions, like I talked about, like in somewhere like, you know, not Louisiana per se, but an example. Man, it won't be a fun season, especially if people put a lot more food on the landscape, too. You know, we're spending so much money on putting these high, high energy foods on the landscape. We shouldn't be surprised if that kind of works against us at a local scale when it's too much.

Yeah, I mean, we do it here. We manage, you know, to have this long run in January. And Brent, what does Arkansas hunt? Like 50, 55 or 52 out of 55 days possible there at the end? And it's something like that?

Yeah, after our first split, when we come back after the first split, it is like 51 of 54 possible days we hunt straight.

It's crazy. And yeah, I mean, I wish we could start and stop the season more than twice like it is because we have that little break at Christmas. And I'd be willing to sacrifice some days for it, too, man. And Brent, you're a big proponent of, you know, planning these splits around full moon events. We could, I think we could do a lot of management with the structure of the season and improve the experience quite a bit.

Yeah, agreed. I agree. There's more to it than I think there's more to it than just the people part, even though that's what a lot of states seem to be talking about, just managing the people. I think there's some frameworks and some other things that we could look at as far as alleviating this pressure piece. Well, Brad, man, we appreciate you coming on the show and all the work that you're doing. This is some awesome insight and the more work you all do and more work your students do, I think we're all going to benefit from all that effort because between what you're doing, Dr. Osborne's doing, Ryan Askren's doing, Five Oaks, and you take these little pockets and all of a sudden we're going to accumulate enough, hopefully enough data and enough stuff to make some more analysis and more determination about what these ducks are actually doing. Because we've seen to have jumped light years, what's interesting, we've kind of jumped light years of what we know about these ducks in a time when they're not doing exactly great. So, I can't imagine once we get a population bump again, and what we find out when there's more of them on the landscape, and they maybe deplete one of these refuges of food, because there's more of them, and they got to do something different. I think we could see all kinds of stuff come out of that.

Sure. I mean, I will mention that on years where like, we have had years where we get big floods in our system, and like all of our corn doesn't make or something like that, or we have low energy years on refuges and stuff like that. Our ducks are not there because of food on a refuge. That's clear with our rest areas. Our rest areas that we have with private landowners, they have zero food in them, and our ducks use them just like they would a normal refuge. Our ducks use refuges in January when our measurements show there's no discernible food on those refuges anymore. The ducks don't need the food on the refuge, at least in our area. I imagine a bunch of areas around Missouri, Arkansas, and a bunch of other places, maybe Illinois, etc. In the end of all things, less food on the landscape could mean, I want to make a point that moving away from flooded crops in some areas might be appropriate, especially on a state and federal level, and moving towards moist soil management could have multiple benefits, especially on refuges, in that they'll still imprint to those refuges, but they might explore more if food is less available.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I think that's a little bit of the strategy that Arkansas is doing, because most of the rest areas that are adjacent to the WMAs, the GTRs, are moist soil units. The state's gotten really active in managing those. So we'll see, we'll see. But yeah, man, thanks again for coming on. We appreciate everyone listening. I hope if you listen to the show and you like some of the content to it, you tell some more people about it, because this was really good stuff, and it kind of diffuses some stuff that floats around out there on the Facebook groups and everything else, and text chains and whatnot, and kind of give some real science behind what is being observed, what these ducks are doing nowadays. So, appreciate you listening, appreciate our sponsors, and we'll catch you next time.

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