Dave Duncan, Canadian Wildlife Service (Ret.)

Dave Duncan, Ph.D. (retired), worked across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, focusing on pintails. Throughout his professional career, he’s shown a true passion for this particular duck and how to turn the tide on its decline. Duncan joins the show to discuss the past, present, and future of the pintail population while sharing some concerns with the new regulations set to go into place this coming season. This episode is worth a listen as Duncan shares some keen insights about this magnificent bird.

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Transcript

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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.

Brent and Cason back again with another episode of The Standard Sportsman Podcast. We're sitting here at the tail end of May with some pretty important counts going on. Kind of trickle into June a little bit, I believe. And I know that part of the world has gotten some water here lately. It's just going to depend on whether the timing is right. But Cason, have you been hearing anything related to B-Pop and May Pond counts from some of your contacts?

No, nothing really. You know, you hear anecdotal reports about good moisture here or good ducks here, then you hear a conflicting report that says, yeah, well, they're in that spot because it's dry in the Dakotas or what have you. So nothing, nothing I think that's really any significance yet.

Yeah, I would say the same. I've talked to a few people and you're right, it's kind of spotty. But we'll see, we'll see how this shakes out and whether this water is, you know, right timing-wise. You know, if you recall last year, they did get a bunch of rain, but it ended up being in June and that was kind of too late. Ducks had already settled where they were going to settle and it pushed a lot of ducks north, north of where they typically would be breeding. And as we saw last duck season, I think that kept them from coming as far south as they normally would. They got their distance mapped out and where they started from was a little farther north than normal and where they stopped coming south was a little farther north as well. So hopefully some settled in the places where the ducks... Exactly, exactly.

This is Dave Duncan here where I live in Edmonton, Alberta, in central Alberta. It's been very dry here and in terms of what's going to happen this year in precipitation for ducks and pintails, it's actually too late for the pintails. They're normally nesting late April and then May and they're not the persistent re-nesters that mallards are. So it's pretty well over and done for most of the pintail population.

Yeah. Well, that's going to lead us into what we're talking about today. And we truly got an expert on this particular topic. So, Cason, I'll let you introduce Dave and we'll get going.

Yeah. So Dave Duncan is here with us. PhD, my, I have to say, maybe my resident pintail expert. Dave and I don't talk often, but we did have the pleasure of meeting several years ago down in Louisiana. We sat together on a panel with some other really bright minds. Paul Ink, Mickey Heitmeyer were there. Why they let me in the doors, I'm not sure. But anyway, Dave, thanks for taking the time to join us today and talk about all things Canada and pintails and whatever else we get into. So, appreciate your time.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Cason. Any opportunity I get to talk about my favorite bird, the pintail, I'm in.

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Yeah, you hear the word sort of stately and handsome applied to Drake pentails in particular. And even in the birding community, a few Facebook groups, they admire the pental a lot as well. Just such a gorgeous bird. And I actually have a soft spot in my heart for hens as well, because my research involved a lot of trapping in hens and they're a subtle beauty to them as well.

Sure, so I'll tell kind of a funny story because we're gonna get into the new harvest regulation with pentails obviously. But a few years ago, I don't think it was last year, maybe the year before, we had limited out on pentails and my youngest son, I think he was five at the time. So he had shot and missed a bird, maybe they opened a weekend of the season or so and did not like the recoil and kind of refused to shoot any more the rest of the year. We had shot our limited pentails and he was on the hunt. And now, like any other time that happens, they're landing in the decoys and, you know, there's seven, eight yards in front of them and he still won't shoot. I'm like, man, this is a really good first bird. You should shoot that duck, but he was having none of it. But, yeah, that would have been a good way to start his career.

Yeah, good for him when I go out doing waterfall hunting in Alberta now. I hold back on the pentails and usually my hunting partners take great pleasure in shooting them and laughing at me for holding back.

Yeah, well, yeah, Brent and I catch a little heat sometimes for self-restraint, but that's the whole of the conversation in there, Brent.

Yeah, yeah, we'll save that for another day.

I don't know how you find them. I've seen references to pentails being wary in some of the Southern states, maybe California in particular, but I have found them to be much more naive than Mallards.

It's hit or miss. Usually, they're pretty elusive for us, but occasionally once a year or once every two years, we will have a day where they do everything right, and it's a lot of fun, and obviously we shoot the majority of our pentails then, but the rest of the time, they don't really work for us a whole lot. Maybe that's why they're so attractive and special. They're a little bit rarer.

Yeah, we get the same.

Yeah, because we see tons of them in the fall. I mean, tons of them, but during the regular season, they're there. They just don't want to cooperate.

Yeah, that's the same.

The mallards are much more wary, and the pentails will come in closer. This is typically field hunting for me in the fall in Canada, in Western Canada, and they'll be, you know, you shoot one and the rest of them will circle around again, looking for them by the league. And I just find them to be much more naive than mallards in the early fall up in Canada.

Yeah, and I do want to talk about that a little bit, because that's what we see a lot of, you know, we see the highlights on social media, and you see the piles afterwards, and you see a lot of pentails in those piles in the field hunting. And I've done it, I've been to Saskatchewan and hunted, and we didn't shoot a lot of pentails in particular when I went, but that was also almost 15 years ago, or will be 15 years ago this season. But why don't we circle back a little bit and just do a little background on you and some of your history, because you've worked across the three main provinces that ducks come from, and done a lot of different things, and obviously a specialist on the particular bird we're talking about today. But maybe give us a little background so the listeners can connect the dots a little bit.

Worked on the wildlife branch for the provincial government there in Manitoba for a while, and then I decided I want to dig into birds and pursue ducks. So I went to Edmonton, Alberta, where I currently reside and started a graduate student program. And actually an interesting story, my professor wanted me to work on island nesting ducks. They had been building some safe nesting islands in some of the wetlands in southern Alberta, and he had a student studying their higher nesting success since the predators don't get to him, and he wanted me to follow up looking at the survival of the ducklings and broods. So I went down there and did a lot of nest searching, and lo and behold, I stumbled on the fact that Pintail was by far the number one duck. This is around Brooks, Alberta, in southern Alberta, was by far the number one duck in the mainland, not on the islands, but on the mainland. So I subsequently developed a few ideas to pursue a completely different project based on the Pintails and sort of reproductive biology. And I took some eggs from the wild and took them into captivity and raised them to compare captive mallards to wild mallards in terms of a number of parameters of nesting. And then I kind of moved to BC for a couple of years, went back to Saskatchewan, got involved with the North American Waterfall Management Plan, working on one of the early sort of first step projects called the Prairie Poffle Project, and subsequently worked for, oh, maybe a decade for the Saskatchewan Provincial Government and various jobs there, including chairing the North American Waterfall Management Plan Technical Committee for the Province of Saskatchewan. Then I went from the Provincial Government to the Federal Government, joined the Canadian Wildlife Service, moved back to Edmonton, and was there for some 20 years working in various capacities. For the Canadian Wildlife Service, I was involved with the Pacific Flyway as a Canadian rep for quite a while. I was chairing the Arctic Goose Joint Venture for quite a while and played with a few other birds in addition to ducks, but ducks and pintails have been nearest and dearest to my heart over the years.

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Well, so I guess we'll just kind of address the elephant in the room. You and I both, and I know Brent as well, we all remember the plight of the pen tail, especially over the last 30 to 40 years, maybe longer than that, now that I date myself a little bit. But it's been a struggle with their populations over the last few decades. Can you possibly shed a little light on why, or what we consider to be the impetus behind that struggle?

Yeah.

So just for the listeners, of course, the first years of the survey, the pen tail population was 9 to 10 million. And then the last time we saw 5 million for the continental population was back in about 1980. And then the last decade, they've been down to a high of 3 million, the last few years down to a population of 2 million. So there's been a very, very long-term decline. And it was actually, I think, with 1991, the very first duck symposium in Baton Rouge. I went there and I pulled together a little paper, kind of speculative about what the heck's going on with pintails because there hadn't been a lot of work on pintails. In fact, my PhD in 1986 was, I think, only the second PhD ever done on pintails. There just wasn't a lot of work had been done on them. It wasn't my original research, but slapped together information from a lot of people, a lot of organizations, US Fish and Wildlife Service, various studies had been done over the years and put together this notion that the problem, I was entitled to my talk, the problem with pintails and it was the fact that they're really a short cover nesting duck. They're on the short grass prairies or up in Alaska, where there's short vegetation, non-tree areas. Now that we've converted, say, 75 percent or more of our prairies to cultivated land, well, the pintail doesn't see a big difference between a short grass prairie and a stubble field. So they're readily nested cultivated land, and that's what we found. Then cultivated land, be it predators or agricultural machinery comes along and they lose so many nests. I mean, we're down to maybe 10 percent of nests of most duck species hatching. With pintails, it's more like 5 percent. That was an idea that I floated at that first Duck Symposium in Baton Rouge, and then Mike Miller from California had worked on wintering pintails, and I put together a paper about the status of pintails shortly thereafter. Since then, there's been no one who's really seriously challenged that idea, and it's generally accepted that that's why we have a problem with the pintails, is that they're so ready to nest in cropland rather than seek out a little vegetation on an edge of a pond or a little bit here and there, piece of bush like shovelers and blue wings and mallards, denser, taller cover, they'll nest in very sparse cover and they get absolutely hammered by predators. And so that's the accepted, to this day, that's the accepted rationale for the decline in the pintail population.

So I've got a little bit of a follow up question on that. You mentioned the 75 percent reduction in the conversion into cultivated land. So can you, you may not have this stat on the top of your head, but can you speak to any detail about the quality of habitat that a cultivated field provides, or excuse me, a cultivated field adjacent to a wetland provides compared to, say, native grassland? I know there's obviously a reduction in the carrying capacity of those two ponds. Do you have any way of putting a value on that?

I think the pond, the ponds aren't aren't that important other than in cultivated land. You tend to get them tilled through when they're dry. You tend to get them drained. If you've got pasture, they don't drain the wetlands or fill the wetlands typically. And so, but it's mainly the upland cover and in a monoculture of wheat or canola stubble. For whatever reason, the predators, be it skunks, foxes, sometimes crows, are just finding the nests much more readily than they are in native grass. So in native grass, mind you, native grass which typically uses pastures and bigger chunks and there's this idea of large piece versus small pieces of habitat affect nests and success. But we find them on a pasture and on cultivated land, you're lucky if you get 5% of the pintail nests to hatch. So they're just getting absolutely hammered out there on the cultivated land.

Yeah, and I would think on top of predators, I would think if they're making nests out in short stubble of a wheat field or whatever it is, that the equipment that's getting drug through there would also have an impact on a nest. Is that safe to assume?

Yeah, there was some old studies in the 50s and 60s, even myself in the 80s, I was leaning towards agriculture machinery, the pintail being an early nester in Southern Alberta nesting say the last week of April, and seeding doesn't happen until a week or two or three later, and along comes the seeding and destroys the nest. I and others, I think, were pointing to agriculture machinery as a bigger source of loss, but it seems in the last couple of decades, there's a bit more information coming from a number of studies, and it's pointing not so much at the agriculture machinery, but more so at predation being by far the number one cause of nest loss. Now, having said that, all it takes is add on another five or 10 percent loss from agriculture machinery on top of the very, very high predation loss that all of our upland ducks are facing, and maybe that makes the difference. But it's certainly not, doesn't appear to be the main or primary source of nest loss in Pentel. But it could be additive, and that might be part of the issue.

Yeah, I would think so. I would think so. Just a lot of things after them right now. So we're going to evolve this conversation into where we are today and what some of the news has been generated related to Pentel and upcoming limits and everything else. But it was just pretty much almost to the month, two years ago, where it was kind of red alert. Pentels are in a bad way. There's conservation organizations publishing articles saying, you know, Pentels are in a bad shape. For 23, 24 season, we came within a few hundred thousand or a few thousand Pentels of having the season entirely closed based on the previous quote unquote science behind it. I don't say quote unquote be smart aleck. I just, science is kind of a wide ranging term. But the thoughts were at the time, Pentels were in a bad way. And we may be taking some drastic measures from a regulatory standpoint. What is your recollection of what built up to that and got it to be in such a state that there was some true worry on the landscape?

Yeah, I think just as we've talked about the population, decline and what we've seen over the last many, many decades led us all to say, and there's many papers on the decline of the Pentels and the plight of the Pentels and the problem of the Pentels. But then, then there was a few changes. I think a few things happened. Number one, when we first had the North American Waterfall Management Plan in 1986, it was all about waterfall populations, recovering them, keeping them abundant and resilient. And then in, when was it about, when they revised the North American Waterfall Management Plan to 2012, suddenly this idea of not just waterfall populations, but also having a goal to support hunters and hunting, and support for waterfall programs came into being in the 2012 NAWOP revision. So you've got this secondary goal and you got these now multiple objectives at least from the North American Waterfall Management Plan point of view, to start, and none of us would disagree with this, to try to bolster support, social support, hunting support for ducks and duck habitat programs. And so that changed, a bit of the change of the scenery a bit from concentration on only waterfall populations, habitat to now, well, think about the human side, the human dimension side, the social side, that in the long term we need more support, and this is, you know, the background to this is, of course, declining number of licenses of waterfall hunters. And so this, in the 2012 NAWOP revision, added this new objective of increasing support for waterfall populations and for hunting. And so that, that changed, that puts a different spin on things. And then over the last, you know, for quite a while now, I think you had a very strong lobby from California, where, you know, they received all these birds from the North, from Alaska and Northwest Territories, they're specifically going down the West Coast Flyway, the Pacific Flyway, and they're seeing so many of these birds and yet be getting very, very frustrated increasingly that they can't take more than one or two birds. So I think you added that in with, you know, the pressures from the at least parts of the some flyways saying, really, come on, there's a lot of birds out there and why can't we shoot more to the North American Waterfall Management Plan, saying, well, let's not just think about waterfall population but also the population of hunters out there. And then that just stimulated this working group to say, well, let's look at a new harvest strategy and see what comes out of that. And, you know, that started, I think, the look at changing things from the status quo and the old harvest strategy into the new one that we're now looking at with potential three bird bag.

Yeah, right. So when this new strategy, say 2012, when this new strategy was evaluated and implemented with the North American Waterfall Management Plan, when they go to that thought process of we need to consider the hunting side of it as well, what's feasible, does that impact what goes into or does it modify the formulas of AHM or is that just, let's see if we can get in the ballpark with what we do limit wise and kind of keep the population clicking along?

I think what it does is say we don't just have that singular goal of waterfall population. We have another goal of waterfall hunters and support for programs. And so now you're sort of, now you're balancing it a bit and put add to that the pressure that was, you know, from some places coming to to to increase the harvest. And then, you know, all the flyways, I think, I think there was some objections, maybe initially from Mississippi Flyways, all the flyways eventually jumped on board. But after a lot of consideration, a lot of study, but a lot of study by the same people that are interested in not only waterfall populations, but also increasing support from hunters and from other constituencies as well. So I think that the sort of the field changed a bit, started to switch. And people said, well, maybe we can also accept a little more risk and be a little less conservative in our approach in the hope of increasing waterfall hunters' support.

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That does seem to be a common theme or a word you hear quite a bit now when frameworks and limits and opportunity is kind of the key word. And so you hear that quite a bit. It seems to kind of grow with every passing year. And yeah, you have to have something to offer a hunter to make him feel inspired to go buy a license and spend all the money on duck hunting that you do. But let me ask you this from a historical standpoint because of what we're doing now. And we can talk, we can get started and kind of talk about the new limit, new regulations that are in place that are going to be implemented for this coming season. But have pintails always been managed across the, across the continent, or not across the continent, but across, you know, from the state side of things? You know, like mallards are different. Mallard limit is different in Mississippi Flyway, it's different in the Central Flyway, it's different in the Pacific Flyway, it's different in the Atlantic Flyway. And we're also kind of counting different groups of mallards. You know, there's a subset of the Mid-Continent Mallards, there's the Pacific Flyway Mallards and there's the Atlantic-based Mallards. And so everything's kind of evaluated differently. But on pintails, at least I know currently, it's across the board. Has it always been that way?

There are pintails to be one population, if you will, one group. And it's always been that way. And the idea was, you know, most of them in the, historically, you know, going back quite a few decades now, were on the prairies, and only when the prairies got dry did they then overfly the prairies and go up north. Or they probably nest a little later, and a few of them don't nest, a few more of them don't nest, and smaller clutch size, that kind of thing. So it's always been considered, there's only one pintail population. Now, having said that, there's been some studies in Alaska that are showing very high return rates or fidelity rates of pintails. So they catch a pintail on a nest and band it, let it go. And instead of this very, we compare them to blue wings that seem to float all over the place, particularly the prairies, wherever it's wet. The idea of pintails mainly on the prairies and then some of them going up north. A couple of studies from Alaska are now saying, well, you know, there's this, maybe it's a larger group of birds that are always nesting in Alaska. These guys, and when Mike Miller put some of his satellite transmitters on birds, some of them just went right to Alaska. They didn't come to the prairies and check it out and then say it's too dry and then move. So what proportion of birds? I'm not sure, but there is and maybe perhaps more evidence now that there's this, call it what you want, Alaska breeding population. There's also in the Northwest Territory of Northern BC, Alberta, this Northern population, maybe call it a Pacific Flyway population. So it's never been considered separate and we've never had enough evidence to think about them and considering them separately. But perhaps we will as time goes on and with raising concerns about the pintail population. That was one of my concerns as well as maybe we'll perhaps in your lifetime see the almost elimination of the prairie nesting pintail and nothing but Northern and Alaskan nesting pintails. Probably not right away, but if things were to continue down the road that we've seen since 1955, and leading in that direction. But it's always been considered one population, still is considered one population. All the pintails in North America, irrespective of where they nest. But maybe there's a little information coming out now that might make us want to have a second look at that.

Yeah, for sure. Do you think that the shift in focus to the hunter population, do you think that's the root cause in this change in framework that we just witnessed in the pintails?

I think it's one of the root causes. I mean, it's not that alone that did it, but there was always this struggle between, when it comes to pintails, that the North American Waterfall Management Plan objective or goal equates to the long-term average population. So for pintails, the last couple of decades, it's always been below that North American Waterfall Management Plan objective of the long-term mean population because it's a declining population, which meant that there was always this little rub, this little antagonism between shooting this bird, which is below our Waterfall Management Plan population objective goal, and yet still shooting them and then recently perhaps shooting more of them. So that was always a bit of a rub that was there. So I think with the North American Waterfall Management Plan, putting in the human dimensions of Waterfall Hunters into the mix helped push it that way, but it wouldn't certainly have happened without the very long and extent of and actually quality work that went into the new interim harvest strategy. I wasn't involved with it, but I've looked at it and there were some pleasant surprises in there of the things that they did consider that I thought they might have overlooked.

So what exactly surprised you or were you pleased with on that?

Well, one of the things, so I was not overly enthusiastic about the new change to close season when it's 1.2 million birds, and it used to be 1.75, I think it was, where you'd get a close season. So I was worried about that, particularly as I mentioned, that you can almost get a million birds in Alaska and the Northwest Territories and Northern BC and Alberta alone. So that could lead you to the extirpation of the prairie pintail population and still have an open season. Then when I looked a little deeper, a little closer at the new interim harvest strategy, I realized that, in fact, they did consider where the population was. So there's actually a matrix within this new strategy that's not just about the population level of closing it at 1.25 and when you can take three birds. They added in a dimension of the mean latitude. In other words, they recognize that as the mean latitude of the printout population increases, that is, more and more birds are nesting north, you tend to be more conservative and much less frequently get a three bird bag. I was pleased that the continental population, but in fact, factored in whether the birds were nesting on the prairies, or whether the average population, more and more of the birds were in fact moving and nesting further north. That was one thing I was happy to see that I was concerned with when I first looked at it. If you read information about the new interim strategy, it often overlooks that aspect of it. You just see the close season when there's 1.2 million birds. But if you look in a little more detail, it's that 1.2 million birds for close season, but also the three bird bag limit is dependent upon the average latitude of the breeding population, so that when there's lots of birds nesting further south, in Dakotas and Canadian prairies, you're much more likely to get a three bird season than when most of the birds are up north.

Interesting, because I've read a ton of stuff on this, and you're right, that part is left out, and I think the Waterfowl Science Community and the US. Fish and Wildlife Service could explain it. That's not that complicated for a hunter to understand, but you don't ever see, I've not seen that mentioned one time in the discussion about why that dropped from 1.75 to 1.2, because we were within a whisker of being below that 1.75 cutoff just two years ago. And that sees it would have been closed, completely closed across the country. Nobody has shot pen tails. And then you see, okay, now we got this new strategy, and now we're going to drop it, but no real explanation as to how all that factors in. And so that's a really interesting point, and it makes some sense. So now you go, okay, well, now I understand a little bit better. So if we're not getting the pen tails on the Prairie Pothole region, we and say the Southern and the Mississippi Flyway or the Mississippi Flyway together, maybe we don't get three in a particular year, and California may, because their pen tails are coming from a different place. So I think that's a pretty interesting point to make, and I would encourage anybody in the waterfowl science community that's listening to this to maybe share those kinds of things. We don't have to know how the sausage is made in every single little detail, but some, as general as that, I think it would be handy for a hunter to know that.

One thing I just point out, that I don't know that it would ever award three birds the way I see it. And there's people, you know, the people who developed it and worked on it, they're a lot more familiar than I am, but I don't know that it would necessarily award, say the Pacific Flyway with a three bird bag, but reduce more Eastern Flyways to a two bird bag. I think it's right across the board. It's this one measure of what the population is, the breeding population estimate, combined with the mean latitude, and I believe that applies to all flyways.

Yeah, no, I agree with that, but a state on their own could go with a lower limit. We don't have to follow what the US Fish and Wildlife Service sets. We can go with something different. And if, I guess, if our commission, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, got intel or had been fed some information related to, hey, the prairie pothole pentails are, they're not doing so hot. And these are a globally managed bird, so to speak. Maybe we ought to think about, we kill a decent enough number of them, maybe we should think about cutting that down. And I know that kind of gets into the, whether harvest matters and all this other jazz, but we could, a state could independently do something different than the, I mean, we shoot one less speckle belly here than we're allowed because we kill so many. And so we've self-imposed a two bird limit versus the allowed three. So, I mean, it's possible.

Right, you'd have the lead in freedom to do that. It's kind of like me as an individual hunter where I hold off until all my other hunting buddies go out of their way to take one in front of me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any kind of sense or any kind of feel? I mean, you're up there hunting in Prairie, Canada. We see some of the videos and whatnot of dry field hunting. Obviously the super highly effective spinning wing decoy. And a lot of those birds that are that are harvested are pentails in what you see. Does that factor in in your mind? Does that factor in at all? I mean, if that's still if pentails are still included in an eight bird limit and we're here in the States, we're going one to two to three. How does that all kind of all that kind of come together?

Yeah, Canada, again, I wasn't particularly pleased with it, but Canada took off the reduced pintail limit a couple of years ago now. So you can get out and it allows you to take eight pintails if you get the chance. Now, a lot of times we don't see a lot of pintails here. They tend to be migrating a little earlier. You don't get the big flocks of pintails that often in Western Canada. They seem to, where the mallards are hold on to the very last ice over. The pintails are typically long gone. So I wasn't particularly enthralled when I saw Canada loosen its pintail limit. Mind you, of course, Canada shoots less than 10 percent of the total harvest in North America. But still, I thought there was maybe some utility in having a restriction on the number of pintails just to keep the message alive that, you know, pintails aren't thriving. Pintails are a population that are still in trouble. And for that reason alone, I personally would have favored having a restricted bag on pintails, but it wasn't my decision to make.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Yeah, I think you said something there that's very significant and may go kind of unnoticed by some listeners. You mentioned just doing it to send the message that it still matters. You know, they're still in a precarious situation. I think Brent and I get into those topics a lot here, you know, making decisions based on just being conservation minded. And Brent, we seem to catch a little flak for that because there's this bigger narrative now that's so focused on R3 and hunter recruitment and retention that seems to kind of want to push back against anything that's just, you know, kind of general conservation minded. Like, I don't know. I don't see the harm in it, much like we talked about mallard hens, you know. It's not a significant thing. It's not going to rebound in the population, but having that in the back of your head, being a little conservation minded is never a bad thing. So I guess I'll pivot to this now. What, I know you've expressed in your emails and communication, you have some reservations about it, but what are your overall feelings about this new shift and this additional harvest? You think it's good for pintails or bad?

Yeah. Well, I'll start by laying out where a few of my concerns come from, and not that they weren't addressed by the people who developed the new interim strategy, but I still have concerns based on, we've already talked about the population decline, of course, and it's very, very large. I mean, it's nowhere near 9-10 million of the 50s, and maybe we'll never be again. We don't know. It would take a very large landscape change. Also, and it's probably recognized in the strategy, but Pintails don't lay as many eggs as Mallards and other ducks. They're often just laying 7-9 eggs in a clutch, and Mallards and other ducks are more than that. And Pintails won't re-nest again and again and again like a Mallard. You'll be lucky if a Pintail re-nests once. So they don't have the reproductive capacity to bounce back as rapidly as other duck species. And again, these things may be probably considered in some way in the new strategy. We've got, you know, we're still below the North American Waterfall Management Plan goal. So there's still a bit of a clash between, you know, liberalizing Pintail bag limits and yet having this North American Plan goal, which is the long-term average of the population, and we're still far below that, you know, about half of what the North American Plan goal is. We have way more information on Mallards than we do on Pintails. I was, when I did my PhD in 86, I think I was only the second PhD on Pintails. There have been quite a few since then because of our concern over Pintails. But I'm sure there's three to five times the number of graduate studies and PhDs on Mallards than there is on Pintails. So that, just to say that we're not as well as informed on Pintails as we are on say Mallards. And when it comes to banding, which is an important, very important part, banding and the recoveries from banding in terms of AHM, that I just looked it up, what was it? I think, yeah, there's been about a million Mallard recoveries, now not banded, but recoveries. That's a lot of Mallard recoveries for Pintails over the whole course of the banding efforts that we've done over the decades. It's only 150,000, so 15% of what it is for Mallard. So again, to say, we're not nearly as well informed on Pintails as we are on Mallards. And we talked about the one population idea, maybe there is a case will be made in the future for Alaskan Northern breeding birds being considered somewhat separately. So the California folks can take a few more because the population, although it's declined a bit in the long term, it hasn't declined as much as the prairie population that feeds into the Mississippi and Central more. So I see all those reasons. And then I look at the new interim strategy that talks about a harvestable surplus. And I'm thinking, well, it's in the eye of the beholder. Is there really a surplus of Pintails when we're so far below our goal, our North American plan goal? And, of course, the strategy again looks at considering all these things. And it says, well, we don't think it's going to harm the population. And information to date suggests it's not additive and we'll be safe doing it. But it doesn't allay my concerns completely, knowing that they did factor in all these things. They admit that there was a statement somewhere on the Fish and Wildlife Service site about biologists are accepting more risks now with pintail populations. Well, that's a little concerning to me again, for a population of duck that's in decline, that we're accepting more risk in terms of this new harvest strategy. The good news being, we will revisit this strategy. It is only an interim strategy. I think when they get three seasons of three bird bag limits, then it will get reviewed, but that might not be in three years. It might be in five or ten years. And it is interim. So, there's a lot of things that they've considered. It went through a lot of reviews. A lot of people looked at it. It had independent review before it came out. But just because science says we're probably okay to do something, doesn't mean we must do it or that we're all happy to do it or that it's indeed the right thing to do, if you will, putting a judgment on it.

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Yeah, when our Pinto population is two million birds and then we're harvesting half a million, well, there's no way, well, unless it was completely density dependent and additive, there's no way on God's green earth that it would be a good thing, right? I have non-hunting people ask me, well, yeah, you duck biologists, you think it's not hurting them, it's not hurting them, but can it be a good thing for them? Well, no, no, no. I've never seen it.

They're dead.

They're dead, yeah. It can't be very good. No, no. And let's not talk about crippling loss or anything else too, but anyways, half a million out of a two million estimated population is pretty scary to me. And I think that's why it's scary to some of the hunters out there as well. And you get hawks and doves wherever you are on any issue. And I guess I consider myself, perhaps yourselves, we're a little more trending toward the dove end of things rather than the hawkish end.

Yeah, yeah, that's kind of, we just, I think Cason and I both, we just tend to lean a little more conservative on some of these things. When you see something, it's not doing as well as it should and struggle maybe sometimes to understand why we put all our eggs in one basket. And we are totally in the camp that habitat drives this deal population-wise. It doesn't matter whether it's mallards, pintails, teal, canvasbacks, doesn't matter. But what can be done in these interim windows like we're in now where the habitat is not great and we're seeing in the reports we're getting, we're probably gonna have another year where it's not gonna be a highly productive breeding season. And so, how long do we keep this train going down those tracks and hoping for a bounce back? Now, we all know mallards can bounce back really quick. And you've already stated, pintails cannot. And that's, I just think the more we just kind of from our seat, being outside the science community, it makes you scratch your head a little bit. Not to say anybody's wrong, it's hard to wrap your brain around a little bit.

Yeah, a lot of, again, I'll reiterate that there was a lot of this interim strategy. There were smart people working on it and good people working on it. And it had a lot of people behind it. And they've done the best with the data they have. And maybe one of the best things we can do for this situation we're in right now is ensure that we collect even more information on pintails. So when it does get reviewed and revised in three to 10 years' time, that we'll be in a better place to more firmly answer the questions and reduce the risk to the population than what we are now. And I'm hearing stories of threats to reduce the banding lab budget and Fish and Wildlife Service in general. And what we certainly need is more information rather than less information at this point. And the more we can do to support our waterfall programs as well as the habitat programs, but also the science programs, we'll just make sure we're in a stronger position in the future when we do revisit this strategy. You know, more banding of pintails is not easy. More banding of pintails in other places and more studies of pintails, and more studies of their recruitment. And looking at Alaska, what's the chance that maybe there is, you know, there's a separate population, if you will, of birds that are nesting in Alaska and Northwest Territories, going down the Pacific Flyway and then just hanging out in California. You know, that would make a large difference targeting that question or potentially make a large difference if we could get enough information on that.

Yeah, and that's a big thing, Cason, I both harp on a lot is the is the data and the quality of data and a lot of that falls on the hunter's shoulders to be honest when you complete a HIP survey. If you get selected out of the HIP survey to do the advanced surveys, do them. Don't throw that envelope away because their return rate is not that great on those things. And so the more extrapolating they have to do versus the direct feedback from a hunter, the lower the quality of data is going to be. And you could put it into the greatest formula in the world and it not spit out the best it could be if it's not great data that goes into it. So I think that you made a great point related to the potential cut in funding related to banding because Lincoln Peterson estimates rely heavily on banding. Our AHM relies heavily on band data. You talk about breaking this system down to its knees if we're not able to band ducks and geese like we have, and it's on a huge decline anyway, especially in your part of the world. You know, we're seeing a lot of wintertime banding on our end of the flyway but they don't do as much with that data as they do with what's done up there. And so, you know, you pull banding out of this, it breaks that system based on what I understand it to be. And that would be detrimental at a time when ducks really can't afford it.

Yeah, I've heard there's some lobbies and rallies going forth to try to maintain the support for the bird banding lab. And it's not just the lab. Well, we need the lab, but also the efforts out there on the landscape to band these things. I tried increasing our pin-tail banding in Alberta. Son of a gun is just trying to find a place with a decent number of pin-tails. And they tend to like shower water even in the late summer banding, preseason banding season. And it's hard to find a group of them. And then you do. And then the water changes or the mallards move in and push out the pin-tails. It is challenging, but we definitely need it. And we need more of it rather than less of it. And so it's very concerning when there's some noises being made to cut back on programs like bird banding.

Yeah, I think that's, it's concerning. And I guess I feel like, again, coming back to this R3 movement, that there's no denying that we need conservation dollars, we need funding for these efforts. But I think it's a little, it's just my opinion, it's a little misguided to try to ring every drop of blood out of the resource in the attempt to have hunters. I think if the populations are healthy and the experience is good, we will have hunters. And maybe I just come at that from a little different side of the human dynamic. But I think pushing it to the limit for the sake of being able to do so is not the best idea.

I'm with you on that case. And yeah, I'm in the sort of conservative camp as well. And all our other duck populations have been doing very well. Thank you very much. So the one species, the Pintail, there was concern over Scop and Elizabeth, but the Pintail is a going concern still to this very day.

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I'm not sure which program there's both. There's a number of programs out there, but the main, I think the main solution from a pin tail perspective, if we had more hay land and more pasture and less annual cultivation, the pin tails would do better. Although the exception there is a spring seeded crop, which Ducks Unlimited has done quite a bit of work on, but still it needs to be those conversions to either, sorry, fall seeded crop, pardon me, fall seeded crops so there isn't the tillage in the spring and the crop grows up sooner and faster and denser. That or conversion of cultivated land to pasture or haying is the ultimate solution and it's typically market driven. In the big picture, it's market driven and right now we have, I assume it's the same in the US, but the cattle prices are very high right now in Canada. Beef prices, very high and if that were to continue and people keep eating beef, well, there's the incentive for people that are farming on marginal land to say, well, you know what? I think I can make a bucket of cows rather than canola or wheat. That will be in the long term, things that affect agriculture on the prairies are going to be what's going to drive at least the pintails. Everything we do, the habitat programs that we have, there's some government programs that come in and go various places in Canada for conversion of annual tilled crops to perennial cover, if you will. They're all helpful, but the magnitude of the change, we probably need maybe in 100 years if we keep going with our habitat efforts, but it's not going to happen in a decade or two. We just don't have the resources to make that huge change on the landscape that's needed for pintails.

No, I wouldn't think so. That's what's tough. And yeah, we're seeing the same thing in the United States, too. And just some humongous shifts in the business of agriculture. Of course, we're waiting on a farm bill to get sorted out. I know there's a, I read something this morning related to there's a bill that's floating through the house that they're trying to separate the food, you know, because our farm bill includes food stamps and all that. And then, of course, everything ag related and everything related to the ground itself, which backs into a lot of conservation related programs that landowners can take advantage of. But now, apparently, they're thinking about separating some of that out versus it being lumped in this gigantic farm bill. So I mean, just some monumental shifts in what's going on with everything. And I know, you know, speaking with Lorne, they just basically have no protections in place in Saskatchewan. And he had some crazy stat that I think 8% of the ownership of farm ground in Saskatchewan owns 40% of the acreage.

Yeah, that's very, very likely. The bigger and bigger farms are taking over. The little guys can, the little farmers, the mixed farmers, they just can't make a go of it. So, the big guys that are doing well continue to do well and they accumulate more and more land. So, you get, yes, more, fewer and fewer farmers controlling more and more of the landscape.

Yeah, well, that's interesting. Interesting times for sure. And we're seeing that with our, with our pen tails. It's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out, you know, because we've got a change, we got a shortened blue wing till season for us, which is based off, you know, they actually did pretty decent last year, if I remember, but this is based off two years ago to where it's shortened. We have a 16 day blue wing till season, and this year it's only nine, despite their population taking a bump, that would have put them back into a regular 16 day early season. So, some limits, some frameworks getting messed with, and it's gonna be interesting to see how that kind of plays out.

An old work compadre of mine used to say, if we could just get every person in China to eat a hamburger a week, what that would do to the price of beef and the beef market and ultimately make large changes on the landscape. So, I mean, there's things going on in the world well beyond even our control in North America that could have an effect on the agricultural landscape in North America.

And so, Dave, real quick, because I was fascinated by what you presented years ago in terms of beef and how that would impact waterfowl populations and habitat. Dive into that real quick for people who have never heard that side of that discussion.

Well, I guess we tucked on it maybe a little bit. When it comes to, say, pintails in particular, in cropland dominated landscape, we know that the nest success, the percent of nest that hatch is much less so than in landscapes that are dominated by permanent cover, be it pasture or CRP or whatever you have out there. It may or may not be related to the fact that you get these big parcels of pasture or permanent cover. You get more coyotes and fewer foxes. Foxes are harder on ducks than coyotes are. But overall, when you get a piece of permanent cover, unless it's an isolated little tiny patch of a quarter section of 160 acres surrounded by a huge area of cultivated land while every predator is going to migrate into that little parcel and hammer the ducks. But if you get enough of it out there in the landscape, you get a much higher nest success, particularly for pintails of patching. So when we've studied pastures in Saskatchewan, we're getting in the neighborhood of 15 to 20% nest success, which is tremendous considering most ducks are only getting 10%. But they're nesting in little pond fringes and little bits of habitat here and there. But then as we talked about earlier in the cropland, those pintails that nest in the cropland are down to about 5% nesting success. So the permanent cover CRP, pastures, hay land is a good thing, not just for pintails but for all ducks. It seems to be the majority of information suggests we're really helping ducks when we do that. The landscape dominated by cultivation, whether it's because the pintails are nesting right in the cultivation and getting hammered by predators or machinery, or even just the reduction of the overall cover where every blue wing and mallard and gadwall and shovelers is nesting in the little ring around the slew or the little clump of shrubs, or a little fence line or right away here or there, they end up only getting about 10% of the nests that hatch. So having this permanent cover, this taller cover, in terms of pin tails, they don't need the tall cover. They just need land that's not annually cultivated. They do very well. So it's a wonderful thing for pin tails to get to any kind of permanent cover out there and they'll do very good. And when you're talking about sort of a bigger, broader perspective, you know, native prairie, the biodiversity in native prairie, not just from helping ducks, helping pin tails, helping all the other bird community. You know, we should get huge buy-in from the general bird community, bird watching community, nature lovers out there. And you can replicate, over time, you can replicate native prairie if you seed, cultivate it down, land down to the right mixture of plants, grasses, and forbs. And so you can help everything from, you name it, just about every vertebrate animal and invertebrate will be in there. And the biodiversity of the gargantuan, which might help us in some ways to get this broader community support for programs that are going out there to help a broad diversity of wildlife.

No, certainly. No doubt about it. And that little brief snippet of information there just shows you and shows us as hunters really just how complex all this is and how many variables are at play. Because you get factions that are totally concerned about flooded corn in Missouri or some heated pond somewhere else. And those things on the grand landscape of all this are really not that big a factor. And these other things that are going on that are impacting populations are, they are, because Cason and I say it all the time on here, if we had 10 million mallards or we had 4 million pintails, we wouldn't be worried about any of this stuff. We'd all think everything's going great. And when we're not there, we tend to look for reasons why. But some of the things maybe the hunting community is focused on, there's maybe a little bit of wasted energy because some of these stuff we've talked about on these last two week shows are really the drivers of what we're going to see in the air.

One thing we haven't mentioned that I'd like to bring up, you're probably aware that when it comes to the pintails too, that thank goodness this population rise in the Eastern Dakotas and Montanans has come about. If it wasn't for that, in some cases, the prairie nesting pintail population would be in very dire straits. And I don't know, they've also got more ponds than they've had historically, in the particular Eastern Dakotas. And I don't know if that's a short-term change in the weather, whether it's a long-term thing and it will continue in the future. But if it wasn't for the ponds and the pintails in the Eastern Dakotas, the situation would look much worse than it is today. I don't know that those birds would just pop up to Canada. There's some good news there, whatever is going on in Eastern Dakotas.

Yeah, that's a fact. Even though they don't have the historical production rate that Prairie Canada has, there may be some shifts afoot. It may take a while to see that. But from our perspective on the southern end of the flyway, we'd much rather see the ducks settle there than bypass Prairie Canada and go into the parklands or into the boreal forests. Because, as we mentioned earlier, those ducks didn't make it back down south as far as we are last year. And their little radar beacon goes off that says they only want to be so far away from getting back to breeding grounds. So we may see some shifts. And I think guys on the southern end of the flyway, that'd be a welcome shift if ducks started settling in the Dakotas and made their trips south more in their range than we saw last year.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, I guess, you may consider it a sort of a piece of good news, if you will, that the pin tail has gotten tremendous help in terms of the habitat situation in the eastern Dakotas. If it wasn't for that, I think it would be even much more dire for the prairie nesting population of pin tails. Yeah.

I think you're right. I think you're right. Well, Dave, and we appreciate you coming on the show and talking about pin tails. We have not spent a lot of time on them, other than little anecdotal conversations when this harvest piece came out and everything changed related to, you know, how many we can shoot. So, and it left a lot of us scratching our head a little bit, but I think this episode definitely helped us and we appreciate your insight.

I appreciate being asked, Brent, Cason, it's a topic near and dear to my heart, so I'm happy to talk about it. And anything we said today, as you pointed out, not disparaging of the great people that worked on the AHM, just another viewpoint from myself that I still have some concerns and we'll see what the next five to 10 years brings.

That's right. That's right. That's exactly it. But yeah. All right. We appreciate everybody listening. You can check us out online at thestandardsportsman.com or on social media at thestandardsportsman. Please tell all your friends about the show and we'll catch you next time.