Latest / Ducks Unlimited Podcast / Ep. 594 – Mallards of the Great Lakes – New Research into Population Declines

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Ep. 594 – Mallards of the Great Lakes – New Research into Population Declines · Ducks Unlimited Podcast

• Mike Brasher: Hey everybody, I am Dr. Mike Brasher. I'm going to be your host on this episode and we have another science topic to bring to you today and it involves mallards and it relates to mallards in the Great Lakes region. It's a topic that or a group of birds that we haven't spoken much about in the four or five years that we've been doing the podcast. We've had our eye on some research that was underway and knew that eventually we would have the people involved in that research on to talk about it. Today is that day, and I'm happy to be hosting this episode with our two guests. Joining us on the line, soon-to-be Dr. Ben Luukkonen, joining all the way from Michigan. Ben, great to have you here. Ben Luukkonen: Thanks, Mike. Really appreciate the opportunity to be involved. Mike Brasher: And a good friend of mine, a fellow Ducks Unlimited employee and a science geek on the waterfowl side of things, Dr. John Colussy. Also, in Michigan, with our Great Lakes and Atlantic Region office. John, it's great to have you on the podcast, I think, for the first time. John Coluccy: Yeah, this is the first time. I've been ducking you pretty good there for a while, and you finally got me. Mike Brasher: That's right. I think we tried to rope you into a Black Duck episode some time ago. managed to find a conflict on your calendar, and so we pushed that one. Still haven't gotten back to that one yet, but we will. John Coluccy: Yeah, yeah, we should. We should. There'll be a good opportunity there, I think, with some of the ongoing research that's going to be wrapping up here in the not-too-distant future. Mike Brasher: Yeah, we'll do some quick introductions here, Ben. I'll start with you. I introduced you as soon to be Dr. Ben Luukkonen. So this research was part of your PhD work there at Michigan State. You were telling me that you've completed all the degree requirements, just sort of the formality of going through the official kind of conferring of the diploma, those types of things. Very soon, Dr. Ben Lucan. But Ben, to start with, tell folks about yourself. Where are you from? What's your upbringing? How did you make it to Michigan State? And then a little bit later on, we'll talk about sort of what's next for you. But just introduce yourself to our audience. Ben Luukkonen: Yeah. So I grew up in Southern Michigan and I think I had kind of both a traditional but also maybe a non-traditional introduction to waterfowl. So traditional in the sense that I grew up in a hunting family. My dad and grandpa were avid hunters, including duck hunters. And so I was hunting, fishing, and just spending time outdoors from an early age. But I think maybe a little bit non-traditional in the sense that my dad was an avian research scientist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. And so I also had a very early introduction to doing research and some of my earliest memories of being involved I included banding Canada geese at about five years old. And so both of those things kind of instilled an early interest in wildlife and specifically in waterfowl. And so I knew from a fairly pretty early age that I wanted to pursue a career in wildlife research and management. That led me to doing an undergraduate degree at Michigan State University in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. That didn't scare me away from academia and research, and so I continued on and did a master's degree at Iowa State University. And that was a project that looked at movement and survival of Canada geese in Iowa and tried to help address the question of, what is the efficacy of hunter harvest in managing urban goose populations and addressing And then I was fortunate to have the opportunity to come back to Michigan State University to work on this PhD on Great Lakes Mallards. Mike Brasher: Ben, I had forgotten about your research there at Iowa State and seemed to recall that being a project that I had on my early list of topics to cover on the podcast. But other things happened and never came back to that. So you missed out, uh, whatever, however many years ago that would have been, but we got you now. Also a fun little story. I'm not sure if you would be aware of this and John, I don't, I don't even know if you'd be aware of this, but I actually went through an interview, uh, been with, with your dad. Um, it would have been back in 2004, 2005, I interviewed for the, um, I don't know if, I don't remember if it was the state waterfowl biologist position. I don't think it would have been, it would have been the position under him at that time. But I, I kind of knew your dad had met him and, but we didn't know one another all that well, but yeah, interviewed, drove up from, from Columbus, Ohio to, uh, to East Lansing, interviewed. Obviously I did not get offered that job, but, um, did you by chance know that I had interviewed for that job way back when? Ben Luukkonen: No, I had no idea, but I suppose things worked out just fine for you. Mike Brasher: Yeah, they turned out. I think they turned out well for everyone there. So, John, I probably told you that before. John Coluccy: I don't think I heard that story, either that or I forgot, but I'm getting a little old, so you never know. Mike Brasher: I could always blame it on my connection with Ohio State as a reason for not being hired in Michigan, right? That's true. John Coluccy: Well, that's Michigan State country up that way, though. Mike Brasher: Oh, well, yeah, that's true. That's true. So, um, anyway, yeah, that was, you know, there's some other stories that I think we'll probably get to Ben with, with people that have been influential in your life, a mutual friend of ours, Greg Soulier, any opportunity that we have to kind of mention his name and, throw shade his way, we'll probably take advantage of that. But anyway, yeah, your last name is one that people from that region will likely be familiar with because of your dad working in that profession for so many years and being such an influential figure for waterfowl, wetland conservation, certainly in Michigan, but the broader North American landscape, his involvement in Mississippi Flyaway is a great friend to all of us. Um, we were obviously saddened to lose him a couple of years ago, but delighted to have you carry on that name in this field and, and looking forward to sharing some of the results from your research with our listeners here. I know they'll be interested in it. And John, from your, um, your background, you've. been with DU quite a number of years. I'll let you tell folks about that, but what about your upbringing, personal life, in terms of what got you into this field and then what you do for DU now? John Coluccy: I was born and raised behind the Cheddar Curtain, referred to as Wisconsin. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. And like Ben, I was brought up in an outdoor family. I had a lot of exposure to fishing and camping and hunting through My mother's grandfather and my father and my mother loved to camp and things like that. So, we spent a good deal of time outside and traveled along with my father, did a lot of pheasant hunting. We did some Canada goose hunting over at Horicon Marsh and that really tugged at the heartstrings for me. That was kind of the beginning of the waterfowl, I guess, passion. Kind of lit that fire. you know, early on was always enthralled with the outdoor life and field and stream magazines. And there were all these romantic stories about being a conservation agent, a warden, you know, or a forest ranger and things like that. So, those things kind of spoke to me early on, but I, you know, ultimately didn't know exactly what angle or where I wanted to end up in that whole field. I ended up going to school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After a short stint at a junior college, I did play college baseball at the junior college level and then transferred back to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Played there for three years, but also was involved in enrolled in the Natural Resources Wildlife Ecology program and that's what my bachelor's degree was in. Completed that there and then I spent a fair bit of time trying to find where I wanted to go after my baseball career was done and I had my undergraduate degree. I went out and got some experience as a field technician working with a lot of different masters researchers on various topics from Arctic and snowshoe hare to Canada goose lead poisoning and you know, finally kind of landed in waterfowl and figured out that's what my passion was and then put the plan in play to go back to graduate school and ended up at the University of Missouri with Dr. Ronald Drobny as my advisor and much like Ben, working on resident candidate geese in central Missouri. And so, I worked on two degree programs there, told my wife that we were going to be there for three or four years doing my master's degree and we ended up there for about eight and came out of that with a master's and a PhD. which was great, and 2001, ended up with Ducks Unlimited at our national headquarters there in Memphis, and about a year later, transferred up to our Great Lakes Atlantic Regional Office here in Michigan, and have been here ever since. So, 23 years in May, I've been working for Ducks Unlimited, first as a regional biologist doing their on-the-ground conservation programs in Wisconsin, which was really, really cool. to be able to go back and actually do some wetland restoration and enhancement work on Horicon Marsh in places that I hunted as a kid with my father. And then, you know, ultimately moved into conservation planning and science. It's kind of where my heart was in my training. And then now kind of director of conservation planning and science here in our Great Lakes Atlantic region and helping inform our on-the-ground conservation delivery. Mike Brasher: And John, you are one of four directors of conservation planning at our regional level. Frequent listeners will have heard from Dr. Mark Petrie out in the western region. Dr. Dale James was our previous director of conservation planning and science in the southern region, and he was on at least once, maybe twice. Dr. Aaron Pierce is now that person. And then in the Great Plains Regional Office, we have Dr. Kaylin Kimmick. And so, the four of y'all, along with some of our other science staff, including me, kind of get in… We get to collaborate with a lot of our research partners at the university level, at the federal, state level. to investigate key questions that we in Ducks Unlimited and a lot of our partners are asking about sort of the state of waterfowl and the state of waterfowl habitats. And this discussion today, I think it's a great example of some of the role that we play as science staff within the organization, how closely We work with the actual researchers, whether it be the professor at the university or the graduate students that are actually doing most of the work in the field, collecting the data. There are very few examples where we're the ones that are doing all of the research as Ducks Unlimited. Most of the cases, most of the times, we're partnering. with others that are actually doing that and we're helping to kind of guide it. And then importantly, we take that information and use it to improve, refine, or reinforce, if the case may be, some of the conservation programs that we're doing. So, just a little bit of a detour there to kind of help our listeners connect some of the people that they're going to be listening to. and then think about how that information is actually used to advance DU's mission. So, with regard to this topic, the title, Ben, of your research is Great Lakes Mallard Movement and Population Dynamics. We're going to kind of break all that down here as we go through this, but this project has been, well, how many years did you, were you actually collecting data? Was it three or four years? We had three field seasons. Three field seasons, okay. And so there are a number of projects that we invest in that are kind of of this same theme, movements, population dynamics. We've studied these things as a collection of scientists across North America for a number of decades using various methodologies and data sets. And one of the things that's enabling us to answer questions at kind of finer levels now than ever before, these GPS tracking devices, and that's one of the aspects of your project that people are going to hear about. But there are a lot of other aspects of this as well. So what I want to do first, I think, is have John talk about this idea of Great Lakes Mallards. In the waterfowl management community, there's very good reason to kind of think about different subpopulations of mallards for various management purposes and conservation purposes. And so, here we're talking specifically about Great Lakes mallards. So, John, can I turn it over to you to help our listeners kind of understand what we mean when we say Great Lakes mallards and why is it important for us to partition out this subpopulation? Yeah. John Coluccy: I guess loosely, we kind of define Great Lakes mallards as those mallards that settle and breed in the Great Lakes. And so in the Great Lakes region, we're fortunate enough in three of the states where the higher densities of breeding mallards occur to have long-term population surveys that date back as far as 1968 in Minnesota, 1973 in Wisconsin, and 1991 in Michigan. And so, we've got long-term data streams that we can track the population trajectories of these birds over time. And so, there are other breeding mallards that occur in the Great Lakes states like Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, but the densities there are much lower. And so, states have not invested in aerial surveys like these other states. that are kind of the core breeding states. Obviously mallards across the border in Ontario, just across from us here in Detroit, would be included in that. They are included more in the eastern survey area than some of the other traditional survey area that is covered. I'm sure you guys have covered that on the podcast previously, some of these breeding waterfowl surveys and their geospatial locations. Mike Brasher: Yeah, we have. I don't think we've covered that topic from a research standpoint. We certainly talk about it in the annual discussion of the Breeding Population Survey. We talk about the Eastern Survey area and some of the things that go into it, but yeah. Not from a research standpoint yet. And so we've defined sort of that general group of birds. What about its importance in harvest? A lot of our listeners are hunters. And where do those birds contribute, I guess, in terms of… Where do they factor in terms of helping to set regulations? What can you tell us about that? John Coluccy: Yeah, hugely important. There's a great affinity amongst waterfowl hunters for big green-headed ducks, and mallards make fine table fare, as the three of us probably know here, and everybody that's out there. And mallards typically are the number one harvested duck in the Great Lakes region, elsewhere primarily as well. And number one state, duck harvest. And what's important is that from a harvest perspective is that a lot of these local mallards, these Great Lakes mallards, contribute substantially to the harvest in the Great Lakes. For example, in Michigan, an estimated 79% of the mallards harvested in the state during a duck season are produced regionally here in the Great Lakes region. So they're super important. We do get influenced by other populations of mallards. The Mid-Continent Prairie Pothole region sends mallards over this way, but the degree is variable depending upon where you are. And the same thing with Eastern Canada as well. But these locally… produced birds are really important for our local hunters. Mike Brasher: And we invest in studies kind of specific to this Great Lakes group of mallards because, as we've learned through decades of insight from data, they're a little different. Those landscapes are a little different. It's not the prairie pothole region. It is a fundamentally different landscape, and Ben, you'll probably talk about this as we get into your research. Some of the demographic drivers, some of the things that are most important to infecting the ups and downs of the populations for this group of birds are a little different than what we think about and what we talk about for driving the ups and downs of of population levels in, let's say, the Prairie Pothole region, the Western Boreal Forest. Now, one of the things that I guess I'll add here, just a little additional tidbit, is that Great Lakes Mallards, from a harvest perspective, adaptive harvest management perspective, Great Lakes Mallards, the breeding numbers from those three states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, are included in that total mid-continent mallard adaptive harvest management kind of Regulation setting process so we have a western stock of mallards we have a midcontinent stock of mallards and then. There's sort of Eastern Mallards, but their harvest regulations in Atlantic Flyaway are set a little bit differently now. But I just wanted to kind of make that connection also into the importance of this work and the importance of Great Lakes Mallards actually does influence harvest regulations for the entire Central and Mississippi Flyaway through that Mid-Continent Mallard AHN process. So, this group of birds is kind of of heightened concern right now. We've, I guess for a couple of decades, well let me just let me kind of back up a little bit I guess John and and you can you can prompt Ben to speak to this if you'd like to but give people an idea of what we've observed with regard to the trajectory of Great Lakes Mallards and some of the past research that we've invested in and then kind of ultimately leading up to where we are and the importance of this research now, but what's the trajectory of that population been looking like through the years? John Coluccy: Yeah, I mean the heightened interest is due to the long-term population decline that we've observed in Great Lakes Mallards through those three breeding waterfowl surveys that I mentioned previously, and I'll ask Ben to jump in here too, but you know since about 1997 we've we've observed about a 59% decrease in the breeding mallard population based on our aerial spring survey estimates. And so we went from about 1.1 million in 1997 down to about 460,000 as recent as 2023 based on our survey. So that's a real concern. And while other mallard populations have have increased particularly the mid continent mallard population now we're in a decline now with prolonged and persistent drought that's been going on those two populations used to track each other pretty pretty closely you know so as things were going for those populations they although they were on different scales obviously they they tracked each other till about 2006 and then there was this departure where mid continent mallards increased and we continue to decline here in the Great Lakes. And so that's that's kind of the story there. Mike Brasher: I think right now we will take a break and we'll come back and we'll get into the research and the results. Got some exciting stuff to share. So stay with us, folks. We'll be right back. Mike Brasher: All right, welcome back, everybody. Ben, what can you add to that in terms of maybe the hypotheses, the different ideas that people had and have developed here in recent years about possible, you know, the potential explanations for that decline? Where do we stand on that? And I think that kind of feeds right into your research. Ben Luukkonen: Yeah, one of the things you touched on is that the environmental conditions are different between the Prairie Pothole region, Prairie Parkland regions, or just more generally the prairies compared to the Great Lakes. It is maybe somewhat perplexing that both Great Lakes Mallards and the remainder of the Mid-Continent population tracked one another until that So one of our hypotheses will maybe there's been some sort of kind of large habitat change at a landscape level in the Great Lakes region, and one of the things we do know is that. in the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes Joint Venture area, which broadly includes the Great Lakes region, we've lost almost one and a half million hectares of grassland and pasture from 2001 through 2016. And so one of our hypotheses was that that large-scale loss of grassland could be influential and result in a loss of upland nesting cover available to mallards, and so perhaps productivity has declined. Mike Brasher: 1.6 million hectares. What does that convert to in terms of acres? I'm willing to bet that the majority of our listenership is not going to be able to relate to hectares. Ben Luukkonen: Yeah, I should have had the acre value. Don't quote me on this, but I think it's a little over 3 million acres. John Coluccy: I think the multiplier is 2.47 acres per hectare, as I recall. Mike Brasher: Okay, so a little bit over 3 million acres. All right, so what was next? Sorry to interrupt you there, but I wanted to make sure I did that conversion. Ben Luukkonen: Yeah, that's good. A couple of the other research questions or hypotheses were related to a distribution change. interested in a couple of different spatial scales because one of the ways that the Great Lakes region could lose breeding mallards is if female mallards that are produced or hatched in the Great Lakes states are leaving to nest elsewhere in other regions, such as the prairies or farther north in the Hudson Bay lowlands. And it's difficult to assess emigration or a distribution shift Using our banding data alone, especially when the library capture rates are low and so we didn't feel that we had adequate data to assess that just with with with the existing long term banding data. And then the other thing related to this issue of distribution change is many of the banders and state and federal managers have anecdotally noticed this seemingly increasing trend in the number of mallards that are using urban areas or large cities. including during the breeding period. And these aerial surveys that we talked about earlier that are used to track changes in mallard populations are not really designed to count mallards in cities. As you might imagine, it's not feasible or not desirable to fly a plane really low over large cities, and it's probably difficult to count Mallard using those areas. And so we wanted to assess also whether Mallard distribution was changing among habitat types more locally, and for some reason were Mallards increasingly using these urban developed areas. And so to get at both of these distributional changes, we decided to use GPS, GSM transmitters, as you alluded to earlier, which allow us to track fine scale movements and as well as large scale movements for these individuals that we put transmitters on. Mike Brasher: You know, Ben, as I'm listening to you describe these different hypotheses and potential explanations for the decline, It reminds me of similar conversations that we have regarding any other population of interest. When we're talking about demographic rates, as we scientists like to use those words, we're talking about survival, we're talking about reproduction, and then we can decompose all those things into different parts of survival, hunting survival, hunting season survival, or harvest mortality. natural mortality and then all the different reproductive rates. But generally, at the high level, we're talking about several different things that can affect that trend that we're observing in a population level. We could see a change in survival. We could see a change in productivity. We could see a redistribution of birds, which is what you're talking about now. And that redistribution, typically we think of it occurring as moving out of the region, where they're no longer captured in the survey. But it just occurred to me that there's another kind of Great Lakes mallards present a unique twist on that, where they could be redistributing still within the region, but into urban areas that aren't captured on the surveys and therefore you wouldn't have seen them. Am I kind of grasping what you're saying there as a potential another kind of tweak on that explanation? Ben Luukkonen: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think a lot of the managers who conduct these surveys have had concern about just their ability to count Mallards in urban areas and so there was You know, maybe some question, to what degree is this decline actually a loss of birds and to what degree is it maybe undercounting the birds that are there? John Coluccy: Yeah, it kind of becomes a scale thing. You know, the emigration, when you think of that, you think of them emigrating out of the Great Lakes all together. In the case that you're describing, Mike and Ben, they could be emigrating into urban areas and we're just not able to count them anymore because of safety issues. Mike Brasher: This is a side question. Is there any ongoing effort to do the Lincoln-Peterson estimation method for the Great Lakes Mallards? Is it good enough? There's probably a few additional assumptions that may not be met yet regarding the ability to estimate a population size at that particular scale, right? Ben Luukkonen: Yeah, we've talked some about that. And one of the limiting factors is you need an estimate of total harvest that is from the population of interest. And of course, as we heard earlier, Great Lakes harvest Mallard harvest is made up primarily of local birds that we consider to be from the Great Lakes population, but also includes migrant birds. And so there's some issues there with the harvest estimates. And so that's maybe one of the primary challenges to using Lincoln estimates. Mike Brasher: Yeah, I can see that. So we're talking about a declining population of mallards, as we're observing it from the data sets that we have available, trying to figure out what's driving that. Was there anything else, Ben, that kind of with regard to setting up your research that we needed to cover here? I know we'll get into the specific objectives, but any background that we needed to cover? Ben Luukkonen: There was one more major research question that we had that's really only come up in the last four or five years here, and that's genetics. I know that you've had several episodes talking about malaria genetics in North America, so I guess I'll leave it to you, Mike, to decide how deeply we go into that rabbit hole. Just briefly, we know from recent work by Filaretsky and colleagues that mallards in Eastern North America have substantial introgression of domestic game farm mallard genes. And so we were concerned, well, interested, I guess, is that genetic introgression occurring in mallards in the Great Lakes region and then concern as to whether that's potentially a contributor to this decline. Mike Brasher: Yeah, I think you've set it up well there. I don't think we need to go into very much more detail right now because most of the people listening to this podcast will have heard about that larger issue in much more detail. The question that I have though, and I will say that your research is fascinating because of some of what it discovered related to the differences between these birds and their genetic signatures, and we will get into that shortly, was that Because the timing of when this research was being conceived probably would have predated the realization that we've got a fairly high degree of Game Farm Mallard, um, I guess presence in the Great Lakes. I mean, because you've been doing this route for about four years, some of Phil's initial discoveries in that regard kind of only came about about four or five years ago. So the timing on this was pretty incredible. And so I just, uh, When did you say, we need to be collecting blood from these birds that we're marking? I mean, obviously, you had to have done it right at the start, because I think you collected it from all the birds that you marked. But tell me about those early days and that realization of, this might be something worth looking at. Ben Luukkonen: Yeah, I do think the timing was very fortuitous. If this project had occurred even, you know, two, three years earlier, we may not have had that knowledge about Gamefire Mallard releases, and we may, you know, have not included genetics as a major component in the project. you know, the project was kind of conceived just, you know, shortly before I got on the project. But I can recall early on from being in the project that, you know, we were aware of this genetic issue and there was interest in including that. But I don't think anybody had any idea just how big and how significant of a component that would turn out to be. Yeah. Mike Brasher: I think I described in an earlier episode with Phil and Dr. Brian Davis that some of what we're learning from various studies take us into this realm of true scientific discovery. It's a piece of information that we previously were totally unaware of. A lot of the work that we're doing now across various research projects are providing additional, very valuable, incremental bits of information about phenomena that we've had some understanding and awareness about through the years. But every now and then we come across something where we're like, holy cow, did not know this was happening. And this is one of those things. And so your research provides some of the more interesting things that I've seen related to this. So we'll get into that. I think we probably teased that enough. Before we get into the research, the how you did it, where, we've kind of covered the why. But all the other specifics, we're getting close to wanting to take a break here. But before we do that, let's talk about the partners that made this possible. None of this happens as a result of a single entity. It's a lot of different people and organizations and funders that contribute to this. So Ben, highlight those people to kind of let folks realize that this is a true partnership effort anytime we do a project of this nature. Ben Luukkonen: Yeah, I'll just start by saying we were really fortunate to have awesome contributions from a huge number of partners and research of this scale is just not possible without partnerships. So the partners included, in no particular order, Ducks Unlimited, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Upper Mississippi and Great Lakes Joint Venture, Michigan State University and the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the Illinois Natural History Survey and Forbes Biological Station, Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Franklin College, Winus Point Marsh Conservancy, and the University of Texas, El Paso, and the Levretsky Lab. I'll just add that we had a total of five states involved on this project and these contributions either in terms of funding, in terms of logistical support to capture and mark birds, was absolutely critical in this project being a success. Mike Brasher: John, anything to add there from a Ducks Unlimited perspective? Yeah. John Coluccy: Yeah, for sure. I don't get the fun of getting out in the field much anymore these days, as you know, Mike. I did get to join Ben a couple of times, but one of the roles in And my job here at Ducks Unlimited is to help develop research, but also find support for research and to support work being undertaken by graduate students on projects that align with specific information needs we have. And we're greatly interested in the Great Lakes Mallards and their decline. And so we were able to We were able to align with a very generous donor, Sunshine Charitable Foundation out of the Chicago area was very interested in this research and provided a very generous gift, which allowed us to provide a very, very large number of radio transmitters for the study. So that was kind of our major contribution to the study. Mike Brasher: Appreciate y'all pointing all that out. You know, just like we say that volunteers are what make this organization, Ducks Unlimited, who it is and what we've been able to do. It is our research, funding partners, many of which are also our Ducks Unlimited members and donors. But more importantly, and over the years through financial and in-kind contributions, we've leaned on our state, federal, university partners for making all of this happen. And this is another great example of that and how we leverage all of those different entities from the donors to states and the federal agencies to make this happen. So, appreciate you pointing that out. All right. Well, we've been going for quite a while here. We still have a fair bit of information to cover. So, let's take a break. We're going to separate, I think, this into two episodes. So, if that's all right with you, Ben and John, stay with us and we'll pick up on a subsequent episode. So, thanks, Ben. Thanks, John, for being part of this. Sounds great. Thanks for the opportunity. Yep. Thanks, Mike. Special thanks to our guests on today's episode, Dr. Ben Luukkonen and Dr. John Colussy. We appreciate them taking the time to step us through this. We've got a fair bit more to go, and so we will pick that up on the next episode. Also, thank my producer, Chris Isaac, for the great work he does with this. And we thank you, the listener, for your time and for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.