Latest / Ducks Unlimited Podcast / 2025 WATERFOWL SEASON OUTLOOK (Ep. 704)

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2025 WATERFOWL SEASON OUTLOOK (Ep. 704) · Ducks Unlimited Podcast

• 0:01
  VO: The following episode of the DU podcast features a video component. For the full experience, visit the Ducks Unlimited channel on YouTube. Subscribe and enjoy.
• 0:11
  Can we do a mic check, please? Everybody, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host, doctor Mike Brazier.
• 0:16
  I'm your host, Katie Burke.
• 0:18
  I'm your host, doctor Jared Hemphith. And I'm your host, Matt Harrison.
• 0:29
  VO: Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, the only podcast about all things waterfowl. From hunting insights to science based discussions about ducks, geese, and issues affecting waterfowl and wetlands conservation in North America. The DU podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails.
• 0:55
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• 1:17
  Mike Brasher: Everyone, welcome in to the 2025 Ducks Unlimited waterfowl season outlook in partnership with On X Hunt. We are live from the Ducks Unlimited studio here at 1 Waterfowl Way, Memphis, Tennessee. I am Mike Brasher, senior waterfowl scientist here at Ducks Unlimited. I'm gonna be your host one of your host on this event tonight, and we are excited. We have a number of guests joining us, a couple in studio.
• 1:42
  We have several online. We're gonna get to those introductions here in a moment. It is September 2. Fall is in the air. Cool weather is is is coming down later this week.
• 1:53
  We're all excited about it. A lot a lot of folks got out, went hunting this week. We're gonna get some reports on that straight from the field from up in Canada. And here we are again in what has become a bit of a account an annual occurrence for us here at Ducks Unlimited, to bring you live the coverage of the US Fish and Wildlife Services Waterfowl Population Status Report, a treasure trove of information and data. It informs everything from conservation to harvest management and all sorts of other, probably a few conversations in the duck blind as well, and debates on social media every now and then.
• 2:27
  We might hear some of those. So we've got a lot of stuff to cover tonight. The one thing that we're doing a little bit different this year, substantially different from from past years, excuse the rattling of the papers here, is we are doing this the night of the report release, and so we've not had as much time to prepare. It's gonna make it a little bit more fun, we hope, less formal, and we're going to get right to the introductions of our guests, and then we have a few slides to present here, step through the high level results from this year's survey, then we've got several periods of discussion. We're going to have a mid break at the 08:00 hour central time.
• 3:08
  So let's get started. I'm happy to welcome in Studio Lake Pickle. I got to find your name here or your title, on x hunt man hunt on x hunt, marketing manager and host of Backwoods University at MeatEater. Lake, thanks so much for being here.
• 3:25
  Lake Pickle: Man, I'm I'm happy to be here. I've I always pay attention to these things when they come out, and but the most official capacity that I've been involved in this before now is usually like a screenshot of what DU puts out, and then it makes it into a group chat with guys that I duck hunt with. So this is definitely the most official official version of this that I've been involved in, but I'm happy to be here.
• 3:45
  Mike Brasher: A little bit different this year, and to my right, Jimbo Robinson, you got a long title here as well, Managing Director of Event Marketing and Field Support.
• 3:53
  Jimbo Robinson: I'm excited. Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited about the rawness of tonight and what really the closest to we can get to the report and and to hear what people's initial thoughts were. I know what mine were, and and I know what what Lake said. That that's what I used to do is is send it out, group chat, and go, not bad, or better than I thought, or, you know, and just to get the conversation started.
• 4:19
  Lake Pickle: What do y'all think?
• 4:20
  Jimbo Robinson: What do y'all think? Or, you know, but excited to be here, and thanks for letting me join y'all.
• 4:27
  Mike Brasher: Yeah, having you here is really it brings a unique angle to it. We've changed up the guest panel every year trying to find the right mix of science and industry partners, and then you bring a little bit of a different sort of angle because you work so closely with our volunteers, with the people that make Ducks Unlimited what it is at that grassroots level, and so you hear these questions sort of at a different level than we do sort of in the biological realm, so it's really cool to have you here. Former IRD. I'm Yes, yeah, right? I'm sure that
• 5:02
  Lake Pickle: I'll just filter for you.
• 5:03
  Mike Brasher: I'm sure what you get is a lot more raw than what we do, so I appreciate that. I'm gonna go online now and introduce the seven folks that we have joining us from the field, and I'm going to look down here to make sure I get their names and titles correct. Doctor. Dan Smith, waterfowl scientist from Ducks Unlimited's Western Region. Dan, great to have you back with us.
• 5:25
  Dan Smith: Thanks, Mike. Always fun to talk about all the data surrounding death numbers and hypothesize how that might influence fall.
• 5:31
  Mike Brasher: Next, we're gonna go to doctor Scott Stephens, the senior director of Prairie and Boreal Conservation Strategy with DU Inc. No stranger to the podcast, joining us from a remote location in Bismarck, North Dakota.
• 5:42
  Scott Stephens: Hey, Mike. Always happy to talk about ducks, so glad to be here.
• 5:45
  Mike Brasher: And I think you have just you know, you've been living up to your motto, life is short, you better hunt. You're you and Matt Dyson are fresh alpha hunts, so we're gonna hear about that. Sarah Fleming, the winner of tonight's longest title contest, managing director of conservation program for the Great Lakes Atlantic Region. So, Sarah, great to have you with us tonight.
• 6:04
  Sarah Fleming: Yeah. I look forward to chatting about the Northeast program where I spend a lot of my time in the marsh.
• 6:09
  Mike Brasher: Another return guest to this particular event is Jim Ronquist, vice president of development with Drake Waterfowl. Jimbo, we got two Jimbos. We might just end up calling you Ronquist. But yeah. So Jimbo Ronquest great to have you.
• 6:24
  Jimbo Ronquest: As always, a pleasure to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.
• 6:27
  Mike Brasher: Now we have Josh Dooley, goose specialist with US Fish and Wildlife Service division of migratory bird management, one of the preeminent goose goose experts when it comes to the type of information that we're gonna be talking about tonight. Josh, great to have you.
• 6:42
  Josh Dooley: Yep. Great to be here. Glad to be on the podcast.
• 6:45
  Mike Brasher: And kind of rounding out that sort of the the co management of element of what happens with migratory birds, representative from a state agency, Taylor Finger, game bird ecologist with Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Taylor, thanks for joining us.
• 7:00
  Taylor Finger: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
• 7:02
  Mike Brasher: And Doctor. Matt Dyson, been on every one of these. Great to have you back again, waterfowl research scientist with Ducks Unlimited Canada. Matt, thanks for joining us.
• 7:13
  Matt Dyson: Thanks, Mike. Good to be back. Looking forward to this tonight.
• 7:16
  Mike Brasher: All right. Well, we are going to again thank tonight's partner with On X Hunt. Appreciate their support of Ducks Unlimited, of what we're doing here in bringing the duck numbers to all of our folks out there in the social media land, in web land. We appreciate On X as a partner in everything that we're doing here. I think what we are gonna do right now is jump right into this presentation.
• 7:40
  I'm gonna step through, we're gonna present some highlights, and then we'll have a group discussion, sort of a free for all. So, Chris, can we get that presentation? The thing I have to do here and want to do every year is thank the people that make this happen, our US Fish and Wildlife Service, Canadian Wildlife Service, state and provincial partners that are all sort of agency members of these flyway councils that you see represented with their logos here, the Pacific Flyway Council, Central Flyway Council, Mississippi Flyway Council, and the Atlantic Flyway Council, they are the folks that do all of this work, they are the folks that collect the data. Ducks Unlimited, as I said, has the pleasure of communicating out these numbers. They are not Ducks Unlimited's number.
• 8:21
  We might have a staff or two that are involved in data collection somewhere along the way, but it is our state, federal, provincial partners that do all of this work, and we thank them greatly. So let's go back to our next slide here, Chris, and let me see if I can figure this out. Okay, there are two reports, well, actually, are several reports that have been released today. These are two of the more notable ones. The first is the US Fish and Wildlife Service waterfowl population status report.
• 8:45
  You're gonna see some of the results from that here in a moment. That's where we get all the all the good data about the population sizes, whether they increase over last year or how they are relative to their long term average. Then there's the adaptive harvest management report for the 2627 hunting season, and that is where they present the results. They take all that data from the waterfowl population status report and integrate it into harvest management strategies, and it delivers recommendations for harvest regulations for next year, we're going to touch on those briefly. And so orientation here to some of what you're going to hear, we're going to talk about two things, sort of the traditional survey area and the Eastern survey area.
• 9:25
  You see these represented geographically here. If you've been a past viewer of this, these will be familiar to you. The other thing that I'll point out is if you want more in-depth analysis from Ducks Unlimited, some comments from our leadership, go to www.ducks.org/ducknumbers. You'll find a lot of great information there. Okay.
• 9:45
  Here are the numbers, folks, fresh from the report. One of the first things that you'll find in that waterfowl population status report is this right here, the estimate of total prairie ponds in US and Canada, 4,180,000, down 19% from 2024, down 20% from the long term average. We're gonna break down we can kinda get into the details here, that broke down between the Canadian side and the US side, which is what this right here shows. Not a surprise if you've listened to past episodes, recent episodes of the Ducks Unlimited podcast to see that US pond count down from last year, we'll dig into that here in a moment. Canadian ponds only down 5%, but that's because it was extremely dry there last year, the same way it was this year, and it's just kind of some high level takeaways here, the things that stories, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, early spring, birds flew through, prairies were still a little bit dry, so we saw another above average abundance of ducks that settled in the Boreal forest.
• 10:44
  There were some rains that came, May and June improved things here and there. It's gonna provide some benefit to later nesters in the Prairie Region, and I think you're gonna find out as we go through here, we expect production overall to be average at best, maybe poor in some areas. There might be some bright spots here that we'll talk about. Okay, total ducks, this is the other big number, 33,980,000, virtually the same as last year, I think it was 33.988, if I'm not mistaken, that's down 4% from the long term average, you see the graph there depicting that trend. Mallard's, that's one of the other big numbers that people always look to, a lot of implications, a lot of interest in that.
• 11:25
  6.554, virtually unchanged from last year, down 1% if you do the math, but statistically no difference, but still down 17% from the long term average. Pintails, this is one that's gotten a lot of questions here the past year. We have a three pintail bag limit that we're entering into here in the twenty five-twenty six season, and we're gonna tell you here a little bit later on what you're gonna expect for the 2627 season. The estimate this year was up 13% from last year, but still remains down 41% from the long term average. American wigeon, up 9% from last year, up 22% over the long term average.
• 12:06
  Green winged teal, this is another species that nests predominantly in the boreal, down 15% from last year, but still above its long term average. Blue winged teal, this is one that I think surprised a lot of folks last year. It dropped down to a level where it sort of triggered a nine day early teal season. It's down again it's down 4% this year, now down 13% below the long term average. You can probably guess what that means for the recommendation for early teal season next year.
• 12:33
  And then another unique way of looking at some of this, you take these four prairie nesting dabblers, mallards, gadwall, shovelers, and blue wings, virtually unchanged from last year, but still down 9% from the long term average. You can look at this also by sort of separating out where these birds settle. This was a notable story last year where we saw a tremendous increase in the number of those particular prairie, typical prairie dabblers that settled in the Boreal Forest. There was a slight shift in that settling pattern this year with a little bit more in the prairies, we can maybe speculate a bit about what may have caused that. Now we have a couple of diving diver duck species to talk about that are positive stories, I think.
• 13:17
  Here, redheads up 17% over last year, up 25% from long term average. Canvas backs, similar pattern, up from last year, also up from long term average. Scalp, down a little bit from last year and down 25% from long term average. Okay. Now we're gonna take quick reactions.
• 13:35
  I wanna stay here in studio. Lake, you're the guest. What you take from that?
• 13:40
  Lake Pickle: Man, I take a lot away from it. I got more questions than I got answers. But, I mean, so many things jumped off the page. The first one being kinda habitat related, talking about the difference in the ponds, and then there's some of the the maps here in the report itself where to me it looks concerning, but that's when I ask guys like you and guys on this panel, like, is this concerning as it looks to me? And then just the just the, you know, regular Joe duck hunter in me, anybody like, Jimbo, like you were talking about earlier.
• 14:13
  When we pull up that picture that, you know, d u posted earlier today, that 1% change in mileage that you that you notated, statistically, I can look at that and go, that's no difference. So it probably would have resulted in me taking a screenshot and going not bad. But had I got a little 1% positive, we'd all be celebrating.
• 14:33
  Taylor Finger: Me and
• 14:33
  Lake Pickle: my buddies would. So I I mean, with that whether I can help it or not, that's where my head goes. Like, what what what's going on with the mallards? I can't help it. That's just where my head's at.
• 14:42
  You know?
• 14:43
  Mike Brasher: What do you think the first question you're gonna get is, or have you already gotten?
• 14:46
  Jimbo Robinson: I've already gotten it, and this is this is a good one. This was and I think this was big on social media today.
• 14:51
  Mike Brasher: Okay.
• 14:52
  Jimbo Robinson: Why don't we count wood ducks?
• 14:54
  Mike Brasher: Well, we do in the Atlantic Flyaway. We're going get to that a little bit later on. There is an index for wood ducks in the Mississippi flyaway. We we don't present that in any of the information that we release, so tomorrow we are going to Ducks Unlimited is gonna share some results from the Eastern survey area, and you're gonna see some of those tonight, sort of a sneak peek of what's gonna come out, and there is an estimate for wood ducks, but in that flyway, they're hard to survey.
• 15:21
  Jimbo Robinson: You gave me
• 15:22
  Mike Brasher: a question.
• 15:23
  Jimbo Robinson: I said, well, they're nest cav. I mean, they
• 15:26
  Mike Brasher: They're hard to survey.
• 15:27
  Josh Dooley: They're hard
• 15:27
  Jimbo Robinson: to survey.
• 15:27
  Mike Brasher: They are hard to survey. There are datasets that the waterfowl management community have used to try to index what's happening with those populations, and so some of that information is out there. They don't, you know, they they don't fluctuate fluctuate a whole lot based on what we're seeing,
• 15:40
  Jimbo Robinson: but that's a That great was a funny one today, but I mean, I kind of resort back to what Lake said. What concerns me the most is is the ponds, I think, and that's kind of what the discussion has become. I don't think that the numbers were to me, honestly, I thought the numbers were a little better than maybe I expected. I thought they would be down a little bit more, especially with with the Mallard's and some others, but that the the next year, that forecast for for
• 16:09
  Mike Brasher: You're getting ahead. Yeah. You're already I'm sorry. You're you're No. No.
• 16:12
  You're already thinking. I know.
• 16:13
  Jimbo Robinson: That's what gets me Yes. Every time is that the work's not done. It's not. You know, live for today, give us what we may get this Life
• 16:22
  Mike Brasher: is short, you better hunt.
• 16:23
  Jimbo Robinson: Better hunt. Yep. I've heard that many a times on podcasts with Doctor. Stevens, so
• 16:30
  Mike Brasher: Okay. So I have seven guests online who's itching to jump in here. Just raise your hand and I'll call on you, because I can see all seven of you right now. I'm gonna go with Doctor. Scott Stevens, top center, because I know you have you've been you've got lots to to share.
• 16:44
  Your reaction was what?
• 16:46
  Scott Stephens: I was surprised that the duck numbers weren't down further. As you know, Mike, we we made bets on what we thought they were gonna be, and you you bet
• 16:54
  Mike Brasher: I lost.
• 16:55
  Josh Dooley: Let me just
• 16:56
  Mike Brasher: say I lost.
• 16:57
  Josh Dooley: You
• 16:57
  Scott Stephens: you were predicting down more than I did, but I still predicted down more than it was. So so I was surprised by that. But, you know, the discussion about ponds and the conditions, like, I I see that every day. I saw that this past weekend. It is dry, and we are not set up to come out of that yet.
• 17:16
  Like, we need to fall across the prairies where, you know, it is so wet that people can't get out in the field to put decoys, can't get out in the field to harvest crops, and we are not there. It is bone dry across much of the prairie still.
• 17:30
  Mike Brasher: So I wanna call on Taylor real quick. Is there anything that you can add to that question, you know, about wood ducks? Why don't we why don't we count or estimate wood ducks? I mean, I I provided a little bit, but you are in those discussions much more closely than I am.
• 17:44
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. For for Wisconsin, we we do an estimate for wood ducks. You know, we primarily structure our spring survey around when mallards are, but I mean, it's when you're flying in a plane, I fly the surveys and you have to worry about leaf out because if there is any leaf out whatsoever, you're not counting any wood ducks here. They're just if it's wet and then they're in the woods, it's really hard at, you know, a 100 and 100 miles an hour, 150 feet up, 200 feet up and counting ducks. So but, yeah, from the flyaways perspective, yeah, we we just have an index.
• 18:15
  We discuss them. We actually focus more of our harvest rates and everything or look at harvest rates that we have, and that goes into how we structure our bag limits related to that, not so much the counts. Yep.
• 18:26
  Mike Brasher: And I also want to tell Lake and Jimbo here in studio, if you guys have questions for any of our guests, hop in, ask those. I want to go to Ron Quest and get his reaction, a man of the people who's out there with him, all the duck calling contest on that circuit. What did you you've had all of about an hour to look at the report, you saw those slides, I hope you were able to see the slides that we were putting up there. What's your what's Jim Ronquist's reaction?
• 18:56
  Jimbo Ronquest: Well, unfortunately, was not able to see the slide, I was trying to follow along here, looking through the report and catching up as I just come in and started looking at it. So I'm kinda glancing across it as as we speak here. And talking to all the people, it's been a running conversation amongst my crowd, much like y'all. You where where is it gonna hit? What what are we gonna be at?
• 19:16
  What's the b pop gonna be? What's the pawn numbers gonna be? What's your thoughts? What's we're to be liberal, moderate, restrictive? You know, everybody's had those conversations.
• 19:26
  I am mildly surprised that we hit where we hit. I I would have bet much lower numbers from what I had been hearing from people that had been up there and people counting and whatnot. I I didn't expect to be so flat on Mallards. That's a win, in my opinion. Be ready for a bunch of old smart duh, for sure.
• 19:48
  Yeah. I think, though, it's a win seeing that Mallards were only effectively flat. I I think that's a good thing. And and the ponds, that's a bad thing. To Scott's point, I'd like to see it really start raining on the prairies.
• 20:02
  But I I think this is overall, it could have been worse.
• 20:06
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. Yeah. Jimbo, I think you I think you well, you've already reiterated something I heard earlier today that be ready for a lot of old ducks, smart ducks in this fall population. I'm we'll be interested to hear from Dan Smith out west on, like, whether how true that's gonna hold out there, and then also maybe the Atlantic Flyway. Those those two flyways may be set up this year in a little better situation from a production standpoint than the Central Mississippi Flyways, but, although it feels like we did good by holding over or carrying over a larger than expected breeding population, they didn't go back to great habitat conditions as indexed by the dry prairies and some continuing drought up there in the Boreal Forest.
• 20:54
  Jimbo Ronquest: Interesting though, and y'all hit on earlier, is widget and horse shovelers being up above the long term. I'm trying to scroll back here to find them. But I was like, what the heck could widget do to make such a jump? That's kind of cool.
• 21:09
  Mike Brasher: Well, I'm going to ask Doctor. Matt Dyson if he has any thoughts on that because you all were chitchatting about that a little bit before we went live.
• 21:17
  Matt Dyson: Yeah, Mike. Well, I think overall a little bit surprising to see the stability in some of the numbers was perhaps it's the company I keep, but was certainly a little bit more pessimistic on some of the numbers that we might see this year as well, given some of the conditions, and of course the the Maypawn number being the most concerning of of of being down quite significantly. But in terms of Widgin, you know, know that that's a species that can exploit those boreal habitats that might be more stable, and so we can see some production out of them. But really, I think, you know, trying to track some of the more long term numbers on Widgeon is when we look at those reports over the last few years, there have been some regions that have been bouncing around a little bit, and we can maybe talk about that a little further later on.
• 21:58
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. I see that book in your background, Boreal Forest. I think I have one of those. That is a book, right? It
• 22:05
  Matt Dyson: is a good book.
• 22:06
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. Okay. So go out and find that if you're looking for some good information on the Boreal Forest, what it is, and how important it is. The difference in pond estimates between The US and Canada this year was interesting. Scott, you might remember whenever, was it, I forget if that was part of the episode that you were on, maybe it was with Jared and Nathan where we were talking about what we expected to happen with pond numbers on The US side of things.
• 22:39
  Last year, rain fell prior to the surveys being conducted and resulted in a pretty big spike in the number of wetlands that actually they estimated. I think the timing was kind of poor for ducks though, because ducks, it was an early migration also last year, but, I mean, maybe maybe more of them had some had good success out of there than we anticipated, but we knew how dry it was, and I was actually even sort of speculating with someone, you know, if pawn numbers on The US side go back just to what they were in '23, that's about a 35% decline because you remember that it was back it was up 50%. Lo and behold, it was down 34%. So that was, you know, another one of those things that maybe wasn't or one of the things that wasn't unexpected, but that is the story to your point, Scott, in terms of what we need, desperately need a lot of rain there in the Prairies. Yeah.
• 23:35
  Other Yeah. Go ahead, Scott.
• 23:38
  Scott Stephens: Mike, I was just gonna say, you know, we we've talked about these numbers, and a lot of times we're comparing to last year and that sort of thing, like pond numbers. My comparison is 2011. I remember that year well because there was water everywhere all across the prairies. And in that year, we counted 8.1 ponds, 8,100,000 ponds compared to 4.1 now. So just for context and, you know, I I'd argue it's the same thing on Mallard's where at the peak of Mallard numbers that we had in 2016, we were at eleven seven nine two.
• 24:12
  Now we're at sixty five fifty three. You know? That's a 45% decline. So I I think that context is important too. Like, you know yeah.
• 24:22
  Maybe not a big difference compared to last year, but not that long ago. You know, the peak of Mallard's was in 2016, you know, less than a decade ago. That peak in ponds was 2011, you know, fourteen years ago. So, you know, a a big change from probably what a lot of folks are benchmarking in their head.
• 24:41
  Mike Brasher: I think one of the headlines that we that we provided was that the pond estimate this year overall was the lowest in twenty years, the lowest since '2 since 02/2004. But it wasn't the wasn't the lowest on record by by any stretch. The lowest on record, I believe, is actually like 2,700,000.0, which was 02/2002. So we've been here before. We're down from last year.
• 25:08
  How are we relative to yeah. We're lower than what we were looking in at the at in The US. Yeah. It's we've seen some variation in where these numbers have gone on one side of the of the border versus the other.
• 25:24
  Jimbo Robinson: And doctor Scott, I think one of the questions that, you know, came to my head is, in your time of looking at this, we have been lower, and I think that optimism is that this trend has bounced back numerous times. I saw some comments today being shared on on Facebook of like, you know, when this happened and this happened, and when DE was created, there were no ducks. Right? So like there was that, there is some optimism in that we've been lower and that we can battle back and that, and you've got to look for the highlights, Jimbo Ronquist hit on that a little bit, is that, man, mallards weren't as bad, that adaptability for these waterfowl to adjust and to make adjustments on the fly, think is probably, maybe, and this question really for any of you is, is that kind of something that their adaptability to some of this maybe is why the numbers weren't what we could have expected? Yeah.
• 26:21
  Scott Stephens: I I think so. That seems reasonable to me. And and, yeah, it's a good point. I I would be the first guy to say that, you know, I I'm not worried about ducks. Like, when we get wet again, the ducks will respond.
• 26:31
  I don't I don't have any questions about that. Just a question of, like, you know, where where do we get to before we get that wet conditions and, you know, the stage set to go through another boom period, but that will happen. I would prefer it starts happening next year like a lot of other folks, but we just gotta wait until it does happen.
• 26:50
  Mike Brasher: I wanna ask Josh a question here, bring you into the conversation because you actually flew you were part of these surveys this year. You were an observer, I think, in Eastern Canada, but you work for the Fish and Wildlife Service or close to the you're part of the group that's responsible for assembling all this information and working on these reports. I imagine you played a role in them. So what other insight can you provide on the discussion that we've had here based on all the conversations you and your colleagues have had?
• 27:22
  Josh Dooley: Well, first, yeah, I'd touch on. So I do help compile our status report every along with the co authors on that, Nathan Zinfur and Walt Rhodes. And typically, yeah, I haven't been involved with our waterfowl breeding population habitat survey as an observer. Typically, I'm doing goose field work, you know, throughout the summer and in the spring. But this year, yeah, we're short staffed a bit, so I was able to get up and be an observer on the Eastern Survey area with our migratory bird chief, Mark Connoff, who is the pilot.
• 27:50
  So that was pretty cool. Got to see Maine, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Labrador. Yeah. Really awesome area of Eastern Canada that I wasn't that familiar with. So as far as, yeah, logistics of the survey, it was a challenge this year like it is every year, probably more so this year just with some of the uncertainty around funding and staff.
• 28:09
  So it's really amazing effort, you know, that we pull this thing off every year, and that's a testament to all the folks, you know, in US Fish and Wildlife Service and the state agencies to make this happen each year. I guess just kinda stepping back, yeah, here in the conversations, and I know you've touched on it before another, yeah, podcast, but, you know, you gotta think about these systems in kind of these decadal long processes. Right? Like, we're in wet cycles and dry cycles, and we're in a dry cycle in the prairies. That's kinda what it comes down to.
• 28:40
  And you look at those numbers, usually a good indicator of this year's numbers is, you know, where were we last year? There's some variance around that that you're probably gonna go based on the fifty years or plus years that we've been doing this survey. So when things are down and things are dry, yeah, you're not expecting, you know, some big boom in population. That's just not really how duck dynamics work, particularly those prairie nesters. But we do see, you know, as you guys have touched on some of the populations, you know, that relied more on those boreal habitats, and later we'll talk about geese, which are, you know, in different habitats as well that, you know, a lot of different dynamics across these suite of birds.
• 29:16
  Mike Brasher: Thank you, Josh. I want to remind folks, if you have questions, comments, drop them in drop them in the comment section, wherever it is that you are watching, and we're gonna try to get to those a little bit later on. We're gonna have some of those fed to us as we go throughout this. I want to you have anything else right now? We good?
• 29:33
  No. Okay. We're going to move to the Eastern survey area. Sarah Fleming is going to help us here in a moment. I have a couple of slides that I want to show covering some of what we talked about just a few moments ago.
• 29:46
  Chris, can we get those? So I think I have two species that I'm gonna cover here. There are six species or species groups that actually, if we throw wood ducks in there, that are covered in the Eastern survey area section of the report. Mallard, black duck, green winged teal, ring necked duck, golden eye golden eyes, mergansers, then wood ducks. Here we see mallard for the Eastern survey area, 1,137,000, same as 2024, a little bit of variation around that, but statistically, different than what we had last year, down about 10% from the long term average.
• 30:26
  If you're an Atlantic Flyway hunter that is wondering what this means about the Mallard bag limit, you probably can guess by now since we're about the same level as last year. Chris, let's go to the next slide here with black ducks, another species that if you roll back the clock a number of years, there was a fair bit of worry, a fair bit of concern about the long term trajectory of this, but here over the past few years, we've seen some relative stability and even a little uptick over the past several years, and we came in at just shy of 800,000 birds, black ducks down a little bit from last year, I don't that's probably not statistically significant, up a little bit from the long term average, that bodes well if you're a black duck hunter in the East, and here's your wood duck estimate, and it's probably I think they call this a model based estimate. It takes a couple of different datasets, combines it, and comes up with a rough estimate of about 900,000 wood ducks in the breeding population, similar to last year, similar to the long term average. So that's where we are on survey numbers in the Eastern survey area.
• 31:37
  We can cover green wing, ring necked, golden eyes if we want to, there's not a whole lot of change there, but I wanna bring Sarah into this because you're up in New York, and this is Do you cover that region? You also have some familiarity with Eastern Canada, I think you Did you live in Ontario for a while? He said, okay, yeah, you lived in Ontario for a while. So your reaction whenever you saw the report, given your perspective on the way things are in the Eastern Survey Area and the general trend for those populations.
• 32:12
  Sarah Fleming: Yeah. So I guess, like, I'm kinda listening to my colleagues here kinda chuckling in the background. I know we a lot of you guys will go and open open the report to the to the prairies, to our duck factory. For me, I flip to the to the Eastern report first. That's where I want to see what's going on because that that's in my backyard, and as you've you alluded, Mike, I grew up in Ontario.
• 32:30
  My family's still there, so I have strong ties and connections to Central Ontario and the and the heritage and waterfowling community there, coupled with my I live in Central New York now and spend a lot of time in the marsh there. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the seeing the the very positive trends with with regards to the the wet conditions. They were projected to be excellent to good, when it when you start looking at Quebec moving moving east into the Boreal, into the Maritimes. You know, it's a relatively stable system comparatively. So in the Prairies, it's a little bit more dynamic, and so you we've covered that before on some previous podcasts, but just the idea that the rain and the conditions out there are not changing as much, and so we're seeing a lot of stability, which is reflective of and I'll think in a lot of the numbers and the wet conditions out there.
• 33:18
  Coupled with the fact that we are actually, especially over in the Northeast here where I live in in New York area and over into New England, we're actually sort of in a, more of a tropical system, if you want to put terms on that. We're actually in a hundred year wet cycle. So keeping that in mind that we're kind of a little bit different over here in the Northeast when it comes to conditions, but very happy to see a lot of our our duck numbers are stable. We're always watching some of our iconic species like like the mallard. We've know we've been seeing some long term declines in that population with a lot of focus and research trying to target what's going on there, but nice to see some stability at least in the last couple of years, but we're still seeing, you know, long term trends that have to be addressed on that declining population there.
• 34:05
  And black ducks, of course, our iconic black duck, you know, I think to your point, was a little down this year, but I don't think it was significantly significant from past long term trends. So happy to see that that species is continuing to hold, especially considering some of the declining populations that we'd seen historically, and it looks looks like a lot of the good work that we're doing on the ground is is helping support that population.
• 34:27
  Mike Brasher: Sarah, do y'all get many black ducks at winter right there in y'all's, around y'all's area? You get out and
• 34:32
  Sarah Fleming: We do. Yeah. Some of those? Yeah. Absolutely.
• 34:35
  So I'm in Central New York. We get a substantial number of wintering black duck populations in the Finger Lakes region, but actually the largest number of black wintering black ducks are actually in the Delaware Bay side of New Jersey. And so a lot of hunters will head down to new to that part of New Jersey and take have a lot of success hunting black ducks over there.
• 34:53
  Mike Brasher: So, Josh, you were oh, sorry, Sarah. Were you gonna continue on?
• 34:57
  Sarah Fleming: Well, I was just gonna make one more quick point about green wings, which was one I wanted to call out for our South Carolina crew that might be think looking at the numbers and might potentially see the the little bit of a decline from last year when we start looking at the trend downward. But, again, long term trends are supporting that population are gonna be stable. So I know they had a very successful year last year, so I'm suspecting we'll see similar trends this year as well. So to the Carolinas, don't don't worry about those numbers. Long term trends will be stable.
• 35:25
  Mike Brasher: Good deal. Lake, you ever done any hunting over there in the Atlantic Flyway?
• 35:29
  Lake Pickle: Man, I I haven't, and so I I actually had a question, Lainan, going back towards the the black ducks because, you know, down where I hunt at, ducks are like a they're a rarity.
• 35:40
  Jimbo Robinson: They're a treasure.
• 35:41
  Lake Pickle: And, yeah, they are. And so for for you as well, I mean, y'all both could probably speak to it. You talked about that species being able to find some stabilization over the past few years. Is there do y'all have any inclination of what that could be attributed to?
• 35:55
  Mike Brasher: Well, I think we have several people online here. Matt Dyson, you spent some time studying birds in the didn't you remind me, what did you study like, for your PhD? Was were black ducks a part of that?
• 36:11
  Matt Dyson: They they were not, Mike. So I I mostly did my PhD work in in the Western Memorial Forest, so outside of the black ducks kind of traditional breeding breeding habitat, but has spent a little bit of time thinking about black ducks, in in Eastern Canada. And and there's been quite a few hypotheses around, you know, why black ducks declined, previously, whether it was harvest, whether it was related to competition with mallards, and a variety of other conditions conditions on the wintering grounds. And of course, I think overall, you know, as as Sarah mentioned here too, we're kind of in a period right now of of generally wet conditions in in that that area of the continent, and and that's I think been good for black ducks in particular, as some of our our habitats that are are used by black ducks have have, you know, seen some restoration of those types of habitats, thinking about some of the salt marshes, in particular, along the coast and their wintering grounds. And so I think those probably have made positive contributions.
• 37:06
  I'm not sure how well we can quantify exactly all of those contributions and how they've really moved the needle on those populations, but overall have certainly helped us, to improve conditions. I don't know if, Sarah, you had anything to add there.
• 37:18
  Sarah Fleming: No. And you're absolutely right. We're focusing a lot of our our conservation efforts on the coastal areas, which is a significant wintering area for black ducks. There's also some really great research going on right now with the flyaway looking at movement and patterns with of black ducks on where they're in the landscape and where they're breeding, and so they're having telemetry units that are helping to track where the birds are moving up into the boreal parts of Canada. So that's also helping us project and target some of those critical areas where we wanna see continued protection.
• 37:45
  And, Matt, to your point, black ducks generally a little bit more isolated than mallard populations. They like their to be kind of in their more secluded locations, so the more we can target those areas. And with boreal forests and protected areas that have strong wet conditions, I think we've been seeing some good recruitment.
• 38:01
  Mike Brasher: Other comments. Josh Dooley, you flew, like you were saying, those one of the I don't know exactly how much you covered there in the East, but, you know, I think the report was, and you probably even said good to excellent conditions across a number of that area. Mean, do you have anything to add with regard to this black duck question, and then what you would anticipate maybe from the productivity of black ducks this year?
• 38:25
  Josh Dooley: No. I don't have too much to add. I mean Mhmm. I did touch on you. I flew from basically Maine all the way up through Labrador and Newfoundland as part of that eastern survey.
• 38:35
  And overall, yeah, if you look at those maps, habitat maps year to year, you know, much like Alaska, the East is pretty stable. So everything was rated, you know, pretty good or excellent. Some areas were a little bit drier than last year, but Mhmm. Particularly like Southern Maine, had an early, phenology this year. It seemed pretty good condition, pretty good habitat conditions.
• 38:56
  So, you know, based on what we saw habitat flying it, again, I don't have a lot of experience my first year in that crew area, but seemed like, yeah, conditions were pretty average. Some of those areas in the Southern Portion of Maine were probably above average. So given that, you'd probably expect about average production. I
• 39:13
  Mike Brasher: have a good question here that came in from a viewer. It said, why are ring neck ducks only reported for the Eastern survey area, and how can they apply to a population you don't count continent wide? So I think the who wants to take that one? So I have I can offer I mean, they they are counted. Josh, you you kind of jump in here.
• 39:36
  You do estimate them. You count them, estimate them for the for the traditional survey area. Those aren't reported at the species level, though. Right? Well, they're not in the report at a species level.
• 39:48
  Right?
• 39:49
  Josh Dooley: Yeah. We do have those data available, so they are counted in other segments or on the traditional survey area. In the East, yeah, they're part of, the multi species stock management because they've selected species there that represent different habitat types because that's what they're really interested in. They wanna use kind of those primary four species as, you know, these indicators of those different habitats. So if, you know, one of those populations is going down, we'd expect other, you know, duck populations that use those similar habitats would be going down as well.
• 40:21
  So they use those forest kind of indicator species for that multi stock management. So they're explicitly incorporated in that harvest strategy, whereas in, yeah, the Mid Continent, the other strategies are just part of the aggregate bag much like other species.
• 40:33
  Mike Brasher: So Josh, not to get too deep in the weeds, just keep this real simple answer. That multi stock management in the Atlantic Flyway, does that have some adaptive capacities to it, some adaptive elements to it, kind of the way we we we see and we know happens with midcontinent mallard or is it sort of at a different level type of harvest strategy? Again, not getting into too many details.
• 41:02
  Josh Dooley: No, it's the exact same thing. So it's a long term optimization based on objectives that have been agreed upon in the flyways. So just like with MidCon MLRs, doing it with one population, actually optimizing over four different populations. So it's more complex modeling in the optimization process, but all the same nuts and bolts that go into Mid Continent Mallards.
• 41:19
  Mike Brasher: Okay. Taylor, I want to give you an opportunity to add to anything here. We're going to go to the Great Lakes here in a moment, but I don't know if you had any you know, if you think much about black ducks in your area, don't know how many of them you have might have there, how many of them might come in through there, I know not a ton, but then also this question of of ring neck ducks. Anything to add there from your perspective?
• 41:41
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. We we could probably put a bounty on black ducks in Wisconsin and not shoot anymore. So I I don't I don't think that that would be a big concern on our end. But we do count ring necks. We include them in our other duck estimate, particularly for the statewide stuff.
• 41:56
  But as Josh indicated, it's all lumped into our Mid Continent Mallard package, so we don't, you know, really dig into the nuts and bolts too much on ring necks.
• 42:06
  Mike Brasher: Okay. Any other question before for Sarah or any other thoughts about the Eastern Survey Area numbers? We fly through these topics. These two hours are going to go by really quick. Kent can't into a lot of details, but I want folks to jump in.
• 42:21
  If you have questions, let's let's take those.
• 42:24
  Matt Dyson: Mike, I'll stand to be corrected here, but I believe ring necks are included in the traditional survey area because the average count per strata or transect don't meet the criteria for inclusion of an individual species. There's not enough distributed across the entire strata to estimate.
• 42:41
  Mike Brasher: For them to be reported at the species level, Yep.
• 42:45
  Matt Dyson: Yes, that's correct. Yep.
• 42:46
  Mike Brasher: Okay. But they do count, they do observe them, they record them, and you can generate ring necked duck estimates if you wanted that. Right, Josh?
• 42:54
  Josh Dooley: Yeah. So we have other things, yeah, in our database that are available from, yeah, our branch of monitoring and data management upon request. So we count swans, we count a lot of other things that aren't in the report. We just report those top 10 species for the traditional survey area.
• 43:11
  Scott Stephens: But if they're not meeting that standard that Matt talked about, the data's pretty sparse. Right?
• 43:17
  Josh Dooley: Oh, yeah. For sure.
• 43:18
  Jimbo Ronquest: Yeah.
• 43:18
  Jimbo Robinson: I was about to ask, what does that mean in layman's terms?
• 43:21
  Mike Brasher: What does what mean? That that it's sparse? Well, just that The variance isn't tight Why
• 43:27
  Jimbo Robinson: why is it so I'm gonna
• 43:29
  Mike Brasher: let Josh answer What's the
• 43:30
  Jimbo Robinson: bottom what's the bottom number of that? Like, what's the what's the What's the threshold that you Yeah. Have to
• 43:36
  Mike Brasher: I'm gonna let Josh answer that.
• 43:38
  Josh Dooley: Yeah. I'm not sure on the particular threshold, but as far as the variance, all these, you know, surveys we do in the Trigeau Sole Survey Area are statistically designed surveys. So you're flying just a portion of that overall area. You come up with a density, you know, on the portion that you fly, and then you apply it to the whole area that you don't survey. So if you get into some of these species that are very low counts, you might have a lot of, you know, blake transects that you don't actually observe any on those transects.
• 44:04
  So that's what Mike was touching on your variance in your estimate. The variability in that estimate is huge. When you go to extrapolate that up to the whole survey area, the confidence intervals or the variance on those estimates are just very, very large, so they're not really that meaningful when you try to compare year over year.
• 44:21
  Mike Brasher: And I I can imagine some people are are thinking, well, if you're not seeing any ducks on those transects, just move them to ones where they're to a place where there are ducks. That's not the way statistically rigorous surveys are designed. You can't just select the areas where you see ducks if you're gonna then extrapolate over some larger area. Those transects have to be randomly placed such that they are representative. They cover a representative portion of that overall area.
• 44:49
  So And it's
• 44:50
  Scott Stephens: important it's important to keep in mind, at least in the traditional survey area, those transects were distributed to really count mallards well. Yeah. And so that's what it was designed to do. Like, we count all the other species, but that's why there aren't many ring nucks on those on those transects because it was designed to count mallards well.
• 45:11
  Jimbo Ronquest: We're gonna
• 45:11
  Jimbo Robinson: Do we count geese?
• 45:12
  Mike Brasher: Oh, yeah. We're gonna that's after the break, we have a whole section. We're gonna talk about geese.
• 45:17
  Jimbo Robinson: I'd I'd think I'd rather count geese than ducks. I'm just saying I know why Taylor chose that. Or not Taylor, Josh. Josh. I know why Josh chose those.
• 45:26
  Mike Brasher: I'm sure Josh has lots of stories
• 45:27
  Jimbo Robinson: for you. Yeah. Those probably show up a little bit better than the smaller
• 45:30
  Mike Brasher: What's ring probably more interesting is going to those remote camps and studying the geese during the breeding season. That's some pretty cool stuff there. So we're going to jump on into the Great Lakes, and I've got the presentation here, Chris, let's go forward to this. Have one slide here, so I hope everybody is seeing that, Great Lakes Mallards. This graph here, the data you see in it, is a reflection of the combined estimates of Mallards as surveyed in the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, down 21% from last year, down 45% from the long term average.
• 46:05
  One of the things that was of note, I think, last year is that there was a huge jump in the Michigan estimate last year, and now there was a huge decline this year also in that Michigan estimate. I think there each of those past couple of years, there have been some challenges with that survey, the timing of it, maybe even some scheduling, aircraft scheduling challenges. Whenever you're doing these surveys, what is it, Josh? Like, the traditional search, just the West Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey itself covers some 2,000,000 square miles, I think, or more, and so then when you have other states that are contributing to these surveys, on any given year, you're bound to encounter some logistical or weather challenges, so it's almost impossible for you to have perfect conditions for conducting the surveys exactly as they're designed at exactly the right time that they are. So I think Michigan in the past two years has had some challenges there, which has resulted in some pretty wide changes from year to year.
• 47:07
  Taylor, I want to bring you in now. That long term declining trend on Great Lakes Mallards is a topic we could discuss for quite some time, but initial reactions to that, to that number that I just showed, and then I've got a few questions for you as a state agency biologist in this in this community.
• 47:26
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. I I would just I kinda look back and see some of our highest numbers, and you can lay a graph of, you know, our peak CRP within the Great Lakes region and it matches up almost perfectly. Like, if you go back to 2010 here in Wisconsin, we had three quarters of million acres of CRP, and right now, we have less than 200,000 acres. So we've lost half a million acres of what would be good grassland habitat, and you're not going to produce nowhere near the amount of grassland nesting species when you don't have the habitat for it.
• 47:58
  Mike Brasher: Wow. I did not so I knew Michigan had lost a lot of their CRP, was not I guess I was not aware, maybe I did, and I just didn't realize it, that that same trend carried across those other states there.
• 48:12
  Jimbo Robinson: So, yeah, very interesting. What what what is the decline? Why the decline in CRP?
• 48:19
  Taylor Finger: It's I mean, the cost of commodities in terms of, you know, the value of corn for other things like gasoline or, you know, it's all subsidized ethanol, all of that. So the the price of corn makes it so that farmers it it's worth not keeping your land in CRP and the way that the farm bill has changed over time is what was considered, you know, CRP of available acreage is now not available acreage for a lot of what was traditionally good grassland areas, and now it's going to high erosion soil places that aren't necessarily duck production places.
• 48:54
  Mike Brasher: So, Taylor, I want you to speak about the role of the state agencies in the some of the surveys that y'all conduct. There are seven, eight maybe, maybe a few more states. Actually, yeah, when you look across other states, even Louisiana, Texas do a breeding population survey for model ducks. But if we look at California, Oregon, Washington, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, those and then maybe others even. But the role that states play in in this overall data collection effort, speak about that.
• 49:25
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. So essentially, our survey, most of the state surveys are all functionally exactly the same as the Fish and Wildlife Service and Canadian Wildlife Service surveys because we're contributing primarily our Mallard estimates. So that that is part of the Mid Continent package. So when we structure our surveys, they are for for Mallards. If I were trying to count Canada geese, I wouldn't structure at the same time that I would count for Mallards.
• 49:52
  And that really has been a challenge, I would say, over the last four to five years just because, particularly, the Great Lakes states, we haven't had winters. So our surveys I mean, the last two years were the earliest surveys we've ever flown since 1973 here in Wisconsin. Typically, surveys would be in the April, the May, or sometimes even the May, this year it was April 16. So that was again, because we have to worry about leaf out, we have to worry about those birds, and when are you gonna start seeing flocks of mallards instead of pairs and things along those lines. So it has been difficult on our end, but, you know, making sure that we structure those the timing so that we can incorporate it into the flyaway decisions.
• 50:40
  Mike Brasher: So, Taylor, those numbers factor into that we get from some of these states factor into harvest management strategies. But beyond that, what y'all do well, what you do in producing ducks in your own state is really, really important to the hunters in your state, like in term locally produced ducks is kind of the term that we that we often refer to. Talk about that. I don't know if you have the percentages, like what percentage of mallards in your state come from or have been banded in Wisconsin. We've got data that can speak to that.
• 51:14
  Right?
• 51:14
  Taylor Finger: Yep. Yeah. We're actually kinda doing some research right now using some of our telemetry data, some of our banding derivation data, as well as some of the stable isotope analysis stuff where we can try to look at. Because historically, we looked at our Mallards and we said that we found based on band recoveries that over 70% of the mallards that were harvested in Wisconsin came from Wisconsin. But when we look at that, nobody was banding mallards north of us in, you know, Boreal, Ontario.
• 51:42
  So inherently, you're only gonna find the bands that you put out. And so we're kinda using some of the stable isotope analysis to look at, and it's still, I think, gonna be north of 60% for Mallards. For Wood ducks, it's in that upper 70 to 80% of the Wood ducks that we harvest here are coming from Wisconsin and same with bluing teal. Most of our bluing teal are coming from the Great Lakes region. So for Wisconsin, it's a huge deal because, I mean, most people don't think about it, but Wisconsin ranks top five in the country in terms of number of waterfowl hunters, and most of them are out the first two to three weeks, the September, October.
• 52:15
  So that's when we're primarily harvesting our own local birds, and that's kind of what the expectation is for our hunters.
• 52:22
  Mike Brasher: Speaking of conditions this year, your your survey results, what what can your Wisconsin hunters kind of expect? Like, I don't have your survey numbers right here in front of me. I know I know we had an article recently where we did a coverage of each of the state surveys, but just, you know, quick synopsis and what are you telling your hunters in terms of what they can expect?
• 52:43
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. Generally, Wisconsin was the the shining star for the Great Lakes reports. I mean, our Mallard numbers were down 2%, so essentially unchanged. Our Wood Duck, I mean, our millage were up 2% which was unchanged. Our wood ducks were down 2% which was unchanged.
• 52:59
  Our teal were down about blooming teal were down about 15%, but that was we didn't count any blooming teal while we were from the plane in one of our regions, but our ground crews counted them. So you know, based on the model, it showed that we didn't count any, but we knew that there were some there. So there's a little caveat related to that. And Canada geese were about down 8%, but, you know, basically flat from where we've been seeing for the last ten to fifteen years. So and water was good, and we had water all summer long.
• 53:28
  So our our wetland conditions here in Wisconsin are phenomenal. We actually just wrapped up our banding operations where we band close to 10,000 birds, and it was a struggle to get mallards on the bait because of how good our wetland conditions were. There was a ton of mallards. We just couldn't get them to come to corn because when you're pulling them off a solid, you know, wetland habitat, it it just was difficult to do. So, yeah, across the board, we actually look pretty good here in Wisconsin.
• 53:54
  Mike Brasher: So you have a favorite favorite species type of hunting that you do personally there in Wisconsin or just anytime you can get out and anywhere you can go?
• 54:03
  Taylor Finger: It it all depends on the time of the year. I I go after wood ducks pretty hard early in the early in the fall and then switch over and like to do some open water hunting on Green Bay and Lake Michigan later in the year.
• 54:14
  Mike Brasher: I wanna open it up now for questions from here in studio or anyone online, you know, and we're gonna try to let Sarah go here after the break if she wants to. She's on Eastern time zone, so it's probably getting, yeah, getting on up into the evening for her. So, Sarah, if you have any questions, anything to add, just sort of an open floor here. Who's got a question?
• 54:33
  Sarah Fleming: Can I?
• 54:33
  Mike Brasher: I'll go in. Absolutely. Jump in.
• 54:36
  Sarah Fleming: Yeah. No. Taylor, I was just gonna jump in real quick. I know we really highlighted the, you know, Wisconsin looking great, but any thoughts on where Michigan stands? Numbers I've been seeing and stuff there seem similar trends with regards to stable wet conditions, you know.
• 54:49
  Great Lake Mallards are not doing great, but overall, you know, I think hunters should probably expect similar conditions as to last year.
• 54:55
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. That's what that would be what I expect. I know that, you know, Michigan's numbers were down. However, like I said, I think Barb and the Michigan crew had some issues with the timing of their survey and the length of the survey that it took. So, yeah, I I take everything with a little bit of grain of salt, and that's why we don't tend to look at things on a year to year basis.
• 55:12
  You just look at how things look over, you know, ten, twenty year trends.
• 55:16
  Mike Brasher: Other questions? Thoughts?
• 55:19
  Matt Dyson: Mike, I'll just jump in too. You know, there's some important work published earlier this year looking at factors influencing mallard productions, particularly in the Great Lakes region, and really underscoring the importance of productivity and and summer survival for a lot of these birds. And that relates right back to what Jimbo was talking about earlier in terms of the work not being done and opportunities for conservation programming to help support things like productivity, because that's where we're gonna see, you know, our our best ability to really move the needle on these populations. It's it's putting habitat on the landscape to ensure that there's productivity and reducing that summer mortality. And and that's what a lot of the data shows us, for these birds.
• 55:54
  That's the most important place where you can, really move the needle on populations.
• 55:58
  Sarah Fleming: Well, Matt, that's a great point. I'll just jump in real quick and give a plug to our our Great Lakes team because that's a lot of what we're focusing on right now is spring habitat and summer habitat, working largely with some of our NRCS, Natural Resource Conservation Partnerships, working on trying to put rest restore areas, and as we've already alluded to, trying to put some more good habitat, grassland habitat in in those declining areas back on the ground. So shout out to the Great Lakes team for meeting some of those objectives to hopefully help with the waterfowl productivity.
• 56:26
  Mike Brasher: Do you have a question?
• 56:28
  Jimbo Robinson: More, and and and Ronquist may be able to kind of speak to some of this too, but one of the things that I have noticed recently is even though we've had some late flooding, and lake as well, some late flooding in our areas, it seems like water is being removed a lot faster in this part of the region, which may, you know, be a factor of how the ducks return back to the habitat. Is there any studies on wintering water and how long everybody wants their crops out, everybody wants their crops in earlier, everybody wants the water off faster. I know in the in the early two thousands and in in late nineteen nineties, it seemed like there was a big push for leaving water and habitat in the wintering areas longer. Are there any studies with that? And that I guess it's more for, and Jimbo speak up, if you kind of, you know, saw seen some of the same things about how they're returning.
• 57:22
  What's the health of them returning worse?
• 57:24
  Mike Brasher: Now are you referring to this idea of imprinting on Habitat or them giving them a maximum opportunity to attain good body condition.
• 57:36
  Jimbo Robinson: Body conditions as they return.
• 57:37
  Lake Pickle: Yeah. That's what I'm talking about anecdotally, like, that's what all the talk's about, is like, yeah, just how much to taking habitat away, and they don't, you know, they don't have enough water, where the duck's gonna go, same same kind of conversation.
• 57:49
  Jimbo Robinson: Yeah.
• 57:50
  Mike Brasher: I think there's probably a little bit of We get to And actually, is a question that we received about imprinting and things of that nature, and I don't know, I'll stay away from sort of the scientific term, just definition of imprinting and that process, but we've talked about this before on some other episodes, that if I'm a habitat manager, and if I'm wanting to provide high quality mean, if I want ducks to use my property, I'm gonna do everything that I can to make them view it as a place that provides them all the resources they need. Of course, part of that is pressure, managing pressure, that's also another big topic, groceries that come along with it, and it's the groceries that you can provide for the longest period of time. So the later you can provide that, you know, that's gonna be a good thing. There's obviously some compromises that you'll have to be aware of, you don't want to, you know, you can put it on too early, so anyway, I don't know right off the top of my head of any recent studies that have looked at kind of the timing of water and how long it stays in the spring and how that affects body condition, I'm looking to see who we have here.
• 59:10
  Jimbo Robinson: They're more thinking about the adaptability when they get back north. Yeah. Right? I mean Strong bodies equal better chances of adaptability when they reach the breeding grounds.
• 59:20
  Mike Brasher: There definitely have been studies in the past that and continue to link habitat conditions during winter to the to recruitment during during summer. There are some measurable relationships there, some out of California, some out of Mississippi, Louisville Valley. I see Dan nodding his head, so I don't know if you have anything that you want to add to there, Dan.
• 59:41
  Dan Smith: Yeah, I mean, there's a decent amount of research that looks at those, what we typically call cross seasonal effects, where you want those, you know, female birds to leave and with a lot of fat on them, basically, to make sure that they can make it. But that relationship is stronger in geese. Ducks are pretty good at taking advantage of breeding habitats when they get there, assuming it is there, right? So that's one kind of thing to consider. But, you know, usually, at least in the West, we start to see our biggest concern with breeding or with wintering waterfowl being later in the winter.
• 1:00:15
  We want it that's kind of when we start to run out of food. It's hopefully when they're switching to invertebrates as those become available as temperatures warm up. So it's all kind of a balancing act. But, yeah, it's it's an important one to consider for sure.
• 1:00:28
  Scott Stephens: Mike, I was I was just gonna add that at least given the the drought conditions that we've seen across the Midcontinent and in the Prairies, you know, like like, it's always important to send them back in good shape. That's not gonna sort of compensate for the fact that it's dry and there's no, you know, little habitat for them to breed in. And, you know, the challenges that we see in the numbers right now is primarily driven by that, at least in the Midcontinent.
• 1:00:53
  Jimbo Robinson: Yeah. So it's up north.
• 1:00:56
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. Well, doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
• 1:00:57
  Jimbo Robinson: I'm trying to find the optimism in this. I keep getting shot down by. I was trying to find something there.
• 1:01:03
  Lake Pickle: That's what
• 1:01:03
  Mike Brasher: the question mean that we shouldn't try and continue to provide high quality habitat during the winter. We have to keep doing that, Scott's I'm just
• 1:01:09
  Jimbo Robinson: telling all
• 1:01:10
  Mike Brasher: my farmer friends now.
• 1:01:11
  Jimbo Robinson: Pull the boards
• 1:01:11
  Lake Pickle: at the January. Well, the question that I have though is like the talking about how dry everything was, and from what I was hearing is y'all were thinking everything was y'all were expecting it to be worse, like the overall report to be like lower numbers, right?
• 1:01:25
  Mike Brasher: I think we so yeah. Either there were pockets of production that were a little bit better than what we anticipated last year, or maybe we just had sort an incorrect gauge on what we might but again, when you talk about a two or three, a 2,000,000 bird move from one year to the next, that's not a huge change. Yeah. You know? So if it had been down 2,000,000 birds, that's something for us to talk about, but biologically, that's not a big move from a continental population standpoint.
• 1:02:02
  So even if we saw that, not a huge deal.
• 1:02:04
  Jimbo Robinson: Yeah. Not a big deal to you. Yeah.
• 1:02:07
  Taylor Finger: And I'll just comment. I mean, mallards are very adaptable. Again, it doesn't have to be very good habitat for mallards to produce, and I mean, I've we've caught mallards in the Coles parking lot right in front of Lambeau Field. So, again, there's they're they're pretty. They can find what we wouldn't consider very good grassland habitat is still make it productive.
• 1:02:27
  Jimbo Robinson: You say that and the numbers are are down.
• 1:02:30
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. But I I agree. I mean, you still need you still need decent habitat, but I'm just in terms of tempering our expectations
• 1:02:38
  Jimbo Robinson: need any more parking lots now.
• 1:02:39
  Lake Pickle: Also, can can you tell us what was planted in the Coles parking lot?
• 1:02:42
  Taylor Finger: That's what we wanna
• 1:02:43
  Jimbo Robinson: I don't know. A lot of groceries there or what? Yeah.
• 1:02:46
  Mike Brasher: A lot
• 1:02:46
  Jimbo Robinson: of tailgates left over from Lambo? What's going on there?
• 1:02:48
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. Yep. It definitely tailgates. Bratz and cheese what they're living off of.
• 1:02:52
  Mike Brasher: Hey. They'll do it. I've told the story where I've seen Mallard's eating french fries out of a McDonald's parking lot. They will do it. So alright.
• 1:03:00
  We are at 08:00, actually two minutes past, and we're going to take a break, so we're going to be back in five minutes, so we'll get back here at 08:07. Sarah, you are welcome to stick around. You're also welcome to go on and get on with your evening. We thank you for joining us. Y'all stay with us.
• 1:03:17
  This is the 2025 Ducks Unlimited waterfowl season outlook brought to you in partnership with On X Hunt. We'll be right back.
• 1:03:32
  VO: Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.
• 1:03:49
  Mike Brasher: Welcome back, everyone. Mike Brasher, Lake Pickle, Jimbo Robinson. We are back with the second half of the 2025 Ducks Unlimited waterfowl season outlook brought to you in partnership with On X Hunt. We greatly appreciate y'all showing up and helping us out here, Lake.
• 1:04:06
  Lake Pickle: Absolutely.
• 1:04:07
  Mike Brasher: We are gonna go out west, and Dan Smith, doctor Dan Smith is gonna help us out here in a second. Oh, you know, the first thing that I need to do here, because I have this little fancy run of show that I was about to forget, it is a migratory bird hunting season that's underway. This is a reminder. If you are a migratory bird hunter, you have to get HIP registered, the harvest information program, it's either called a HIP registration, HIP certification. Check that out and make sure you have that.
• 1:04:38
  Most states offer that for free. There may be some processing fee for some of them, it kind of varies a little bit, but that is the beginning stage for how you become a potential participant in a harvest survey for either ducks or geese or snipe, doves, you can you know, a lot of other your information that you provide at that hip registration stage is what enters you into a potential sampling pool. Those estimates or what you answer are not what gives us the estimates, It's your participation in subsequent surveys. You're you participated in those.
• 1:05:15
  Jimbo Robinson: Every year.
• 1:05:15
  Mike Brasher: Every year? Yep. No. The wind surveys.
• 1:05:18
  Jimbo Robinson: I did. I had to send them I've done it twice. I did it once in Arkansas and once in North Dakota.
• 1:05:23
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. The other thing that I'll say, if you hunt in Mississippi and then you go hunt in Louisiana, you have to be HIP certified or HIP registered in each of those states, and the questions that you are asked, you answer respective to your harvest hunting success in those states in that previous Most
• 1:05:38
  Jimbo Robinson: places you cannot check out without doing it.
• 1:05:41
  Mike Brasher: You're not supposed to be able It's
• 1:05:42
  Jimbo Robinson: called technology.
• 1:05:43
  Mike Brasher: That's right. And it's gotten a lot better. It's gotten a lot better. Okay. And I'm sure our state partners here can tell us a whole lot more about that, federal partners as well.
• 1:05:53
  But we're going to go to Western Mallard, going to go out west, and so, Chris, can you queue my presentation? I have just two slides here, I believe. So Dan Smith can tell us a lot more about this, but whenever he gets into duck season frameworks for the Pacific Flyway, some of this information here really becomes important. They look at the status of mallards in Alaska, and then mallards in some of those other states, and so we've got sort of a, I guess there's a couple of different ways we can look at this, there's overall Western Mallards that factor into the harvest regulation process, then we can also look at sort of some mallards that are a little bit outside of that framework that still contribute to the Pacific Flyway, but if we look at Alaska specifically as a survey area, mallard estimates were down 30% from last year, and you look at the southern portion of that flyway from where those Mallard estimates are, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, up 17% from last year. California has been a particular bright spot there for Mallard over the past couple of years, I wanna get Dan's thoughts on that, and then when you look at the total ducks for that Pacific Flyaway, those Pacific Flyaway sources, you know, just about even with where we were last year when you throw Alberta in there as well, 17,980,000.
• 1:07:12
  Now, these birds here, most of these birds that we're gonna be talking about that we're adding up here, are going to come out of that traditional survey area, that 34,000,000 that we talked about at the top, but up 6% from the long term average. So if you're a Pacific Flyway hunter, I mean, these look like pretty good numbers. Dan, I want to get your reaction to that, your thoughts as a Pacific Flyway hunter.
• 1:07:37
  Dan Smith: Yeah, Mike, I was similarly kind of surprised to see overall not too much of a change as far as total waterfowl numbers go. In the West, California, we had that that huge increase this year, which was nice to see. We've had a long decline in particularly in Mallards here in California. So to see a bump back was great. We're still far from even where we were a couple of decades ago, so there's a lot of ground to make up.
• 1:08:06
  But Northeastern California really had great conditions this year, and Mallards took advantage of it. And really all the waterfowl that we had up there took advantage of it. So it kind of comes back to this earlier conversation we were having, you know, these these birds are are pretty resilient at taking advantage of good conditions. One thing that we also need to consider is that good conditions have to be able to happen. That's kind of where we need to make sure those landscapes can recover when water shows up, and that's not always the case in some of our more developed areas.
• 1:08:39
  So overall, it looked pretty good. I'm a little concerned to see Alaska down. Habitat conditions seem to be relatively okay, but some of the early news that I got from some of the banding crews up there was that the age ratios were definitely adult dominated. So for me, that's a that's a pretty big concern as far as adding recruits to that fall population. So production is probably not great in some age areas for us.
• 1:09:07
  Mike Brasher: You know, Dan, this is one of those times where we can we could pause and look at the tables here in this report. I'm looking at the total duck breeding population estimates, and I look at Alaska, and it's up 5% from last year. It's not statistically significant from a different standpoint, but from the long term average, total ducks in that Alaska region are down 30%, so that's not a good thing. We've seen that downward trend in duck population, breeding ducks in Alaska. If you look at mallards, it's interesting, from year to year, that mallard breeding population estimate in some of those Alaska areas, down 23%, but unchanged from the long term average.
• 1:09:53
  So mallards are kind of doing a little bit of a different thing there when you look at overall ducks. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Dan, but I think pintails, when you look at the ducks in Alaska that have declined, maybe pintails are one that has declined the most. Am I remembering that correct?
• 1:10:10
  Dan Smith: Yeah. Pintail, widgeon, and teal are all pretty far off their long term average in Alaska. So that's a concern because at least in the Pacific Flyway, are pretty important birds for harvest. Yeah. Greenleaf teal in particular, California's number one harvested bird.
• 1:10:28
  A lot of those are coming out of Alaska. So to see numbers down, particularly over the long term, is is not great.
• 1:10:34
  Scott Stephens: It's probably timely to also talk about the fact that I know Dan's been engaged, and I've been engaged with some of our colleagues out west to look to put a greater focus on work in Alaska and trying
• 1:10:47
  Taylor Finger: to
• 1:10:47
  Scott Stephens: understand what's driving those declines and how we can work with state and federal colleagues up there to to sort of stave off those declines and actually recover birds, but it starts with understanding what's going on.
• 1:11:02
  Lake Pickle: Yeah. I had a question about something you were saying earlier. You made a statement when you were talking about the birds being able to adapt from having these good conditions, and you said something, probably not gonna get the quote directly, but you said something along the lines of we need to we need to be able to let good conditions happen. Can you go into that a little bit further? Like, did you mean by that exactly?
• 1:11:21
  Dan Smith: Yeah, I mean, of the classic ones is if you have multiple years of sustained drought, those wetland areas tend to get turned into other things, particularly where a lot of people exist. And so even if we get a lot of rain, those wetland habitats are just not able to even recover because their footprint's taken over. So Northeastern California this year, you know, that area still has a decent amount of its historic wetland. It has a good amount of grass. When those wet conditions, you know, really allow it to, it will boom, and ducks will take advantage of it.
• 1:11:52
  And some of our more agriculturally dominated landscapes in the Central Valley, it's harder to have those good years.
• 1:11:59
  Lake Pickle: Right. That makes sense. I mean, if there's not, there's not anything there, doesn't matter how good the conditions are.
• 1:12:06
  Dan Smith: Yeah, exactly. And Scott brings up a good point. You know, Alaska is is hugely important for us in the Pacific Flyway. It's a priority one breeding area for Ducks Unlimited. It is a waterfowl factory for us, and we want to learn more.
• 1:12:21
  Hopefully pretty soon here, we'll be adding an Alaska team member to our science and planning team so we can start to really dive into these questions with our partners, because there's a lot of folks already up there thinking about this stuff too.
• 1:12:32
  Lake Pickle: Understood. That's good information.
• 1:12:35
  Mike Brasher: I am I'm looking for other stories here in the charts here. I saw something a minute ago. Yeah. You know, pintails. Pintails were actually up this year.
• 1:12:42
  You know, Dan, in Alaska, said, well, yeah, they're down 20% from long term average, up 30% from last year. You can look into these tables, and I'm kind of curious what Josh's thought process is on this, you can look in these tables across all these different species, and it's really cool because they have the different strata broken down. For each species, we've a table here in the traditional survey area. It tells you for each of the strata if they're up or down from last year, if they're up or down from the long term average. Sometimes these things make sense based on what we know of the biology species' habitat conditions, like last year and even this year as well, that we would have a fair number of birds overfly the prairies, settle in the Boreal Forest and other locations.
• 1:13:35
  Not a huge surprise. We saw, again, above average estimates of breeding ducks that had settled in the Boreal Forest and so forth, but then we can look at Alaska and see some of these changes, up 30% for pintails in one strata, down 30% in another, or whatever the case may be. I mean, Josh, it's impossible to explain each of these data points. Right? There's sometimes that these birds are just gonna be doing things that we can't see, we can't understand what they're responding to.
• 1:14:05
  There can be inherently some noise, some random noise, some random sampling artifacts that happen in one year or another due to timing of the survey, habitat conditions that we may not have a full handle on, or just the variability, sort of the small the degree to which habitat conditions may vary on smaller scales than we really have an appreciation for. How do you look at some of this, Josh, as a person that helps put these reports together?
• 1:14:36
  Josh Dooley: Yeah. So you broke up a little bit on this end.
• 1:14:38
  Jimbo Ronquest: Hopefully Of course
• 1:14:38
  Mike Brasher: I did. Yeah. But
• 1:14:40
  Josh Dooley: I think I got to just what you're saying. No. Taylor had touched on this earlier, you know, particularly as managers, I mean, we really do kind of look at those longer term trends. I mean, that's what we're interested in, those system dynamics. So, you know, year to year change, yeah, there's certainly interesting aspects there.
• 1:14:57
  You know, what doesn't get touched on a lot, but we do have them in the status report, are all the actual statistical values of whether those, actual changes differ or not statistically and most of them don't, you know, if they're pretty small changes. So again, that's kind of noise in the system, that's a variability you expect from going out and getting a sample and extrapolating that up to an estimate. But yeah, interested more in those longer term dynamics, the trends, so you know, those are significant. If we see a significant ten year, fifteen year trend, that really speaks to some dynamics that are changing. And again, you'll see distributional changes, you know, there may be some differences like you're saying year to year that can't be explained, but over the long term, you start to see patterns like the pintails.
• 1:15:38
  When it's dry in the prairies, you definitely see an overflight and you see more numbers up in the Boreal. That's based kinda on their biology and what they typically do and what other ducks do. So we do see that in the data, you know, if you tease it out over longer term. So, yeah, as a manager, always looking at those kinda longer term trends and not getting too worked up about some of that annual variation.
• 1:15:58
  Mike Brasher: Dan, do you have a report out of the Klamath this year? That has been a big story, the past few. Have I seen a few things where there's some water this year, maybe in contrast to past years?
• 1:16:11
  Dan Smith: Yeah. We had a we had a great year this year. It was a it was a pretty wet winter. Particularly, had a lot of storm systems in winter move through Oregon, and obviously Klamath region overlaps with Oregon. So it seems to be doing pretty well.
• 1:16:26
  This picture actually behind me is when I was up in the region in June. And so conditions were great. Broods were all over the place. There was a lot of molting birds. So it was was pretty spectacular.
• 1:16:39
  There's ducks everywhere, and we actually have a huge restoration site that our biologist in the region, Amelia Raquel, worked on, which was just about 14,000 acres in Upper Klamath Lake, and that's a huge footprint for us in the West. We're pretty limited in where we can do restoration, and that was just absolutely massive, and it's still holding a lot of birds right now. So it's a pretty spectacular place. Well recovered from just even a couple years ago where it was pretty much completely dry.
• 1:17:07
  Mike Brasher: You ever been to that landscape, Klamath?
• 1:17:09
  Jimbo Robinson: No. But what about the Great Salt Lake?
• 1:17:11
  Mike Brasher: Great Salt Lake. Great question. Let's see. We had Karina Eber on with us last year. Karina was not able to join tonight.
• 1:17:18
  Checked with her. Dan, do you have a read on that? You talked to Karina lately?
• 1:17:23
  Dan Smith: Yeah. I I haven't talked to Karina lately. I talked to a few folks. We actually have some cool projects that we're trying to start out there. I won't talk about them yet because they're very early days, but they were catching some birds and marking birds, and things looked pretty good.
• 1:17:39
  It sounded like there were some weird trends. There was actually green and teal out there pretty early where folks weren't necessarily expecting it. So I'm kind of curious what that might mean. But yeah, right now we don't have any of the Utah data in the reports that we're looking at right now.
• 1:17:55
  Jimbo Robinson: It seems to be a hot topic or more of a topic that's discussed.
• 1:17:59
  Mike Brasher: It is. It is. So, I mean, that's super cool to have the Klamath, have water back there, and this is usually the time of year, past couple years anyway, we've been talking about botulism outbreaks. I have not heard that this year, Dan. I'm guessing we're in better shape.
• 1:18:13
  Dan Smith: So, I mean, botulism happens. I mean, we always have a little bit, but fortunately there was some water that was able to be moved around, And so hopefully they did a well, not hopefully, they did a really good job of trying to keep those soils inundated so that that botulism outbreak would be pretty minimal. And so that was the last report I heard. No big outbreak like the hundreds of thousands of birds that have had it in the past couple years.
• 1:18:39
  Mike Brasher: We're gonna move on real quick here in a moment to I have several questions coming in. We see them. We're getting them. We're gonna we have an open session here a little bit later on. We have several questions about harvest regulations and how these numbers affect that.
• 1:18:53
  We're gonna get into that in just a minute. I wanna pause and let Jimbo here in studio just kind of give a plug for our volunteers, the event system, all the chapters that have their events. I mean, fall is an exciting time for all that, and this is probably a lot of the information that folks will be, at least here in the near term, be talking Absolutely.
• 1:19:11
  Jimbo Robinson: A lot of committee meetings are meeting right now. Our event system really cranks up between now. There's a lot of committee meetings that are happening for events that are gonna take place in either October, late September, October, and then November seem to be our our big event season, and this is a topic that happens at especially with regional directors and and volunteers, and and it's what draws some new volunteers in. They see the numbers, we're talking about what the habitat looks like, and whether it's somebody just thinking about, you know, what it means for them locally or what it means for them on the big landscape, it is. And so we have a lot of events coming up if you want to love to get you involved.
• 1:19:52
  If you've thought about volunteering or wanted to get involved with your local committee, can do that. Go to volunteer4du.org, or you can visit our website, our volunteer page. Also, all of our events are listed on there, ducks.org/events, and they can list it out by state. So find your state, find your local area. If you don't have a chapter in that area, we'd love to start one.
• 1:20:14
  Send a note in to the website or go to our volunteer page, and we'll start the discussion there. But yeah, this this topic will be discussed, and we, I know that you, we hosted a great podcast with you last year, one of our internal ones with the regional directors discussing kind of what the numbers mean to the field, and that was sent out today, great, to our bullet points. So if you have questions about the numbers, all of our regional directors, the fevers, our directors of development, all of those can discuss kind of what DU as a whole saw, kind of the trends that we've discussed here tonight. They really have the talking points to discuss this, and if they have questions, especially all our volunteers, feel free to reach out to any of us here at National Headquarters, and you've always been an open book to everybody to discuss, because sometimes our field staff and our volunteers, they don't understand, they look at it as a big picture, kind of like how Lake and I have done it all night. We sit here and look at each other, y'all discussing stuff, and my eyes are big, and I just don't
• 1:21:12
  Mike Brasher: You mean these equations in here you
• 1:21:14
  Jimbo Robinson: I've been scrolling through this. I've been flipping through these pages and these plus or minuses, and the last time I failed a class in this, I think it was in statistics.
• 1:21:21
  Jimbo Ronquest: A lot
• 1:21:22
  Jimbo Robinson: of the
• 1:21:22
  Lake Pickle: times I've been flipping papers just because I wanna look like I know I what I'm looking
• 1:21:25
  Jimbo Robinson: got stuff laid
• 1:21:26
  Jimbo Ronquest: out here,
• 1:21:26
  Mike Brasher: and half
• 1:21:27
  Jimbo Robinson: of this this model structure here, this math problem here, I know I failed that in college at least That was not but it's it's amazing what goes into this. Yeah. And I think if our if our volunteers and our members and supporters understood half of this paperwork, and and and so it's amazing what we're doing here tonight by explaining the big picture. They're taking what this is, what my what I wanted my teachers to do. You're on the same page I've been looking at for, like, the last ten minutes trying to figure out what that is.
• 1:21:56
  Mike Brasher: And at t plus one, that's population size of next year. I can get that. It's about it.
• 1:22:01
  Jimbo Robinson: You're lying to me. I know you know exactly what that means.
• 1:22:03
  Mike Brasher: No. Know.
• 1:22:03
  Lake Pickle: I I
• 1:22:04
  Mike Brasher: can guess at it.
• 1:22:05
  Lake Pickle: If I can add something to what you're saying being for someone out, you know, not part of Ducks Unlimited, I think a lot of folks don't know.
• 1:22:11
  Josh Dooley: You're a
• 1:22:11
  Jimbo Robinson: huge part of Ducks Unlimited.
• 1:22:12
  Lake Pickle: Well, but I'm not I don't I'm not I don't work here.
• 1:22:14
  Jimbo Ronquest: Right.
• 1:22:15
  Lake Pickle: You know what I mean? I don't think people know how accessible DU is sometimes. Like, at how because there is. I mean, there's there's folks that that duck hunting is what they do. It's what they're passionate about, and they look at these numbers.
• 1:22:29
  They know their support's coming out. They've probably seen watched some of this hopefully, and they still have questions. But again, to what you're saying, there is somebody within DU in their state locally probably that they could reach out to and get answers to all this stuff on a local level.
• 1:22:44
  Jimbo Robinson: And and and exactly right. And what most people don't know is that, you know, our our corporate partners that support DU immensely in everything they do, you know, Jimbo Ronquist is on here from Drake Waterfowl, and Jimbo has an open door to most people's offices. He's either got a relationship with somebody here that he's worked with, done one of these. He knows something. People can always reach out to somebody like Jimbo.
• 1:23:08
  Ask a DU question. If he can't answer it, he could pick up the phone, text somebody at any point, and and we're all open here. We want to we want that to be readily available, and and the same thing with with Lake and all the guys at OnX and all of our other great corporate partners, these guys have a way in. If you feel like that, hey, I don't want to just reach out to to Ducks Unlimited, you know, from an outside, you you know somebody in the field that you can reach out to that knows how to get in touch with us, and and it's kind of what we do here at DU is is, you know, we're a huge 30,000 plus volunteer family that somebody here can answer a question and help anybody at any point.
• 1:23:44
  Mike Brasher: We'll get
• 1:23:44
  Lake Pickle: it done.
• 1:23:45
  Mike Brasher: We'll get it done. Jimbo, Ron, question, I'm gonna come to you here in a moment. What I want to do right now though, and because I know this is a question that you're interested in, this next topic here, Chris Isaac, I wanna go to the presentation here and talk about harvest regulation recommendations. I mentioned this companion report, that's what we were looking at over here with all fancy equations. It is the one you see here, the adaptive harvest management hunt 2026 hunting season.
• 1:24:09
  None of the numbers that came out today affect the hunting seasons, the bag limits, season lengths, those types of things. None of it affects or changes what we're going to have, what we're in right now with the 2526 season. So we do wanna point out that Canada and The US set their seasons differently. They set them separately. They use the same data, much of the same data, have different harvest strategies, a lot of reasons for that.
• 1:24:33
  That's an entirely different discussion. What this report contains is all of the a written sort of summary of all of the work that has happened over the past several decades to establish those harvest objectives. What is it we're trying to accomplish when we're setting regulations? The strategies, the models, the knowledge that we've gained about how harvest affects populations and how that interacts with habitat and recruitment, etcetera, those are the harvest strategies and the recommendations that get laid out in here. So this report does include the recommendations for next year's hunting seasons from the Fish and Wildlife Service perspective for for next year, for all for a lot of different all different species that are out there.
• 1:25:16
  States, there's still some work to be done. States have to weigh in through the flyway councils, then Fish and Wildlife Service kind of does their thing as well, but here we go. This is what a lot of people have wondered about. Whenever we first saw this report, it did not take very much for us to look at this and see no change, no change, no change, unchanged, up just slightly for pintails, and then pretty quickly, without even seeing the Adaptive Harvest Management Report, be able to conclude, well, what we've got this year for harvest regulations is pretty much, well, exactly, as far as I can tell, with the exception of geese, there are probably going to be some changes there, but we can get to that here in a minute. I want talk out in turn because I don't know that to be exact, but for ducks anyway, pretty much a carbon copy of what we had this year.
• 1:26:01
  Liberal duck season frameworks for all flyaways, the way those are set differ a little bit. Three pintail daily limit for all flyaways, again, in 2627. These are, quote, expected. Four Mallards in Atlantic Flyway, two black ducks in Atlantic Flyway, repeat of the nine day early teal season. Jimbo, Ronquist, your reaction.
• 1:26:24
  You're happy?
• 1:26:25
  Jimbo Ronquest: Of course, we're happy. Everybody wants to go duck hunting as much as they can. It it's interesting. Again, like I said earlier, there was a lot of lot of under the table bets on where this was gonna wind up. But, of course, you know, more days in the field give us more opportunity to enjoy God's great outdoors and an opportunity to go duck hunting.
• 1:26:45
  There'll be a there will be a lot of questions where people will go, well, why why is it still liberal? Why has it has why hasn't it followed, duck population trends? There'll be all kinds of questions to that. That said, I I understand by looking into matrix. It's easy to kinda figure it out, the the very, very, very basics of it.
• 1:27:07
  That being said, I know it constantly moves and tries to adjust itself. I would like to learn more about that. I know now is not the time nor the place, but it's interesting how it does work. And I answered the question a lot. To Jimbo Robinson's point, I do get a lot of questions about things.
• 1:27:25
  And my thing is let it work. There's a group of the whole waterfowl science community has a way in on this thing, and a lot of people way smarter than I am. I look at those math equations on here, and I'm like, I don't know what that means. I'm just going, what's it say? If people would just trust the system, and sure, it's okay to ask questions and learn, but trust the system and let it work, it's it seems to me like it's doing its job.
• 1:27:54
  Of course, I'm happy. I'd have been happy either way. If it had come up restrictive, say, man, they're gonna go duck hunting. They're gonna get to go duck hunting somewhere, somehow, some way. So I I lived through the March in the past.
• 1:28:06
  I can do it again. The the other thing I'd like to say, just, you know, I read these reports every year. The amount of effort that goes into putting this together is unbelievable. You just start reading everything that goes into it, and the effort and the organization it takes to put this together and send it out for us to do what we're doing tonight is absolutely amazing.
• 1:28:28
  Mike Brasher: Well, I appreciate you saying that, Jimbo. I appreciate that. Kinda on behalf of our state and federal partners that we have here joining us, and I think this is as I said, we've tried different things over the past several years with our panel. I think this one is pretty cool because we have have Taylor Finger with Wisconsin DNR, we have Josh Dooley with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and I'm wanting to go to Taylor. I wanna make sure I'm
• 1:28:54
  Lake Pickle: Yeah. Looking
• 1:28:55
  Scott Stephens: Now you're back, Mike.
• 1:28:56
  Mike Brasher: We're back. Okay. All right. I thought we had kind of lost you there. We had we've given all sorts of accolades to every one of you, but I'm not gonna repeat those.
• 1:29:05
  You're just gonna take our word for it, they were nothing but just glorious comments, so we were talking about actually, I kind of was saying this was a pretty neat panel that we have, where we have a couple of a state representative and a federal representative here joining us that are involved in the day to day of these harvest regulation processes. And so, Taylor, were you able to hear some of what Jimbo was saying? Did you catch that or were you cut out before that?
• 1:29:32
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. No. No. I was able to hear what Jimbo was covering and, yeah, that just touching base on, you know, how this all goes into all of the decisions that we end up making from the Flyway perspective. We'll be heading to the Flyway where Mississippi's Flyway's in Bloomington, Indiana next week.
• 1:29:48
  And so, like, guys are all shuffling through this. That is the rest of my week is to prepare for what, you know, the next sixty hours is next week of sitting down and hashing out all of this information going through all of this to ultimately develop some recommendations to send to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
• 1:30:05
  Mike Brasher: That's right. Whereas we take two hours to go through everything here at a very high level. Taylor, your committee that we will some of our team will be there next week to kind of observe and see what happens, and we participate in some of the committees, but we will take two hours for one section just to talk about one particular aspect of what's presented in this report, and then that goes on for two or three days, and then you also present that to the Flyway Council, and so then explain that, like what happens next. What happened next week? Your colleagues in Mississippi Flyway and the other flyaways here, I think over the next two weeks maybe, will do the same thing.
• 1:30:44
  You make your recommendation, right? It kind of in sort of brief terms describe what happens from here.
• 1:30:49
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. So the the tech section, which is, you know, the state managers, federal managers, scientists, we all review all of the information that's come from the Fish and Wildlife Service, all the research that's going on out there, what we've been hearing from our constituents, and we work and develop as a technical section, a recommendation that then goes to the Flyway Council, which the council is made up of representatives of at at all of our state levels like bureau directors and those that are in charge of making large scale decisions for state agencies. And so those recommendations go to the Flyway Council to review what the technical section thought and ultimately, they will make then a recommendation to the Fish and Wildlife Service, Service Regulation, Committee. So the SRC, which then will look at all of the flyways recommendations for across all four flyways and look at the justifications and, you know, what was proposed and ultimately make a decision from the Fish and Wildlife Services perspective. So it kind of a a bottom up approach of leaning on the expertise to making sure that everybody in the room has had an opportunity to review all of the information and data before any decisions being made.
• 1:32:01
  Mike Brasher: And and you if you mentioned it, I didn't catch it because I'm sitting here monitoring messages and text from from our our audience as well as other people. What is the timeline for that SRC, for the US Fish and Wildlife Service Service Regulations Committee meeting at which they would kinda make that recommendation, that decision.
• 1:32:21
  Taylor Finger: Josh, you can correct me. Believe it's in the October is when the SRC will meet for the first time.
• 1:32:27
  Josh Dooley: Yep. So we have meeting. I don't know if the dates are finalized yet, but the SRC meeting, next one will be in November, and then typically another one in April.
• 1:32:36
  Mike Brasher: So I want to move on real quick. I want to make sure we cover some geese. We can How close were we? Oh, good question. That's a
• 1:32:43
  Jimbo Robinson: question that comes up all the time. How close were we to
• 1:32:46
  Lake Pickle: a to a good question,
• 1:32:48
  Mike Brasher: a different How close were we this year, Josh?
• 1:32:50
  Taylor Finger: I did I did a quick look, and if we retain the same amount of wetlands, I think we'd have had to lose a million mallards. So we'd had to drop another million mallards with the same amount of wetlands that we had to get down into the moderate package. Yep.
• 1:33:02
  Jimbo Robinson: I wouldn't have shown up. Yeah. If you lost another million mallards, I'd have Yeah. You would have. I'd been home crying.
• 1:33:09
  Mike Brasher: Well, oh, you wouldn't have shown up here.
• 1:33:10
  Jimbo Robinson: You'd have
• 1:33:11
  Mike Brasher: shown up at the blind.
• 1:33:11
  Jimbo Robinson: Oh, yeah. I've been there for sure. But that's crazy to think. I mean, that's that's what I think that's what a lot of people kind of question or want to know is, what about what's the pond count loss to get us there?
• 1:33:25
  Mike Brasher: I think at this at that 6,000,000 Mid Continent Mallard level, I don't think there was a pond count number that would have gotten us to anything other than liberal. Is that right, Taylor?
• 1:33:37
  Taylor Finger: Yeah. When I was looking at it, I think it still would have had to been less than 2,000,000, which wasn't even on the matrix.
• 1:33:43
  Jimbo Robinson: On the matrix. It's not on the graph.
• 1:33:44
  Mike Brasher: Yeah.
• 1:33:45
  Jimbo Robinson: We're good. That's okay.
• 1:33:48
  Mike Brasher: Right. What I will encourage folks to do, like I had someone text me today and they had looked at the Mallard estimate from the traditional survey area, and they were trying to plug that into the matrix for Midcontinent Mallards or for for yeah. But that's not exactly how it works. You have to go you have to pull out only a portion of that mallard count from the traditional survey area, and you have to add in the mallard estimates from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. If you go back to the video podcast episode that we released last Thursday, we stepped through that to kind of preview what it is you need to be thinking about if you're concerned about if you're trying to answer, look at this data and say, what's that going to mean for my harvest regulations?
• 1:34:25
  We spelled all that out in that episode.
• 1:34:27
  Jimbo Robinson: Yeah, go watch that. Yeah.
• 1:34:29
  Mike Brasher: All right. We'll come back to some of the harvest regulation stuff I would imagine. I want to first put up another slide here, and we're going to bring Josh in. We're going to talk about geese, and Josh has the amazing title of goose specialist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and he is our goose expert here, and so, Chris, go ahead and put our put that slide up, Arctic goose camps. Josh, you can tell us in any more detail you want, but this is where people go every year, researchers including Josh, probably sometimes, head up to those far northern locations, incredibly remote site to lay hands on geese of all different species, actually studying the birds, banding the birds, some of those sites did not have some banding occurring at it this year, but Josh, those Arctic goose camps, that amazing it's amazing feat that biologists have been able to accomplish just establishing those and maintaining them.
• 1:35:32
  Talk about that, and then what goes into estimating the goose populations?
• 1:35:37
  Josh Dooley: Yeah. So, yeah, excited here to talk about geese finally, because that's what I kinda do my day to day. And, yeah, the slide you have here just shows banding locations across the Subarctic and Arctic, and so you hit exactly on it. This is a huge effort that takes place every year with federal, state, provincial, other partners, to pull off this each year. And just the logistics that go into field work are tricky, but doing all this stuff in the Arctic, you know, it's especially tricky.
• 1:36:03
  Just all the the preplanning that goes into cashing fuel and all the logistics that have to occur for just smooth operations, you know, as far as banding each year is just incredible. But these locations, yeah, show the primary location where a lot of these banding efforts occur and then the species targeted. So if folks can see that, you know, try to at some of these locations target multiple species, in the Arctic. And on any given year, in recent years, you know, ban between about forty and fifty thousand geese in the Arctic and Sub Arctic. So it's a huge effort every year, involves a lot of different people.
• 1:36:39
  So we can touch on, yeah, maybe in a second, you know, some of the productivity outlooks at some of these different locations. But another thing you had hit on is just, yeah, how do we actually estimate goose populations? So I'd take a second just to talk about that, that there's really three primary sources, and ways in which we estimate goose populations. And to step back even farther is that there's a lot of goose populations. So in North America, we have seven species of geese and what we report in the status report annually, 24 different populations.
• 1:37:12
  So it's a lot of different populations. It's often difficult to talk about geese because there's so many populations and names are constantly changing and they're surveyed in a variety of ways. But the primary ways that geese are surveyed are from count surveys. Some of those are multi species surveys. So some of the indices for geese, which we talked about was with the waterfowl breeding population habitat survey.
• 1:37:33
  There's also some big multi species surveys that occur in Alaska headed by Fish and Wildlife Service Alaska STEP. So the Arctic Coastal Plain, survey and then the YK Delta coastal zone survey. So these are primary areas in Alaska where similarly have a transect survey come up with estimates for for geese and other ducks in those areas. We also have a lot of single species surveys for geese. So like dusky candied geese up on the Copper River Delta in the Mississippi Flyway.
• 1:38:02
  There's Southern Hudson Bay candied geese along the West Coast, so that's a specifically designed survey for them. AP candied geese up on the Angava Peninsula. So a lot of kind of single surveys to target some of these particular goose populations. Another, way that we estimate, goose populations are Lincoln estimates. So I won't go into a lot of detail on those, but that's an indirect measure of population size that we get from two sources.
• 1:38:29
  So from harvest that we get from our harvest surveys, like you touched on that, the diary survey, the parts collection survey to come up with our total harvest estimates, and then we get harvest rates from our banding and recovery data. So you put those two pieces of information together, that gives you an indirect measure of population size and we now use those Lincoln estimates to primarily monitor status of the four Mid Continent Arctic goose populations. So Midcontinent lesser snow geese, Midcontinent cackling geese, Midcontinent white fronts, and then Ross's geese. And then there are a few surveys that we monitor through mark re site surveys. So these are birds who are collared when they first migrate down, So like a Lucian cackling geese, and then actually go out and do surveys where you're looking at the number of marked to unmarked individuals in the population to come up with the total population estimate.
• 1:39:19
  And I'd say too that, yeah, these goose surveys occur different times of the year as well depending on population. So a lot of them are in the spring during the breeding season, but some of these are also staging surveys. So like with greater snow geese, that's a spring staging survey when those birds are staging in the spring around Saint Lawrence area in Quebec. I'll also do, like, a fall photographic survey for Pacific Brandt at Eisenbeck when all the geese are there. All the brand are there in the fall.
• 1:39:47
  So and then midwinter surveys as well. So Atlantic bran are primarily indexed by a midwinter survey. So a lot of different survey types, a lot of different populations. And, yeah, Mike, we can touch on some of the highlights from the status report or if you guys have questions about, yeah, some of the survey methods.
• 1:40:03
  Mike Brasher: Well, Josh, am I on here? Okay. Yeah. So we probably don't have time to go into a lot of the methods. I know Jim Ronquist is probably there licking his chops to ask you a question about the Lincoln Peterson estimation method.
• 1:40:15
  I get that one from him every now and then, but I'm gonna have to tell Ronquist, just hold that question. I do want, Josh, your thoughts on like, when you looked at the reports, what were two or three of the more notable results? And maybe I'll just prompt you, like, let's look across the country. What are the goose species that are gonna be most intriguing to a lot of people? Canada geese, obviously, they're one of the most harvested, heavily harvested, but there are so many populations of Canada geese.
• 1:40:42
  I mean, maybe let's if there's one of those that stood out, talk about that, but white fronts Yeah.
• 1:40:48
  Jimbo Robinson: I can
• 1:40:48
  Mike Brasher: snow yeast.
• 1:40:49
  Josh Dooley: I yeah. I can talk about a few of the highlights from this year's status report. So if people do look at that status report, we report a couple different things in some of the tables, which are pretty easy to pick out, but we report the change from last year. So you can see if there's a big, you know, jump in the most recent estimate compared to the prior year, but we also report ten year trends. So that gives some kind of indication, yeah, are these populations trending upward or downward, you know, over the recent decade.
• 1:41:15
  So some of the highlights as far as recent estimates, lot of the Midcontinent populations where we are using those Lincoln estimates popped up a bit in these most recent estimates. So these are 2023 is the most recent Lincoln estimates that we have for those four mid continent population geese and all four of those increased a bit from 2022. And so we can get into some of the methods that some of that had to do with increased harvest estimates during that year and possibly some changes to do with our harvest survey in those estimates being a bit higher than they had been in the past. But again, we try to look over long term, you know, not just year over year change, And most of those midcontinent populations overall are declining over the last ten years, and I know you've talked a bit about that on some of the different podcast. And then as far as annual change, you know, there's a few groups of geese where we have some conservation concern restrictive regulations currently, and all those populations were up this past year.
• 1:42:14
  So AP Canada geese, those are Canada geese that breed on the Angava Peninsula and Winter Atlantic Flyway. They've been under restrictive regulations, but this last survey estimate was quite a bit higher in 2025 compared to 2024. So a lot of people were excited about that. Dusky candy geese are a small group of candy geese that breed there on the Copper River Delta of Alaska. Their survey numbers were also up a bit this past year.
• 1:42:39
  Atlantic brant midwinter survey numbers were up a bit this year, and they've been under restrictive regulations, going into this year in the Atlantic Flyway. And then emperor geese in Alaska, their survey indices were up this year. So some positive notes there as far as, yeah, some of those conservation concern species. And, really, there's only one population goose population that had a kind of a significant decrease from the prior year, and that was greater snow goose. And that, again, is that spring survey count came in pretty low compared to the prior year.
• 1:43:12
  And then the other piece of information we have are those ten year trends. Yep. So some notable things there if I can continue on my
• 1:43:19
  Mike Brasher: I tell you I tell you what. Let me we're let me me interrupt you there, and let me ask if there are any questions. I mean, there is a ton of we don't talk much about the goose estimates because because there's just so much information. I mean, everybody loves ducks, but nobody I mean, a lot of people love geese too. Right?
• 1:43:38
  But there is just so much information. There's only so much that we can take in. I wanna give people here online and in the studio an opportunity to ask you any questions you have a favorite goose species you're interested in.
• 1:43:49
  Jimbo Ronquest: Just looking here, it looks like overall specabilities are not doing too bad, down a little bit from the long term or the ten year trend. But looks like we're up a little bit from 2023 if I'm or '22 from what I'm reading this. Right? I know that Speckabelly has become very important to this part of the world in the past few years, and looks like lesser snow geese may be back up a little. I can definitely see a downward trend.
• 1:44:17
  Just what I see here might be just because of it looks like they're back up. So past couple of years, it seemed like snow geese have been down on the prairie.
• 1:44:25
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. So So
• 1:44:26
  Jimbo Ronquest: that's kind of good news.
• 1:44:27
  Mike Brasher: Josh, in that regard, what can you tell us about production out of the Arctic for many of these goose populations this year?
• 1:44:35
  Josh Dooley: Yeah. Overall, you know, first thing we have to go on is kinda spring phenology, so we get an indicator of that kinda early June, you know, what is the timing of the spring? So when does ice out occur in some of those primary breeding locations? And for the most part, across the Arctic and Sub Arctic, it was pretty earlier average phenology. The few places where it's noted late phenology was Northern Alaska, so on the Arctic Coastal Plain, and some areas in the Western Canadian Arctic.
• 1:45:03
  And then as far, you know, later people come back in, you had the slide there showing the banding crews and for the most part in the Mid Continent, like for lesser snow geese, Ross geese is good production, above average in some areas, average in other areas. Where was noted some some low production were from the sites for Pacific Brant, so both on the YK Delta noted pretty high predation levels this year, so low production there. And then on the North Slope, they also indicated pretty low production based from that late phenology where there's a lot of flooding in some of the brant nesting areas. And positive note, good production on Atlantic brant this year. That was noted in the East.
• 1:45:44
  And then a couple other spots where there's low production were AP Canada geese and pretty average production for greater snow geese this year. So that was a quick snapshot, I guess. But on the Mid Continent, on the whole, most of the populations, you expect pretty average or above average production based on what we saw at Banding, and that's early August.
• 1:46:02
  Mike Brasher: Good deal. Good deal. So if you're a goose hunter, a reason to be optimistic this year. Question, you look like you got a question, Lee.
• 1:46:08
  Lake Pickle: No. I mean, I was just more or less, it sounded like overall good news. There's a whole lot of information there like you were saying. I mean, that was a lot of information, but going back to layman's terms, it sounded like overall good news, and that's something to be happy about. Yep.
• 1:46:22
  Mike Brasher: It was great having Josh to be part of this because in just that ten minute segment, we were able to get a snapshot of the incredible amount of work and data that goes into estimating goose populations and getting a handle on what's happening with them. You're pouring through the numbers here. I wanna go to online. Anybody else have a question? Sarah, I know you get some questions about what's happening with some of your populations out there.
• 1:46:46
  Any from Sarah, you, or anyone else, any thoughts, anything, any questions for Josh?
• 1:46:52
  Sarah Fleming: No, nothing high level on my end, I just know that the Atlantic population, you've already alluded to it, Josh, that the numbers look like they were increasing this year compared to previous years, so hopefully we'll be starting to see we're currently under a restrictive season with the one bird bag, so I know a lot of our waterfowl hunters over here in the Northeast are we're hoping to see those positive trends and some more liberal seasons moving forward to get out of this restrictive one that we're in right now.
• 1:47:16
  Mike Brasher: Did you find anything in there? Still going back to some of those math problems?
• 1:47:20
  Jimbo Robinson: No. No. Not when they spell it out and give you the plus or minus.
• 1:47:23
  Mike Brasher: You got it.
• 1:47:24
  Jimbo Robinson: You got it. I think, I mean, yeah, mean, agree with what Ronquist said. I mean, to us, it's about the specks and snows, right, in this part of the region, and and that's where a lot of the the questions and comments come from is is the goose population looks really good. Right? And that's because that's what you see.
• 1:47:44
  Right? Yeah. And I think that that's what, you know, that's a lot of our volunteers and our supporters when they ride up and down, you know, if you travel through Arkansas at any point or Mississippi during the season, all you see is geese, and so they just immediately think, the population's great. The population's healthy. But what, you know, Josh explained is there's a lot more to it, and then
• 1:48:06
  Lake Pickle: Yeah. I know that I've seen a lot of guys on Facebook and whatnot that would probably claim to be goose specialists, but Josh just blew my mind with all that information he shared in that short period of time.
• 1:48:16
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. We have a ton of questions that have been coming in. We have a lot of people asking about sort of migration and how things have changed through time, how distributions of birds have changed through time, that's another two hour episode.
• 1:48:30
  Jimbo Ronquest: Oh, man. Absolutely.
• 1:48:32
  Mike Brasher: And hey, there is what I will say is those are legitimate questions. We partnered with some researchers here recently to use available data to quantify changes in the band recovery distributions of a lot of different species of ducks. Other folks have done that with various goose species, greater white fronts have were traditionally harvested on, you know, mostly on the the Gulf Coast, Texas Gulf Coast, began to shift into Louisiana, now up into the Mississippi Luleville Valley and other regions beyond that. These changes are real. There's data to support it.
• 1:49:07
  There are a lot of different reasons for that. Nailing those down is really difficult because there's no single factor that is controlling that and driving that for any single species. It's a multi factor type thing, and it's messy. I mean, these are birds that are migrating across and interacting with a very complex landscape that changes from year to year and changes, especially changes long term. I know some of our pilot biologists that have been flying these surveys for a long, long time have actually seen those changes firsthand, they write about those.
• 1:49:44
  So we did get your questions. That's a very complicated topic that a lot of work is being done on, and we can't possibly cover it here. Thoughts or additions to that as I check some more questions My
• 1:49:57
  Jimbo Robinson: only question would be is is one of the hot topics last year was the the goose conservation season. Right? Whether you agree with it or not, what is that conservation season doing to the overall numbers, whether it's helping or hurting the snow goose population? And and that that comes up in a lot of conversations. Is there ever a point where they're gonna pull back on it?
• 1:50:20
  Mike Brasher: Too is a two hour conversation.
• 1:50:24
  Jimbo Robinson: And so I mean,
• 1:50:24
  Mike Brasher: just Taylor's laughing. I'm not gonna dare throw that to Taylor.
• 1:50:29
  Jimbo Robinson: I just, you know, that's a big as some seasons or as some states are getting rid of it, some states are still pushing it. What is it doing
• 1:50:37
  Mike Brasher: to Well, because of all the wonderful decades of data that folks have collected at these remote camps and have banded birds, and hunters have reported have recovered and reported bands, and hunters have participated in harvest surveys. It's because of all that data that we can answer these we can, It's one thing to ask the question, it's another to answer it, and the only way you can answer it is with data, and most of the data that we have to answer these questions comes from hunters and from the people that we have here online that are representing our state and federal partners, those agencies that really lead that. So the information is out there. There have been a lot of studies conducted recently. There's an article in the DU Magazine recently about the snow goose issue.
• 1:51:24
  Again, we do have the intention of discussing that with the people actually doing the research. We will answer those very questions You've done because there are podcast
• 1:51:32
  Jimbo Robinson: answers on it as well.
• 1:51:33
  Mike Brasher: We have, but we need to update those because there's new information out there. I was going to say something else. There was a question that came in here while I look it up, any comments from the folks here as we are nearing the 09:00 hour Central? Any comments from our guests? Mike.
• 1:51:49
  Yep.
• 1:51:49
  Dan Smith: I'll just throw it out there. As a as a waterfowl hunter in the Pacific Flyway, I'm really interested to see what happens with the interim strategy for pintail. We get a three bird bag.
• 1:51:59
  Lake Pickle: Mhmm.
• 1:51:59
  Dan Smith: I'm really curious to see what that actually does to actual harvest. Mhmm. There's a lot of days that I could have if the regulation said I could shoot 15 pintail, I'd still shoot none. So I'm really curious just to see how that change, you know, manifests in harvest numbers.
• 1:52:14
  Jimbo Ronquest: I would say there's a lot of people across the country have that same same questions because I hear about it from so many people. Jimbo, what do you think about three penthouses? Let's wait and see what happens.
• 1:52:25
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. I mean, this this could have been, and it will happen sometime with this, you know, if we were really worried or nervous, not worried, but nervous, mostly from a communication standpoint, if pintails had dropped this year, and if they had dropped to a point where next year they were recommended for a one bird limit, I mean, that was would that'd be a significant communication challenge. Mean, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that we would've seen that, but we didn't, and so it's where we are right now. We'll have two years of that three pintel limit, and so to Dan's point, we're going to learn a lot here over the next couple of years, and folks like Taylor and Josh and all of their colleagues are really going to be looking intently at that data. They're really, really excited to see what that is.
• 1:53:14
  Jimbo Robinson: I did get a question on that. If there was a significant drop, could the regulations change? This year? No, not
• 1:53:23
  Jimbo Ronquest: for this year.
• 1:53:23
  Jimbo Robinson: Oh. But for next year.
• 1:53:25
  Mike Brasher: Oh, absolutely. Mean, if the population dropped?
• 1:53:29
  Jimbo Robinson: Dropped significantly.
• 1:53:30
  Mike Brasher: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
• 1:53:31
  Jimbo Robinson: Because, you know, we're talking about the 2026 framework, right, the suggestions, and that was a question was if harvest, you know, not that harvest makes an impact, but
• 1:53:42
  Mike Brasher: if harvest matters, habitat matters more.
• 1:53:45
  Jimbo Robinson: Did you make a sticker? What? Did you make a sticker?
• 1:53:49
  Taylor Finger: No. A great opportunity for us in the flyaway just because, I mean, for the lay folk that doesn't necessarily understand this, we never increase a bag limit on a population that is decreasing. And so this gives us an opportunity to see how potential hunting and harvest affects Mhmm. Something because inherently whenever a population goes down, we decrease the bag limit or a population goes up, we increase the bag limit.
• 1:54:14
  Jimbo Ronquest: So
• 1:54:15
  Taylor Finger: I know we are all a little bit hesitant and a little nervous about the communication aspect, but from a scientific and, you know, management perspective, this allows us a chance to really see what happens.
• 1:54:27
  Mike Brasher: Yeah. I want I wanna I wanna clarify just something that you said, Taylor, to make sure people heard it right. You said we never increased the bag limit on the species that's declining. What you're what you mean is that historically Historically had never been the way it the way it worked.
• 1:54:41
  Taylor Finger: Under Yeah.
• 1:54:42
  Mike Brasher: That's right. That's right. But the pintel strategy is kinda suggesting that there's an opportunity to do something a little bit different when you went to that that new strategy.
• 1:54:50
  Jimbo Ronquest: Right.
• 1:54:50
  Mike Brasher: K.
• 1:54:51
  Scott Stephens: I I just wanted to pile on and say that I think kudos to the federal and state partners for getting that interim strategy and and doing the things that you just described, Taylor, and, you know, because researchers who've been working on pintails have been asking for that kind of thing for, like, twenty five years now. Mhmm. Right?
• 1:55:08
  Josh Dooley: Like, you say that
• 1:55:09
  Jimbo Robinson: kind of thing, what do you mean? An increase?
• 1:55:12
  Scott Stephens: Increases Yeah. Increases in the harvest. Yeah. Like, I I know there was a paper in the late nineties, early two thousands that I looked at, and it was like, you know what we need to do? We need to increase the harvest, like, in the signal that we have.
• 1:55:27
  We we can't find any connection to that and survival rates, so it would be nice to test that further. And that's exactly what we're doing now, and, you know, we will monitor things and see how it impacts it, and we will learn. So
• 1:55:39
  Mike Brasher: But but just to clarify again, and Josh, you correct me, and Taylor, if I'm if I'm wrong, but in talking with folks, it's like, isn't this isn't a test. It is a new interim harvest strategy that was made possible by additional years of data and new modeling, and when that modeling was done and when it was done in the face of explicitly stated objectives that the Flyway Council, state, and federal folks agreed on, that new model, that new harvest strategy indicated that there was more harvest potential for that pintel population than what had previously been allowed under the old strategy, so it wasn't a deliberate test. They did not go into it saying, we're gonna test something. They went into it saying, we have better data or more data and better analytical methods, and we're gonna see what it gives us with regard to a new harvest strategy. Right?
• 1:56:33
  Right, Taylor?
• 1:56:34
  Taylor Finger: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, maybe I framed it incorrectly, but, yeah, I mean, it took nearly a decade's worth of work for a ton of biologists and scientists on, you know, the pintail, updating the pintail harvest strategy. And, yeah, like you said, it did identify additional opportunity.
• 1:56:51
  And like I said, it just it came at a time when the population was declining. So this will, you know, from us as the flyways perspective, this is a way to test some of the assumptions that we have held in, you know, in terms of and management for waterfowl species over the last twenty, twenty five years.
• 1:57:10
  Mike Brasher: Any other comments from folks? I realize we are at nine zero two. We still have had some questions that came in. Do we have like Mike.
• 1:57:17
  Matt Dyson: Yep. I'll I'll just add relative to the pintail conversation. I mean, similar when we we start to look at our our Great Lakes Mallards, you know, we're we're talking about a species that we also know and understand that it's not harvest that's contributing to a lot of those declines from the data sources like our survey data, our banding data, it's productivity on the breeding grounds. So it's that availability of of productive grassland, ponds on the on the prairies, and that interaction with with agriculture there that that can potentially drive those populations down. So again, you know, delivering habitat program is is really one of the ways we can move the needle on those populations as well.
• 1:57:48
  Mike Brasher: We are at nine zero two. Do we have like a super hard stop here, Chris Isaac? I want to make sure there aren't any other kind of questions, like pressing questions there's that folks have, especially here in studio. I've got sort of a good ending question for folks. Anything out there?
• 1:58:04
  Jimbo Robinson: Are there any comments? Any good questions on the comments? I mean, I know a
• 1:58:09
  Mike Brasher: lot There have been some.
• 1:58:10
  Jimbo Robinson: Yes. There seem to be a lot about pintails. I mean, that seemed to be the go ahead.
• 1:58:14
  Taylor Finger: I'd like to I'd
• 1:58:15
  Jimbo Ronquest: like to throw something out before we move on with this just recent conversation about harvest breaks. I think something a picture we gotta paint out there, we all are bad about saying it's not about harvest, it's about habitat, which is true, absolutely. But I think we need to preface that with managed regulated harvest does not harm waterfowl populations. It's not like everybody can go out there and it's free for all, you can see as many as you can talk into giving up. I think we need to make sure we preface that.
• 1:58:41
  Lake Pickle: Yep. Mhmm.
• 1:58:42
  Mike Brasher: Good point. Other thoughts from the crew? Okay. I have a fantastic final question to ask. How accurate is the duck survey, and what is y'all's opinion?
• 1:58:54
  This is the really good part. I mean, Josh and Taylor and Scott, anybody can I mean, there's a great answer to that question? You can answer it a lot of different ways in terms of how accurate is it. You can answer it quantitatively, but you could also kind of answer it just sort of philosophically from the amount of work that goes into this and how rigorous it is approached. What is y'all's opinion for the future trend for ducks in conservation?
• 1:59:21
  Who wants to take that first? Because I will call on you.
• 1:59:24
  Taylor Finger: I I guess I'll just comment and say that, I mean, I have no idea if there's 33,000,000 ducks out there, you know, in terms of what the actual survey produces a hard number. But as we stated, you know, as managers, we look at trends. We look at how this compares to what we saw ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, and does that go up? Does that go down? Looking at the hard number doesn't do me a whole lot of good other than where it shakes out on a matrix in terms of a sixty day season or a six duck daily bag limit.
• 1:59:54
  So, I mean, I do feel like we I mean, it's the best wildlife survey in the world in terms of its, you know, size and the amount of work that goes into it. That being said, there's caveats with anything that we do, but I just again, if you wanna look at it and say, yeah, we think we know that there's 33,000,000 ducks. We we don't. But compared to what we saw ten years ago, okay, that tells us if we're up or we're down. And I think that's how we have to approach it.
• 2:00:24
  Jimbo Robinson: Oh.
• 2:00:25
  Mike Brasher: Scott, were you about to jump in or somebody?
• 2:00:27
  Scott Stephens: Sure. Yeah. I when whenever you're whenever you take a statistics course, one of the one of the famous quotes that you always get is all models are wrong, some are useful. And so I think that applies here as as Taylor described. This this survey and the information and the models that we create based on it is the envy of wildlife around the world.
• 2:00:50
  Like, the duck survey that we are talking about here tonight is the longest running, you know, biggest scale. It's like people would kill to have the information that we have on ducks. Is it perfect? Do we know everything? No.
• 2:01:03
  But it's been really useful. It's allowed us to manage continental waterfowl populations for, you know, a long, long time since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act successfully. They're all pretty healthy. We've we've learned a lot of cool things. So, you know, that that would be my answer.
• 2:01:22
  Dan Smith: I'd just add on to try to create what we have right now out of nothing would be a monumental tax. Right? And so the fact that we even have these and it goes far beyond just just counting waterfowl and spring. Right? I mean, you gotta think about all the harvest data that we get, all the banding data.
• 2:01:38
  I mean, it's we have multiple data streams that really allow us the luxury of asking well informed questions. And so as far as accuracy, I mean, the number of juxt changes on a daily basis. But we have a pretty good index that we can rely on to ask some really relevant questions.
• 2:01:54
  Mike Brasher: You know, to that point, Dan, I was talking with somebody from Australia the other day, or a couple weeks ago, about some of the challenges that they're facing, and to start from scratch, as you said, as they would have to do to get where we are, the legislation, all the administrative structures, not to mention all the data, I mean, just the administrative structures that they lack, that we do here in North America, a monumental task, but then it's that administrative structure that provides that collaborative approach, and is really what galvanizes everyone and provides the momentum and the shared view and importance of all of this data and all this work, and so it's really, really cool. Josh, I want to give you an opportunity to say anything. Your agency is front and center this regard along with our Canadian Wildlife Service colleagues who obviously are not represented on here tonight.
• 2:02:48
  Josh Dooley: Yeah. I think you guys, you know, touched on it. This is a pretty magnificent survey, and if you're thinking about trying to capture, you know, population dynamics of the species and estimate abundance, I don't know what you'd do besides a statistically designed rigorous survey that, you know, encompasses a broad portion of species range. And so, you know, there's difficulties with surveys because you're trying to optimize across a bunch of different species. So there's early nesters and late nesters and things in the survey is timed up, you know, to really capture mouther dynamics.
• 2:03:19
  So there's always things in the survey that you can't exactly optimize, but the amount of information we get from the survey and rigorously doing it with set protocols, like, yeah, it's it's fantastic. And especially to be behind the scenes and really see what goes into it just year to year, the logistics. I mean, it's not certain that this thing's gonna happen every year. I mean, the amount of permitting and logistics and funding and things that have to come together and administrative staff behind the scenes. I mean, it's just it's it's really amazing.
• 2:03:47
  So, you know, another thing I'd say, again, you know, as managers, we're looking at long term dynamics and just look at a, you know, a graph of the wet dry cycle, the pond counts of the prairies, and look at duck abundance and, you know, you do capture those dynamics with the survey. So at a large scale, I think, yeah, we have a pretty good representation of what these populations are doing out there, and that allows us to really make these informed decisions that we have over the past decades to ensure that populations and harvest is sustainable and continued into the future.
• 2:04:19
  Jimbo Robinson: Something really interesting that Taylor said that caught my attention was is he doesn't really the numbers don't matter to him, but the trends do.
• 2:04:26
  Mike Brasher: Well, from a populate my guess is that he's talking about from a population sustainability standpoint, the trend is what's more important.
• 2:04:34
  Josh Dooley: Mhmm.
• 2:04:35
  Mike Brasher: The number is important because we have conducted surveys over a long period of time that have produced estimates. Those surveys have been conducted the same way, so those estimates can be used to inform decisions because although they may not be perfect, they may not deliver the exact I mean, there are estimates of variation around this, right? And so it is an estimate for that defined area, there is some uncertainty associated with it, and so you can use those numbers to understand relationships and then make decisions based on those relationships, but as he's saying in his position, let him speak for himself here in a moment, it is that trend up, down, how steep that trend is that he really, that that would really worry him. Whether it's 33,000,000 or if it's scaled somehow differently and it's 16,000,000 and it goes, you know, it's that Taylor, am I kind of getting it right?
• 2:05:30
  Taylor Finger: Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Again, it's I mean, for me, it's okay. We're what's the percentage we are up compared to the percentage we were down?
• 2:05:38
  That type of thing makes a difference to me because quite frankly, the numbers were they're they're just a number on there. So were we up a lot from the last year? Were we down a lot from the last year? How are we compared to the five years ago or ten years ago? That that's where we focus a lot of our effort and time on.
• 2:05:54
  And as I said, the numbers are important for us from the flyaway perspective because that's the things that alright. Well, now we're below the sixteen day teal season or, hey, SCOP are now in a restrictive package versus a moderate package or things along those lines. So, again, that's important to pay attention to. But when when we're talking with the public, when we're communicating with that, that's alright. What do we go from, you know, 6,000,000 mallards to six and a half million mallards?
• 2:06:19
  Okay. We're up 3% or 4%. That's that's realistically what I focus most of my effort and time on.
• 2:06:26
  Jimbo Robinson: What's interesting, and I think what and I and you and I talked about this last year. What when you when you're in the field, what people the first thing people say is is, well, these numbers do not reflect what's in front of my blind. That's like the most common leg shaking his head. I know Jimbo's heard it. Like, that's what our the crowds I run-in, that's what goes to their head first.
• 2:06:51
  And so a question came up today about 03:00, I got a text from a buddy who talks, and I talked to this about, and he was like, this, what we're using for this survey seems to be extremely old. Will there ever be a trend of using new technology to gather this data?
• 2:07:11
  Mike Brasher: We are unpacking a lot here, but I'll say the answer is yes. There are efforts underway to look at modernizing survey techniques, data collection techniques, whether you're talking about counting ponds, estimating ducks, estimating geese, what's the other one that I was thinking about? Collecting harvest data, those types of things, there are modernization efforts and thoughts underway, so yes, a lot of the folks that we have here and their colleagues are at the center of that. Right. So, and in terms of this does not reflect what I'm seeing in front of my blind, the thing that we have commented on multiple times recently with various guests is that if you think you're seeing 30 or 40% fewer ducks in front of your blind these days, you probably are because there are 30 or 40% fewer ducks in the continent right now than there were about seven or eight years ago based on these surveys that we're talking about because it's that trend that should be that is a meaningful index or indicator of where we are relative to where we were about seven or eight years ago.
• 2:08:22
  Comments from our panel in that regard.
• 2:08:25
  Scott Stephens: Well, I I would just say, Mike, for the prairie nesting species, it's closer to half would be the better number to the last peak that we had, which is about a decade ago. So you know? But but at the same time, when I hear comments like that, it's like, well, in front of your blind is a sample, and that's the way we collect this information, but that's one sample. So if you roll it up over what everybody's seeing across all of their blinds, it might be a different story. Yeah.
• 2:08:52
  Jimbo Robinson: Yeah. No. And that's it. And go ahead, Lee.
• 2:08:54
  Lake Pickle: Well, the one thing I would add to that is I think it was Scott that said it earlier. He was talking about imagine if we had didn't have this survey and we had to start from scratch, and I had never really thought about that because going back to what I was saying earlier, for years, this comes out, y'all make a post about it. It's a screenshot. I'm it goes into a group text every time. Every time.
• 2:09:13
  And I have never thought about, like, for me or for most other folks, we go, oh, there's the numbers. Like, just spending what little time I've spent today or or folks that have watched this, I'm sure, just a little bit of more insight into how much work goes into this. And it also makes me think too when you're talking about updating survey techniques, obviously, that's not something that can happen overnight.
• 2:09:35
  Mike Brasher: No. Is Sure can.
• 2:09:36
  Lake Pickle: This is it's huge. And and it's it's been insightful for me and hope for everyone watching, just gaining more information and learning more about how much goes into this. Absolutely.
• 2:09:46
  Jimbo Robinson: And you can make a and and Mike does a tremendous job along with a lot of people on here on the Ducks Unlimited podcast. Go through, scroll through, and listen to a lot of the questions that that's that I've brought up tonight are questions that you've discussed on on on numerous podcasts, but but what you said is is exactly right. I think Scott just said it, it's a sample, right, but there's also a lot of changing habitats that the farming techniques have gotten better. There's a lot of other of those outside factors that probably from an outsider's perspective looking into what they're doing in the survey, those kinds of factors have gone into the survey over the years as well. Not that necessarily, but if you relate that to your waterfowl hunting, there's a lot of things that have changed inside of what you're doing in in your at your blind.
• 2:10:33
  Right? So the same people that have hunted the same spot for for decades, look what's happened around you and look at that broad landscape of of whether it's urban sprawl or whatever it is, look what's going on around you and take all that into consideration, and considering that we've lost Absolutely. As what he said, 50% of of the population, and if you sit back and you look at it and you say, but you still get to go, and there's still an opportunity, as Jimbo says, you know, Ronquist, there's still an opportunity you gotta go, and it's still sixty days that we get to share God's creation and what he's blessed us with to do, and when you take the numbers, if you don't try to dissect it, Nobody
• 2:11:12
  Mike Brasher: would do that. We don't
• 2:11:13
  Jimbo Robinson: know Well, what you would no, I'm talking about from layman's terms, if you don't try to dissect and say, okay, blue wings are down or green wings are down, we're gonna see less green wings, or shovelers are up, we're gonna see more shovelers, and try to relate it to exactly what you have there, it works, and it's worked for centuries. Yeah. Decades.
• 2:11:32
  Mike Brasher: This is a great segue. I want to I do wanna get back to this question that this person had. What's your opinion about the the future I wanna make sure I get this right. The future opinion for the future trend for ducks in conservation, and I want to go to Sarah with this. I give her a few seconds to think about this because Sarah is sort of at the intersection of science and our conservation delivery.
• 2:11:58
  You touched on some of the the items that are important there. It's not about what's happening just in front of your blind, it's it's about what's happening at the continental level with regard to the ability to produce ducks. It's also about what's happening around your blind in that landscape closer to you. It's also affected by other things between those areas where the ducks are produced and where they're ending up in front of your blind, hopefully. It depends on all sorts of environmental changes that are happening with warmer winters, less snowfall, changing precipitation patterns, a whole bunch of things, which makes it really difficult to give all of us a very solid, easy to sleep at night answer.
• 2:12:40
  Sarah is on the front lines from Ducks Unlimited standpoint, having that science background, and leading our conservation delivery in the Northeast. So Sarah, your thoughts, your opinion, the future of ducks and conservation.
• 2:12:54
  Sarah Fleming: Well, I think our numbers speak for themselves. When we look at the historical trends, long term and and de used habitat conservation delivery and the acres we're putting on the ground, we're continuing to see healthy sustainable populations and so I think those trends are going to continue. And we have little bumps along the way, but long term trends, we're continuing to see strong huntable populations. So, I think as long as we're putting good habitat on the ground and have willing partners and willing owners wanting to work with us to continue those trends, I think we're going to continue on a very positive trajectory. And we've seen it, historically speaking.
• 2:13:26
  When we look at the history and the policies that have been put in place to ensure these the protection of this this huntable species, I think. You know, it's the envy of the we've already alluded to this, waterfowl conservation is the envy of a lot of other game management programs, both continentally speaking and across the world. And so we've I foresee strong very strong population trends moving in the future and good habitat conservation on the ground, you know, especially with our million million acre goals every year that our CEO has object has challenged us all with. I think we're gonna see good things long term.
• 2:13:59
  Mike Brasher: Yep. This is a great place to wrap it up. We could go on I am like, this is really energizing. Here we are two hours, twenty minutes into a conversation I feel like we're just kind of wanting to get started, you know? But out of respect for everyone's time, we're going to wrap this up.
• 2:14:17
  I will thank our guests from the field, Doctor. Scott Stephens, Doctor. Matt Dyson. We didn't even give you many opportunities to talk there, Matt, but we'll get you back here at some point. Thank you for being here with us.
• 2:14:30
  Great to have you. I mean, that's the way it goes when you get a lot of people that love to talk about things, right?
• 2:14:35
  Matt Dyson: That's right, all good, Mike.
• 2:14:36
  Mike Brasher: Yep, yeah, we appreciate our DU Canada colleagues, and always great to have you here. Let's see, who else? I lost my panel here. I want to make sure I get everybody. Can I get the little panel screen back up there?
• 2:14:48
  I'm going to go with Sarah Fleming from New York, Taylor Finger, Jimbo Ronquist, Dan Smith, Josh Dooley. Thank you all so much for joining us, spending your evening with us, and providing wonderful information in studio. Jimbo Robinson, great having you be part of this, and then our great partners at On X Hunt, Lake Pickle, great to have you here as well. Glad you drove up. You got to drive back tonight?
• 2:15:17
  We're getting you out of here later than you anticipated to.
• 2:15:19
  Lake Pickle: Man, I wouldn't have missed this. I'm happy to be here.
• 2:15:22
  Jimbo Robinson: Yeah. Dad, it's been amazing to be here, and really just to get to hear everybody, you know, the hard work that has gone into it, and and and I I said it last year, you know, it's kinda like for some people, it's it's the Super Bowl. It's it's their what they've been working, you know, and Taylor still has a lot to I think, yeah, Taylor has a lot left. Right? Got next week that he gets to unfold all of this, and so for us, we're excited.
• 2:15:49
  We feel like we're done now. It's time time to move into the season. For Taylor, really just getting going, and for a lot of our team, it's just getting going too, and and thank all of y'all for for taking the time to be here with us tonight. It's a very special moment, and it's another benefit of all the hard work that goes in into this survey each year, and I'm just humbled to be here.
• 2:16:10
  Lake Pickle: And if I if I could just add one more thing. Again, coming coming from the perspective of a guy, I feel like Jimbo, I feel like me and you are on the same wavelength here, and Jimbo Ronquist on there. Like, I'm no biologist. I care a lot about this stuff. But one thing that I appreciate from coming from most of the panel and and you is, like, it's it's so evident, like, the the passion that comes from this.
• 2:16:30
  Like, everyone in here that's talking about this, they're they're in here because they care about it. It's not just work to them. They love what they do, and it shows, and and that's been really cool.
• 2:16:39
  Mike Brasher: So you mentioned something that makes me wanna say, you know, Taylor will sleep very well in about a week and a half or so when that meeting next week is over. I will sleep very well tonight because this has been an incredible day, incredibly busy day, but it doesn't happen without the assistance of a ton of people, a few of them that I do wanna name that have been influential in what's happening here tonight, Most of whom you've never seen, may not have even heard from, Ty Scharrow, Casey Messerly, Katie Tucker, Mallory Murphy, Chris Isaac, Rachel Jared, Clay Baird, Beth Bryan, Mary Owen Sanderling, Kevin Woods, a host of others. From DU Canada, Camille Losa, Camille, if I mispronounce your name, I'm sorry, Lee Patterson, and then, like I said, a ton of other folks. Get out, attend a Ducks Unlimited event, ducks.org/events, and get out, take advantage of the resource. And in the immortal words of our good friend here, doctor Scott Stephens, life is short.
• 2:17:38
  You better hunt.
• 2:17:39
  Jimbo Robinson: And if we didn't answer your question, send it
• 2:17:40
  Mike Brasher: in. That's right. That's right. Thanks, y'all. 2025 Ducks Unlimited waterfowl season outlook.
• 2:17:45
  Signing off.
• 2:17:49
  VO: Thank you for listening to the DU podcast sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly.
• 2:18:11
  Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited. Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.