Latest / Ducks Unlimited Podcast / RELOADED EP224 - Waterfowl Harvest Management Series, Part 12: AHM – Learning, Legacy, and Influence

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RELOADED EP224 - Waterfowl Harvest Management Series, Part 12: AHM – Learning, Legacy, and Influence · Ducks Unlimited Podcast

• 0:03
  VO: Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast, RELOADED, where we bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In RELOADED, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.
• 0:35
  Mike Brasher: Today, we're continuing on with our series on waterfowl harvest management featuring our guest, retired from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, USGS, whatever other agencies he might have he might have been transitioned to along the way, doctor Jim Nichols. Jim, welcome back to the podcast.
• 0:52
  Jim Nichols: Thanks very much, Mike.
• 0:53
  Mike Brasher: Let's pick up right here where we left off on the last when we had made it through some of the fundamental components of adaptive harvest management. We had stepped through the regulatory alternatives and kind of how we go about selecting those and the optimization matrix that gets out gets outputted as a result of the stochastic dynamic programming. The next thing that I want to talk about here, and this is sort of the start of a wrap up to the discussion, is going to highlight some of the importance of this process and then some of the individual components, some of the other aspects of as it's going to relate to hunters and our role in this. So, for starters, let's talk about the different data streams that are used to kind of inform the models. Monitoring is as we've talked about, as you've described to us, fundamental aspect of this process of seeing how your predictions compare to what's actually observed, and you can't come up with observations unless you're doing some some monitoring programs or having data streams of some type.
• 2:00
  So talk about some of the most important data streams, data collection methods with respect to adaptive harvest management.
• 2:08
  Jim Nichols: Okay, it's interesting because most of the, well not most, all of the monitoring methods that are sort of used for waterfowl were developed long before was ever considered or thought about. It was just smart folks who were interested, very interested in ducks and interested in population dynamics and knew enough about those to implement these programs. So a key one, one of the last things we chatted about was the matrix that had to do with, or the table, that had to do with population size in the spring and number of ponds on the breeding grounds in the spring as well. And those are things which come from our May aerial surveys. The formal name of that thing changes from year to year, but it's basically folks flying a specific kind of stratified random design and counting birds and then translating those into, those counts into overall estimate, so both the population size and number of ponds.
• 3:12
  It's an extensive survey, the CWS Fish and Wildlife Service and states, DU folks as well, all participate in that, so it's real big deal. Another data stream is the harvest survey. Okay, so harvest survey does a couple of things for you, it estimates the number of birds that are taken in a given year and as we said, that's part of our objective is to maximize harvest over a long term timeframe, so it's clearly relevant to objectives. The other thing it does is provide us a way of getting at reproductive rate on a large continental scale. You know, there's DU, for example, has some, you know, much better than I do, Mike has some great programs for actually being able to estimate duck recruitment on smallish areas in their detailed approaches that are certainly a lot better in a sense than what we do at the continental scale.
• 4:10
  When you think of the data that are available continentally, you can't implement all those sort of nest search and nest visitation experiments. And so what's done is look at the age ratio of birds in the harvest, how many adults to young there are for example, and that ends up being a component of the way that we estimate the number of adults to young actually in the population in the fall flight. Now it's only a component, the other piece that's needed are banding data. And certainly as I know that's a, you know, all duck hunters are familiar with duck bands and hopefully are reporting those reasonably. And what the banning data do is allow you to estimate a bunch of things.
• 4:58
  With respect to age ratio, what if we just looked at young to adult in the harvest? Would that be a good indication of how many young were produced, young produced per adult in the fall population? Well the answer would be no, and the reason it's no is because young end up being harvested at a greater rate. In other words, a young bird at the beginning of the hunting season has a much higher probability of being shot than a same sex adult bird does. And so basically the banding data allow you to estimate those two different probabilities, the chances that a young bird will be shot as opposed to chances that an adult bird will be shot.
• 5:43
  And that difference then is sort of applied to the harvest age ratio is a way of estimating the age ratio in the fall population of ducks. Basically the banding data have a role there. A real key thing that the banding data have a role in is estimating the distribution of harvest rates, like what harvest rate are we likely to get if we implement a particular set of hunting regulations. And every single year, Scott Boomer and his group actually updates our ability to predict hunting regulate, excuse me, the harvest rate resulting from any set of regulations by the harvest rates that resulted from last year's set of regulations. And so that's another very important component of the sort of model.
• 6:37
  We have to be able to, when we select a set of regulations, say well what, how many dead birds do we expect this to result in, what harvest rates are gonna result from selecting that package, that's an important part of the prediction. And then, had a final, oh yeah, and the final thing the banding data allow us to do, or real relevant for, is estimating survival rates. Now the survival rates aren't estimated annually, this is not, this is done periodically though, with the idea of parameterizing or providing good estimates of survival that are actually used in these different models for compensatory and additive mortality, for example. So I may be missing something, I think those are the three key sort of monitoring programs. The aerial surveys, they're responsible for our breeding population size and our pond numbers.
• 7:30
  A harvest survey that helps us keep track of the harvest which is what we're trying to maximize And also is useful when we look at young and adult for estimating a reproductive rate. And then the banding data which help us with estimating reproductive rate, it helps us with estimating the harvest rates associated with given regulations, and it helps us estimate survival rates that go into our models.
• 7:56
  Mike Brasher: Thank you for those descriptions, Jim. We've talked with Doctor. Ken Ratchford about the Waterfowl Breeding Compulation and Habitat Survey on a previous episode. Actually, was earlier this year with regard to the postponement or the cancellation of this year's survey. So there's an episode where people can learn a bit more about that survey if they aren't familiar with it.
• 8:16
  We also talked in detail about the harvest surveys with Doctor. Paul Padding and Doctor. Kathy Fleming, maybe a two or three part episode even earlier this year, I think maybe back in January of this year, so people can certainly learn more about that if they want to. What we have not yet done is had a well, I guess we did actually speak with doctor Mark Lindberg about some banding banding data, the utility of banding data in in waterfowl management. So we've we've kinda covered a number of those, all three of those key data collection streams in some detail on previous episodes so people can go back and listen to those if they if those they so choose.
• 8:56
  But I'm glad that you you pulled out the importance of banding data with respect to because that's one of the one of the questions that that I see a lot, I hear often, is how are these data used? How are they how do they influence the decisions that ultimate ultimately come back to influence me as a hunter? What's my why other than the gee whiz cool factor of wanting to know where this bird originated, where it was banded, and to where it traveled when you harvest it? People want to know, and we try to impress upon them the utility of that data, and this is and and why it's important for them to report their bans. We we constantly try to encourage that, and and this is probably the best example of how those data are used every year, at least some of the data are used every year in in the adaptive harvest management process.
• 9:52
  So so those efforts taken by hunters actually inform and fuel the the work of this of the harvest management process. So thanks for for pulling those out and talking about that, Jim. You know, at at this point, is there anything else that we need to discuss with regard to the the mechanics of I think we've covered most of it, Jim. But before we move into some of the remaining kind of questions that I have about what did we learn, did we think about this, or what was reaction when we first this first got became implemented. Are are there any other topics that we need to discuss relative to the the mechanics and application of The
• 10:35
  Jim Nichols: one thing about reporting of of bans, I'll say that you're absolutely right, that it's extremely important for waterfowl hunters to know how important they are reporting of bans to decisions and to this whole process. And I will say that the more bans that are reported, that is, you know, we're not sunk if somebody doesn't report one, never assume that all bands are recorded. So we know how to deal with non reporting, but the more folks who report, the lower our variance, the lower our uncertainty is about things like harvest rates that are produced from particular sets of regulations. So even though we know how to deal with non reporting, it's not the kiss of death when somebody doesn't report a ban, it really does help, it is an important thing. In terms of the iterative process itself, I just want to remind people the whole idea about this is it's adaptive in the sense that when we test each one of those models predictions, when we ask how well each one of the models did at predicting next year's, what we see in the May aerial survey, and end up giving more weight to the models that predicted better and less weight to the ones that predicted poorly, that is a real tangible sort of expression of learning.
• 11:57
  In other words, we can look at the evolution of these model weights and that's a very clear sort of quantitative expression of the degree to which we've learned stuff. And we've already talked about the fact that we've, yeah, we've learned that a couple of these models aren't very useful and a couple of them still are. But that learning, number one, is very tangible and real, and number two, it makes a difference to the regulations that are selected each year. So now when we look at our matrix, or excuse me, our table that has population size on one axis of it and number of ponds on the other, the regulations packages that occur in each one of those things, it's different now than it was 25 ago when we were taking, assuming each one of those models was equally likely, equally plausible. And it's very different because now it's based on the models that are most plausible as judged by their predictive ability, and so it's big deal.
• 12:55
  Learning happens and learning is useful to management, not just learning for the sake of learning. And the final thing is to mention is what some people call double loop learning. It's the idea that every once in a while you kick out and something causes you to want to change one or more of the components that we've talked about of the management process. And for example, in 2002 Mike Brasher and Fred Johnson led an effort to pull out some of the models and sort of tweak them in ways that were very very sensible and change the model set in ways that made sense to go forward. Right now there's an awful lot of talk about objectives again, and I think that's ongoing, the idea of maybe revisiting objectives and making them a bit more rich, maybe going back to some of the ideas Jim Rendleman had about hunter satisfaction.
• 13:54
  So, but anyway, the point is that you're not locked into this management process once you set on it, settle on a number of models and objectives and so on. But periodically, it may make sense to come out and revisit any one of those components and that's absolutely fair game and it's being encouraged. So I think that's all I wanted to add, Mike. Thanks.
• 14:17
  Mike Brasher: One of the things I wanna go back to is your is where you spoke about the importance of reporting bands, and we have ways to account for unreported bands, but the more bands that are recovered bands that are reported, the the lower our variance, the greater our precision, however we wanna say that. But there's a there's an important implication for that. It's not just that we want smaller confidence intervals or we want higher precision. We want greater degrees of precision because that leads to greater confidence in our decision making. Right?
• 14:53
  Like, the the finer the the narrower our confidence interval around a certain parameter estimates, the greater confidence that we have that it's closer to the true estimate. And then therefore, it enables us to be more confident in the decisions that we're making as a result of the inclusion of those parameters. Is that right?
• 15:10
  Jim Nichols: Yeah, you're exactly right. And especially if people understand the notion of confidence intervals, just sort of the endpoints if you will, that say I'm 95% sure that an estimate may fall within an interval or something that's not a completely correct statement but kind of a folksy way of saying it. You're right, we've got confidence interval. When we update model weights, they're based on two different things, both of which have uncertainty associated with them. One is the actual population size that we observe.
• 15:45
  And we don't, you know, we estimate numbers of birds by counting them, but that estimate has uncertainty associated with it. And the other thing is the predictions of the models themselves. And those predictions are governed, the uncertainty of those predictions are governed by the uncertainty associated with our ability to estimate parameters such as survival rates and harvest rates that go into them. And so you're absolutely right. The better we can do, the less uncertainty we have about what each model predicts and about what we actually observe, the greater our chances are of learning.
• 16:24
  That is the bigger change we're gonna see in those model weights, which reflects more learn.
• 16:37
  VO: Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.
• 16:53
  Mike Brasher: Adaptive harvest management was first implemented for Midcontinent mallards, and we could probably spend an hour talking about this aspect of it alone, I guess I have just a general question. Mallards are obviously the species for which we have the most robust, the most abundant datasets. When setting adaptive harvest management on the basis of mallards and recognizing that the regulations that are promulgated as a result of that will also affect some of the other species. How much of your analytical time and intellectual time was consumed by that part of the discussion, thinking about the implications of setting harvest regulations for a group of species based on the mallard in this case?
• 17:43
  Jim Nichols: Early on, again, Scott Boomer will be a good guy to ask this question, he'll give you a more informed answer, but I'll tell you what I think, is that early on there wasn't a lot of attention devoted to that, not because people didn't think it was important, but because prior to that, if you think about it, even in sort of the pre adaptive management days, hunting regulations, if you think about it for a lot of species really did follow malice. And it wasn't because people didn't recognize obviously differences, you know, interspecific differences in waterfowl population dynamics, but it basically had to do with time and effort. In other words, I've always, I have an incredible amount of respect for the folks in the migratory bird management office who sort of do the number crunching, who look at population sizes, estimate survival rates, and things of this nature, they, it's a small team of individuals and they're asked to do this for basically all the hunted waterfowl species, and it's just impossible. There, if you, it may be, if you multiply their staff by about 10, you might be able to do the job that we're doing for mallards with a number of other different species, but it's just physically impossible and so it's not so much, it's absolutely not, doesn't have to do with the idea that other species are not important or that we think they behave exactly the same as mallards, it's just that you have to pick somewhere when you have very limited resources you have to figure out where to put them.
• 19:19
  Now I will say that obviously there's some species like when you recognize right away they're not doing well, something like Cambusback in the days when we started the program, you would go ahead and treat those species differently. Again, not having the resources to put together an adaptive management program for them, which we wish we could have had, but recognizing they're different and setting things differently. But for a lot of species, you're right, it just followed along with knowledge, knowledge very much influenced them, but it wasn't because of lack of appreciation of interspecific differences, it wasn't nearly as much that as it was just the idea that there wasn't enough time and effort and personnel to do a good job with them. But it's not that different from historically, I'm saying way pre AHM, I think we kinda did the same thing.
• 20:11
  Mike Brasher: And that's an important point, Jim, and it's probably worth emphasizing, there are other species beyond canvas backs that have been kind of carved out because of special concern for their populations, mottleducks, black ducks, scot, pintails, canvas backs, as you mentioned, redheads also kind of fall into this category of having their own sort of separate regulations. And there's a process by which all of those are are established, and we can talk with Scott and maybe some other folks about those as well. But but anyway, just wanted to touch on that, the the fact that kind of Mallard served as this umbrella for for and then it does fall down to dictate the regulations for some for some other species. I wanna get your thoughts, Jim. You can tell me I don't know how much you interacted with the Flyway folks after the once was implemented.
• 20:59
  I don't know how much of the discussions in the in the immediate years after implementation you were party to. But what can you tell me about the initial reaction, observations during the first two, three, four years after was implemented? Was there still some apprehension? Was there was there still was there any consternation? Or or was there an almost I don't know.
• 21:25
  Immediate's probably too dramatic of a word, but did you notice a change in the tone of the discussions that you might have been part of? Can you provide any any insight on how the conversations around harvest management might have changed after was implemented?
• 21:40
  Jim Nichols: I can provide a little bit, but you're absolutely right. I'm good for maybe the first few years, three or four years after establishment of and after that, I didn't go to to regs meetings very frequently just because of my new sort of organizational position. But yeah, so at first my impression was that the one thing I absolutely noticed which was really striking was a real sort of decrease in the contentiousness of discussion. In other words, the arguing that used to go on, it was very very much reduced. And again, I like to think a lot of that was because once again, no matter what sort of model of how you carried in your head of how you thought things were, you realized that the Fish and Wildlife Service was giving your model equal way, was saying, okay, I respect your views, and I'm gonna now subject those views to this fair game of seeing how well your views predict relative to how well these other folks views predict.
• 22:47
  And I think that was satisfying to at least know that Fish and Wildlife Service was paying attention to us, okay? They're incorporating our ideas into the modeling effort. So there was a lot less dissonance and sort of contentiousness. Now was there apprehension? I think there was, there was still apprehension and I think the main reason is that parts of the process end up being pretty complicated.
• 23:13
  Fred Johnson did just a really really great effort of, after the thing was implemented, after the implementation 1995, 1996 hunting season, he didn't just, you know, clap his hands and say, okay, I'm off, this is great, I did it. But he, every single year after that he was, not only did he participate in a lot of the flyaway meetings, but he would also have special adaptive management meetings where he would gather together any state biologist who was interested and go over different aspects of the program of how it worked with the view of always trying to generate a better and better understanding how this thing worked among biologists and among, yeah, sort of relevant stakeholders. Because there's no question, it's not simple, and I think this was, this bothers people, it still bothers them today, they're almost, no matter how much you're understanding, there's almost, for a lot of people, there's there's always gonna be a piece of this that's sort of black boxy that bothers them, and and I get that, I understand it.
• 24:22
  Mike Brasher: Another question I have for you here, and I introduced this at the close of the previous episode, is that since 1995 when adaptive harvest management was first implemented, we've had an unbroken string of liberal harvest regulations for midcontinent mallards. A couple of questions here. First, has that surprised you? And second, do you think we've just gotten lucky with favorable environmental conditions over that time period, or is there perhaps something inherent in that has contributed to or played a large role in achieving that stability, at least for midcontinent mallards?
• 24:55
  Jim Nichols: Yeah, so I think there's something about that's contributed, but I'd be less than forthright if I didn't say that I thought we were really lucky. In those habitat conditions on the breeding grounds for this period of time have been pretty darn good, and I think that has been fortuitous in the sense that, especially if the, say the second or third year after we'd implemented this, if Habitat conditions had been such that we ended up calling for very, very restrictive regulations, I don't know how to predict exactly what would have happened, but I'll bet you a six pack there would have been a lot of, sort of a lot of heated discussion about whether or not this was a smart thing to have embarked on. And so I do think we've been lucky, I also think adaptive management does sort of imbue or provide some sort of stability, but I absolutely think we've been very fortunate.
• 25:56
  Mike Brasher: Well, and let's hope that we continue to be fortunate. You know, invariably, I think our luck is going to change, and I think every few years, there are those of us that have been saying, okay, well, next year's gonna be the year, and I think I remarked to Dale and Ken on an earlier episode that if we were ever to experience a historic drought, one would have thought 2020 would have been the year it would have happened, but but it didn't. But so let's hope that let's hope that we don't look back in two years and say 2020 was the year that it started. So anyway, it will will happen at some point. We all know that.
• 26:32
  But you're right, has given us a transparent process, my read on it is that's one of the reasons why it's been so successful, at least in terms of defining success as sort of withstanding the test of time twenty five years. Of course, the liberal regulations that have come along with that as a result of the things we've talked about certainly hasn't hurt in terms of sticking around for that long. One of the true tests will be once we face a downturn in habitat conditions and sort of widespread drought up on the prairies, and so we'll see how things unfold at that point. So now, Jim, I'm gonna try to speed through a couple of final questions here. One comment that I'll just make is having read a lot of papers related to this topic, and your name is assigned to many of them, Adaptive waterfowl harvest management has has been held up as a as a I don't even know if premier is too strong of a word.
• 27:35
  It's certainly the way I would view it, a premier example of the application of adaptive management to inform recurring harvest decisions. I know you have frequently cited it as a case study in many papers related to sort of larger, more general natural resource management concerns. So how far has the reach of been with regard to influencing the way people think about and and do harvest management or any other kind of regulatory decisions for other groups of wildlife or natural resources?
• 28:08
  Jim Nichols: Our idea at first was that once this program was up and running and people sort of bought into it, that it would be a sort of a Field of Dreams deal, that folks would see this and they'd say, man, I want to do this for my system, know, build it and everybody will come running and it's been frustrating that that hasn't happened and again, I think the main reason for it is that programs, even though people realize the utility of it, they need champions. And champions, people willing to devote that much time to something like this, or difficult to come by. But absolutely, I hold it up as the sort of the number one application of formal adaptive management in the world, I don't think anything's even close to it. There have been now some, not nearly as many as I would like, but there have been other places where folks are using it. Just one quick example, I know we're running out of time, Delaware Bay, horseshoe crabs are harvested, horseshoe crabs lay little green eggs that red knots and all kinds of other shorebirds end up liking as they proceed on their migration up to the breeding grounds during the spring.
• 29:22
  And anyway, now there's an adaptive harvest management program which actually takes into account red knot numbers as well as how crabs are doing. So it's the first time the, in this case, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has ever bought into a formal program for setting regulations. And so absolutely we patterned it after when I worked on developing it with the key people there. We very much patterned it after this waterfowl management program. And basically I think the waterfowl management community just deserves a huge amount of credit for all kinds of things, but in particular for this, for sticking with this form of management and for gradually expanding it as its utility and value has been recognized.
• 30:14
  Mike Brasher: Was there anything, looking back, was there anything that surprised you as we began to learn more about waterfowl population dynamics and the effects of harvest through I'm
• 30:26
  Jim Nichols: not sure I have a smart answer for that. I know one of the things that initially surprised me was the way that sort of model weights could jump in particular years. In other words, there are a couple of key years where model weights made big changes, but it only surprised me because I wasn't thinking deeply enough about it. In other words, in retrospect when you have an unusual year when population, observed population size is say bigger than any one of your model predictions, it makes sense that that ought to be a time when things change a lot. So in terms of population dynamics, all those four hypotheses were all ones that I viewed as plausible, as reasonable, and so the idea that we're homing in on one, it's not an unreasonable one at all, it's one that makes sense, or one or two, they both make sense to me.
• 31:19
  So I don't think I've been really surprised by any of the population aspects of it, but I've been real pleased that the learning has occurred, that we've been able to get rid of a couple and have a couple hypotheses that still remain.
• 31:32
  Mike Brasher: In your opinion, where does adaptive harvest management rank among the group of highly notable developments or, you know, events or institutions over the history of waterfowl management? And what I'll what I'll do here is just say that, as I've spoken with Ken and Dale, as you go back through the through the decades, we you can, along the way, in each decade, identify significant events that sort of define the progression of waterfowl management, waterfowl harvest management along the way. Certainly, adaptive harvest management in the became the signature event of the of the nineties. But when you look across the entire history of the waterfowl management enterprise, where do you rank in that history?
• 32:19
  Jim Nichols: Yes, I think of that as a really, really big deal. So I think of the ability to estimate things and set up good monitoring programs, I think of that as a huge deal that waterfowl biologists were doing way way before people who managed almost any other natural resource were doing. So I give biologists, waterfowl folks a huge amount of credit for that. When I think about use of models, again, in the general sense of being able to somehow project consequences of the stuff you're doing with a population, waterfowl biologists once again were very very much at the forefront of that. Some fisheries folks were doing a good job also, but waterfowl people were way out ahead of most groups by and large.
• 33:04
  And now with respect to adaptive management, I think that waterfowl biologists have once again just been sort of head and shoulders in the, out in front of folks and have been in the forefront of wildlife management. And when I, when anybody asks me about a vision for the future of either conservation biology or wildlife management, basically any sort of enterprise that involves making decisions about natural resources, I say adaptive management is it. That's the vision for the future is basically every sort of important natural resource decision being sort of governed by a process like this that where you're trying to reduce uncertainty while simultaneously making smart decisions. And if I could just close with one quick comment, sort of a wise guy comment I make from time to time, is I always say, okay, if you have questions about, you know, well, should I use some other approach or what should I do in terms of management? I say imagine yourself on a witness stand and you've made some decision and maybe it didn't turn out so well, I don't know, but anyway, you've got some lawyer whose soup costs more than you make in a month, he's grilling you with questions and he's saying, well why in the world did you make that decision?
• 34:23
  And I'm saying, just think how nice it would be to be able to say, okay, I made that decision and it was, objective, it's scientific, it's transparent, and it's the smartest thing I could have done given my state of the system and given my objectives. It's the smartest thing I could have done at the time. And I can't imagine a more kind of defensible position if you've got to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
• 34:50
  Mike Brasher: And that is where we are in waterfowl harvest management with making decisions to achieve clearly defined objectives given a set of regulatory alternatives, the different decisions that we can choose from, and given pursuit of a better truthful understanding of the system. And in no small part due to the hard work that you've done, that your colleagues such as Ken Williams, Fred Johnson, many others in the camp that we've we've talked about here that have been key figures in in the early days of And and some of those individuals continue to play key roles today. Mike Brunch is obviously one of those. Scott Boomer has a very prominent role in nowadays, and there are a ton of additional aspects of of that we could discuss, and we will have an opportunity to to discuss some of those with with Scott, hopefully, later on. But this has been for me, it's I'll tell you, Jim, it's been pretty intimidating for me knowing that I'm asking questions to one of the godfathers of and trying not to screw it up.
• 35:54
  So I hope I haven't I hope I've not screwed it up, but I appreciate you being very gracious with your time. I appreciate your all the work that you've done over the years as a waterfowl hunter, as someone who works in this in this profession. So thank you, Jim, for joining us here, for sharing your expertise, and for dedicating a better part of your career to the waterfowl management enterprise. Thank you, Jim.
• 36:17
  Jim Nichols: No, well thank you. It's been a real pleasure and you're obviously very knowledgeable about this stuff. So it's been a all your questions were good. Thanks very much, Mike.
• 36:24
  Mike Brasher: A final and very special thank you to our guest on this episode, Doctor. Jim Nichols, and he shared much of his time to describe his knowledge, his experience, his expertise. As always, we thank our producer, Clay Baird, for the great work he does editing these podcasts and posting them for you, our listeners. And then, of course, to you, our listeners, we thank you for your time and support of the podcast and for your support, passion, and commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.
• 36:52
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• 37:14
  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.