3-9-25 - Talking Waterfowl Populations & Management with Scott Vance of Delta Waterfowl

To contact Scott and his organization, you can find him at

"https://deltawaterfowl.org"

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:23):
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(00:44):
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Speaker 2 (01:00):
Good evening, everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Jim Straighter here, and we have got a really informative
show for you tonight. I know a lot of you
folks out there in duck's hunting and observing waterfowl, and
we've got a waterfowl expert extraordinaire on with us this
evening the name of Scott Vance and he is a
director with Delta Waterfowl, and he's going to talk about

(01:25):
all things ducks tonight. Where were the ducks the last
couple of seasons. I know a lot of you been frustrated.
How does hunting impact the duck numbers, where our ducks
come from, and all aspects of waterfowl management.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
So hang on with us and this all to be
a great turn.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
I know, Scott Croney, you're looking forward to this as
much as I am, because we got a really special
guest tonight.

Speaker 4 (01:52):
Waterfowl is a species that everybody likes to hunt, and
I don't like seeing and the trend moving towards less
hunters going in a field to duck hunt because they
don't understand the dynamics of what it takes to manufacture
ducks and what it takes to understand the migration and

(02:13):
why they're doing what they're doing. So if folks have
had a few seasons now behind them where they've been
scratching their head and wanting more ducks to look at
and shoot at. Tonight will be a really good program
for him, Jim, to get some answers to a lot
of things that more people have made assumptions on instead
of gathering the facts on. And there's not a better

(02:34):
man to do it than Scott Vince when it comes
to getting this information.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
Yes, sir, so we're going to go straight to break here, folks,
and stick with us.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
This is going to be so informational.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
I've learned a ton about what these trends mean and
why that people are frustrated, and what we can do
to help these ducks out. So we'll be back right
after the break. The break is presented by SMI Marine.
There are eleven and four hundred Westport Road. Go see him.
Get your boat ready, the seasons upon us. Remember you
never get soaked at SMI. All right, folks, we're back,

(03:11):
and as we mentioned earlier, we're talking tonight with Scott Vance.
He is a director with Delta Waterfowl and a tremendous
proponent for ducks and duck management. Scott, welcome aboard.

Speaker 5 (03:25):
Buddy, Hey, I appreciate it. It's good to be on.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
Yes, sir, well Scott, I guess let's start with the obvious.
Tell folks a little bit about yourself and how much
your involvement in wildlife management is span decades actually, and uh,
you're happy to be with Delta.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
We'll talk a little bit about what Delta is and
what they do. Yeah, you're a you're aging. I still
don't hold that.

Speaker 5 (03:52):
I think I am. Listens in my resume.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
You will love that for sure. Yeah, I've been I've
been working.

Speaker 5 (03:59):
Uh, wildlife management for close to thirty five years now.
Got my degree at Clemson University and environmental toxicology a
long long time ago, and worked for a couple of
state wildlife agencies and then work for the National Wild
Turkey Federation for about seventeen years. I was a CEO

(04:19):
for another nonprofit here in Tennessee, and now I work
for Built the Waterfowl Foundation, and I've been super blessed.
I've been able to do a lot of stuff across
the United States, not only with waterfowl, but with upland
species deer turkey. Did my thesis on queil management, and
so it's just been a blessing and been read a

(04:43):
lot of great people and learned a lot of great things.
You know, a lot of times the textbooks aren't everything
that you need to listen to. You need to listen
to these old guys who have been out there and
doing it for years and years, and you'll figure out
a lot of secrets and a lot of things that
if you don't learn in school. And so I've been
super blo to have a lot of great mentors and
really blessed work for a lot of great organizations as well.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Well as old saying goes, it's hard to be the experience.

Speaker 5 (05:11):
Yeah, I'm starting to get that gray hair and my
beard's completely white, So I guess you call that experience.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Well, sure, sure, Well you've certainly earned your stripes.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
I've known about you for quite some time and I'm
really excited that Delta has been fortunate enough to have
you board as a director. Scott, tell folks a little
bit about Delta and what's your all primary missions? You are,
you do a lot of things, but just give folks
an overview of the impact Delta has and what your

(05:43):
all programs are about and your point towards the future.

Speaker 5 (05:47):
Obviously, sure well, we like to say that we are
the duck hunters organization, and that is absolutely true. We
do a tremendous amount for ducks and duck hunters our
program are really specific to producing more ducks, and so
our programs are really focused around the breeding season, making

(06:11):
sure that duck nesting is more successful and we put
more ducks in the flyway every fall. And then we
do a lot for duck hunting as well. We have
a great policy group. We do a lot of shallow
water wetlands work, which are super important for ducks. People
don't understand how important these small wetlands, usually in those
agricultural systems are. And then we do a lot of

(06:32):
few hunts and we have a program called the University
Hunt Program. Our goals to have that in over one
hundred universities very soon. And that's actually a class that
college kids can take, introduces them to the North American
model of wildlife management, to hunting, trapping, and all the
different aspects, and then gives them an opportunity to go

(06:54):
hunting and experience that, you know, to learn how to
clean the game and enjoy the harvest afterwards. So it's
just a great program. It's a. It's what you know,
I call a three sixty program from you know, create
more ducks, to create more duck hunters, and then making
sure that's all sustainable for the future.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
Yes, sir, and we're going to talk in depth about
some of your programs later, but y'all got some pretty
lofty initiatives that you're working on right now, and can
you give folks kind of some of those things what
you're excited about?

Speaker 5 (07:30):
Yeah, you know, this is something I you know, I've
only been without a couple of years, and when I
came on board, absolutely dropped my jaw. In my job interview,
we were talking about it, and we were talking about
how much money we were going to be raising to
do this initiative and how much of an impact it
was going to have. And you know, when you start
using words like perpetuity and forever, uh, that's pretty that's

(07:54):
pretty lofty goal. And so essentially, what we have on
the board here is the million Duck Initiative. And what
that initiative is is we will raise enough money it's
going to be two hundred and fifty million dollars, we
will endow that money and then we will use the
interest off of that money to produce at least and

(08:15):
it will probably be more, but we know we can
produce at least one million additional ducks into the flyway.
That's not just you know, having the nest hatch, that's
actually having them fly and start, you know, into the
flyway on migration routes every single fall forever. And you know,

(08:37):
I had never heard an organization have that type of
goal and that type of vision. But we're almost there.
I think we just hit two hundred and twenty million,
and we've already started to implement the million duck initiative.
On the ground, We're doing more trap sites than we
have in the past. We increased our hen house program

(08:58):
by another ten thousand nest structures, and you know, our
goal is to slowly increase that and over the next
four to five years will be at full capacity and
we'll be trapping, you know, throughout the whole prairie pile,
whole region, having houses up, and we'll be actually putting

(09:19):
a million birds in the flyway every year.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
That is really fantastic.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
And as you say, this is in some flashing the
paying deal, you all are already well on.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Your way to reaching those financial goals.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
And a little bit in detail about where some of
those moneys will be spent if you would.

Speaker 5 (09:40):
Yeah, absolutely so. Right now, we've got about fifteen trap
sites on the prairies, and those trap sites vary from
thirty six thousand acres all the way down to just
a few hundred acres, and it's based on the habitat
and the habitat composition. And what we found is if
we very intensively trap predators in the areas where we

(10:03):
have the most duck nesting, then obviously we have the
most impact on next success. And that's the real key
is a lot of great habitat still exists in the
prairie Paul Hole region, but what we end up with
is really really high, unnaturally high predator numbers, and our
next success in many places is five to six percent.

(10:24):
That means that that six out of one hundred duck
nests actually hatch. All the rest of them are pre dated.
And so if you don't trap, if you don't actively trap,
and you don't trap in a saturated way like we do,
the net success is dismal. And it takes fifteen to
twenty percent just to produce more ducks than you lose

(10:48):
through predation and so when you're having only you know,
single digit net success, you're actually losing more ducks during
the breeding season than you're producing. And so that's why
our predator programs are so important. And so that's one
thing we do. We trap over fifty sites right now
across the prairies. And then we also have a program

(11:12):
that's called our hen House program, which we elevate nest
structures and we make that nest predator proof. The predators
can't climb the toll that can't get to it. And
those are al those one utilized by milord ducks. Other
species just don't utilize those nesting structures particularly well. And
what we found is about eighty percent of those structures

(11:34):
get utilized on the prairie and out of those, eighty
percent of them actually produced ducks. And so really great program.
You know, the key there is just scaling it to
the point where we're producing a million ducks every year.
And you know, last year our numbers showed that we're
we were producing well ever one hundred and fifty thousand

(11:54):
ducks into the flyway.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
Scott talk a little bit about this predator deal because
Scott Crona and I are huge proponents of trapping. We've
done numerous shows about it in some importance, but I
think it's probably as a more important waterfound than anything
I can think of, except maybe turkeys. It's just a
huge negative talk about where that predation has increased, why

(12:24):
and why it's so important to control those numbers of
predators every year.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
This isn't something you fix.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
And you know, perpetuity obviously you have to continue on.

Speaker 5 (12:34):
Right Yeah, when you walk away, the predator numbers come
right back. So it's something that you know, it's a
continuous thing, is keeping those predator numbers down, and and
it is I mentioned it was unnaturally high, and the
reason it's unnaturally high is that that area if you've
ever spent any time in the Dakota's or Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta,

(12:56):
it gets cold, It gets really, really really cold, and
you know typically they have really deep snow. And you know,
years ago there was no agriculture. It was just a
sea of grass. It was a sea of wetlands. And
so you know, when they started to thaw and the
grass started to come back, the ducks would come back.

(13:17):
There were literally almost no predators out there for ducks
because they could not survive the winter, and until man
started to do agriculture, you know, provide what we call hibernicula,
which is you know, culverts, old buildings, sellars, places where

(13:38):
these these mammals, you know, raccoons, skunks can survive the winter.
You know, they just weren't there. And over the last
forty to fifty years they've slowly started to move into
that area, and now the populations are extremely high. There's
plenty of waste grain, there's plenty of places for them

(13:59):
to live. And I think everybody's recognized here recently, the
weather just isn't as cold as it used to be,
and so those ducks didn't evolve a strategy to avoid
ground nest predators, and so they'll nest in a place,
you know, that doesn't have any cover. They're not like
a turkey or a quail that'll try to hide their nest.

(14:20):
You know, ducks just nest out and open grasslands, and
so one coon can go out there and decimate you know,
forty or fifty nests if they wanted to in one night,
just because they're so easy to find. And so if
you don't remove those predators, nest success is really really
low in most of those habitats, and that's really the
key is it wasn't a deal before.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
Well, John, we're going to talk about the horrible mortality
that these hens face when they go these nesting areas.
We're going to talk about all kinds of different thanks, Scott,
to go with the impact the hunt has where the
ducks come from. So we'll do that right after this break.

(15:05):
So folks hang on, got to go to the break.
It's presented by Malsho Property's Heart Realty. Paul Thomas is
a broker there. He has all kinds of great wildlife properties,
farms and lakefront homes for sale. You can check out
his current listings at mop h A r T realty
dot com. All right, Scott, there, before the break, we

(15:30):
were talking about several things that are a number of
things actually they are on people's minds, but one of
the biggest is where are the ducks? You know, folks
in this part of the Flyway, especially Scott and I
are bombarded with questions like that and what can you tell.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Us about it?

Speaker 5 (15:50):
Yeah, that was the big question I got this yere too,
especially you know when you got into the Christmas and
after period of time in January where honestly, we were
getting some pretty good weather fronts and people still weren't
seeing as many ducks as they expected. And so that
was a huge question I got from a lot of

(16:11):
different folks, a lot of different angles. And the reality
is a couple of things. There's a few things that
really had an impact. One was, you know, just the
number of ducks overall. You know, we are experiencing the
depressed duck population. We've had a seven to nine year drought,
according to which meteorologists you ask, in the prairie pothole region,

(16:34):
and of course lack of water means fewer ducks. The
other thing was weather. You know, our weather, as I
mentioned earlier, and I think everybody can see it's sixty
something degrees right now here, which I'm ready for it.
I'm tired as soon as duck season's over. I'm tired
of the cold myself. But you know, we just did

(16:57):
not get the weather fronts early in the duck season
like we typically would. We've got big changes in land use.
You know, if you look across a lot of the
southeast and the Midwest states, mid Atlantic states, we just
flat don't have as much duck habitat across those states

(17:19):
as we used to have, and we certainly don't have
as much water. You know, there used to be a
lot of large waterfowl management areas. A lot of those
areas held water, you know, from the beginning of the
season until two months after the season, and you know,
now they just don't. And so that really changed the

(17:39):
geographic distribution of ducks. And the biggest thing is, you know,
duck numbers. You know, if you look back at twenty fourteen, fifteen,
even sixteen, you know, we had over twice as many
ducks as we've got now. And if you look at
just the number of mallards, you know, back in twenty fifteen,

(18:03):
we had over eleven million mallards compared to just over
six million now. And so when people talk about, you know,
I didn't see as many ducks. I don't have as
many ducks on my property, some of that is just
simply a numbers game. There just aren't as many ducks.
And you know, honestly, not to ring Delta's bell too loud,
but that's that's what we're doing. We're trying to produce

(18:24):
more ducks, even in the face of a drought or
in the face of habitat loss. You know, we can
produce more ducks on a smaller acreage because of the
predator programs we're doing, so it really comes into play there.
And then the big thing that I saw, you know,
if I just kind of do a recap of duck

(18:45):
migration this year, a lot of our ducks that would
have typically been in Arkansas, you know, western Kentucky, West Tennessee,
even down into Louisiana, by the they were still in
the Dakotas. You know, the Dakota is still held ducks

(19:05):
right on into December, and then we had some of
the frontal movements in January and those ducks just kind
of stalled out. A lot of ducks in Missouri. I
was talking to y'all earlier about the fact that Missouri,
you know, does a survey of just their public lands,

(19:26):
and they counted six hundred thousand mallards on just their
public lands alone. That doesn't count all the private lands
along the Missouri River and you know, the tributaries of
Missouri and the Mississippi River clubs. That's just on land.
The mdc ons they counted over six hundred thousand mallards

(19:47):
in their December survey at least that many, you know
in Illinois, a lot of mallards in Kansas this year,
a lot of them in Nebraska, and so they didn't
make it here. The bottom line, and our telemetry data
really indicated that. We had telemetry data from February and

(20:09):
in January and our marked birds and radio birds. They
just didn't move. You know, they moved very very little.
You'd have an outlier that would move, but for the
most part they were pretty comfortable. And you know, there's
a phenomenon that happens once the days start getting longer
and the light period starts to get longer, and that

(20:30):
starts to change the hormones, and those ducks they start
going into you know, what we called the nuptial molt
where they're starting to put on their breeding colors and
then the hens start to really build up their body
condition for egg laying and blind back north. And so
once you get past the winter solstice and the days

(20:53):
start getting longer, that light period triggers something you know,
hormonal in these ducks, and the likelihood of them making
a big swing south after that it's pretty small. So
if we don't get a good migration and we're not
holding birds by around Christmas. You know, we typically don't

(21:13):
get a huge migration uh in January because of that,
and uh, I think you know, those are some of
the things that really affected it. And there just weren't
that many birds. There were some there was some good
shooting on some areas, and that really goes back to
duck distribution. You know. The bottom line is if you
have plenty of food, you've got good, good water that

(21:35):
you can manipulate, bring it up and bring it down
when you need to, and then you're able to rest
those ducks. You know, they don't have constant shooting and disturbance. Uh.
There's a lot of people in West Tennessee, in West Kentucky,
Arkansas that still shot plenty of ducks this year. But
if you're hunting a place where those things aren't present
and you can't manage the the hunting pressure, uh, it

(21:58):
was pretty pretty rough. It is pretty bad season. I
can attest to it personally.

Speaker 4 (22:03):
I'm going to jump in for just a minute and
express kind of happen also, and that is right there
around the Thanksgiving mark, we had a tremendous cool front
that did impact in a positive way for the opener
in Kentucky, for example, that did bring some ducks in,

(22:25):
and we did lose some ducks the evening before opening
morning because of the such a big drastic drop and
some water started locking up. And but one of the
things that I'm gathering over the years from following you
and watching what Delta produces is these maps and this

(22:45):
data and the information that comes out.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
You have to.

Speaker 4 (22:48):
Follow the ducks, you have to follow the migration, and
you have to follow the data. And the data will
put you in your vehicle behind the windshield looking at
a lot of road miles, or it'll put you in
the airplane to move with how the ducks have moved,
and to brag on the impact of habitat with Delta

(23:08):
and staying informed with how pressure does impact and affect
waterfowl species. If you're a hunter and you will continue
to study what is going on and realize that ducks
and duck hunting has changed a little bit over the
last forty or fifty years. You can still have a
lot of good waterfowl hunting, but it's going to take

(23:31):
more than just listening to grandpa or doing what you
used to do. There's nothing wrong with that heritage and tradition,
but the world of waterfowl has changed and there's still
ducks to hunt, but you've got to look at what's
out there and what's available. And that's another good reason
to kind of stay in touch with what Delta is

(23:52):
doing on a three hundred and sixty five day a
year program and management advantage versus just getting your your
shell bag and your waiters out two weeks before season
comes in and thinking you're going to be a duck hunter.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yep, yeah, thank you, Scott.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
I'd like you to repeat a couple of things because
they're so important. Talk again about the nesting success horror
show on the on the percentage of ducks that actually
do get to produce, and then talk about those numbers
again that of the six million ducks, how many were

(24:33):
concentrated because it's odd weather in Missouri and Illinois, Kansas
and those areas.

Speaker 5 (24:39):
If you would, yeah, you bet, you bet. Well, if
you look at the just breeding across the whole prairie
pothole region, and that takes in a little bit of
eye with most of Irish prairies and their duck habitat
has been drained but if you look at South Dakota,
North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, you know we have

(25:02):
the shallow water wetlands up there, and that's how these
birds start out. That's why those small shallow water wetlands
are so so important. It's why we have an initiative
and a cost share program with the farmers where if
they have those shallow water wetlands, we'll actually pay them
an incentive to not drain them. In Canada, we don't

(25:24):
have the same laws that they have in the United States,
where you know, in the United States, most of those
small wetlands have been declared wetlands and it's illegal to
drain those or impact them. Now in Canada, we don't
have that same regulation, and so a lot of times
people will have this wet area out in the agricultural field,
they'll drain it. And so those are the areas that

(25:47):
these ducks use. And the reason those are so important
is you'll produce ten times more ducks on ten small
wetlands than you will on one large wetlands. And it's
because of the way that pair up. When they go
to the prairies, they're looking for a small pond where
that hen and that drake can essentially have that pond

(26:10):
of themselves. Now, there may be six or seven species
of duck on that same little pothole, but none of
them will be the same species, because that drake will
run off every other mallard that comes in there. And
so that's really important if you think about that on
a large scale. You think you've got six point six
million millards and when they all start pairing up, well

(26:33):
they only you know, only one pair is going to
use a small pond. So you have to have literally
hundreds of thousands of those ponds, those small wetlands across
the prairie. And so that's where it starts. And then
of course they initiate nesting in the grass habitats. What
we found is even in the very best grass habitat,

(26:55):
even you know, one of the arguments is, well, you
can have this sea of grass out there, and that
will protect the ducks from predation because they're just so
hard to find from the predators. The reality is that
doesn't play out anymore. That just doesn't. There's so many
predators up there. The predator numbers are so high, and
it's such an unnatural thing the ducks did not evolve

(27:19):
any way to avoid them. And one of the big
issues that the hens have, and I know we wanted
to talk about this is hen predation is twenty five
to thirty percent. You know, twenty five to thirty percent
of those hens sitting on a nest they get caught
by red fox because what they try to do is
instead of flush and fly, when they see the red

(27:39):
fox coming, they set really tight and they think, you know,
this fox is going to walk by me, and you know,
sometimes they do, a lot of times they don't, and
so they can catch it. Yeah, fox can catch a
duck right out of the air. And so when you're
losing twenty five or thirty percent of your hens and
then nine you know to ninety five percent of your

(28:02):
nests are being predated by nest predators, the poor ducks
don't have a chance unless we're trapping predators. I mean,
it is just that's the bottom line. Is if you're
not removing those predators, you're just not gonna have good
dut production bottom line.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
And that and obviously trapping takes money, and that goes
back to ferals initiatives. All right, folks, gotta go to
break here. This break is presented by SMI Marine there
at eleven four hundred Westport Road, just north of the Snyder.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Go see them.

Speaker 3 (28:33):
Get your boat ready for fishing and boating season, and
remember you'll never.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Get soaked by my friends at SMI.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
God, I want to return to this conversation about one
hundred predator share for just the next few minutes before
we little break. Why are there so many foxes and
tunes up in those areas?

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Now?

Speaker 5 (28:54):
What?

Speaker 2 (28:55):
What was the impetus for that?

Speaker 3 (28:57):
I know you mentioned some infrastructure are like drain tiles
and what have you, But what caused that?

Speaker 5 (29:03):
Right? Well, you know, it's an interesting question. I'm not
sure everybody you know fully understands it. Some of it
has been weather related. You know. The recent population increases
are quite honestly from having pretty mild winters. You know,
we see a significant decrease in predator numbers when we

(29:26):
have one of those really really cold winters and deep snow.
You know, we had a really cold winter. I guess
it was twenty two. We had a cold winter, pretty
deep snow, and it knocked the predator numbers back pretty well,
you know it did. There weren't as many predators. And
the reason we know that is when we go out

(29:47):
and set traps. Obviously, you know, if we're catching a trap,
you know, seven out of ten traps or catching a predator,
and then we go to only catching three out of
ten traps, we know there's not as many predators. Obviously
some that's happened, and so that particular spring we didn't
have as many predators, and so we know the weather
knocked them back. And so I really feel personally, and

(30:10):
a lot of folks agree that, you know, this gradual
warming trend that we've had and just winter is not
being nearly as severe, and we'll have severe weather, but
it doesn't last as long. It seems like, you know,
the temperatures will get down cold, but they will, it
doesn't stay cold for a month. And that's what it

(30:32):
really takes to knock those predators back is you know,
essentially they can't survive that cold. They and can't find
any food, so they starved to death. And that's what
kept them out of that part of the world for
so long, was there was no food in the winter
and it was really nasty winters. And so those species

(30:53):
what we call mesomal mammals and like I said, it's
primarily raccoons and skunks and then red fox up there.
Those are the primary mammalian predators. They just didn't exist,
they couldn't survive. So over the last fifty or sixty
years they have slowly started to increase. And with the

(31:13):
weather changes, with the increase in agriculture, you know, and
obviously duct food. You know, they've got more foods up
there as well. You know, there's more species up there
for them to eat, and it stays warm longer. They're
just producing more offspring and the numbers are growing exponentially,
and so that's that's what we've seen, and you know,

(31:35):
it's it's really decimated the ducks.

Speaker 3 (31:39):
And back to your earlier statement about what happens if
there's note trapping and there's just normal mess. It's a
horrendous percentage of success, right, I.

Speaker 5 (31:50):
Mean it is. You know, there are places where we'll
see twenty to thirty percent in that success just because
predator numbers are absent, But in most places it's less
than ten percent. You know, if you're not trapping.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
That's just crazy.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
All right, Scott will be back right after the break
to talk more ducks. We're gonna talk about where our
ducks acts are coming from, and we're gonna talk specifically
about Mallard, So stick with us.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
We'll be back.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
This break is presented by massil Property's Heart Realty. Paul
Thomas is a broker. Check out their listings at mop
h A r Trealty dot com. Scott Corn and I
know you wanted to talk with brother Vance here about
honey impact. Touch base on that and why it's gonna

(32:40):
boil out of people's minds if you would.

Speaker 4 (32:44):
Most all of us are pretty familiar with how different
types of pressures can impact any species, but us as humans,
you know we're a predator.

Speaker 5 (32:57):
Also, our decoy.

Speaker 4 (32:59):
Tactics have changed, changed, our alloys and shot have changed,
and even how we go to work since the pandemic
has changed. Many people have found themselves reporting to work
by doing no more than waking up at their house
and logging into the computer. And it's created.

Speaker 5 (33:20):
A schedule where.

Speaker 4 (33:22):
Honestly, folks are getting out and being able to hunt more.
And I know that I've kept an eye on what
Delta's released with their findings and how hunting pressure has
had a significant impact and how it can be used
as a tool to decide when to hunt or how
much to hunt certain areas. And this is going to

(33:43):
go with people who are actually traveling and folks that
are just staying around their hometowns or where they reside
at as far as hunting. So brother, vance, if you
don't care, let listeners know what is going on and
how we do need to consider that predator impact. That
pressure impact is us as humans to how it's gonna

(34:06):
dictate whether or not we have a good or a
day bad day of field. When it comes to actually
trying the harvest ducks to bring home and put on
the table.

Speaker 5 (34:15):
Oh yeah, well that's you know, that's when when people
have a bad season, that's the first thing that starts happening.
And of course you and I both uh you know,
follow a lot of the social media posts and and
and groups, and the first thing out of their mouth was,
we need to drop the you know, limit and limit
the seasons because we just don't have enough ducks. And

(34:36):
then you know, it's it's kind of created some of
these conspiracy theories if the numbers are wrong, you know,
on the breeding areas and just because they're not killing
ducks or not seeing ducks, they don't think anybody really is.
And so one of the things that is a really
important point when it comes to population dynamics and duck

(34:57):
harvest specifically, is just how small an impact hunter harvest
has on overall duck numbers. And if you look at that,
less than ten percent of the ducks are actually harvested
by hunters each year. Ninety percent of the duck death mortality,
if you will, across a year, occurs during the breeding

(35:21):
season or outside of hunting season. And with hens, you know,
everybody wants to limit how many hens they shoot because
we know they lay eggs and produce little ones. Less
than five percent of the overall hen mortality in a
given year is due to hunters, and so limiting hunting
really would have an imperceivable impact on overall duck populations.

(35:44):
That's the bottom line is if you if you just said, hey,
we're not going to shoot any more hens, or we're
going to drop the limit, you know, from six to three,
or we're going to shorten the season you know, twenty
five or thirty days, unless the population was very, very low,
and we were in a situation where the models and

(36:04):
the data show us that we're going to be harvesting
a much higher percentage of the total population. And that's
exactly what adaptive harvest management does. That's exactly what the
US Fish and Wildlife Service set the seasons on and
state agencies. You know, obviously, when you kill a duck,
that's a dead duck. But overall, hunting does not impact

(36:28):
duck populations tremendously at all. You have to look at
other things, and that mortality due to predation is really
the big thing on the prairies. Now, pressure, you know,
and disturbance is a whole different deal. And what we're
starting to see is just what you said. People are
hunting more. And as I mentioned earlier, we have less water.

(36:53):
You know, a lot of the areas in the southeast
and the mid Atlantic states did not get flooded this year.
You know, either they didn't have the water, their pumps
weren't working. You know, we had various infrastructure issues, dikes out,
things of that nature, and a lot of the public
waters did not get flooded. They didn't see any water.

(37:16):
And so if you don't have water, you don't have ducks.
It's that simple. And so nobody goes to hunts ducks
where there's no water unless you're hunting fills, you know,
close to water out in the Midwest and prairies, and
the reality is without as many places to hunt, if
you have the same number or more hunters, obviously you're
going to concentrate hunting pressure. And what we really saw

(37:39):
in the last two years is these ducks have started
to avoid pressured areas and they've completely changed their habits.
A lot of the radio telemetry is showing and this
is nothing really new. Ducks have always fed at night
and loaf during the day, but they're not even leaving.
Some of these refuse at all, you know, during hunting hours,

(38:03):
and when they do, they don't go very far. And
you know, the bottom line is what we found is
the pressure so high around some of the refuges and
some of the public areas that hold a lot of birds.
If they do go out and venture during the day
and they do go far, they die and so that
bird doesn't get a second chance. And so the birds

(38:24):
that are that are left, you know, they've figured out
the game. And so that goes back to this distribution,
and it also goes back to if you want quality hunting,
you absolutely have to rest areas you know, I've seen
public areas that were only hunted a couple of days
a week, and they gave two or three days in
between hunt days. And you know a lot of your

(38:47):
private lands that really shoot well. You know, they may
only hunt once every week, or they may only hunt
once every two weeks. And what that does is it
allows those birds to get in there and feel very comfortable, safe,
and you know then when you go to shoot, you're
going to have a really good hunt. So you know,
it may be that you don't hunt as much, but

(39:08):
the hunts that you do have or higher quality. And
I think anybody that's.

Speaker 4 (39:13):
Put in the waterfowl world understands the old terms of
a gentleman's hunt or having fresh birds and and a lot.

Speaker 5 (39:23):
Of these things.

Speaker 4 (39:24):
If you go back and look over the years when
you talk about some of those private individuals, and I'm
not sure if you want to bring those up on
the air or not, but we both know who they are.
There are definitely folks that have options, right, and there
are certain states that are doing a little bit better
job on both helping with the private and the public

(39:45):
sectors of not just incentives, but just ways and what's
rules and regulations are being put into place, and when
it when it comes to looking at waterfowl in general,
would you agree that folks are going to have to
just stop and look at what they can do as

(40:08):
a die hard or want to be waterfowl hunter to start,
I guess voicing their concerns with out public and private
lands are being managed and actually having to put in
some work themselves to not only improve the food sources,
but to start looking at innovating and developing some of
these shallow water empowerments and looking at habitat that they

(40:32):
can put in on their farms, whether that's adding water
or clearing out vegetation such as big timber in areas
where water already exists so the ducks feel more comfortable
getting down and restling in those areas.

Speaker 5 (40:47):
Yeah, I'm vigorously shaking my head. You can't see it
on the radio, but I'm agreeing with everything you're saying.
And you know, here's the key. I think that that
hunters of all kinds, but especial waterfowl hunters really need
to look at the science. They need to look at
the data. If they don't know all the answers they
need to ask, or you know, go on websites and

(41:11):
find out, educate themselves about what's really happening. Don't fall
into the whole conspiracy or you know, twenty years ago,
I used to shoot ducks in this hole, and now
I don't have any, so I know there's not as
many ducks. Don't fall into that. Go and figure out
what's really happening and what really needs to take place,
and honestly become very well versed in what's going on

(41:34):
in your area, the area that you hunt or the
state that you hunt in, you know, and get very
very active and very vocal, you know, with how we
want to manage the water, how we want to manage
the food, and probably even most importantly, how we want
to manage the pressure. You know, if if the gates

(41:55):
are opened up on opening day a duck season and
it's just a you know, come as you may and
hunt as you want to the chances of having a
really high quality hunt on a property like that, Now,
with the number of hunters we have and how concentrated
hunters are, and the areas that have ducks and have water,
it's pretty low. You know, you could have all the
ducks in the world, But if you shoot them to

(42:16):
three days in a row and you shoot them hard,
well they're gonna leave, you know, and they may not
go far, but they're not going to be back there
every day. And you know, if you continue to have
disturbance and people driving boats and vehicles in there that
matter if you're shooting them or not, you're going to
be running them off. And so the reality is, I
just think people need to educate themselves. They need to

(42:38):
think deeply. If they don't know the answers, they need
to ask experts, you know what the answers are. And
then they need to be very vocal about how things
are managed. And you know, you know, especially how these
public lands are managed. And you know, that's what people
listen to, is they listen to the constituents. And you know,

(42:58):
if you're not seeing things play, you're not seeing the
pressure manage the way you want it, then speak up,
you know, and do it in a concerted effort.

Speaker 4 (43:06):
Where that's where I was going is it's very important
that the water and the land that we do have,
it's very important that we do manage the pressure, and
we do manage the habitat because some of that ground
has not been lost and it's here and it needs
a little bit of tender love and care. And there's
not a waterfowl hunter that I know that would not

(43:30):
like to advocate and see. Even just as far as
the state of Kentucky, I think there's a whole lot
of folks out there that would love to see the
goose hunting capital of the world exist again, and in
the western part of the state. And I think there's
a lot of Kentucky residents in the inner residence that
would love to see better quality hunting on the public

(43:50):
lands that they have, and in an increase in the
amount of habitat work and h and scientific data that's
being utilized is to help change that model or that
management for better use of the lands that we do have.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
Absolutely, I got to go to I've got to go
to break here real quick. This break is presented by
SMI Marine that are eleven four hundred Westport Road.

Speaker 2 (44:15):
Go see him.

Speaker 3 (44:16):
Remember you never get sold by my friends at SMI.
Well start with ninety percent of duck martality occurring during
the breathing season and not during the honting season. I
guess that points at what Delta is really focused on
and and where that can show such big results.

Speaker 5 (44:37):
Right, that's it. That's it, you know, and that that
goes back to that that million duck initiative and really
over the years, you know, Delta started out, uh deltas
O one hundred years old, which is which is hard
to believe. Uh, you know, we don't do a ton
of branding, a ton of marketing, and a lot of
folks don't know a lot about Delta, but it started

(44:58):
out in Canada at the Delta of Marsh and it
was primarily doing duck science and what we found was
the biggest impact we can have with the money that
we spend as during the breeding season. Uh, you know,
we could we could do a lot of other things.
We could focus on wetland habitats, you know, restaurant restoring habitats,

(45:22):
we could focus on, you know, hunting, different aspects. But
the bottom line is if we want to produce more ducks,
which is the overarching goal of Delta waterfowl, it's breeding.
You know, we have to go where they breed and
we have to improve that nest success and get those

(45:43):
ducklings to the point where they can fly. That's it.
And so that's where we put our money.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
And that is that is a fantastic way to approach
all this.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
There's other aspects of this, I guess that we need
to talk about, talk about the way the Feds actually
regulate the seasons, because it's not knee jerk anymore like
it was twenty thirty years ago, where you know, opinions
held most way than the data.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
I'll put it that way.

Speaker 5 (46:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think anybody that hunted back then
realizes that, you know, it could change dramatically based on
what a state agency wanted to do. We're now under
a pretty strict framework that's under the Migratory Bird Act.
And essentially what we do is every year they fly surveys,

(46:38):
they look at the breeding bird populations, and then they
compare that to the total number of mallards that they
that they know they have, and typically that sets the
limit and the season length. And they have a matrix
where they do that, and it's all based on quantitative data.

(47:00):
You know, there's no guesswork.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (47:02):
They've developed models that say, hey, if the if the
number is this, then we have a more liberal season. Uh,
if the numbers this, then we have a more moderate season.
And then if we have you know, really low numbers.
We go into a really conservative season because we recognize
that you know, when number, when the number of birds

(47:22):
get to a certain point, hunting can start to have
a bigger impact because you if you're harvesting the same
number of birds and you've got a lot less birds
than you're obviously harvesting a higher percentage of the total population,
and it can start to be an impact. So, but
that's how they manage it. It's very quantitative. They spend
a lot of time and then they propose that season,

(47:46):
it gets approved, and then that framework goes to all
the states, and the states have the ability to set
they're hunting dates within that day range. So if they
they give us sixty day's season, then whatever state you're
in can set the season dates on whatever. They just
can't exceed sixty days. And they also can't hunt past

(48:09):
January the thirtieth, the end of January. So that's that's
the other thing that a lot of people don't realize
when they keep talking about moving seasons back. You know,
a lot of times we don't see ducks in this
area until late in the season, and honestly, you know,
being out there and seeing the populations and seeing what's
going on. I think more than the ducks actually migrating

(48:34):
into an area, they they're no longer hunting, you're not
hunting them, and so they become more visible, they become
more comfortable and people. You know, if you go out
two weeks after the season's closed, you see ducks everywhere, well,
it's because you hadn't shot at them in two weeks
and so ducks might have been in that area already,

(48:55):
they just weren't on your hunting spot or weren't you know, visible,
because you know, they know they're getting shot at, they
know they're getting disturbed and pursued and so and then
some of that is you know, migrating ducks, and of
course that's the worst time to disturb them would be
that late season. So uh, that's what the FEDS do,
and they do a great job with it, and it's
very important and it's very conservative. You know, the seasons

(49:18):
that they said are very very conservative. They're not going
to have an impact and and the indices and the
models you know, indicate that.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
So, yes, sir, what are population trends here?

Speaker 3 (49:32):
We got two minutes with some of the other species
that you all see affected by your things and where
are they sitting now?

Speaker 5 (49:40):
Yeah, you know, most of the species are doing pretty well.
Pintail numbers are still down, and uh penttails are interesting.
You know a lot of that has to do with
agricultural processes, uh, you know, changing in the prairies. They
went to uh, pentail's nests and short grass just like
millards do. And they primarily nest in those western prairies Saskatchewan, Alberta.

(50:06):
And what happened was they used to do crop tillage,
you know, and everybody remembers when farmers would plant, they'd harvest,
and then they'd till in under and then it would
set there, tilled until they replanted. And a lot of
places have gone to a no tell and so in
that area they went to no tell and uh you

(50:28):
know that impacted pentails because they started nesting in that
no tail ground. And of course, you know John Deere
tractors don't mix with pentails on the nest, so.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
There's no doubt.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Well that's some great insight, all right, folks got to
go to break here. This break is presented by Massiel
Properties Art Realty. Paul Thomas says all types of outdoor
listings for sale check them out at m O P
h A R T Realt Dot.

Speaker 5 (51:02):
Advance.

Speaker 4 (51:03):
We've been friends for a long time, So the question
that I'm fixing to ask you is not to set
the stage to load you up in a booby trap.
But you were talking about pintail numbers are still significantly down,
and something happened this year that really made me only
depend upon the research and what quote unquote the experts

(51:26):
we're providing, And you know, we've seen an increase in
pintail limits go up this year in many states. You know,
you can harvest three pent tails. And it was actually
put into a pretty aggressively and authoritative process of being
voted on by many commissions, and Kentucky Department of Fishing
Wildlife was one of those that wanted to get that

(51:49):
on the agenda and get it passed. And I kind
of set on my hands and I bit my tongue
a whole lot on that because pen tails have always
been a majestic bird to hunt, and I was just
really surprised when you're talking about pintail numbers were still
down from the Delta Voice and then a lot of
the information that we've read as hunters, and I'll just

(52:12):
throw it out there from the DU side and some
of the other reports, it's saying that pintail numbers were
really good and we're ready for an increased harvest, and
there's these goals that are put forward, and those goals
that are put forward by the progress of the twenty.

Speaker 5 (52:32):
Twenty five season was to.

Speaker 4 (52:35):
Look at the overall health and development of the pintail species,
and folks were telling us that this new three bird
limit and harvest regulation was to evolve and help develop
an approach to bring focus on positive growth of pintail
management harvest. So I'm confused.

Speaker 5 (52:56):
No, it's well, and that's good. That's the type of
question that we need to be answering because the reality is,
if you look at long term norms and if you
look at the pentail population, it's still depressed by you know,
a good percentage from the long term norm. And so
that's what I was getting at, is, you know, penttel

(53:17):
numbers haven't continued to just nose dive and decline. They've
kind of steadied out, but they're still lower than they were,
you know, twenty five years ago or twenty years ago.
The reality and it's a great question because it opens
up a whole whole can of worms here that probably
hasn't been discussed broadly, and people are maybe a little
confused about Okay, I hear this, and then I hear

(53:38):
that the reality is the Fish and Wildlife Service and
you know, the flyway councils and different state agency scientists
and DELTA was very involved in this, as was DU.
They looked at the numbers and they said, hey, you know,
we're harvesting pretty good number of pen tails, and then

(54:01):
our data shows that the pent teil numbers here, Maybe
our model needs to be adjusted, Maybe the model is
not exactly what it needs to be, because you know,
they were showing that the pentail harvest could withstand a
lot more pentails being harvested than they initially thought. And

(54:22):
so that's essentially what they did as they went in
and looked at the model, looked at the science, looked
at the data over the last fifteen years, and DELTA
had a scientist that was doing some studies just looking
at harvest data, you know, looking at okay, here's how
many pintails we think they're where. Here's the harvest data.
And what they found was, hey, we should be able

(54:45):
to shoot more pentails with no problem. And a lot
of that has to do with what I talked about
earlier in the show. Hunter harvest is just not a
huge impact. You know, the reality is hunter harvest in
a healthy population of birds doesn't impact the population. And
so by shooting you know, a couple more a year

(55:05):
and the pintail population, you know, the impact on the
total numbers of pentails is going to be imperceivable. And
you know, the biggest issue with pentails, and that's where
I was going, is breeding habitat. You know, we've got
to have good grass habitats, and we've got to have water,

(55:26):
and that western Prairie is the area that has been
the driest, and so when that western Prairie gets wet again,
we should see the numbers of pentails go back up,
you know, pretty dramatically. And so you know, that's a
that's a short answer to your question. Is they looked
at the data, they recognize that we're under harvesting. You know,

(55:47):
the potential of pintail populations even at that lower number,
and so even with them being at a depressed population
on long term, we could still harvest more. And you know,
and people, you know, that's where you that's where you
really balance hunter opportunity and harvest, you know, against population,

(56:08):
sustainability and longevity.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
It brings to.

Speaker 4 (56:14):
Ahead a question that we really didn't talk about before
the show, but it's a very important question and it's
a very important part of waterfowl hunting that I have
great concern on and it is becoming more talk just
like the pintail talk was. And if you've got a minute,

(56:35):
can you share Delta's opinion and maybe some of the
complications that we can get into with some of these
domesticated greenhead mallards that folks are posing with on logs
and inside of stage hunt flooded timbers, because it has
really become a very hot topic.

Speaker 5 (56:59):
Right Yeah, especially in the Southeast. I know it is.
You know, the bottom line is there's there's the interbreeding happening,
and you know, the data indicates that we have a
number of genetic surveys that indicate that a high proportion,
high percentage of the birds on the East Coast have

(57:22):
some to quite a bit of domestic mallard in them,
and you know, we're trying to figure out does that
impact the bird's ability to survive? Does it impact their
ability to migrate. Does it impact overall mallard sustainability you
know on the East coast, And this is primarily an

(57:43):
East coast issue because that's where you know, a lot
of states it's still legal to produce and release domestic mallards.
Now they have to be I believe they have to
be toe clipped or banded in order to do that
so you can differentiate. You know, this bird is a
pen raised bird from a wild bird.

Speaker 4 (58:06):
And a lot of this comes Scott because and I
know we're going to get into it as we start
to close things out. My biggest concern right now is
is us as waterfowl hunters, a lot of folks do
not understand in diseases, especially with amn flu kind of

(58:28):
comes into play with with waterfowl species. And I know
a lot of folks will just admit that they really
don't know. And I'm looking forward to what you're going
to bring to us on that.

Speaker 5 (58:38):
But but the.

Speaker 4 (58:40):
Pintail discussion with increasing the limits and the amount of
domesticated I guess clip birds, mallard green heads especially.

Speaker 5 (58:51):
Uh those two topics.

Speaker 4 (58:53):
If even when we all debate, you know, what's going
on with why the birds are moving or how do
we produce more birds in the blind and in the
boat and in the field, doesn't matter where we were at.

Speaker 5 (59:03):
Those were the two biggest.

Speaker 4 (59:05):
Topics in in the waterfowl arena this year.

Speaker 5 (59:11):
Yeah, I think so. Uh, you know, the pintail thing,
we we actually did some articles on that and I
can share those out. We've got some stuff on our
website that talks about, you know, the role that delta
played and and really the science that went into that.
And I feel very comfortable, you know, I'll just go
ahead and say this, if we if we increased the

(59:33):
limit even more with pintails, I would have no issue
with that based on the data that we now know exists.
And the model was just totally under representing, you know,
the number of pintails and it was also underutilizing the
opportunity to harvest more. So, you know, that's that's the
bottom line with them. With the domestic birds, Honestly, we

(59:57):
still don't really know, you know, long term, how that's
going to have an impact. There's a lot of assumptions
being made, and you know, there's some indication that those
birds don't uh, you know, they're not as sustainable, they
don't feed as vigorously, they're not as tough, and they
don't migrate as much either, and you know those things.

(01:00:21):
Some of that's common sense, you know, you would just
assume that that's the case. But I'm kind of one
of those folks that, you know, I want to see
the data, you know, I want to see some data
on these birds that's long term and it's a bigger
sample size. You know. The reality is death is not
going to get into state waterfowl regulations, you know, as
far as as pushing, you know, for states to ban

(01:00:45):
domestic release unless the science says that's that's what needs
to happen, you know, and then and then that's up
to that's up to people that are in positions much
higher than me to make that call. And you know,
the reality is, we just don't have enough science right
now to really say.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
So.

Speaker 5 (01:01:04):
What we do know is there is significant inner breeding,
but that is primarily ah, you know, in Atlantic Flyway issue.
You know, the mallards that we see here in Tennessee, Kentucky,
and you know along the Mississippi River Corridor Central and
Mississippi Flyway, they're they're pretty they're still pretty purebred mallards,

(01:01:28):
pretty wild mallards.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
Well, it's always best, I think, to have your mind
set towards unintended consequences when you start filing with a
manipulating mother nature. Yeah, yeah, that's just my Like you said,
you got to loss of data on the penttail deal
to wrap that up again, the data seemed to say

(01:01:51):
that given hunters are a very low percentage of the
loss of the birds, given where the numbers were, it
was okay to give us more opportunity.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Correct.

Speaker 5 (01:02:05):
Yeah, And overall we were underestimating. The model was underestimating
the total number of pentails because there were times when
the harvest was exceeding the number of pentails that we
thought we even had, and so you know, and that
was not in recent years, but in some of the
years it was like, okay, we just harvested more pentails

(01:02:26):
than the model said we even had, which is not
gonna ever happen, obviously, and so it just it just
caused them to go back in and look at the
model and say, Okay, our model is not estimating this correctly.
And then when they redid the models, it indicated we
could increase those those numbers.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
Okay, the harvest, we've got to get to a break here.
This break is presented by SMI Marine. Go show them
to get your boat ready for fishing and or boating season.

Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
Remember you never get soaked at SMI.

Speaker 5 (01:03:01):
Not.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
I want to return to something we touched on a
little bit, but I think it's kind of at the
heart of how you often actually reach the goal of
a million mallards, and that is your All's nesting house program.
I want you to talk about that and what happens
in the population dynamics with a protected nest versus what

(01:03:23):
we see in nature across these prairie potholes at the
present time.

Speaker 5 (01:03:27):
Sure, yeah, I like to call it ROI ducks. Where
you're looking at your return on investment and these nest
houses are absolutely the most cost effective way to produce
more mallards. And that's the key take on point is
a lot of folks don't understand exactly how those houses work,
but it's essentially an elevated nest structure on a pole.

(01:03:49):
They install those in the winter. They go out there
when there's ice on a drill hole through the ice,
put them down into the bottom of a wetland and
then it's a round tubular structure. It's made up out
of wire that has you know, some nesting material woven
into it all the way around in a circle, and
so the hen can nest in there, her nest is safe.

(01:04:10):
And then when the ducklings you know, actually hatch, they
can just jump right out into the water and start foraging.
And so if you look at those nest structures and
you look at that actual nest structure, it only costs
about fifteen dollars a piece. And when we go out
and put those across the landscape, we know that about

(01:04:32):
eighty percent of them are actually utilized by Mallard ducks.
And if you look at the numbers, if you've got
a thousand of those nest houses, eighty percent utilization rate,
if even sixty percent we know sometimes it's higher than
sixty percent. It gives up to seventy five percent actually
hatch successful nests. And if you look at the average

(01:04:53):
duckling survival out of a thousand nest houses, we're able
to produce two than two hundred and eighty new ducks minimum,
that's our minimum number into the flyway every year. And
so those are ducks that are not only hatched, but
they survive, you know, throughout the summer and get big
enough to fly and they fly south with the rest
of them. And so when you look at the number

(01:05:14):
of ducks that we're able to produce per dollar, that
henhouse program is by far the most successful and best
return on investment of anything we can do anywhere to
produce ducks. And it's such a simple concept, but it's
so so effective, and that's one of the reasons. You know,
our goal is to have one hundred and ten thousand

(01:05:37):
of those hen houses across the prairies for our million
duck campaign, and those that's going to produce a quarter
of a million ducks every year, year, every year. And
you know, that's an exciting program. And it's, like I said,
it's something so simple, so cost effective. It just requires
a crew to go out install them and then you know,

(01:05:58):
some annual maintenance, not very much maintenance, but some annual
maintenance to keep those up and they just keep producing
up here after year, kind of like a wood ducks
you know box.

Speaker 3 (01:06:08):
Program, yes, which a lot of our folks are very
familiar with. If they can get off of successful clutch,
the numbers just climb exponentially. Compare that to what happens
in a normal sit or which are normal is probably
not the right word since we got all these predators.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
But compare to.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
That, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:06:32):
Yeah, you take sure if you take that same one
thousand nests and uh, you know, you look at an
eight percent hat rate and you look at about a
forty percent survival rate for the ducklings. If you had
a thousand nests in the uplands there in the Prairie
pothole region, you'd have about three hundred ducks that would

(01:06:52):
fly south as opposed to to uh, you know, almost
twenty three hundred. That's that's the difference. I mean, like
I said, if you, if you, if you look at
how much difference theys make, it's just amazing. And it's
such a simple concept.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
It really is.

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
Scott here in the closing minutes tell folks how to
get in touch with you all and what they can
do to participate.

Speaker 5 (01:07:19):
Yeah, you know, our website is just Delta Waterfowl dot
org and uh you know, I encourage you to go
on there and check that out. We have chapters you
know throughout the mid Atlantic States and the Southeast. Now, uh,
I would encourage you to get involved in one of
those if it's nothing else. It's a great place to
meet other duck hunters, and uh, you know, it's a

(01:07:41):
great place to support the sport that we all love
and the species that we all you know want to
see flourish and to sustain waterfowl hunting. And uh, there's
a lot of stuff on our website about getting involved locally,
you know, in this area. The big thing that we
can do is wood duck box and uh and then

(01:08:02):
obviously be very aware of any policy issues. Delta is
super active. We've got uh oh eight people now in
our policy department and uh one of those is full
time into the the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, you know, which
is some of the most important duck hunting areas. And

(01:08:23):
his job is to look at duck hunting regulations and
to try to get as much money and resources for
our national wildlife refuges and and state agencies for waterfowl
as we can. So get involved with those things, voice
voice your opinion and make sure your voice is heard well.

Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
And and again give us the uh website where folks
can go to get all these reports and data.

Speaker 5 (01:08:48):
Yeah, it's www. Deltawaterfowl dot org.

Speaker 3 (01:08:54):
God, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you
being on with us, and uh a lot of really
you meat potato information that I think they'll be pretty
shocking to some folks out there, So keep after it
and we'll be in touch.

Speaker 5 (01:09:11):
Hey, you bet, you bet. Thank you so much. It's
always great to be on your ship.

Speaker 3 (01:09:15):
Yes, sir, that's a wrap for tonight. God bless everybody.