Ep. 397: Backwoods University – Where Have The Mallards Gone?

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwood’s University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to aex hunt for their support of this podcast.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: I’m your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we’re gonna.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: Address one of the most burning questions being asked in the hunting community today.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: Where have all the mallards gone?

00:00:24
Speaker 1: Or specifically, where have all the mallards gone in the Mississippi Flyway. This question has been getting asked for a while and its persistence has led to more questions and theories, such as is the flyway shifting or changing or ducks simply not migrating as south due to human manipulations.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: Or other factors.

00:00:42
Speaker 1: There’s a lot of ideas and impassioned opinions on this subject, so all the more reason for us here at Backwoods University to lean right into it and see if we can’t shine some light on this issue. So get your waiters on and make sure you’ve got non toxic shot and duck stamps, because we’re going duck hunting. It’s duck season in Mississippi and I’m standing in muddy knee deep water in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. For any that don’t know, the Mississippi Delta is part of an alluvial floodplain that has the Mississippi River to think for its unique geographical characteristics and significance. It’s flat, it’s vast, and it’s known for its fertile souls and high diversity and amount of wildlife. And this time of year, the late winter months, it’s at its absolute best. The cold, crisp mornings, the white tailed deer out and stirring, the distant sound of speckle belly and snow geese flying overhead, and yes, of course ducks. Some of the old age duck hunters that I got to spend some time around in duck camps would always say things like, you know, the Delta likes to show off this time of year, which reminds me I should probably pay attention because we’ve got some mallards working. What you’re hearing is arguably the most sought out scenario for every duck hunter that has ever lived. Where minutes into legal shooting light and a pair of green heads are now working our whole and flirting with being in range as I try to stealthily peek at my fragmented view of the dim sky, broken up by branches and limbs of the tree. I’m leaned against, my eyes lock on to the two of them. I’ve always been enamored by duck flight, the way they seem to fly so in sync with one another, the way they cup or set their wings as they prepare to land. I dare say it’s downright poetic to watch. And I promise I’m being truthful when I say that. I feel lucky every single time I get to see it. It never gets old.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: Huh yeah, huh ad birth. What I’ll say is my right art stud is one of the fruit.

00:03:21
Speaker 3: Though.

00:03:22
Speaker 2: All I know is that’s a good way you started mooring.

00:03:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, an here I be rid.

00:03:30
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:03:31
Speaker 1: One thousand, five hundred and thirty three miles. That is the distance between where I duck hunted in North Dakota earlier this year and the area in Mississippi that you just heard me duck hunting in in that video clip. One thousand, five hundred and thirty three miles. I know humans that hesitate at the thought of traveling that distance. However, these Mallard ducks do that and more every single year or at least they used to, well some of them still do we think or we know, or at least we think we know. What I’m trying to say is that’s exactly what we’re here to talk about the migration of mallards in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. As I stated earlier, the video clip of the hunt you heard painting an ideal scenario that duck hunters seek out. However, in recent years, those very incidents of mallard ducks cascading down into your decoys has become a more rare occurrence. But why that’s the million duck question there, my foul minded friends, and you know on this show we aren’t afraid to ask questions. To kick this off, I want to read you an excerpt from an article that is aptly titled where have the Mallards Gone? A clear look at the decline of mallards in the Lower Mississippi Valley Over the past several winners, waterfowl hunters across the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley from Mississippi to eastern Arkansas to north east Louisiana ask the same question.

00:05:03
Speaker 2: Where are all the mallards?

00:05:04
Speaker 1: It’s not a new question. More than twenty years ago, doctor Rick Kaminski and others published a popular article that echoed the same concern, Borrowing from the nineteen sixties folk song where Have all the Flowers Gone? They titled the article where Have all the Mallards Gone? The article described how mallard numbers had dropped sharply in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley since the nineteen eighties, even though breeding populations were greater in the two thousands during the drought bitten eighties. They pointed to multiple contributing factors, including mild winter weather and changing food availability. Importantly, they emphasized a growing mismatch between habitat and duck needs. There was still water on the landscape in Mississippi, but the groceries were getting scarce in some areas, likely due to increased crop harvest efficiency in changing agricultural practices. Fast forward to today, in the mystery of the missing mallard continues. However, our tools and data sets have improved, and our understanding of flyway scale changes has deepened. First, the long term decline of the wintering mallarge and the Mississippi Alluvial Valley is not completely driven by what is happening during duck season. The dominant forces behind the decline are rooted farther north on the breeding grounds. Second, there is a perceived reduction in winter water across portions of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and changes in land use and management practices since the original article, further changes in fall and winter weather that affect duck migration are now well documented. Okay, I know I gave you a whole lot there, but don’t worry. We’re going to break down every bit of that further with the author of this very article.

00:06:52
Speaker 3: So I’m James Calicatt. I’m the waterfowl and upland game bird Extension specialists at Mississippi State University. It’s kind of like idio other professor you know that does research and teaching, but a good proportion of my appointment is extension. And so what that is is our arm in the university that takes the research and puts it into the hands of the stakeholder, so the landowners, the habitat managers, the hunters, and so we try to communicate the science we produce at the university to those audiences. So, you know, I do workshops, field days, write popular articles. We have Gamebird University podcast where we talk a lot about the projects and topics that come from the phone calls that I get here at the office. So I felt like I got a pretty sweet gig here for sure.

00:07:39
Speaker 1: James has been neck deep in waterfowl research in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley for a long time now, and he also wrote this article alongside two other authors, Mike Schumer and Mark McConnell. Some of you may remember McConnell from the first Bob White Quill episode. Anyway, I want to start this discussion by asking James about the fact that this is not a new question, but rather a question that has been getting asked and left unanswered for quite some time now.

00:08:06
Speaker 3: So I went to work for Wildye Fisheries and Parks in the waterfowl program in twenty eleven, I think, and from the day one putting on the patches, man, that was all phone call I’m gonna get, you know, And I’ve had it since then, and prior to that, when I was in grad school, and you know, that question been going on for a while.

00:08:28
Speaker 4: Even back then.

00:08:30
Speaker 3: At that time frame when they wrote that article, Aaron Pearce was doing his dissertation that was creating what we know now of the aerial waterfowl survey in Mississippi. So his PhD word was was the first of those surveys, and then the state adopted it and has had it for twenty years since. But another researcher in the Delta this did a lot of waterfowl work, Ken Ronicky, had had done some aerial surveys in the Delta in the late eighties early nineties and they had seen to client and mallards from when Ken did those surveys to when Aaron did his, and so it was like we’re missing like two hundred or four hundred thousand mallards or something like where did they go? You know? And that’s Arkansas and Mississippi there. So that question has been going on for a very very long time, with a lot of theories behind why that is.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: And not to go straight doom and gloom here, but correct me if I’m wrong. From reading that article, it seemed like that question’s been going on for a long time. But while that question’s been going on, we we haven’t seen mallards and going up seems like it’s still just kind of downward.

00:09:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the long term trend of mallards in the in the MAV both from Arkansas and Mississippi is trending negative. It’s a little bit seems to be more stronger in Arkansas. You know, it’s not getting any better from that front. And there’s a lot of reasons behind that potentially. You know, when you look at some of these better years of mallard harvest and that sort of thing, you know, a lot of those are driven so much by weather, and I feel like that’s where a lot of our issues are and that’s a tough place to be. Man, that’s something we ain’t got. We can’t do nothing about. Yeah, and so you know, good years kind of come with the weather, uh and and the rest of the time it’s you know, it fluctuates, but it’s trending downwards in the end of those trends. You know, you kind of think about it. You look at something over twenty years and you have some ups and downs and so you you you’re confident centerables wide and then that sort of thing. But you know, if the overall trend line is negative, like you have that negative line still going, but if you looked at the points of where those peak numbers are. Yeah, occasionally there’s one that’s way up here, and there’s some there ways down here, you know, So when the weather happens, we get birds. But yeah, the overall trend it’s not good.

00:10:58
Speaker 1: Okay, So we’re starting to get a bright, odd idea of what’s going on here, and frankly, it’s not great news.

00:11:04
Speaker 2: There’s not really a way to sugarcoat it.

00:11:06
Speaker 1: This has been causing biologists and duck hunters to scratch their heads for twenty years now, and I know, trust me, I know we want answers. The way that I’m approaching this discussion is to start with the broader, more outside factors and work inward to the more specific factors.

00:11:21
Speaker 2: And if you caught it.

00:11:22
Speaker 1: There in that last bit, James already gave us big contributing in broad factor number one.

00:11:27
Speaker 2: Weather. This is my least favorite factor. Man. I really do hate this factor.

00:11:32
Speaker 1: And you want to know why, because you can’t really do anything about it.

00:11:36
Speaker 2: The weather’s gonna be what it’s gonna be.

00:11:37
Speaker 1: Seriously, if you figure out how to manufacture a cold front, let me know. However, it’s undoubtedly one of the key ingredients to the smaller decline problem that we’re having and we’re gonna learn more about that. But go ahead and keep track as we start this list now onto the next. Like I said, broad factors first, and then we work inward. Waterfowl are migratory.

00:12:00
Speaker 2: We know this.

00:12:00
Speaker 1: However, it’s easy for us as hunters to develop a myopic view when it comes to ducks. What I mean by this is when we see mallard declines that are impossible to ignore, we sometimes only think about our local landscape. And hang on, I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about our local landscape.

00:12:17
Speaker 2: I’m saying we shouldn’t only.

00:12:19
Speaker 1: Think about our local landscape. For instance, a vital player in this equation is the breeding range the Prairie Pothole region made up of the Dakotas in the southern portion of Saskatchewan and Alberta. This is the mallard factory more or less. And if this area isn’t doing well, then frankly, it doesn’t matter how good of a job we do here in the lower Mississippi alluvial Valley, there won’t be any mallards to travel down here.

00:12:43
Speaker 3: There’s tons of you know, reasons and threats to breeding habitat for waterfowl. You know, ducks in the prairies and parklands and elsewhere, what they need is grassland nesting cover to feed on and to raise breeds on and to molt on as well. And so there’s you know, the to do list. That’s for one reason that when we talk about like you know, mortality and ducks and skewede sexu ratios and everything. You know, the breeding time periods, that time if you die there, that that matters a lot more, you know. So and a hen has a whole lot of to dos that a drake doesn’t, you know. So hens are a little bit more predisposed to that natural mortality up there. But you know, we need a lot of that cover to produce ducks, especially in dry years, and we’ve been kind of dry on the drier end for quite a while now. I’ve seen that, you know, depending on the age of the person who has watched prairie conditions over time, you know, you know, there were times where it was really dried and we were really struggling, and then water came back to the prairies and we just went through the roof. So, I mean, they can bounce back, but it’s harder to bounce back the less you have of that habitat, because just like anything else, whether you’re talking about beer or turkey or anything, you have x amount of habitat and there’s only so many animals that can support And that’s one reason we talk about this. You can’t stop pyle ducks, Like, well, if you just send a whole bunch of birds back to the north, you didn’t shoot. There’s only so many that can do their thing up there and what’s left up there, and so you just have higher natural mortality because hunting in general is based on the fact that we are compensating for that natural mortality. So if ducks that we shoot likely could die from natural causes. Right, that’s an oversimplification of things. But we need that cover, and that cover is disappearing for a multitude of reasons. One way that we have been very successful in putting habitat on the prairies is through programs like the Conservation reserve program, So taking marginal crop land and putting it back into some type of cover. You know, down here in the delta we make plant bottomlane hardwoods with that, but up in the prairies they’re planting grass in those and so we’ve lost since twenty seventeen total CRP acres like twelve million somidd acres. But I tried my best to go through and calculate on a perk county basis in the prairies of the States, because we don’t have CRP in Canada. You know, they don’t have a program.

00:15:32
Speaker 4: Quite like that.

00:15:33
Speaker 3: But here we lost about somewhere in the neighborhood of four point eight million acres of CRP that went back into production.

00:15:42
Speaker 4: And you know, the things drive that.

00:15:43
Speaker 3: You know, that’s a farming landscape, it’s a working landscape, and those are going to drive those decisions on what to do with that land. And you know, but that’s four point eight million less acres. They could be per decent ducks right now.

00:15:55
Speaker 1: I’m going to interject here, and this may sound obvious, but if we want ducks to persist, and even more down the line, if we want mallards to end up in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, then we have to have breeding grounds. And losing four point eight million acres of CRP is not good.

00:16:13
Speaker 3: Since twenty fifteen, they’ve been declining so last ten years. So ten years ago, though we counted more ducks than we we ever have, you know, is the highest breeding population on record. Forgive me, I’m gonna say deepop a lot, but that’s waterfowl breeding populations. So we have the highest one of that survey on record. And from that point, it’s pretty well precipitous decline down to where we are now. And hopefully we’re kind of leveling off at this point, or else we’re gonna we are going to see reduced seasons and bag limits, you know, when we go too much further below where we are now, we’re not producing as many mallards. So there just are less mallards to even be able to come here if we get the weather. So we have way less than we would have ten years So ten plus million mallards ten years ago were like six you know, and when we get to that half point about five million, depending on what the pond counts are in that matrix of how harvest packages are selected. At five million mallards with you know, a certain level of pond count that’s a forty five day six stug back, So we’re not that far from it.

00:17:24
Speaker 1: For me, man I so, and this is an anecdote, but I’d been to South Dakota a lot. This past trip was my first time ever going to North Dakota. And you hear about North Dakota as like this waterfowl mecha right, like growing up down here, That’s all you hear about is man North Dakota, North Dakota. The shooting mallards in North Dakota, pre dry field hunts, all this mallards everywhere by the thousands, and prairies upon prairies. Man, I saw ducks, I did. I mean, like, there were ducks up there. We had one good hunt while I was up there, but it was not what I thought it was gonna be. I don’t want to go to North Dakota and say, man, I was kind of disappointed.

00:18:04
Speaker 4: You know what I mean, you don’t want to But.

00:18:06
Speaker 1: Just what I was seeing, I was like, bro, where did they go?

00:18:11
Speaker 2: You know?

00:18:11
Speaker 1: You know what I mean?

00:18:12
Speaker 2: And it’s uh uh.

00:18:14
Speaker 1: And that’s a whole other conversation because people on land, people farm people got to make I mean like, it’s complex, it’s nuanced. I understand that, but it’s it’s it points to a larger problem that hey, if this is gonna be something that we’re going to prioritize, somebody has to figure this out.

00:18:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and and conservation is always you know, nuanced in the way that that we have to go about it, because, like I said, it’s the reality the fact that you know, producers have to make a living, you know, and we have to provide that those crops to people and and and for all the various needs we have for those and you know, ad markets fluctuate all the time, and so there’s times when conservations profitable and there’s times where it’s not. And we have to come up with some kind of creative ways to make that a little bit more effect if I think moving forward, and I don’t know right now what that would be, but the game is changing a little bit, and we got to be adaptable and we got to we got to do it. And I have I got a lot of confidence in the conservation community because we’ve gone through our ups and downs and we’ve had challenges. It’s just it’s scary to be in those points where it’s like, man, this is this is not good. It’s very scary time frame, and I it’s hard to stay upbeat about it. And you know, we have to look at everything, but you know, we do what the science tells us to do, and right now the science is telling us that we’re not producing ducks.

00:19:42
Speaker 1: Big contributing and broad factor number two trouble in the breeding grounds. In this present time, we simply are not producing as many mallards as we were a decade ago. From ten million mallards to six million mallards is alarming, much like losing four point z millions of CRP is alarming. This is a large problem, But now I want to change topics. Weather in breeding grounds big parts of the problem. We got that down, So let’s transition into talking more of the prominent theories you hear in camp conversations or table chatter at your local du banquet. One of the most popular ones is that the flyway is shifting. We hear that all the time, or at least I do, but I want to know if there’s any truth to it.

00:20:29
Speaker 3: There was a big paper came out a year or so ago that looked at changes in distributions of band recovery from nineteen sixty five I believe to like twenty twenty and see a pretty good shift north and a little bit to the west. But it’s mostly just a northward shift, and there’s nothing that really really spells out wholesale shift in ducks westward. It’s more of ducks are just staying a little further north. And there’s a lot of reasons potentially for that, weather principal among those. But I got curious because to me, I find it’s super interesting to think about how things have changed since I was a young duck hunter in the nineties and early two thousands, when I was a kid and Ducks Unlimited was keeping the ducks from coming down south and everything, I was whole hauled into it, you know, because that’s what everybody older than me was telling me.

00:21:28
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, yeah, so.

00:21:29
Speaker 3: And I think with social media, obviously things can spread faster. But when you’re shooting a ton of mallards in Arkansas, and you know, it doesn’t seem like the old days, but it’s still good. Unless you went over there to Oklahoma or Kansas, I don’t really know that you would know anything about it, true, And unless you’re in desperate measures to shoot ducks, you know. So these pictures and things on social media just pushed that narrative like, oh my god, look how many ducks. I’ve never heard of people shooting ducks in Oklahoma now there’s these people shooting them like crazy in Oklahoma and Kansas, and so total mark Mallard harvest just kind of for Kansas from when hip data was a thing, it looks like, you know, in two thousand, they were shooting about the same number of Mallards per hunter as they did in twenty twenty, and now they’re shooting less now than they had. The hunter numbers have increased over that time period. And that’s why reason raw harvest data doesn’t mean as much until you put that effort in there, you know, right, you have to have the like how many hunters were out there. And so in Oklahoma again, same trend in hunter numbers. Waterfowl hunters in Oklahoma has increased over the last twenty five years, and their harvest shows no discernible trend as far as total ducks over that twenty year period. And actually Mallard’s specific harvest seems to have declined over time. And so I may be completely on, but at least from the harvest data and looking at it from as far as an average duck for hunter number per year over time, nothing out of this data tells me they’re shooting more now than they were twenty years ago, and Mallard’s it says they’re shooting less, at least in Oklahoma.

00:23:17
Speaker 2: So is the flyway shifting west? Who’s to say? I can say?

00:23:21
Speaker 1: According to James, there’s not any data to support that it’s happening. And more interestingly is the fact that states like Kansas and Oklahoma that often get brought up in this conversation show that Mallard harvest has showed no change or even slight declines in the past twenty five years. The only thing that has increased is hunter numbers. See y’all draw whatever conclusions you want to from that, But me personally, that leads me to believe that the problem lies elsewhere. So let’s move on to another heavily discussed theory on this topic about changes in the flyway. Some suggest that Mallards simply aren’t migrating as far south as they used to, and this one comes with all kinds of colorful ideas. Been hearing this for as long as I can remember. The Duck’s unlimited has heated ponds in the north that completely halts the Mallard migration, or that the number of flooded cornfields in the north has become so vast that it is the sole reason that mallards don’t come down this far south anymore. Is there any truth to all this? Hearsay, James, you got to help us out with all this.

00:24:21
Speaker 3: I’ve been hearing the heated ponds things since the nineties. I’ve been hearing that and heard it when I became a state Duck biologist used to get that, you know, the younger me was all.

00:24:31
Speaker 4: Full in it.

00:24:32
Speaker 3: Like I said before, I was like, I can’t believe they heat those ponds up there. That’s just it’s just ridiculous. And now DU’s headquarters is in Memphis. Their largest office is near Jackson, Mississippi, in Ridgeland, and they have field offices stretched across the southeast, and they consistently are some of the most productive office as far as when you talk about deliverables like acres you know, conserved in that region and all that. So it doesn’t line up with why would you heap ponds up north when you’re putting all these acres of habitat on the ground on public refuges and public WMA’s doesn’t make a lot of sense. And when you raise probably most of your money in the southeast too, I don’t know that that’s still at the thing, but at one time I know it was like kind of more their dollars, you know, reported are kind of coming out of those so and they invest heavily in the breeding grounds obviously just as much, you know, and the southern states you know, have grant programs, do you Canada? And du Canada does a tremendous work in Saskatchewan, which is super important, Mississippi mallards and so yeah, all those things together just kind of don’t support the notion that du itself is trying to ruin your duck on it.

00:25:48
Speaker 1: A lot of evidence to show that Ducks un Limited is not keeping ducks up north.

00:25:54
Speaker 4: So the follow up question of that is what actually is keeping them up north? I think the biggest driver is the weather. Some of the farmers I grew up with, and folks that I think would have never told you that the climate’s changing, are telling you the climate’s changing.

00:26:11
Speaker 1: See, that was going to be my follow up question, and you have to ask it these days when someone talks about long term weather effects, the questions are we talking climate change type weather scripts or we’re talking like year to year fluctuation.

00:26:25
Speaker 3: Now it’s the trend seems to be we’re trending warmer, and we do get so, you know, I think everybody needs to step back and think about, Okay, in the nineties and early two thousands, how many times were you breaking ice through the season? And then now how many times do you do it? And so we’re trending milder. And when we do get a weather event, it’s super severe. The last several years are good examples of that, super severe cold events. And there are occurring at times where you’re like, okay, I got about eight to ten days left in this duck season to hunt.

00:26:58
Speaker 4: What this gave us?

00:26:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so unless you’re out there in the field on that thing, we may hit peak abundance of ducks typical to an average year. But did we see it in the blind No, probably not unless you’re out there taking advantage of it that whole time after that occurred, and the question is, too, how long do those to northern latitudes that would be holding birds waiting for that? How long are those freezes? You’ve got to have consecutive days of freeze. That’s a pretty quick event, and that falls quick. Sometimes those birds can ride it out, and so there’s a lot of things that play there. But yeah, that’s what I always go back to, and I think about now, like every Halloween.

00:27:39
Speaker 4: I think about it.

00:27:40
Speaker 3: Every kid’s coming up to our doorstep, you know, in their costumes and everything. And I think back to the nineties when I used to get irritated because my mom would make me wear a jacket over my Halloween costume. He’s like, man, nobody can seem like Halloween costume, you know. And they know kids wearing jackets at Halloween these days. You know.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: I told y’all earlier how much I hate when weather is a contributing factor. Do you want to know what I hate even more when you have to bring up climate change on a podcast, or even worse, when you have to label it as a contributing factor to Mallard declines. So I humbly ask you to let go of any of your predetermined thoughts that you might have when you hear that term, or forget that I said it all together if.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: You need to.

00:28:22
Speaker 1: But just think about some of the questions and examples that James brought up. How much do you bust ice during duck season compared to ten years ago? How often do you see kids wearing jackets on Halloween these days, you gotta admit the man has a point. Duck hunting seems to be this is anecdotal, seems to be growing popularity among the younger group of hunters. Right, the younger group of hunters doesn’t have quite the hindsight that someone with a little bit more years on them. And not that I’m an old sage, but I’m thirty three years old. And when I was in high school and we were hunting all public land in Ssissippi, we didn’t have access to any private ground type stuff, so we hudted all private ground.

00:29:04
Speaker 2: It was definitely.

00:29:05
Speaker 1: Colder, We dealt with sub freezing degrees much more often, and they would stay for longer amounts of time. Yep, we killed more ducks. And this is when I was sixteen years old. We didn’t kill more ducks because I knew what I was doing, you know what I mean?

00:29:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean. It had nothing to do with my skill level there. They just seemed to be more available.

00:29:32
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:29:32
Speaker 2: Right.

00:29:33
Speaker 1: When you talk about climate change for a while now in different topics where it would come up in the wildlife space, I’m almost scared to say it. Sometimes because you know, it’s gotten so like charged as such, like a loaded term. Yeah, but it’s you gotta at some point you have to address it when these things are becoming more and more evident.

00:29:53
Speaker 2: I have no idea what to do about it. I just know that it’s happening.

00:29:56
Speaker 3: And so the way I think about it is we’ve swapped on a lot of things because it is a contentious topic, and it still is. I think most people are going to say, yes, the climate’s changing. It’s the why that’s still contentious. So regardless of what the cause is, or anybody’s belief on the calls, or how much evidence there is to anything for the cause, the fact that it’s happening, I think is pretty well established, you know. And so that’s why, you know, I had somebody asked me about that on LinkedIn that had read the article, and they said that feel nervous to say that most farmers would agree with it, And I was like, I feel like most farmers would agree with that the climate’s changing. I think it’s just that why that’s contentious now. So I don’t think we have to dance around it as much as before. You know, the why is not as important to me at this very moment, other than just saying yes, it is, and we’ve got to figure out how to adapt somewhat to it.

00:30:52
Speaker 1: I remember when I was a kid, not even in the hunting space, but in grade school, learning that ducks fly south for the winter. Some of you out there probably got that same lesson. However, ducks don’t just fly south because our calendar says it’s winter. We actually have to have a winter to drive them to do.

00:31:09
Speaker 3: It, particularly a good proportion of the mallards. You know, It’s not just freezing temperatures. Snow has to occur up north that covers food so they can’t get to it. So when their latitudes where they field feed, they know snow on the ground. They can hang out on open deep water and then go feed and they ain’t got to move, you know. So it’s more than just freezing temps. It’s freezing temps plus snow cover to a certain latitude, and then as you get more mid latitude, it’s freezing, but it’s for duration long enough to push them. And it’s always been that just happened more frequently, you know, And there’s been some research with some of the GPS transmitted ducks they’ve marked up there, like if a mallard hasn’t left North Dakota by winter solstice, they’re probably not leaving.

00:31:58
Speaker 1: Okay, let’s do a quick view before we turn to a different topic, big and broad contributing factors to this lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley mallard decline One weather and or climate change if you’re find with using that terminology, and two problems in the breeding grounds that lead to their being simply less mallards overall. As I stated, start broad and work our way inward. We’ve covered what’s going on on the outside, and now it’s time that we focus on what’s going on in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley itself.

00:32:37
Speaker 3: One thing that we don’t know as much about right now is the landscape changes here. Anecdotally, I would say it’s obvious to me spending as much time in the delta as I spend and my time flying aerial waterfowl surveys in the delta, and you know, my father’s family farmers and tala Hashi County, and so I had made a lot of trips driving through the delta, even from a very very young kid and coming over to duck hunt and I duck hunted public lands all over the Delta for most of my young childhood through college and grad school, and get research in the Delta in grad school and all that and worked. So I’ve spent a lot of time over there. And it’s fairly evident to me that two things. One we don’t have near the winter water we used to have. There were times I could drive from Batesville to Tutwiler and as you were getting closer to Marx on six, you would see flooded fields, and then all down highway through you would see flooded fields. I can make that same trip now in January, and I can count on both hands how many flooded fields I see. Probably on one hand.

00:33:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you can make it the hand number two, you’re doing better than I do.

00:33:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:33:51
Speaker 4: And I haven’t been up in the airplane.

00:33:53
Speaker 3: I think it would almost make me sick if I had, because the last time I flew in area waterfowl survey in the Delta was probably the fourteen fifteen winter. Even then, I mean, you know, you’d fly over Boliver County and be like, there’s more rice in bar Ever County than there is anywhere else. Sitting it’s like finding there more winter water here. Same thing kind of Washington County and some others, but all across the delta it’s just a dry landscape. And historically that wasn’t the case. There was a lot more winter water, you know, And there’s lots of reasons behind that. You know, you probably think, you know, farm families, you know, kids move off, they’re not coming back, and duck hunting, you know, farmers aging and that sort of thing. And then you’ve got other people that are you know, maybe that’s just not what they do, that are farming some of that ground now or whatever. But you don’t see people winter flood. Also, we plant crops super early, you know, and probably in the nineties when I was duck hunting, and remember my uncles still talking about are they going to get their beans out by November? And that’s not a thing anymore. And every bit of corn that’s left is germinated well before you know, you would flood it, and so there’s a lot less food out there if you do flood it. And too, we do fall tillage now, you know, getting the fields ready so you don’t have to worry about the risks of spring rains. And so there’s a lot of things going against the ducks of the delta, and a lot more winter water would help, even if you’re just flooding, you know, a bean field that doesn’t have much food left in it. I think that would certainly help. And if you could reduce some fall tillage in some areas, that would be helpful too. But you know, you got to make that work with producers because we don’t. We can’t do things that are counter productive for them. But we have a bad problem sometimes with looking into our own WMA, the WMA that we hunt or whatever it is, and say, nothing’s changed. Well, nothing may have changed on your property. You look in within a duck’s you know, movement patterns surrounding your property lots change, and so is the delta as sticky for ducks, you know, as it used to be.

00:35:56
Speaker 4: I don’t know if it is.

00:35:58
Speaker 1: There’s a lot there, some hard scientific data, some anecdotal evidence, but what’s clear is the landscape has changed. And honestly, this is something that we kind of already know. We already referenced doctor Mark McConnell as one of the authors of this main article that we’ve been referencing, and we referred back to his Bob whack Quill episode, which was the second episode ever of Backwoods University, and if you remember, in that episode, we learned how much large scale agriculture and agricultural practices made changes to the landscape. The Mississippi Delta, in the whole Mississippi Alluvial Valley simply does not have as much or as high of quality waterfowl habitat as it once did. It’s a sad fact, but it is a fact and one that folks like James Callicut are working to be able to quantify. I want to round this conversation with James off by simply asking him where do we go from here? What do we do with this information? Is there any silver lining or hope that we Mallard enthusiast can hold on to To summarize all of it best I can, it’s much. It’s much like anything else in terms of wildlife, especially when there’s a problem with it, people tend to want to find like one large smoking gun.

00:37:10
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:37:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:37:12
Speaker 1: While there may be one, you know, a couple of predominant factors, there’s several that’s making the state of the Mallard sound here in the Mississippi alluvial Valley the way that it is.

00:37:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it’s that you want an easy answer to a complex question. And I totally get that when you’re passionate, because every one of these individuals that is whole sale on flyway shifts or standing corn. How should I put it. It’s like anger or it’s love disguised as anger. Yeah, because I get it. Waterfowling is a part of.

00:37:45
Speaker 4: Who we are.

00:37:47
Speaker 3: And when something that is to that level of passion for you and you seem to be losing it, you know, it’s scary and you’re you get upset.

00:38:00
Speaker 2: Matt.

00:38:01
Speaker 3: You know we’ve all long talked about, like in wildlife, what’s the fascination with silver bullets? I didn’t take any psychology in college, so I’m probably off base here, but I’ve got to think that there’s in human nature that the solution to your problem about something that you care immensely about needs to be something I can change. You want it to be something that’s quick, instant kind of gratification, a regulation change or a law outlawing something that if we can make that happen, that does it. But things like we need to make our landscape back, what it used to be a long time ago, and we need to make the prairies look like they looked like, you know, ten years ago. Takes That takes time, and that’s not a quick fix either. And you know, all these folks, I totally get where they’re coming from, and I don’t want to discount them at all. That’s why we’re looking into the corn things. Try to quantify that so we can say, Okay, if it’s impacting something, let’s do something. But if it’s not, then we really need to focus on these other things. You know, I don’t think because of the weather factor. I don’t think unless that changes somehow, I don’t think we’re ever going to be back to us having mallards to the numbers we did twenty thirty years ago, but we certainly could have.

00:39:21
Speaker 2: More than we have now.

00:39:22
Speaker 3: I think if we work on the issues and at the prairies, and we look into these other things and figure out one way or the other do we need to be focused on that, and we work on our own landscape, I think we certainly could be in better shape. Like it’s not lost, All hope is not lost. It’s just that when we say adapt to new normals in that article. I think what we mean is that even if we figure out all the answers that, you know, the weather’s the one thing we can’t change, and there’s going to be some level of new normal, you know, and we don’t kill a million mallards and in one state. You know, maybe it’s just we’re going to have to settle with what the weather will push to us after we’ve solved the habitat issue, because that’s always what it is most often the time when somebody complains about something with the wildlife issue, the answers habitat and for right now, I’d say that that’s habitat here, but most certainly habitat to the north. I think right now we’ve got the evidence on the flyway shifting portion. At least it produce that uncertainty enough to feel like that’s not one of the things driving this. But we’re looking into the other. We’re not just dismissing folks arguments. We’re going to look at it and we’re going to figure out what it means to us, and we’re going to make actionable items out of that, like we do with any other conservation issue that we have.

00:40:43
Speaker 1: If there’s one part of this I want you to hang on to It’s that all hope is not lost.

00:40:47
Speaker 2: We’ll likely have to adjust, but there is hope. My friends. Hold on to it because it’s there.

00:40:53
Speaker 1: And if there’s any action items that you can walk away with, it’s waterfowl conservation organizations or a high importance. For instance, if you’re wondering how someone who hunts down south can help the breeding grounds up north, then join a conservation organization like Ducks Unlimited or Delta Waterfowl or both, and donate and get involved.

00:41:21
Speaker 2: I want to thank all of.

00:41:22
Speaker 1: You for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this country life. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. If you liked this episode, share it with someone this week, a friend, a family member, a buddy who’s no good at blowing a duck call, take your pick and stick around, because if this podcast was a duck hunt, we’ve scratched out a few, but there’s a group of mallards working up top, and I think they’re going to do it on this next pass.

00:41:44
Speaker 2: There’s a whole lot more on the way.