EP367. Gimme Shelter—Is Waterfowl Sanctuary Important? Or Not?

The Impact of Sanctuaries on Hunting 

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Duck Season Somewhere. Gather up close kids and listen, because I got a controversial topic for you all today, a very important topic that I think, based on Dr. Bradley Cohen’s recent episode is going to hit home with a lot of you all. Anytime this topic comes up, I hear it, you post it. I hear it said, everywhere I go, we need to open federal sanctuaries or we need to close the ones up north, set the birds to fly south. And one of my favorites is, I tell you what. Let’s just go move it around and kind of confuse them so we got better odds at killing them. Today’s guest just so happens to have done a lot of technical research on this very thing. Ask the question will moving sanctuaries, will closing sanctuaries up north, will letting hunters come and hunt those sanctuaries, will it increase productivity for us hunters or will it not? That’s the question. Joining me today is my buddy and former Mississippi state graduate Heath Hagy, who is a waterfowl ecologist for US Fish & Wildlife Service. Thanks for coming on Heath.

Heath Hagy: Hey, Ramsey. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Ramsey Russell: What is your full title? Because it’s a mindful.

Heath Hagy: In the government, we’ve got to have long titles. But I’m Heath Hagy. I am a waterfowl ecologist for the southeast region of National Wildlife Refuge System with the US Fish & Wildlife Service. So, for a living, I get to worry about waterfowl and wetland ecology and even those folks like duck hunters who chase ducks through the wetland. So it’s a pretty good gig.

Ramsey Russell: And you love it, don’t you?

Heath Hagy: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Remind me how many refuges you’re over in the southeast?

Heath Hagy: The southeast region, we’ve got about 131 National Wildlife Refuges and not all of those have waterfowl as what we call a resource of concern. So they’re not all waterfowl refugees.

Ramsey Russell: Broke up just a little bit there. Okay. Stand still and talking to your phone so it don’t break up too bad. What are some of the fun things that you do in the refuge system in the interest of waterfowl?

Heath Hagy: Sure. I’m sort of like an internal consultant to our National Wildlife Refuges. So, I get to work with refuge managers, scientists, students, administrators on all sorts of things, waterfowl. So that’s from the planning side, worrying about how much habitat is we’re making sure that we have enough. And if we don’t, how designing strategies to help us get there, either changing management strategies or trying to acquire new ground in different places. All sorts of things and then on the other side of that, working with individual refuge managers to figure out what they need on the ground or help them with different sorts of management strategies, whether that be crops or moisturizing management, bottom and forest management, so on and so forth. And so, sort of the whole gamut of waterfowl ecology and management for the National Wildlife Refuge system and I’m fortunate I get to work with our partners too, with state agencies and lots of folks to do waterfowl training and all sorts of things kind of within the waterfowl management field.

Ramsey Russell: And you are a duck hunter.

Heath Hagy: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: So, putting ducks on a strap when you go hunting is personally important to you.

Heath Hagy: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: But over 131 refuges in the southeast, you’ve bound to have heard some of these discussions. You might even been talked too heatedly about all those ducks piling up behind the blue goose sign.

Heath Hagy: That’s right. Not everyone sees sanctuary through the same lens. That’s absolutely true. We hear all kinds of things from you’re shortstopping the ducks to you need more sanctuary to. I need sanctuary over here and well, you’re doing it wrong. We should do it like this. So, everyone’s got a little bit different opinion on and it seems like if you ask five people, you can get ten different opinions.

Ramsey Russell: But now, let me say this. I stopped and talked to a guy the other day. He’s a waterfowl historian. In his game room, he had a journal from, I don’t know. Back in the 30s and 40s a hunter’s journal that kept a journal back in the day. The 30s and 40s man, the golden era. The guy talked about the weather and ducks he killed and how the ducks flew. And you flipped a page and you look and on one particular day. And man, sometimes things just don’t change. But one of his entries said, literally said, didn’t see shit. So even back in the good old days, duck hunting is duck hunting. Sometimes the ducks fly and sometimes they don’t. That’s the world of duck hunting. We all got to accept that. But I’m going to start like this. Why do waterfowl sanctuaries exist? What’s their purpose? I mean, there’s got to be a reason that the US Fish & Wildlife Service, who is entrusted to protect first tier priority, endangered and threatened species. Second and big tier priority, migratory game birds. Why is sanctuary such a big component of the National Wildlife Refuge system?

Geographical Distribution of Waterfowl Sanctuaries

We have sanctuaries spread all across the US, all across different areas where birds go through different annual cycle events.

Heath Hagy: That’s a great question. Unfortunately, there’s not one simple answer. So, I’ll try to keep it brief. But there’s a whole bunch of reasons that we might implement sanctuary in any given place and we do. So we have sanctuaries in the northern portions of the Mississippi Flyway, all the way down to the Gulf Coast and the same thing in the Atlantic Flyway, same thing in central and Pacific. So it’s not just their sanctuary on wintering grounds or in migration areas or in breeding areas. We have sanctuaries spread all across the US, all across different areas where birds go through different annual cycle events. The breeding areas, the wintering areas, the migration areas, so on and so forth. And what you ought to do first is just say hey, what do we mean by sanctuary? What are we talking about? Well, when you boil it down, what we’re talking about is an area where birds can go to get away from people. You can’t control whether or not an avian predator is going to fly over, an eagle is going to fly over and jump the birds. You can’t control whether maybe an airplane is going to fly over and maybe buzz some. But when we say sanctuary, what we’re generally talking about is an area where we don’t waterfowl hunt or the timing between waterfowl hunts is weeks or some long period of time. We don’t allow people to go in there and do things that will disturb the birds. So it’s an area of no or really limited disturbance to the bird. So that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about waterfowl sanctuary. The reason that we implement that is that there’s just so much disturbance on the landscape. Especially from people, that sometimes in some situations, the birds really have a hard time finding a spot to go, to sit, to just hang out, to just chill away from people. Sure, in late winter, in some areas, there’s water all across the landscape. You go to the Gulf Coast, there’s certainly a lot of water there. Later in the winter, in the Mississippi Valley, there’s usually lots of water. Maybe sanctuary doesn’t have as big a role in some places and in some time periods as it does others. But certainly, early in the season, when hunting season is in, that’s when you may have high disturbance from duck hunters, from birders, from us, just people out doing our things, living our life. We may be disturbing those birds and it can have implications on where they go and what they do. There’s sort of several schools of thought on this and I’ll just be honest with you, there’s limited evidence to support any of these. So, I’ll just tell you sort of what we have currently the best science right now. So, there’s sort of some schools of thought, and there is the school of thought that sanctuaries are probably most important to influence distribution of birds on the landscape. And I don’t mean short stopping birds necessarily in migration areas. I’m talking about sanctuary in one area of one state and then another sanctuary 20 miles away, so it can spread birds around, make them available to hunters, make them available to bird watchers. Historically, people were worried about disease, making sure we didn’t have all the birds sitting in one spot, because some areas of the country, we’ve lost more than 90% of our wetlands and we’ve degraded lots of those that are left and so there’s far less habitat than there used to be in many places. And so, there’s a natural concentration of waterfowl around these areas and then if you get a disturbance free area, boy, that only further concentrates the birds. And so potentially that could lead to things like increased disease prevalence. So historically, that was one school of thought, was that we might need to spread these birds out a little bit, make them available to hunters, make them available to bird watchers and make sure that they’re not piled on top of each other. Maybe we’ll have fewer disease issues. Then there’s another school that thought maybe sanctuary would be impactful to managing demographics of waterfowl. What I mean by that is survival. Can we make sure that we maintain enough sanctuary so there’s this breeding stock, if you will, of a core number of birds to make sure they survive. They can hang out through winter and they can return north to the breeding season to make sure that we maintain some base level of population. So those are two or three sort of different schools of thought. You could call them hypotheses on what effects of sanctuary has on waterfowl and why we historically have implemented sanctuary on the landscape. And the truth is that all of those and some other things have been used historically to justify putting sanctuary on the landscape. What we know today is that probably the waterfowl distribution, affecting waterfowl distribution is the strongest and most probable justification that we have for sanctuary at large scales. Certainly, you might have some really local effects on survival or maybe other demographic rates for certain species. But at a flyaway scale or at a continental scale, we don’t implement sanctuary to affect survival, for instance. We manage that through other mechanisms. But what we do locally is implement so that in certain areas, we can give birds a place to go so that they didn’t spread out among the landscape. And that’s not just on private lands, that’s also on areas on, for instance, National Wildlife Refuges or State Wildlife Management areas that are open to hunting. So, these little spatial sanctuaries, if you will, these areas where disturbance is very low or absent from people during the winter period, so those birds can spread out from those across the landscape. So that was a little bit of a long winded answer, but it’s sort of hard to say one thing, because historically, over the last hundred years of the US Fish & Wildlife Service and even several hundred years in North America of us implementing managed sanctuary, we’ve used lots of different justifications for doing so, just kind of guessing, just kind of using our best professional judgment based on the knowledge that we had at the time. That information is piling up and getting better and better and better over time, which puts us in a good position today to sort of give the best justification we can. But we’re still doing research to try to figure out what effect sanctuary actually has on the birds and how we might manage sanctuary or implement it to then do something desirable to the birds, like spread them out more on the landscape for instance.

Ramsey Russell: Hey, Therein I’m up acting in Saskatchewan. Was on the phone today with someone with the Manitoba Wildlife foundation and they actually with under public scrutiny in the past, way back in the past, they had actually made the decision to open some of the sanctuary areas and they very quickly realized their error. They said the minute we opened it up, it wasn’t long at all. We didn’t have any birds in our area. They went south, went elsewhere. There really is a lot to this sanctuary that benefits hunters. I mean, at the end of the day, as badly as a duck hunter as I want to wide them up over the decoys, because that’s what I do as a duck hunter. The nature of a duck, he’s got to have somewhere on the landscape to go and just do ducky things, man. Just be a duck and do what he does when he ain’t getting shot at. Am I right?

Heath Hagy: That’s exactly right. You’ve got to give them a little bit of space, because guess what? They’ve got wings. They can fly and do fly thousands of miles every year. So they are perfectly capable of moving to the next county or the next field or the next state if they need to, if they’re getting too much pressure in an area.

Ramsey Russell: The reason I thought to call you and talk to you about this topic is Dr. Bradley Cohen mentioned that at another job you had, I believe, up at Bellrose Research center, you had actually gone out and done some pretty extensive research into disturbing sanctuary areas. Can you speak to that just a little bit?

Heath Hagy: You bet. We did several projects and I still have several ongoing projects on sanctuary. Like I mentioned, we’re still trying to figure it out. It’s complicated. We know that there’s difference in different species and how they respond to disturbance and hence how they respond to sanctuary. So not all ducks are a mallard, right. There’s lots of other ducks out there. And it turns out that shoveler and green-winged teal and gadwall and geese do very different things than each other. Of course, there’s, you get some birds that just have different personalities than other ones and they’re more tolerant of disturbance or more risk averse and just don’t want to use an area if there’s any disturbance there. So a ton of variation. But one project that we did when I was at the Forbes Biological Station, the Bellrose Research lab up in Illinois, is we looked at disturbance and sanctuary around waterfowl hunting blinds. So we had a fairly discreet area. We knew where all of the blinds were, if people used areas outside of where the established blinds were, we had those locations as well. And we flew surveys, really intense aerial surveys, to figure out exactly where the birds were. And we did this a whole bunch of times during fall and winter, over a few years, to see how far away those birds would move from those hunting blind locations. And it turns out that there’s this big, we called it a disturbance buffer. There’s this big buffer where really close to blind, of course, you get very few birds sitting on the water, almost no birds. And then as you get farther away, you build up more and more birds, and you get different kinds of birds. So really close to the blind, you might have a bunch of American coots or something like that. They’re just sort of ignoring your decoys. They’re not worried about it. But the mallards are a long way away. They’re real sensitive to that disturbance. So what we did is we figured out that through some complicated analyses, that it was really about 750 meters away from a blind before we saw bird distributions that were the same as in sanctuary areas. And so, there’s this big buffer that was something like a half mile and that half mile it took to really for an area to become sanctuary again. So, you can think about as hunters distribute through an area every time there’s a hunting party there. Sure, there might be a few birds sitting between groups of hunters, but there’s this huge area that might look a little bit like a half mile, where that’s non sanctuary and think about how much space it takes to put a whole bunch of hunting parties in an area to create non sanctuary conditions, if that makes sense.

Ramsey Russell: It makes sense. I’m sitting in a pit blind. I’m sitting out in a marsh and we’re banging away. We’re walking in, we’re talking, we’re banging away. And that disturbance, for example, creates a half mile barrier around me. It’s like this force shield comes up a half mile away and the ducks just, they resume normal activities a half mile away. That’s a long ways away. I don’t know that the loudest lungs on earth can highball that good.

The Effects of Buffers Around Sanctuaries

So that buffer distance really makes a difference in how birds distribute, how willing they are to return to an area, how long it takes them and the more and more you disturb the birds, the bigger and bigger that buffer area gets. 

Heath Hagy: That’s right and think about our sanctuaries. If you’ve hunted around a National Wildlife Refuge or WMA or even a private area that implements sanctuary, if you’re hunting right on the edge. Generally, there aren’t birds 50 yards away, 100 yards away, just looking at you and smiling at you. Usually there’s a buffer and I’m not saying it’s always exactly a half mile, but there’s this big buffer. And as we pile people around sanctuaries, well, if that sanctuary is only a half mile across and there’s people on either side of it, well, functionally there may not be very much or any sanctuary there while people are hunting. So that buffer distance really makes a difference in how birds distribute, how willing they are to return to an area, how long it takes them and the more and more you disturb the birds, the bigger and bigger that buffer area gets. They’re sensitive to it and it takes a long time for birds to come back to an area. We’ve done a number of telemetry studies looking at the time it takes for birds to go back out to private lands after the hunting season. It usually takes a couple of weeks for those birds to sort of settle down and really begin to go back to using private lands that are hunted during duck season after duck season. That’s some stuff that Ethan Dittmer did, and some of Bradley Cohen, Dr. Cohen’s work at Tennessee Tech and others have shown us. And so, you really can’t, once the duck hunters step out of the wetland, you don’t snap your fingers and open that sanctuary again. It takes up to weeks for that to really return to real sanctuary conditions. And so, it’s just pretty complicated and ducks are really sensitive to disturbance.

Ramsey Russell: Dr. Cohen said that in some of their sanctuary disturbance experiments that they did research, they went out and did something as seemingly innocuous as just kind of walking around like an old lady with binoculars a birder would do just observing it and they did something as extreme as racing through the impalements with mud motors, which we totally voided the place. And predictably, the ducks weren’t there when they were making noise, but in time began to settle back in. They’d come back. But the surprising thing to me, it was like they had been violated. It’s like if you’ve ever lived in a house that got broken into, you’re uncomfortable walking through that door and going into your house after you’ve been broken into, because he said that the ducks returned after they made that mass, that big, explosive disturbance. He said they came back, but they sat in place for two days. They did not move. It wigged them out and he even said that the adjacent landowner said, don’t do that again. We didn’t fire a shot for a week.

Heath Hagy: That’s exactly right.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy, man. It’s the complete opposite effect of what common sense would tell me would be good.

Heath Hagy: That’s exactly right. There are these lag effects. I am a duck hunter and sometimes you just think you have it all figured out and then the ducks will humble you. They’re not dumb. They respond. It’s a two way street. As we respond to them, they respond to us, too. So we’re always chasing each other. Disturbance works both ways and so if you think about it, it really shouldn’t be surprising that freaked them out. That’s a place in those sanctuaries where and this is some of Abigail Blake-Bradshaw. She’s a PhD student with Brad Cohen. Some of her really cool research shows us that those birds just kind of hunkered down and there were fewer shots around the sanctuaries for a couple of days after they did those experimental disturbances on the sanctuaries. So it actually had the opposite effect than what even I would have predicted before we started the research. Really interesting stuff. And I can tell you that other people are doing similar sorts of research now to try to figure out. To try to answer that question. Look, I can come and tell you that, hey, I don’t think it’s a great idea to move sanctuary around, especially in the short term. There are logistical issues with it, there are legal issues with it. But just from a biology side, which we’re talking about right now, the birds are going to figure that out quickly and we’re probably going to have a whole lot of unanticipated effects. And so, while we could sit here and guess at it, we’ve got a bunch of researchers out in the field actually trying to figure that out and answer that exact question for us so that when it comes up again, we could say, hey, we’ve evaluated it, it will give us this result or no, we don’t think it will. We think it’ll actually make it worse for duck hunters. So that’s a big topic of research right now.

What Disturbs Waterfowl Migration Patterns?

Tell me some of the different disturbance factors and how the birds reacted. 

Ramsey Russell: Some of the research you all did, you said there were several projects to Frank Bellrose place you were working. What were some of the other metrics you all tested? What were some of the other functions of disturbance? I mean, did you all literally shoot guns? Did you all walk in like birders? Tell me some of the different disturbance factors and how the birds reacted. That’s what asking.

Heath Hagy: Sure. And I’ll just talk more generally. So some of the stuff was done at Forbes Station, some stuff has been done by other researchers, other places. One of the interesting things is that if you look across all of these studies where people have used experimental disturbances, there’s some work that’s been done in Nebraska previously with finding a marked bird that has a telemetry backpack on, so we know where the bird goes. Shooting a shotgun near the bird, not at the bird, but shooting a shotgun near the bird and seeing where the bird goes and how long it takes them to come back to that area. So those sorts of studies have been done. We’ve done other things where we’ve implemented different kinds of disturbances. As someone with binoculars walking on the levee, a white truck that looks like the white trucks that drive out to check the water control structures, driving on the levee, boats out in an area running right through a flock of birds. What’s really interesting is that some of the things that you would think would be the worst, like driving a truck on a levee, generally aren’t nearly as bad as somebody walking on a levee. Often times it’s not necessarily the loudest thing, but it’s the thing that’s different that’ll really mess with birds and the other thing is, I’m saying birds and waterfowl, there’s no one answer. You get mallards responding a little bit differently than scaup, that respond very differently than snow geese, right. Snow geese, especially with an airplane, you come within 2 miles of them and they’re all up in the air.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, they hate airplanes.

Heath Hagy: Yeah, they do, don’t they? They do. But another time they’ll be 20ft from the road, driving by in your car and you can stop and take a picture. So, it’s super interesting the different ways that different birds respond to the disturbance and what they’re doing is they’re perceiving risk. So every time, like I said, disturbance is a two way street, they’re going to respond to you, you respond to them and it’s just kind of this cycle. But every time that they see you or they see a disturbance event, they perceive a risk of mortality, which is going to, if they’re comfortable with it, there’s enough of their peers there, they think they’re okay, they’re far enough away, they may stay there, but the minute that one of them doesn’t or a few of them think that it’s a bad idea to stay there, boom. You’ve seen two or three ducks get nervous and then everybody leaves, right? And that’s the way it is, because they’re perceiving risk and so you look across them, all these different studies and yeah, it’s highly variable, but sometimes just, it takes a surprising little bit of disturbance to make a big impact and clear out a sanctuary for maybe a few hours, maybe even a few days. And then when they do come back to what we were talking about earlier, they may just hunker down for a little while. Again, they kind of risk averse and all of a sudden that food that’s over in the apartment next door, that doesn’t look as good as it did a few minutes ago before I was disturbed. So it’s really complicated. And like I said, it’s a two way street with disturbance. They’re responding and they perceive risk just like we’re responding to them.

Ramsey Russell: When you all were looking at the effect of disturbance in sanctuary areas, did you all conduct research among different habitat or cover types? Shrub scrub versus open rice field versus marsh.

Heath Hagy: Right. Some of that work has been done. We didn’t do that in any of our experiments at the Forbes Station. I know that Dr. Mike Eichholz at SIU and some of his colleagues, Adam Baney, as I recall, they did some work during spring migration to look at foraging rates and how those varied with distance to like a scrub shrub edge or cattle edge and with water depth and a variety of other things. So, a few people have done those sorts of studies. I’m not aware that there’s sort of one rule where one different cover type, like birds are going to respond one way in open water, but birds respond another way in a hemi marsh, like with a cattail marsh, for instance. But I’ll say, just anecdotally, when you have more structure in a wetland, more visual barriers. When birds feel comfortable in there, they do seem to sit a little bit tighter than something in the open. And that’s again, because you’re going to have some noise reduction and you’re going to have that perception of risk is probably very different. If they can’t see a mile, pintail they sit way out in the open. Snow geese sit in the open. If you’re a mile from them, they can see you, they can perceive you there. Whereas it’s very different if you’re in a cattail marsh or in a moist soil wetland that’s got a lot of standing vegetation mixed in with open water, where they can feel a little bit more secure. So it sort of depends, it depends night and day. It depends on species so that one’s a bit more complicated. And I’m not aware of any research that sort of said, yeah, all species are much more secure or we could reduce disturbance by implementing this kind of management on a National Wildlife Refuge versus this kind of management. It’s just more complicated than that and we haven’t figured it out yet.

Ramsey Russell: I was over in north Texas one time with the late JJ Kent, who was an outfitter, and he had built a little shallow dugout pond 75 to 100 yards behind his house and it had a big old blind on it. He said, come on, we’ll show you this. And, I mean, it just did not look like it was too close to a house. There was another house right near the blind. So just imagine two little farmhouses 200 yards apart and about two thirds in the middle of them, with this little pond that he had planted at Chiwapa millet, which was, let’s say it was chest height, very rigid it stands. And we drove my truck up on the levee and got out and he clapped his hands, nothing. He hollered, nothing. I got out and slammed the door, nothing. I honked a horn, nothing. Said JJ, they ain’t here. He goes, oh, they’re here. And I mean, this can’t be a quarter acre, a half-acre little pond. I’m like, JJ, there ain’t no ducks here. He said, oh, they’re here. He said, get your shotgun out. And I got my shotgun out, put a round in and fired up in the air. Boom. Buddy, let me tell you what a half acre of mallard ducks to include, one about 10 foot from it exploded when the shot went off. They felt so comfortable down in that cover. They didn’t care about us. They couldn’t see us. We couldn’t see them. They knew they were safe till that shotgun went off buddy, and then they got the hell out of dodge. I want to run through with you some of these armchair quarterback solutions to the quote, sanctuary problem. Let’s talk about moving them. Why don’t we just go in on 131 refuges in the southeast and on years 1, 3 and 5, we’ll keep it over in this area and on years 2, 4 and 6, we’ll move the boundaries over here. What would that do? What could that do?

Heath Hagy: It’s a really good question and it’s one that I’ll say we are asking ourselves. I’m asking myself, because I’m not just going to bury my head and say what in the sand and say what we’ve always done is perfect. What we’ve always done is what we shall always do. We’re doing science and when we get an answer, when we do a project like Abby’s project or like Ethan Dittmer’s project, that tells us something new about sanctuary and how ducks use it, then we can use that to redesign what we do to change our management. So that’s the business we’re in is adaptive resource management. So we’re doing science. We’re looking at others to do science. So we are wide open to asking these sorts of questions. So, I don’t mind at all when people ask me, hey, why don’t we move the sanctuaries. Now I’ll say, because we don’t know if it would work, then people aren’t super satisfied with that answer. But that’s the honest answer. You don’t have the science to tell us.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t know that what would work. You didn’t know it would work. How? That’s what I’m trying to say. Okay. You said, I don’t know that it’ll work. What do you mean by the word work? You don’t know that it would continue to sanctuary duck or you don’t know that it would hold the duck but increase productivity. See, that’s where I’m getting at here.

Heath Hagy: Yes. We don’t know if it would mess up the ability of an area to hold birds. And I’m not talking about ducks sitting in a swank sanctuary all day and night when I say that. But in a general area, ducks using that area, they radiate across the landscape. They come back. They radiate across the landscape. It helps an area maintain a population of birds during a period of time, be it fall migration or winter, so on and so forth. So there’s a potential that we could mess that up. There’s also the potential that we could, like in Abby’s project, that we could actually harm the duck hunting on and around National Wildlife Refuges or other entities where they’re implementing sanctuary. Because, of course, those birds are moving or because we do something and that changes the behavior. It changes that risk perception that they have and they hunker down or they do something differently or they decide, boy, you know what? I’m just going to be hungry for a week rather than risk getting off of this sanctuary. So, I’m just going to sit here and quack and not worry about moving at all. There’s a risk there from a biology and ecology standpoint of moving that around. Even from a social standpoint, we’re not sure what effect it would have, but we’re trying to figure that out. Go ahead.

Ramsey Russell: No, you go ahead.

Heath Hagy: I was going to say. I’ll also say, just logistically speaking, it would be really challenging for us in most cases, to quickly, rapidly try to move sanctuary around. We have lots of policies, we have lots of planning documents and processes. So we have to justify our actions within the National Wildlife Refuge system, within the Fish & Wildlife Service to make sure that we have done a clear analysis of how our actions are going to impact waterfowl, for instance. Sorry, my computer just turned off, caught me there. And a variety of other things in the environment will do environmental analysis and so that’s something that is a slow and sometimes painstaking process to make sure that we get it right. And so, we would have to take into account moving of those around. We can’t just snap our fingers and make that decision. So there would have to be a lot of planning and analysis that went into that. Also, think about the logistics of hunters getting to and from certain areas. Sometimes we take advantage of an area that’s super isolated, hard to get to, to be a sanctuary, because it would be really challenging, sometimes maybe even dangerous, for lots of hunters to try to get in there at the same time. So we can allow hunters into an area around there that’s a little bit more easier to access, but have birds in that area, have that central area that’s hard to access, be the sanctuary. So from a biology side, there’s a risk there that we actually make it worse. So we acknowledge that. And then from a logistics side, it would be really challenging just to move things around. And sometimes it just wouldn’t be practical for us to do that. That all said, I think it’s a fair question. And again, we’re doing research right now to try to figure out if that’s something that we could look at in the future, I think. Like I said, science is a process and everything is on the table. We’d be interested in looking at that.

Ramsey Russell: The reason I asked that question, heath, is because as a former US Fish & Wildlife Service employee, it sounds reasonable, except as a guy, that was the guy making no decision on the ground. Here’s what concerns me. The manpower and the money required just to hang and move every year. Those posted signs.

Heath Hagy: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: And then to redo my refuge pamphlets and notify the public we’re looking at. Refuges aren’t a fortune 500 company. They’ve got budgets and they work very smart with their money. So as a guy that was sitting in the desk one day wearing a uniform that would have to go out and do this, I’m thinking, man, this is a very dawning process that’s really going to move funds that I could be putting habitat out there. Instead, I’m going to be doing this. And then I go back to, I’ve heard Dr. Cohen and Dr. Osborne especially talk about this real innate fidelity birds have. They’re not just flying south willy nilly looking for a place to land. They are going to somewhere they remember they got a high philopatry for certain areas and I’m very leery. If you all prove me wrong with a science, I’ll stand by. But just at a glance, from what I know, having talked to those two scientists and what I know have said, have worked in refuges, it seems like maybe it’s working. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s just what I’m saying.

Heath Hagy: I think that’s very fair. I won’t say there aren’t cases where, yeah, this logistically could happen. The cost wouldn’t be huge. But I think you’re exactly right. The changing of signage, the changing of parking areas, the changing of access points, just administering the hunt, the public communication. There’s a risk of people accidentally messing up. We don’t want that. We don’t want somebody making up mistake-

Ramsey Russell: While I came down this way last year, what do you making close –

Heath Hagy: Exactly. And we take all of that into consideration, as do the state agency.

Ramsey Russell: It’d be a nightmare. And so, let’s take another one. Let’s just close all the refuges up north and a bird to fly south.

Waterfowl Movement: Driven by Temperature and Food Availability

You’ve got warm weather and you’ve got plenty of food in the surrounding landscape from agriculture or whatnot. And so, some birds hang up there.

Heath Hagy: I can tell you there’s this wonderful thing called the weather that moves the birds. And so, you could close a refuge in central Illinois in January and it turns out that probably wouldn’t do much because there’s not many birds left there. There aren’t the heated ponds. There aren’t the conspiracy theory things going on at mid-latitude areas. We’ve got weather that’s moving birds out of those areas. And I’m being funny there a little bit, but there are some isolated examples of when a hunting area closes at a mid-latitude state and you’ve got warm weather and you’ve got plenty of food in the surrounding landscape from agriculture or whatnot. And so, some birds hang up there. But I could tell you that when I fly aerial surveys, when people do midwinter counts, you’re talking a very small proportion of the north American waterfowl or waterfowl duck population that’s still hanging out north of the ice land, north of the freeze line. It’s just a very small number of birds. Most of them come to the south and that’s because factors other than sanctuary, it’s factors that have nothing to do with our management ability that’s completely outside of our control. Weather, water on the landscape, those factors control and push and determine what ducks do. Largely, we only have control over just a small portion of what ducks do. So, things like weather. What I’m saying is that’s just not going to matter. In most cases, birds are going to move where they’re going to move, independent of sort of what we do because of things like weather, at least at the scale of migration areas and wintering areas, if that makes sense.

Ramsey Russell: Makes perfect sense. And I’m going to hit the last topic and I’m going to start it like this. Since the dawn of time, since loincloth and fur wrapped men crossed the barren land bridge into north American, we humans have just quested for naive populations of animals. It’s why I go explore different areas, it’s why I travel further from home, because every hunter listening, we all know in our hearts, we just want to find somewhere to experience birds that are naive and hadn’t been pressured, okay. Modern man has that genetic memory from the ancient ones 10,000 years ago that first came into America. We want that. We want to experience naive animals. It’s in our genes. So, let’s do this, because I’ve heard this topic raised as a solution, let’s call it. Let’s just open it up some. Let me come into that refuge, let me draw and let some of us come in just once or twice a week and shoot the refuge. Now, are we with sanctuary?

Heath Hagy: That’s a really good question. It’s one. We get a lot and it’s one where the science is limited. But I can tell you, I’ll just reiterate what I said earlier.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Heath Hagy: The literature says, all the research says that we measure sanctuary conditions in weeks and not days and not hours. It takes a long time for a bird to settle back down after there’s been chronic disturbance. That research has been done here in North America, it’s been done in Europe. The answer is approximately the same. It takes a couple of weeks for birds to settle down after they’ve perceived a huge risk of mortality from hunters being out on the landscape. So, let’s say we did a big lottery and in the middle of all of those refuge sanctuaries, we allowed a few hunting parties to go out. They would probably have a good hunt. Like, let’s just say it, they would probably have a good time.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’d like to be that guy.

Heath Hagy: Yeah, that’s right. And look, I am not making that decision. Keep me far away from that lottery system. But they would probably have a good hunt. But what would that functionally do to the sanctuary? Well, it would degrade that sanctuary. It would destroy that sanctuary for at least weeks and maybe longer. And what would that do to the landscape around those sanctuaries? You’ve got a few groups of hunters that would probably go and have a good hunt. Right? And that’s great-

Ramsey Russell: Short term gains, long term losses.

Heath Hagy: That’s exactly right. But what about for a month when, what if they pushed off 90% of the birds in there and it takes a month for those birds to build back up in that area and then use the hundreds of blinds or dozens of areas around that could be hunted on refuges, outside of refuges, so on and so forth. And so that would be a really short-term thing for a very few number of people that would essentially destroy those sanctuary conditions for some period of time, maybe the rest of winter, depending on when we did it. So, any opportunities like that that we have with a youth waterfowl hunt? We have some of those activities on the edges of sanctuaries and so do state agencies very careful with it. Because we don’t want to mess up the opportunities for lots of people for just one party or just one time period. So we have to be really careful with that.

How Big Do Inviolate Sanctuaries Need to Be & Where Should They Be Located?

But generally, we don’t see that when we do transmitter studies, generally we see birds that go to an area and they sit within a few square miles 5, 10, 2. 

Ramsey Russell: And this leads into a question at the landscape level and I can’t quantify, but at the landscape level. When we think of sanctuaries inviolate sanctuaries, we’ve now defined it, that this sanctuary, this refuge is inviolate. It’s locked up behind the signs or on a property. Could be private, could be state, could be federal sanctuary. The purpose is inviolate. No disturbance, not hunting, not vehicles, not walking, not anything. Just don’t even stop to look. Just a place that ducks can go and let their hair down. But how large of a landscape around me, if I want to hold ducks, if I want to have quality hunting, if I want that inviolate sanctuary of benefit to how big of a geography is this sanctuary? Is that a good question? Do you understand what saying?

Heath Hagy: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll sort of give you two different answers. So, one thing we can look at is how far do birds move around sanctuaries. So if we’re thinking about where would we put sanctuaries on the landscape? And this is something that the Cohen lab is also looking at, Cory Highway and Nick Masto and some other folks working with Dr. Brad Cohen, they’re actually looking at where would we put sanctuaries? Do we have gaps? If we did fill up these gaps, how would it benefit hunters? How would it impact waterfowl movement, sanctuary switching, so on and so on and so forth. And so that’s one thing, so we can look at how far birds move. And actually, a lot of the recent research has really surprised us because we’ve thought that there’s no reason a duck can’t be over in Arkansas and then move over to Mississippi or be in the San Joaquin Valley and then move to Central Valley, other parts of the Central Valley, so on and so forth. But generally, we don’t see that when we do transmitter studies, generally we see birds that go to an area and they sit within a few square miles 5, 10, 2. They sit in a really small area. And it’s not that they’re not moving, but they’re not making these big leaps or even going. We just did a big project on White River National Wildlife Refuge in central Arkansas. Huge 160,000 acre, give or take refuge, huge area. But the birds weren’t going from one end to the other or east to west. Generally, they were using the areas within a few miles around these spatial sanctuaries. Both outside the refuge on private lands and then inside our hunted areas and our sanctuary areas as well. So, you can look at that space. So really, just those birds are generally moving just a few miles and they’re not switching sanctuaries. Most birds and this is a big one that Dr. Brad Cohen’s research has found. Most of his birds find one sanctuary, even if it’s a few hundred acres and that’s the sanctuary that they use all of winter. I think it’s more than 70%. Don’t check me on that. But something like that. It’s Most of them, stay around one sanctuary all winter and they’re not sitting on it all winter. That’s not what I’m saying. But they’re going back and forth to really one sanctuary and then 20 miles up the road, there’s another sanctuary and there’s a group of birds only using that sanctuary. There’s very little switching of those. And like moving up the river, moving down the river. We’re just not seeing that with the transmitter data. And that’s super interesting. So that’s one thing we can use to sort of say, all right, how far away would we need to space these to really let birds move, make birds move, don’t make them move. Whatever our objective was for that. So that’s one thing we can do just on the sanctuary spacing. And then the other thing I would say on how big an area it has to be- Well, I would go back to that disturbance buffer that I mentioned earlier. A half mile. You do a half mile buffer. So, you’ve got a big half mile radius circle. Well, I don’t know what the acreage is off the top of my head, but that’s a big area before you start to get sanctuary in the middle. So, a little 50 acre sanctuary next to where you hunt, well, that’s just not going to be very efficient. You’re not generally going to have very many birds respond to that. You’re going to have to look at hundreds of acres now, not 20,000. I’m not saying that, but hundreds and hundreds of acres. So those birds can. If you drive your four wheeler every day or every time you hunt along the edge of that sanctuary, you’ve got a blind right on the edge of that sanctuary. Those birds need to be 5, 6, 700 yards away typically to really feel safe for that to really be a sanctuary. So, you kind of start to see how you could kind of quantify that sanctuary area. And it’s got to be hundreds of acres just so, just depending on how it’s set up and the shape so that those birds can feel secure and they’re not jumping every time you run a four wheeler by.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Is there any such thing as too much sanctuary and how much is too much and consequently how little is too little on a landscape?

Heath Hagy: That’s a great question. It’s a super hard one to answer. I don’t have an answer, but it’s something that we are looking at. We’ve got a couple of research projects that are helping us get at that. And I think it all goes back to what are our objectives? So if our objectives are to influence distribution of birds on the landscape so that they’re making movements to make a portion of them available for duck hunters, then that’s an objective that we would want to implement. We would want to make sure we didn’t have too much sanctuary. We don’t want to have 200,000 acres of undisturbed area with a whole bunch of food in it that the birds never have to leave. We want birds to go out and use the landscape. The other big portion of that is there’s no way we, as in the Fish & Wildlife Service on National Wildlife Refuge, we can produce enough food for all of the ducks. And we don’t try to- Generally speaking, our objectives are only to fulfill a portion, like about 30%, give or take and depending on the refuge, but only about a third of those energetic needs of the birds that use a general geographic area, which means that two thirds have to come from private land, state WMAs, other naturally flooded wetlands, so on and so forth. So, we acknowledge and we want these birds to move around the landscape because they’re going to get access to different kinds of foods. And again, we can’t provide and don’t want to provide at all. So, I guess, just to go back to your question, that’s not a goal of ours, is to have too much sanctuary. We’re cognizant of that. We want to have enough of the sanctuary to benefit people, bird watchers, hunters, so on and so forth. So those birds can distribute themselves across the landscape and make them available to lots of different people, not so that they’re all in one area piled up where no one can see them. That’s certainly not our objective. And then the other side of that, the too little sanctuary, well, if you’ve got little bitty sanctuaries, they tend to not get used very much. And if they’re too spread out, then you may not have birds who colonize those, or you may not have movements among them, which, again, is another bit of research that the Cohen lab is looking into. So it’s not a question that I have answers to, but it’s something that we ask ourselves and we’re cognizant of. And we acknowledge that there’s a balance there of having sanctuaries to distribute birds across the landscape. Give them a place to eat some food, but then allow them and encourage them to go out into the landscape and be available for harvest.

Ramsey Russell: Beyond the blue goose boundaries of the sanctuary and it can take the shape of fish and wildlife. It can take the shape of state WMA, it can take the form of private lands. Because sanctuary and it all plays together. And I know you work for the service and you represent it, but I’m not trying to make this episode about fish and wildlife sanctuaries as much. I’m just trying to do a deep dive into the concept of sanctuary and why they’re so critically important. There are days just like back in the 30s you go out hunt and you don’t see shit. It ain’t because of the sanctuaries. That’s the point. A couple of questions is three more questions, actually. But can you speak at all to spatial versus temporal, spatial being? Here’s an inviolate sanctuary. It’s a block of land, and it never does anything temporary. Temporal is I’m going to hunt it sometimes, but the rest time the ducks have it. Do you see any benefit or deficits to both? I know they’re probably not equal, but –

What’s the Difference Between a Temporal and Spatial Sanctuary for Waterfowl?

So, here’s what the best science says, that temporal sanctuary gets far less duck use than spatial sanctuary. It’s not even close.

Heath Hagy: They are definitely not equal. So, here’s what the best science says, that temporal sanctuary gets far less duck use than spatial sanctuary. It’s not even close. We’ve tested it a number of different ways. We’ve tested it in a number of different places. I looked at it and it’s part of that study in Illinois that I mentioned. Ethan Dittmer just looked at it in Arkansas. The Cohen lab is looking at it in west Tennessee. Other people have looked at it other places. Temporal sanctuary, meaning that we might not hunt a place a couple of days a week and we might hunt it or we might hunt it two days a week, but it’s not hunted. The rest of the day is five days a week. But what we found is that the bird, there’s that lag effect. So, the birds really don’t move back into there. Once you disturb it more than about once per week. That seems to be about the magic number that really birds just don’t tolerate it. I’m not saying there will be no birds, but you see a great reduction in use. And that has come up in study after study. There’s a really good study done by Mississippi state a few years ago. Elizabeth St. James and Rick Kaminski. Mike Schumer worked on that study. And it’s pretty unique in that they experimentally opened and closed some of the WMA areas. So they compared hunting an area 2 days versus 4 day. And they looked at harvest, they looked at birds using the sanctuaries, birds using the unit, so on and so forth. And while there was a whole bunch of data, and it was complicated. Generally speaking, there was not a huge advantage to only hunting 2 days a week. That really didn’t change the amount of birds that use that versus 4 day a week. So both of those were sort of disturbed conditions and the birds really didn’t respond. That’s one of the same things that we saw with Ethan Dittmer study at White River. Our areas, the north unit of White River National Wildlife Refuge, open to hunting daily, but then it closes around noon. Well, what we didn’t see were any of our birds, or very few of our birds going into that area in the afternoon, responding, even though there’s no hunting in the afternoon. And surely these birds have figured that out, but they still perceive that as a risky area. They’re staying away from that, more or less. We had another area on the south unit that was open, closed to waterfowl hunting, but open to all other kinds of hunting. So that there could deer hunt, raccoon hunt, so on and so forth. There are other disturbances down there. It had far less use in it than our spatial sanctuaries on White River. So that’s really the key that spacing out what we think now is spacing out those spatial sanctuaries, you get them big enough to make a difference, but not too big to just hold large numbers of birds and not allow them to move across the landscape, but space out those spatial sanctuaries so that those birds move around and use these other areas. But as far as temporal sanctuary, there’s probably not a great biological reason to do it. As far as the telemetry studies that we have so far, we just don’t see birds really responding to those short term closures like they would a weaker long closure.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s about what I figured. Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. My camp, for example, that’s the best we can do, is just try to manage our pressure. That’s right. By giving the birds in the afternoon, giving them several days a week just to get in there and hopefully get in there so that on the days we do shoot it, we’re a little more productive. The concept of sanctuary changed forevermore for me when I was working for the service. And the north end of Dahomey National Wildlife Refuge in Bolivar County, Mississippi, was an inviolate sanctuary. We had a very few places, very few places within Tallahatchie Refuge, Dahomey, within our complex, very few places that we planted any feed whatsoever and those very limited places, I can think of two all these years later. Those places were planted because it’s where the public could stop and view them. All the other sanctuaries inviolate were far removed from public. And it was shelter. It was cover. It was shelter. It was no disturbance. There may have been a little bit of moist soil or invertebrates or something like that, but we didn’t actively manage to produce food. It was just a place to go and find respite from getting shot at. And one day, our biologist walked in. I was the only duck hunter on staff, believe it or not and no one, I was a duck hunter, walked in and said, hey, you might be interested in this. Ducks Unlimited has got, like, some GPS units on three hen mounters that just landed. That cohort just landed on Dahomey Refuge. I said, wow. And within that cohort, you got to assume there were some banded birds also. And at the time, back in the late 90s, early thousands, I would have just guessed that they would maybe leave over and come into an agricultural field nearby or one of our hunting areas nearby. I mean, heck, they’re sitting right here. They don’t have to fly up at a mile to get something to eat, right? Every one of those birds, the band recoveries out of those cohorts would leave that refuge, fly 11 miles east to the Mississippi River, cross the river, go onto the White River and fly about 35 miles to Stuttgart. They were flying 40 miles to feed in rice. And that’s where a lot of those birds were recovered. Their band recoveries came from. That changed everything about how the scope of how these sanctuaries may affect a given area. It changed everything I ever thought about a wild duck. Then I realized, holy cow, these guys do have wings. And 40 miles for a duck really ain’t that far.

Heath Hagy: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And a lot of the examples I’m giving are from studies with mallards and that’s not because they’re my favorite duck. Look, I like shovelers, don’t kill anybody, but I’m a big fan of shovelers.

Ramsey Russell: I’m their champion. They call them Ramzillas in certain circles for a reason.

Heath Hagy: That’s right. The other greenhead. That’s right. But what I’m giving you is a lot of science behind mallard movements and there’s a reason for that. It’s that they’re a big duck. They’re the workhorse of the research world because they’re really robustic, carry a transmitter. Well, they’re big ducks. They can carry a big transmitter with a solar panel. And so, we know more about mallards than we do almost anything else, just because they handle the research better than just any other duck. So, we’ve had more success and a longer history of working on those that will change as we get smaller and smaller technology. But right now, they’re still our workhorse. But we’ve got some information. Pintails and there’s information on pintails. They’re doing exactly what you’re talking about. In southwest Louisiana, flying from Sabine, Lacassine Refuges, they’re making 30, 40 miles flights every day. They do very different things. So, all of these species are doing different things. I’m sure green-winged teal do very different things than a mallard. But at the end of the day, they’re all going to use these spatial sanctuaries and then all do these movements around. And so, there’s no doubt that sanctuary can influence the distribution of birds, at least in some semi local area, some 50 miles radius kind of area, in certain portions of the wintering and migration area.

Hunting Pressure Woes

We need more access and what it’s really boiling down to and we all know it.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of controversy surrounding this because you talk to an average public land hunter and trust you me, I hunt public land throughout the year, but there’s too many duck hunters. There’s too much pressure. We need more access and what it’s really boiling down to and we all know it. Everybody listens, nodding their head right now. They know this to be true. According to US Fish & Wildlife Service data, we’re losing hunters. Going to any given WMA on Saturday morning and it doesn’t look like that. It’s a three ring service. But what’s really happening is what’s really, truly happening is we’ve got less hunters becoming far more highly concentrated on a vastly shrinking landscape. To me, long term benefit for my kids, my grandkids, for me when I’m older. And still wanting to shoot ducks, because we need those ducks around those inviolate sanctuaries, especially on state and doubly, especially behind the blue goose sign on Fish & Wildlife, they represent safe havens forever. You see what I’m saying? I mean, that is a place that’s not going to be converted into a shopping center or going to be converted into a subdivision or going to be going to be dissed under, implanted into roundup ready anything. It’s going to be there for those ducks. So, it’s important to me that to understand the value of those relative to my personal quest to shoot ducks. To your point about mallard ducks, being so heavily researched, man, they are the rock stars. They are the iconic duck species. Are they my favorite species? Yeah maybe, certainly. But they’re not just the rock stars of the US. They are the absolute diamond in the whole northern hemisphere that they exist, which is nearly everywhere. I mean, that is the duck, man. It’s a very important species. Last real question I’ve got about sanctuaries and it occurred to me, is a lot down south. Well, let’s put this way. The Duck Season starts in Canada in September. It ends in January down the deep south. It opens in November, and deep south, where I’m from and closed in January. But even in that little brief window, I’m hunting waterfowl and that’s 60 days in very different parts of its life cycle, which affects how it comes in, how it works. It affects its particular needs and wants and desires. A mallard, let’s stick with him. A mallard on Thanksgiving Day versus a mallard on January 15 is a totally different critter. It seems to me, to summarize it like a lot of your new birds, they’re wanting to mix it up. They’re wanting to gather up in big flocks and it’s kind of like college kids going to the bar, mixing it up with their buddies, man, male and female both. But by the time we get to know January, he and she have kind of hit it off and they don’t want to go hang out with a bunch of people. They want to go sit on the couch by themselves and watch HBO. They’re over it, man. They don’t want to fly in and land with 120 decoys. They’re in a totally different frame of mind, which makes hunting them very different. And towards the end, to me, it makes it very frustrating and I’ve seen that worldwide. I’ve seen it over in Netherlands, when the geese begin to pair up or they’re starting to nest, the breeding birds, they’re done with coming into big groups of birds. I’ve seen it worldwide. It’s a totally different life cycle. But do you see an importance in how sanctuaries, how waterfowl in that time frame, utilize sanctuary or the importance in sanctuary in the beginning going to the bar, versus in the end, sitting on the couch together?

Heath Hagy: Absolutely. It’s probably important the whole period of the winter, spring, fall migration. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that I don’t want to conflate things, but often times we’re talking about sanctuary that’s designated in managed sanctuary, often on state and federal lands. So, we’ve got water control. Typically, those are typically pumped earlier than the average area. I’m not talking about all but the average piece of private land because there’s still crops there or they’re still working on harvest or they’re going to wait on rainfall or just a variety of different things. And so often times early in the winter, especially down south, until it starts raining and that’s often in December and January, at least in the May maybe here, where I am, the habitat can be a bit limited and sanctuaries are sometimes the first and the only places to have or some of the only places to have water. And so probably super important during that time period that you not only have the sanctuary, but you’ve got the managed sanctuary, you’ve got the managed wetlands. And so, I would say that’s important also during the hunting season. Of course, that’s the main thing behind sanctuary ride, is that it’s a place to go where there’s no waterfowl hunting. There’s limited disturbance. And so that’s going to be the biggest during the waterfowl hunting season, whenever that is, wherever those birds are in the flyway. It’s certainly important late in winter, but recent research has told us that the food is pretty much gone for most sanctuaries by middle of January, end of January, early February, even on places where we’ve got a lot of foods, because those birds are sitting there, they can feed during the day and they’re going to make those forging flights to private lands, often times at night or mallards will anyway. But that food is kind of gone from sanctuaries. And so those birds, after hunting season in early February and beyond, they’re going to begin to move out to private lands. And so, our sanctuaries probably have less of an importance at that time period. But I say that they’re still going to be managed areas. And what are we doing on private lands? Well, in a good year, where it’s dry, we’re going to begin draining wetlands right after duck season and water is going to begin leaving the landscape. And so, it’s not that they go to zero importance. You still have a lot of bird use, even when that food is sort of depleted there at the end of winter, because you’ve got constant changes in water and food and other things. And as you pointed out, sanctuaries are there, they’re dependable and that’s recognized by ducks. It was here last month. It’s here this month. It’s going to be here next month for me. And so, they’re going to use that area and that’s going to kind of be an anchor in a general geographic area for those birds to depend on. They learn that and it’s important to them. I would say that sanctuaries are important throughout that whole winter cycle and throughout that fall migration period. But probably especially when habitat is limited early in the hunting seasons, when we don’t have a lot of water on the landscape, that’s probably when it’s most important.

Ramsey Russell: Heath, I sure appreciate you, as always. I want to thank you for coming on tonight to share this as a duck hunter. Boy, I got my blinders on during Duck Season.

Heath Hagy: Me, too.

Ramsey Russell: I want to shoot duck. But I find a lot of comfort to know that people like yourself and a lot of other state and federal biologists are really putting a lot of best science into managing these birds we’re all so crazy about. It’s a very complex. We’re managing a continental species, going through a lot of life cycles with an enormous, unprecedented amount of hunting pressure on him. And it’s a very complex puzzle. And I’m always relieved to hear people like yourself come on and explain how this best science is being applied to the benefit of hunters and to the wildlife itself.

Heath Hagy: I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, Ramsey. Yeah, that’s a key component, key principle, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, that we use the best science to guide our professional judgment and do all that we can for the resource. So, it’s a pleasure to come and chat with you this evening and hope we keep doing great things for the ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere, we’ll see you next time.