EP 433. Waterfowl Eyesight: Seeing Things for What They Really Are

 

How Well Can Ducks See?

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where I’ve got a question for you. How important is the camo you wear? And how important is the high detail plastic decoys you’re putting out there to realism? How important is how you hunt and the environment you’re hunting in and matching up with it and turning invisible like the invisible man? What about the vocalizations and what about you guys that smoke cigarettes? Does that affect your duck hunting? Joining me today answer these questions, probably a whole lot more is Dr. Bradley Cohen. Bradley, how the heck are you, man?

Bradley Cohen: Doing good. How about you, man?

Ramsey Russell: Man, I’m doing good. You look, I’m going to fly into this question. Go ahead, you’re going to say something?

Bradley Cohen: No, I don’t. Rock and roll, let’s go.

Ramsey Russell: All right. I’m going to start off like this. What have you been busy doing besides classroom work?

Bradley Cohen: I’ve been spending too much time in the office and actually you’re calling me. I just got done working with my PhD student, Cory Highway, brushing a couple blinds, getting ready for the second opener here in Tennessee. We hunted this weekend, ducks were pretty still after about 30 minutes after sunlight so it didn’t quite settle me down. So I’m amped up getting ready for next Tuesday when it opens up.

Ramsey Russell: It’s been a mild duck season. I mean, we had a great fall, early fall up in Canada and up in the northern tier and we did get some winter weather, but it was a slow opener, I think, throughout most of the deep south. I heard Texas had some good hunting, but everybody I’ve talked to in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, we were glad to be there. We were going through the motion. Some of us shot more ducks than others, but it wasn’t one to write home about. But I think maybe those ducks are still up north.

Bradley Cohen: No. Yeah, well, our GPS marked ducks are certainly still hanging up north they just haven’t had that cold weather to push them down they’re either hung up well above Missouri or we got a couple that are still hanging out in the Dakotas they need a nice, we need a nice cold couple nights to get them down here, but I’m hoping there’s a couple fronts pushing through and I’m hoping that’ll do it.

Ramsey Russell: We’re just run one front away. I’m actually leaving this weekend and going to hunt. I’m going to hunt this weekend, I should say up in Illinois where for divers, for canvasbacks, redheads, blue bills, probably some other stuff, but it would describe to me a 3 mile long raft of divers on the upper Mississippi right now.

Bradley Cohen: You’re bringing me, right? You’re talking to me so you can invite me.

Ramsey Russell: I’m driving right through there, come on. I’ll be passing through doing 70 miles an hour, but I’ll be happy to stop and get you. I love to hunt mallard ducks. I mean, let’s face it, man, mallards are the rock stars. Who doesn’t like to shoot a mallard? But, man, there’s so much to be said about shooting divers and it’s so, to me, it’s a real treat to get to go diver duck hunt with real hardcore diver hunters. These old boys put out, they float massive rigs of hand carved decoys all season long and they live and die by diver duck. Mallard comes in, they’ll shoot him, but he’s likely not to. They’re out there for the divers. And that’s –

Bradley Cohen: Well, you know how it is that if you get on the, it’s just like any other type of hunting. But I feel like with diver duck hunting, when you lay it out and you’re on the spot, they just make you feel good about yourself. They make you feel like you know how to hunt because they, when they’re coming, you know what it is. When they’re coming, they’re coming.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: They’re not passing overhead any times before you convince them they’re coming, they’re doing one pass and they’re doing it right. And so I always enjoy diver hunting. Like, when I feel bad about myself, I want to get it out there and kill a couple blue bills.

Ramsey Russell: Same here. Now, look, Bradley, you posted up something the other day on you all’s Instagram page that started a monumental conversation around my dinner table. And it was about duck eyesight and deer eyesight versus human eyesight. And I’ll be honest with you, even I was surprised. How well can a duck see?

Bradley Cohen: All right, so I’m going to get into science here and it’s going to be a little longer. So you just cut me off and go give me a breather. Give me a second. But let me explain a couple things. First thing I got to put out here is there is nothing, no other animal that perceives its world similar to the way humans do. We’re incredibly unique, both in our eyesight, our hearing, our smell, but especially our eyesight. We are very unique. We’re an apex predator and we see the world completely differently than almost any other animal. All right, so having said that, let me lay down a couple foundation things. What makes eyesight? Well, there’s a couple things. One is we’ll call visual acuity. That’s when you and I go to the eye doctor and they say, okay, you got 20/20 vision. You got – you need contacts, whatever it is, that’s how clear you see the world. How blurry is it versus how clear, does that make sense?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Camouflage Design and Color Vision

Ducks have at least 4 and some bird and even, like, shrimp species have 5. That means they see, like, 100 million shades of color, so they don’t even see the same color.

Bradley Cohen: All right, the next thing is, how many colors do you see? You and I, we have cone cells in our retina and that basically lets us see different colors. And we have a red, we have a green, we have a blue one with 3 different types of cones and that’s what we see. We see about a million different colors, different shades, at least. Now, you ready for this? Ducks have at least 4 and some bird and even, like, shrimp species have 5. That means they see, like, 100 million shades of color, so they don’t even see the same color. Now, on the other hand, deer only have 2 cones and they see the world like someone that’s red green color blind. All right, but we’ll focus on ducks here. So they see colors that we don’t see. This is important to understand. Like, they see ultraviolet colors, they see deep blues. We don’t see them because blues, you want it – Blues are very bad for the eye. And if you’re a long lived animal, like we are, we don’t want those blues hitting our retina. So we actually have pigments in our eye that filter out blue. Like, we don’t want to see blue. We don’t want that touching our eye. Now, a short lived animal, like a mallard, they’re like, give it to me. And so they can see blues infinitely better. And when I say blues, I also mean, like, on camo companies or camouflage, people use a lot of blues because we can’t see them well to make gray. So, like, what seems gray to us on, like, a piece of clothing is actually pretty blue. That’s just a side note. All right, so that’s color vision. Let’s think, oh, 3rd one, field division, so how far in front of you or to your sides can you see? You and I, we have binocular vision. Our 2 eyes overlap in their eyesight and we’re really good at depth perception.

Ramsey Russell: Because we’re predators.

Bradley Cohen: Yeah, because we’re predators. So we see about 100 yards away. We identify the object, we’re good. Most animals, no, they have very little binocular vision. They have what’s called monocular vision. Their eyes are, especially if you’re a prey animal, your eyes are set to the side of your head. Think about, like, a woodcock or something like that. Literally, you can see almost 3600. But because your eyes don’t overlap, terrible depth perception. You ever got into a tree stand when you’re hunting deer and all of a sudden, those deer start looking at you sideways, back and forth, back and forth. Yeah, that’s because what they’re trying to do is actually because they don’t have really good binocular vision. They’re trying to use that movement in their eyes to set depth for themselves. So they have terrible depth perception, ducks for what it’s worth pretty terrible depth perception. They have about 150 in front of them that they have binocular vision. So what’s straight in front of their face, they can see pretty good with depth. But anything on the side, not good depth perception. We good with that so far?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I am. I’m good with it.

Bradley Cohen: Am I going too heavy, too fast?

Ramsey Russell: No. Not at all.

Bradley Cohen: All right, there, the last one. Last one is motion detection, all right. This is called a flicker fusion rate and what it is, is how many times a second your brain refreshes the still image that it’s getting from your eyes. So let me explain this. We’re no different, our brain works no different than like a television. The vision comes into your brain and your brain refreshes that image. And for people, it’s about 60 times a second and we basically perceive that as a moving, continuous stream of movement. Does that make sense?

Ramsey Russell: Yes.

Bradley Cohen: But most animals have a much higher flicker fusion rate. So back in the day, I remember my dog didn’t like to watch television. That’s because TVs back in the day came in at a flicker fusion rate of about 60 times per second, which looks like a continuous stream for you and me. But a dog has about 90 of, flicker freezing rate of 90. So it seemed like still pictures to them. Okay, ducks, deer, even higher. That only matters because that is how we detect movement and so animals with higher flicker fusion rates, they can detect and react. This is the key, react to movement much quicker than something without a high flicker fusion rate. So you and I are very slow to react to something versus, I don’t know, a duck that when we jump up to go shoot, it somehow managed to cover 10 yards, backtracking when we’re up and ready. You see where I’m going with that?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: They can detect. So they can detect movement better and then they can react quicker. This is critical. All right, so those are all the aspects of vision so far.

Ramsey Russell: We’ll say there’s, on the one hand, we predators see better because of our binocular vision. On the other hand, animals have something as a prey base that helps them respond quicker. But a lot of what you’re saying goes against conventional wisdom, Brad. It’s like he’s watching him like a hawk or eagle eye.

Bradley Cohen: No, no, don’t get me wrong. Listen, hawks actually have good vision, but think of it more as a predator versus prey. Well, we hunter prey species. If you’re a predator, you want to identify that object from far away and then figure out what that object is and how far it is so you can grab it. Now, if I’m a prey, I don’t care that you’re 100 yards away if you can’t grab me. Like, I just need to identify you optimally when you’re trying to grab me. So what they’re going to do is they’re going to be more set to detect movement. Does this make sense?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: Now, listen, here’s the thing. There’s a trade off. Your brain can only do so much and this is what I think people have a hard time understanding when we’re making posts that say, like, ducks have poor visual acuity. They have basically, they have the equivalent of, like, 21/40 vision, 20/200, somewhere in that range. And so, like, they’re technically legally blind if you, if it was a person, honestly. All right, but hold on now, but when things are very close to them, you know how you’re nearsighted versus farsighted?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Improving Hunter Reaction Rates

Your brain can only handle so much vision, visual information coming through, all right? It’s just like a wire. Like, how much can we pump in? 

Bradley Cohen: All right. They can’t see stuff at a far distance and very good clarity, like you and I can. We’re unmatched people, humans have unmatched visual clarity at far distances, but they see things really close to them really well. All right, so there’s a trade off, though. Your brain can only handle so much vision, visual information coming through, all right? It’s just like a wire. Like, how much can we pump in? Well, the wire can only handle so much and so there’s a trade off that we know. You either can see with clearer detail or you can have a higher refresh rate on that flicker fusion rate so you can see quicker. Time slows down, I swear to God, it actually slows down. You ever wonder how a bird can catch a mosquito in midair? Like, they perceive time slower, like, things move slower. So you can either see things clarity or you can have a quicker reaction rate. If you’re a prey species, what do you want? You want to react faster.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it makes sense about that flicker fusion rate you’re talking about, because I understand predator and prey, the differences we’re talking about there. But my world is coming at me, if I’m walking down the street at about 2 miles an hour, if I’m jogging at about 4 or 5 miles an hour, a duck is coming at him at about 40 to 50 miles an hour, like a fighter pilot. He’s got to be able to respond.

Bradley Cohen: Right.

Ramsey Russell: And that makes perfect sense to me.

Bradley Cohen: Well, think about it also, they got to be able to respond when they’re weaving through timber. They need that time to go a little slower. They need, they don’t need to see the details of the bark of the tree, that doesn’t mean anything to them. They just need to know it’s a branch and I need to move out of the way. You see where I’m going. So, like, this whole idea and it’s very, it’s so hard to under, to, like, appreciate because we want to make everything seem similar to us. We want to be like, those ducks flared because they saw the scratch in the decoy. They didn’t. They flared because you moved, because they are set up to identify movement, not small details, in their everyday life, it just doesn’t make sense.

Ramsey Russell: How well can waterfowl see details? And I’m building up to some more questions along these details line, but how well can they see? When you talk about at a distance, my mojo versus static decoys versus me sitting in a blind or my uncovered face? What can they see at a distance? And then at what range are they before they’re close enough that their world becomes hyper visual?

Bradley Cohen: So their world becomes very clear at a couple yards.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, 2 or 3 yards.

Bradley Cohen: Yeah. So, like they have those intricate feather patterns because they’re pair bonding. They’re mating and that’s an up close personal experience. You know what I’m saying? So, like, they can see very clear then, but if they’re 30, 40, 60 yards away, everything is a silhouette. Everything’s kind of blurry, it’s kind of like you take off your glasses, maybe have a 4, I don’t know, like a 2 point something on my prescription, if you’re a 4 point something, you’re kind of getting closer to what a duck sees. They see about, I don’t know, sometimes somewhere around 50 times worse than us. Seriously –

Ramsey Russell: I had a friend one time describe getting glasses when he was, I don’t know, 8 or 9 years old. And to drive home, he could see the leaves on the trees and for his whole life, he described it. He said, just as I was driving down the road, maybe you saw the leaves on the tree or the detail on a bird, he said, but mine looked like a crayon coloring. You know what I’m saying? I said, I was just driving down the road and I saw it looked just like we drew in kindergarten, just these green blobs and that was the tree. And once he got those glasses, he could really see the detail.

Ducks Creating Silhouettes

They seeing the world pretty blurry. 

Bradley Cohen: That’s the way to think about it. Like, you and I, we see our blinds. Like I just got done grass and a blind, right? So we’re throwing out, we’re putting all these trees on and all right, like, you and I can see the individual leaves of that cut oak, that duck, that’s all just kind of a, when he’s 60, 70 or 100 yards away, that’s just a blur of color. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t some, maybe some finer details that it could pick up, but in general, no. And when it’s looking down into your blind, that’s just a blur of color with discernible shapes. Now, this is the key, they want, ecologically, as a biologist I’m thinking like, well, why would they want that? They want to blur as many shapes, small details together so that they can get a silhouette like your face. See where I’m going? And they don’t care if that face is sitting still because it blends in with everything else. But the second it moves, that silhouette changed. Does that make sense?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: So the details, no, they’re not. They seeing the world pretty blurry. Nothing season as much clarity. Nothing, even other than hawks and eagles, we have yet to and we’ve tested not we, the broader scientific community has tested 100s of different wildlife species than domestic species. Only hawks are close or better to our vision as far as clarity, most are 20 to 100 times worse.

Ramsey Russell: 20 to 100 times worse. Its –

Bradley Cohen: By the way, that’s a weird number to throw out there. Let me put it as, like, more about most of the world in, like, 20 to 21, 20 to 2200. You know what I’m saying, like, they see everything’s blurry. That’s the key, that’s how blurry. I don’t know. Who cares, right? The key is that it’s pretty dang blurry.

Ramsey Russell: That just flies, in the face of all conventional duck hunting wisdom, where open up any hunting catalog today. And not only do they have a camo pattern, hyper realistic to match my surroundings. Hyper realistic decoys, they got hyper realistic camo boxer shorts and socks, you know what I am saying. You think these ducks have x ray vision where they can see what kind of shorts I’m wearing, now, Bradley?

Bradley Cohen: Now, I’m not saying, I know all this and I’m not saying I’m not running like Avian X with micro detail decoys right now. I’m not saying, I have them, but I also know that I grew up on Long Island doing diver hunts and seed up hunts and whatever else. And all the old timers use 2 and a half liter bottles or 2 liter bottles or 5 gallon drums or whatever. They’re tarred black. That’s fine.

Ramsey Russell: Been there, done that.

Bradley Cohen: And I think and here’s the truth, I think as people, we want to and as hunters, we have to seek to understand why they didn’t decoy or why that turkey flared right at the end or why he got hung up. Whatever it is, we have to try and put explanations to it and we think like people, we never think like the animal. And probably it’s over complicating the situation, if you know what I’m saying.

Ramsey Russell: It reminds me of a book I read one time about fly tying. And you see a certain insect and we want to mimic that exact insect, have the number of wings, the number of legs, the number of eyes, the shape, the exact pattern. But this particular fly tyer described his pattern as being laying a mayfly, for example, on top of an aquarium and then floating on the water and then him looking at it from the bottom of the aquarium and then trying to mimic what he saw from a foot away through water. Because he said, that’s what the fish are seeing, not the hyper detail.

Bradley Cohen: I love that.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s really a very good analogy, isn’t it?

Bradley Cohen: It really is. I mean, I love fly fishing, I tie all my own flies. And there was a set. I saw all these hyper realistic flies back about a decade ago that were coming out and time and time again, there’s a reason that Elk Hair Caddis, Parachute Adams, the most basic flies, pheasant tail nymph, there’s nothing crazy about them. And it’s because they don’t need to be all that crazy. And I think we could learn a lot in that situation and apply it to what trout fishermen have already found out.

Ramsey Russell: As someone that travels coast to coast, north to south, worldwide. And I don’t want to clot it full of different patterns. There’s a camo pattern to match every habitat, terrain on earth. But I have been more of a fundamental guy, like my granddad. Just think about this, our granddad’s era, they wore basic OD green, World War II hunting coats. And after Vietnam stuff, it kind of went to the woodland camo patterns, you know what I’m saying? And generations of duck killers and deer hunters wore just these basic. Heck, I can remember my grandfather hunting in a pair of gray one suit jumper. I mean, just gray. Just like Dicky’s gray that he’d go and change all in his garage with. And so it wasn’t, he didn’t have, the man didn’t own no camo, except maybe old school marsh camo like you see making old. And so growing up in that, I’ve always felt like maybe duck hunting was a little more fundamental than some people would have us to believe. Blend in. Be still don’t move and shoot straight and don’t call when you’re not supposed to. Just real simple, fundamental. I mean, I just, I have a hard time imagining that a wild mallard duck today has evolved to have PhD, rocket surgeon, brain power, unlike a mallard 30 or 40, 50 years ago. They’re mallard, mallard as a duck, they’re just responding to the environment.

Bradley Cohen: Right. I mean, nowadays, I’m looking – Listen, I’m looking right now at a pair, all these digital camo patterns, for the most part. I mean, don’t get me wrong. The quality of the actual clothing is great.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Bradley Cohen: But the patterns themselves are probably too finessed on the details to matter. So you talked about people hunting in a one piece jumper that was all the same color. I’m not so sure that and I’m not so sure that ducks aren’t seeing us in a one piece jumper nowadays, too, with a lot of these digital cameras like that 80 yards away, 100 yards away and we probably look like the same. You see where I’m going with that?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, you put some shadows on anything and it blends. You reminded me of a many years ago, back in the chatroom days. There was a, if you remember the threads back in chat rooms and we all just kind of went in and checked it out and would get involved with a thread. There was a, it was more of a bow hunting situation. It was like a man standing in a tree, backlit by sky, black and white and it was 10 photos. Vote for the one that blended in best and all the popular camo patterns of the day were represented. But the one that everybody voted for is having blend in the best. They then presented it in color. And you know what that guy was wearing? He was wearing a blue and white and red tropical Hawaiian beach shirt, but in black and white, it, by God, blended in better than any other camo out there.

Best Clothing for Hunting and What NOT to Wear

That’s why it’s dark to us, but light to them. And so don’t get any of those grays, they’re saturated in blues, you’ll just be brighter.

Bradley Cohen: All right, so here’s the thing. There’s a lot to be learned from that. Never wear blue when you’re hunting any animal, that’s the key here. I will say that they all see blue very well, but and it also matters, by the way, try to stay away from grays, for the side note of, you’re not going to glow blue to an animal, but you will be brighter against an otherwise dark object, because sunrise and sunset, it’s all blue light. And that’s the reason they see blue so well like ducks, deer see blue really well because they’re moving most of sunrise and sunsets all blue. That’s why it’s dark to us, but light to them. And so don’t get any of those grays, they’re saturated in blues, you’ll just be brighter. You won’t be blue to a duck, but you’ll just stand out a little more. But, yeah, man. I mean, in the end of all things, we are probably overthinking.

Ramsey Russell: Talk a little bit about, we alluded to first how we predators have eyes in the front of our heads with binocular vision. Waterfowl more prominently on the sides of their heads. And I’ve always understood that looking head on at me, a duck cannot see as well, like me. And I’m sitting here thinking to myself of turkey hunting one day and 3 young, 2 year old gobblers walked up on me and they were literally sitting in my lap where they realized there was something that looked different. But they weren’t looking at me head on. They were all cocking their eyes and looking at me with their left or right eye. So talk about how far around them, like, I’m guessing I can probably see it about a, I don’t know, I can see about 200 either side of straight ahead, my peripheral vision. But how far can duck see? And where’s his blind spot?

Bradley Cohen: We say people can see about, give or take 1200 now on the edges. Now, there’s a lot to this, it’s another reason that our vision is so different. We have what’s called the fovea centralis. That’s where all of our photo pigments are, like, in our eye. And so we see really clear straight on, straight in front. So even though we have 1200 field of vision, we actually only see really well straight ahead of us. And then on the sides of our vision, that’s blurry, you’d probably know I’m talking about. But for ducks and deer, turkeys, whatever, they have much greater field of vision. Now, duck has about 3600 field of vision. They can almost see truly behind them, but here’s the thing. They have terrible binocular vision. Like only 150. What’s straight in front of their face is binocular. So that’s that perception for when they’re flying and moving around. But otherwise, on their edges, it doesn’t matter. All they care about is that, again, if you’re 150 yards out and you’re sitting walking through the water, they just want to know that that movement’s happening. So you fly off. Now, here’s the thing. Ducks, when they fly, cock their head down. All right, all ducks do it. They cock their head down. And so that means that –

Ramsey Russell: Well, you see, when they’re flying over ducks and geese, you see when they’re flying over, they kind of got their head left or right looking down at the decoy.

Bradley Cohen: Yeah. Right. It’s mostly –

Ramsey Russell: We breaking up now. Hang on, this is important. Get back in signal range.

How Movement Affects Waterfowl Hunting

So until you see that, that tail, you don’t move.

Bradley Cohen: So they’re back of their head is theoretically seeing or their eyesight is seeing the sky. So they’re seeing both land and sky at the same time. But when they’re to the side of you, they can see you. So, like, when they’re working your decoys and skirting to the over the top of you, they can see you. And the general rule is that a duck can see you move based on what we understand about their field of view, they can see you move until their butt is facing you. So until you see that, that tail, you don’t move.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Bradley Cohen: Now, I’m not saying that, don’t get me wrong. Their ability to pick up on movement gets worse the further towards the tail you are. So the more they’re curving away from you, the worse they’re going to be at picking it up. But the only time you’re truly like, quote unquote undetectable is when they’re really kind of flying away from you.

Ramsey Russell: All right, next question. Movement is critical. We all know when the ducks are working and kind of doing their thing and getting sorted over the decoys and all of a sudden pick up, like a shot was fired and vacate to the next county. We all know somebody moved, somebody jumped up, somebody reached for their gun, something happened. But what about, I’ve never been one, I don’t grow whiskers on half my face. So I don’t wear whiskers. I just ain’t one to have a poo face, but I ain’t knocking nobody that paints your face. I’m just, that’s not me. But how important is that in the grand detail? I know my white face sticks out compared to that, those dark earth tones, that’s a blob. But how, if I’m being still, so does a beam of light hitting a tree branch. How important is that if I’m still? What do you think?

Bradley Cohen: If you’re truly still, so here’s the thing. When I put that post up about like, ducks don’t see as well as we think, one of my friends was like, please talk about face paint. All right, so let me – If you can truly sit still, put your cap down, sit down, don’t look up at those ducks unless you’re the guy working them. There’s no reason for you to have and they can’t see the glare of your face or anything like that, but what they can is that is a bright. Our face is bright against an otherwise pretty dark background. That makes sense?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: So as long as you can stay still, you don’t have to worry about it. But you better believe they’ll pick up on that movement if you move that bright face one way or the other. So dulling it a little bit isn’t bad if you plan on staring up at the sky at them, because they’re going to see a bright object against an otherwise dark situation.

Ramsey Russell: Having children in a duck blind and I think a lot of us listening, as compared to granddad’s age, we take our children at increasingly younger ages. And to me, it’s always been important that they witnessed the spectacle of the ducks moving and flying and the colors and all that good stuff. So when my kids were babies, I put a mask on. I knew they were going to move. They were going to look up. They were going to track a ducks left to right with their face. So I put a mask on them, but I’ve never been one to really wear a mask. I don’t like to call through it. I don’t like to breathe in it. I try to be still. I try to look at the water. If we’re hunting those kind of conditions where I can see the ducks coming in just through the reflections and I can hear their wings beating or I just look at them under the brim of my cap and I just try to like, so still, I’m almost holding my breath, you know what I’m saying? That’s when you’re in the zone. And I felt like within 40 yards, I got them. If I can just get them in 40 yards before they see that scratch decoy, shoot, I can’t see the scratch decoy before they can, they’re probably going to be cartwheeling over the decoys and splashing on the water very quickly. But I think, being still, I just don’t think we can emphasize the fundamental of be still. Be motionless.

Bradley Cohen: Yeah, I mean, in the end of all things, like, I know somebody’s going to listen to this and be like, yeah, they all got that, all these ducks can see the white of my eyes because I’ve watched them flare off of me without moving. Everybody’s going to everyone’s got that story. But the truth, here’s the real truth. If you, I mean, I’ve sat at a million refuges now, doing all these duck trappings and burying a person in sight. And the number of times ducks flare off of you, off each other, is crazy, ducks work a bunch of different groups they’re just ducks. They’re animals with pretty intelligent, but they still got a pea sized brain. You see where I’m going with this? So I think we want to overthink why they flared or like give a justification for every time we didn’t kill them. And really, the only things we can control are making sure we don’t have a really strong silhouette, making sure that when they’re within reasonable distance of us, if they’re coming, we’re not moving, those are the things we can control. That’s what the science tells us. Everything else is just justifications that we’re making up in our head to understand the stuff that necessarily can’t be explained. Just animals being animals.

Ramsey Russell: Animal trying to live to see another day. You talk about the colors and we mentioned the old timers using black decoys and there’s even a contemporary decoy manufacturer that makes, and I hunt over them and I love them or they make a black and white Canada goose silhouette. It’s just, it’s a black, fully flocked sort of light and it’s got the white cheek and the white rump and man, to my 20/20 or 20/30 vision, I can see them. If I go to pick up a duck or I’m walking in from the truck, I can see them a mile off and but the more conventional, realistic Canada goose decoys seem to blend in that I have a hard time picking them up. So I’ve always felt like a black decoy really works good. And it’s like my reasoning and I know what duck don’t think about this. But just imagine this, if I’ve got decoys on the water and they’re black or they’re white or they’re mallard colored, whatever if you start circling around that decoy in your boat that spread 30, 40 yards, you’ve got so much reflection on that water that only for a limited range. When that sun is directly over your back, flat, shining on those decoys from behind you, do I begin to perceive the colors. The rest of the time, what I’m seeing is mostly dark shadows on the water. And that’s always made perfect sense to me of, I hear people say, well, I put white decoys out because they’re brighter and they can see them further. Well, my way of thinking, I think white on the water blends in a lot more than black. I think black stands out, what do you think about that idea?

Bradley Cohen: All right, first of all, by the way, you’re echoing a little bit, so if you’re on speaker, just letting you know. But yeah, all right, here’s the deal. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. If you saw my spread, if you saw my decoy spread, most people wouldn’t hunt with me. I’ll put it that way, because it looks. It’s like that ain’t what we’re going for and that don’t look like a duck. And that does – No. Darkness I think, is, I think black silhouette is the key.

Ramsey Russell: I think it is. It’s just giving that duck something familiar to look at. I think the shape what we hunted up in, hunted one time, one of the most unique hunts I ever did was on the Great Salt Lake proper inches deep water. And I’m talking miles and miles of spans of just inches deep water, nowhere to hide, not a blade of cover and what they do and this was invented after they learned to access those areas with air boats then became the problem. How the heck do I hide? And they noticed, and I noticed, too, when we’re riding out through those flocks of birds, whether it’s shorebirds or waterfowl, they get out there and they stand for acres and all you see are black. You see black silhouettes. And so somebody back in the day came up with this great idea of coming up with thousands of black silhouettes, putting them on tall poles, making a big black spread and then sitting down in a little waterproof tub in between them. And it’s unbelievable. The ducks come right in, green winged hills, shovelers, golden eyes. They’re coming in just feet away and they don’t know anything in this world until somebody sits up in his blind and start shooting. They’re completely clueless and they’re coming right into it. This big black spot.

Bradley Cohen: I think there’s a lot to it, you mentioned before about, like what a duck see when they see a mojo or something like that? I think mojos can be super effective at times because they fundamentally go back to what ducks care about, which is that motion thing. If we think about what is their brain being used for? Where are they naturally attracted to finding its motion? Whether that motion is from a predator or motion is probably from a duck. And so it’s why all these different motion decoys in the end of all things or ripples on our decoys that are moving them, I don’t think it’s like, oh, all of a sudden they’re like, well, that’s a more realistic duck, I’m going to land there. I think it’s you’re holding their attention because motion is what they’re key to appreciate. Does that make sense?

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah, it does and I’m –

Bradley Cohen: Still the same results. Doesn’t really matter why, but I do think that we want these things to look like ducks, feel like ducks, smell like ducks, all these other things. And ducks are just like. Yeah, I just want to key in on what I key in on.

Ramsey Russell: When I think about mojos and spinning wing decoys, again I go way back to the dinosaur days of chat rooms. And when spinning wing decoys hit the market for the first time, UC, Davis did some research on harvest. Some other folks, Washington and Oregon banned them to this day. Now, you can use a pull string spinner, but you can’t use battery operated. I can’t get my mind wrapped around. What’s the difference? Is it the battery or is it the spinning wing? What’s the advantage there? But forget that. Listen, there was a video somebody posted because you better believe that all the chat rumors, all the duck hunters were hitting this thing from all the angles, just like them camo patterns up in the trees and one of the most indelible videos I ever saw was somebody went out right at daylight, excuse me, right at dusk. And it was just nothing but orange sky and shadows and they video very blurry, very not crisp, but they videoed ducks landing in a field. And all you saw was this white and black strobe, you know what I’m saying? And it looked just like a black and white wing on a mojo. It’s like you said, a duck has a brain the size of an English pea, they don’t have this great big old metal like we got with all these different, they’re responding just to environmental cues and instinct and that’s why mojo still work. I know people say, well, they’re wary. I don’t think they are. I think maybe they become habituated after a 1000 times of instinctively trying to decoy and work a decoy. And by the time they’re cupped up coming in, Joe and Jimmy and Sue get shot. But I think they become a little wary. But I don’t think they’re – I think they’re just primitive animals that respond. I mean, they see that black and white wing flash a million times in their lives. And apparently, as you were talking about the way a duck can kind of sort of see the sky and the ground behind him, it’s like I never really thought about the fact that when a flock’s coming in, they’re cognizant not only of what’s in front of them, but what’s beside them and what’s behind them. They know kind of where they are within that flock as they’re moving, coming in.

Bradley Cohen: Yeah, exactly. And that’s, yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s why the jerk string is so dang effective. It ain’t that you’re throwing ripples on every other decoy. It’s like you put motion on this spread. It’s in the end of all things, you’re teeing in on what ducks appreciate most and what whatever their visual go in their brain and then you look at their visual cortex. Get real science here. If you go in and you cut that open, we would probably find that like most of that part is all about motion. That that’s what their brain is wired for, so if we key in on that and if we understand that fundamentally we’re not only better hunters because we know not to make sure we don’t move at the wrong times, but we’re better hunters because we understand in our spread of what they value.

Can Ducks Smell You?

Having said that, they use smell to sample foods.

Ramsey Russell: Change the subject, Bradley. How important is smell in the bird world or especially ducks?

Bradley Cohen: Well, we don’t. That’s a good question. I’ll speculate a little bit on what I understand is, smell is a relatively less important sense for birds. Having said that, they use smell to sample foods. Birds, I don’t know if you know this, but birds don’t have like taste buds. They can’t really taste, but smell plays into like their ability to –

Ramsey Russell: Well, there’s the crap they eat like them leeches and invertebrates and stuff. That’s probably a good thing, they can’t take.

Bradley Cohen: I hear you on that. But if you work your way up into something like vultures or some of the other ones, yeah, they have great sense of smell, like incredible. But in general, it’s probably pretty minor on something like a duck. Now, what they use it for, I don’t know, some things, I don’t know. You’ve gone up to Canada and I mean, so have I. I have hunted it good enough a bit. But when you get in a spot with a lot of ducks, it has a smell, doesn’t it? It smells ducky to me. Like I was out of refuge last night and I talked to my PhD student. I was like, Cory, does this, do you smell it? Do you smell what I’m smelling? Like this smells like ducks. So, like, maybe they use to understand where others have been using, but we don’t really know day in, day out what that sense is and certainly isn’t going to, I do wonder how, if it affects where they sample, where they go. But in general, it’s probably minor compared to division. All birds, predominantly, if you look at where their brain is oriented, it’s all in that visual cortex. They have a really large part of their brain dominated by vision and their eyes are obviously abnormally large to their body type, which shows that they use that more than anything.

Ramsey Russell: I ask about smell because I don’t know how I ran across this one time, but one time I just was curious how or if birds could smell. Woe being to us if a duck or a turkey can smell like a deer. I mean, we’re in a world of hurt or a dog.

Bradley Cohen: Do you imagine having to worry about the wind, too? I mean –

Ramsey Russell: Could you want them downwind of you? But at the same time, if they can smell your cigarettes or smell your coffee, we’re just all in trouble. But I smell the high heavens after 2 weeks on the road, I can tell you that. But I read that, like, for example, these natural gas pipelines will pump a gas that smells like rotten flesh, Marcaine or whatever they call it, they’ll pump it down those lines sometimes and then drive it looking for buzzards. Because buzzards apparently can smell really well, they use it to locate those dead animals. And when they see buzzards, they know there’s a leak in that pipeline. And I just remember one time, gosh, it may have been one of the first trips down to Argentina where baiting is legal. They feed the ducks down there sometimes and that particular outfitter, I’m talking 20 something years ago, that particular outfitter described that one of their most effective techniques was not corn or rice or seed. It was, they would fill up a wine bottle with sorghum molasses and they would throw it off in the water. And they believed that it did something to where the ducks got the smell on them of a sweet seed something smell. And then whenever they flew back to the roost, other ducks would smell and say, hey, he knows where the food is and they would follow him and I’m not sure, that sounds pretty dang far fetched now, but at the same time, how the heck do I know?

Bradley Cohen: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I liked it. I mean, we want to bait ducks, I’ll be on, I always wonder how are, when we’re baiting ducks to trap them, like, how they find that spot. Because we’re not –

Ramsey Russell: How did they find that?

Bradley Cohen: I’m wondering if there is, ducks are always like, if you look at our trail cameras that you watch, I’m like, they’re always sampling. They’re always throwing their head underwater just to, it’s like somebody that’s bored and watching TV you always want to snack near you I always thought about that with ducks, like they’re just bored little animals. But I wonder also, sometimes it doesn’t seem like chance that they just start smashing bait almost instantly. And this is underwater. Like, how’d they know? How they know that, we can’t see that wheat or that corn or that whatever. You cannot see it, the waters muddy. How’d they know? So, yeah, I’ll buy that. They can smell well enough. You sold me. But as far as the science there’s not much done, where the science has done really well on something like smell or any of these type of, like, tactile type things. It’s on birds that are like chickens or turkeys, where we keep them and we got to figure out how to raise them and not stress them out. You see what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: Even like quail. Quail have a lot of, lot of quail being raised. We have good information on that. But weirdly enough, like, even though we do have a mallard duck, that’s sold and raised and peaking duck, that part I don’t think it’s been done.

How Important is Hearing for Duck Behavior?

And so I’ve always kind of wondered and then the other day, somebody was telling me and this going back to the eyesight and the smell and the hearing and a lot of these aspects of waterfowl that we don’t completely understand how it works.

Ramsey Russell: Right. What about hearing? How important is hearing? Because now, this sent me down a rabbit trail, was this right here? To me, a duck is a duck, a goose is a goose, a snow goose is a snow goose. They all kind of sound alike. One time I was hunting, for example, with a man named Redbone, had a heck of a spec call, was a heck of a spec caller himself. And he was calling speckle bellies into an area that they were just, really just trafficking over there. It was not a spec hole and I noticed when he went into his routine, he’d sit there and watch for a minute, watch those specs fly over. And when he started talking to him, it wasn’t just a cookie cutter routine. It was always vaguely different. It was like he started with something else. And I asked him about that and I said and Redbone said, he said, son, those ducks have about 9 or 10 vocalizations. And before I insinuate myself into their conversation, because I can hear them talking to each other, I need to know what they’re talking about before I butt in and the minute that first note would hit their ears, they would turn upside down and start plummeting. And they may not always finish, but by God, they were coming in and whatever he was saying to them was just right. And so I’ve always kind of wondered and then the other day, somebody was telling me and this going back to the eyesight and the smell and the hearing and a lot of these aspects of waterfowl that we don’t completely understand how it works. But, for example, harlequin ducks overwintering the puget sound or overwintering in Prince William or somewhere in Alaska and they fly up those rivers a 1000 miles and nest. And the minute she starts to sit on the eggs, he flies back downriver to where, to hang out with the boys for the summer. Well, months later, she flies down the river and finds him. Now, they all kind of sort of look alike. The harlequin ducks or harlequin duck, they all look alike. The drakes look alike. What is he saying or how does he smell or something, that she can find her mate. Likewise, Canada geese do the same thing. Once they go up and start to nest. The males go off and moat migrate up north. Well, how do they find each other down on the winter grounds among millions of Canada geese, but they find each other because they breed for life. How do they find each other? It’s got to be more than just pure random, just flying through there oh, I think that’s her right over there. It’s got to be.

Bradley Cohen: Yeah, well I wonder how often they really do find each other. Like we know that Canada geese, they can pair for if they keep it the same age in the same flock, but most times they just annually pair. Like, unless it’s a small flock, they’re going to find another guy next year. Like, I don’t know the play by play, but I think something like smell or sound, we think about, penguins who truly do some of them at least breed for life or swans. Swans definitely breed for life. They must be picking up on something that you and I are not, you and I –

Ramsey Russell: You and I have different voices.

Bradley Cohen: What if, let me throw this out at you. What if, because they see, now, keep in mind, I just told you, they see a bunch more colors than we see. What if they do look unique to each other? What if they do and I’m just, I’m throwing it out there. What do I know? But what if because we know, like, a mallard doesn’t look like a mallard to another mallard. They don’t, they look completely different to each other, then we perceive them. I don’t know what they look like. You and I don’t know. We can’t act like we actually even understand what it’s like to have another cone. But what if they do look unique or what if they sound unique? What if they smell unique? But, like, sound is important for ducks. Yeah, we know that they have very well developed senses of hearing, that they’re very sensitive to basal basic sound, like very deep bass sounds. So it’s clear that, yeah, that’s important. But day in, day out, I don’t understand the role plays. If you’re calling way up in the, if you’re rip roaring a mondo 500, 600 yards out of duck, is it hearing you? I think it is.

Ramsey Russell: I think it is. But now, get this to a duck, you know that me and you and all of us duck hunters look alike. We all sound alike and to us, a mallard hen looks like a mallard hen, a mallard duck looks like a mallard duck. One time I was hunting over in Netherlands, where in that particular province, they could hunt with live decoys and the outfitters staked pairs of hen mallards throughout the spread. And as we sat there all night, all morning hunting, it was amazing how I learned a lot about ducks, because if they were a lot like beagle hounds and the fact that if one of them saw something that caught her eye, it could be a plane, it could be a dragonfly, it could be a duck coming in or a goose flying or one time I just threw my cap just to see what they would do, one of those ducks heard it and then they all chimed in like a bunch of beagle hounds starting to pack. But as you listen to them, one of them had 3 notes, one of them had a raspy note, one of them was nasally, one of them was deep pitching. They really kind of sort of, they all sounded like mallards, but they all had their own little unique characteristics. Like the listener right now, he knows that’s Ramsey talking or he knows that’s Bradley talking. I mean, there’s little nuances that we have no idea how these ducks are finding and what they’re using out there against us.

Bradley Cohen: But that’s in the end of all things, isn’t that what we’re trying to or it’s what I’m trying to get across is we got to stop thinking like people when we’re hunting them, when we’re trying to understand them. They don’t perceive their world similar to the way we do. Everything is different. Nothing is similar to us and if we start to understand that, we start to kind of get a grasp of how to become better outdoorsman.

Ramsey Russell: Now I’m going to pull this all into another direction. We’re talking about eyesight, we’re talking about smelling, we’re talking about hearing, we’re talking – an animal’s senses that he uses to self preserve and self persevere. You and I have had some great conversations in the past here on Duck Season Somewhere about hunting pressure. What senses are most used or most offended or most violated on a duck that they feel or perceive hunting pressure. I’m assuming it would be maybe like hearing because of the sounds. Maybe it’s something different.

Bradley Cohen: This is a good question, all right. This is a really good question. I was asked this recently about, like someone was talking about smaller sub gauges for hunting ducks lowering disturbance. How are they actually perceiving it? If you look at, we’ve done a good bit of work on disturbance messing with these ducks, seeing what kind of gets them up and moving or behaviorally messes with them the most, and time and time again, things that are visually related to, that’s a person messes them up the most. So, for example, seeing a person walking, seeing a person entering into their wetland, anything that’s like, they can see that person, that’s the worst. Now, if you’re in a vehicle, if you’re on a boat and they see you, not as bad. It doesn’t upset them as much, but still a disturbance. But having said that, I will say we also have other studies going on where we put out these recording units. They just record ambient sound and then we look at, like, okay, here we hear on these ambient sounds, we hear a mud motor ripping through. Let’s watch what our GPS ducks do. See where I’m going?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: And it’s like a wave. I swear, it’s like a wave. As that sound rips through the area, as 04:00 a.m. hits and all these motors start ripping across, we can literally watch these ducks in a wave rip off. But the legacy effect isn’t nearly as long as if they saw you, like they’re more likely to return the next night. But if they see you, and they don’t want to come back. Does that make sense?

Do Shotguns Warn Waterfowl?

Does something tell him, avoid that area?

Ramsey Russell: It makes perfect sense, which leads me to a question of, I wonder how they perceive shotgun blast, how they associate shotgun noises with hunters and with humans and how far they can hear and perceive it.

Bradley Cohen: It’s a good question and I think there’s some ongoing research that’s trying to address that. We’re certainly interested in all of that –

Ramsey Russell: Like, if a duck is laid over there half mile, he’s wrapping up on a sanctuary a half mile away and I’m over here banging some of the early drifters. Does something tell him, avoid that area?

Bradley Cohen: I think that something like these sounds. I think as long as – it’s just like anything else. All right, I hunted, I deer hunt a place where – all right, this is a WMA, I’m in the middle of nowhere. But for some reason, the one house that is near this WMA likes to play the radio every morning starting at 06:00 AM outside their house, I mean, it’s loud, I’m listening to Game Day, I’m listening to whatever and it’s rocking and rolling. But those deer don’t care. They just learn, so I think as long as you don’t pair the person, the actual negative response with the sound, they can learn to avoid. That makes sense. But you mess with them once, they watch their – But you shoot too close, they watch their buddy fall or they see you shooting at them, that’s the end. So the second we pair sound with the vision, it’s over. But I think sound in general isn’t going to disturb them as much, as long as they don’t realize that’s person. So when you talk about shotguns and stuff like that, if they’re just hearing muffled sounds all the time and they’re not actually experiencing the person with it, that’s okay. You see, you agree with that? You buy it?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’m buying it. I mean –

Bradley Cohen: I mean, this is some of the science that we’re interested in, though. Like, we’re very much strong advocates of, like, we think ducks need more safe areas, rest areas, that the highest quality habitat is actually a place where people aren’t, not necessarily flooded cornfields. It’s where are not, where people aren’t going. And so the more we can disassociate them from interacting with people, the better, the more calm, the less disturbance they’re going to feel. And that person thing is all about vision. Does that makes sense?

Ramsey Russell: It makes perfect sense. I’m sitting here thinking, we were down in Australia a few weeks ago and a lot of wild ducks. A lot of ducks I’d never seen up close and personal, like freckle ducks and bluebills. And it’s like a, yeah, it’s an Australian blue bill, which is more like a ruddy duck. The only ruddy duck down there, were found in great abundance in a city park where people are walking 24/7. And they were just completely indifferent. If you stopped and tried to walk to them, they just swam a little bit off, but they still wouldn’t get farther about 20 yards. Not like they, but if that, if I were in a marsh where I’m hunting, oh, boy, they’d be gone. You know what I’m saying? If you try to walk in on them, duck are, I don’t know how they tell the difference in okay, I’m in a city park, there’s people around, but they don’t have guns versus I’m in an area right here and I better get away from it, they’re going to shoot me. I don’t know, we’re talking about a very small brain that really doesn’t have a strong reasoning capacity, but they can perceive those differences.

Bradley Cohen: I think it’s all the same thing as Pavlov’s dog experiment. You sample, you try, you keep trying and then once you get a good positive response, you just keep doing it. It’s why if we rest in area long enough, those ducks are going to sample back down and then they’re going to say, they’re going to be like, no, negative consequences. And eventually, you know what? You walked in there, you didn’t shoot, you didn’t kill any of their buddies and then maybe eventually they learned. But I will tell you this. I had a PhD student, Abigail Blake Bradshaw, she literally was walking through refuges as part of her disturbance during hunting season. It freaked those ducks out.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bradley Cohen: So they get it. They get that when there’s other things, when they’re being shot at other areas, that people are the enemy, people are the danger.

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy? But if a white tailed deer or something walked through, they’d be indifferent to it.

Bradley Cohen: Doesn’t matter.

Just Don’t Move

 So just keep still and maybe that’ll make the difference when you’re making a blind or something like that, as long as it’s breaking up your silhouette and not completely silhouetted, taller, higher, crazier than everything else around it or a different color that they can focus in on, you’re fine. 

Ramsey Russell: Wrap it up, Bradley. Tell me, just give us a take home message about a duck’s eyesight and how we wear camo, what camo we wear and how we can become better duck hunters with relation to a duck’s eyesight.

Bradley Cohen: Stop thinking that ducks perceive their world similar to the way you do. They don’t. Don’t necessarily worry about the camo, worry about getting good quality clothes. Stay still and keep your head down, stop moving. As I say to everyone in their blind, the second that comes in, don’t move. Relax. You don’t have to see every – you don’t have to watch them come in every single time. When they’re in our decoys, I’ll let you know, all right. So just keep still and maybe that’ll make the difference when you’re making a blind or something like that, as long as it’s breaking up your silhouette and not completely silhouetted, taller, higher, crazier than everything else around it or a different color that they can focus in on, you’re fine. Just don’t move.

Ramsey Russell: It’s funny you say that, because the one time that duck hunters are most prone to move in a duck blind. We’re all sitting there chatting, we’re up under the shadows, we’re all just relaxed, we’re chit chatting, we hadn’t shot in 30 minutes and somebody says she’s stuck. And it looks like everybody break dancing trying to get their hands on their guns.

Bradley Cohen: I know, I’m no different.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, thank you very much, Bradley. And folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Go back to the basics, don’t overthink it, don’t try to humanize a duck. Obey the fundamentals and shoot more ducks. See you next time.