EP 446. Is the Mallard Migration Shifting? Or Is Something Else Possibly Happening?

Redistributing the Ducks

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where I’ve got a great topic for you today, joining me in the studio is Dr. Phil Lavretsky and Dr. Michael Schumer, heads up, just a reminder, the last time Mike Schumer was on here, episode 434, we talked about, where the hell are the ducks? It had a lot to do with the weather and dependency of pushing these birds down south. We also visited with him in episode 233, so catch up on episode 233 and 434. Because in episode 434, Michael, he promised, he said, look, you want to start talking about the game farm genetics and how it could be influencing mallard migration. Well, get me and Lavretsky on here at the same time, we’ll crawl down a rabbit hole. For those of you all joining us for the first time or not having gone back through all our different episodes, Dr. Phil Lavretsky was on episode 27, 344 and 400. Relevant to this topic about game farm genetics, if you’re asking yourself, what the hell is a game farm genetic? Go back and listen to those episodes, guys, how are you now, Dr. Phil? You look like you driving, man, you out in West Texas doing something?

Phil Lavretsky: I’m far West Texas. I’m here trying to go find my chocolate lab that you guys are giving me hell on hopefully, she’ll just be retrieving ducks and not anything else. But I’m excited about it, I’ve got my eldest daughter here, she’s putting up with this whole thing and we just finally found a spot with 3 bars to have this conversation. So I’m pretty, I’m pumped, I’m ready.

Ramsey Russell: It’ll be worth it on a ride back. I say, you got a kennel right there, you know good and well the dog is not going to be in the kennel, it’s going to be in your daughter’s lap the entire ride back home.

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, I told her that, but I was like, oh, be ready for her to pee on you, too.

Ramsey Russell: Nah, come on now, Mike, how the heck are you? Did you hear any feedback from Where the Hell the Ducks episode?

Michael Schumer: Yeah, we got a lot, Ramsey. It was, I mean you know this, you got a lot of feedback on your end and we’ve heard movement of birds since then. But it was a comment, pretty much what everybody was saying. The ducks said, the populations downed but the ducks said hell north, right? December was the warmest December since 1889 on record.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Michael Schumer: Where are the ducks? It’s like when you said, hey, Alberta is what, how many degrees?

Ramsey Russell: It was 540 Christmas day.

Michael Schumer: Right. So that makes December a pretty warm month and it’s not all about the weather, but, boy, the weather this year was rough for folks.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let me ask you now, where the heck are the ducks now? Where are they now? Because there’s been 2 of them arctic clippers come through since we recorded, did that podcast.

Michael Schumer: I am seeing, I don’t have my finger on the pulse of every duck hunter out there, right? But I am seeing a lot of folks shooting ducks and the way the weather is, it’s concentrating birds. A lot of stuff is really frozen up right now, we’ve got a thought coming, which is actually going to be helpful for a lot of folks. I just ran a bunch of numbers and looked at stuff, so I don’t know when you’re going to broadcast this, right. But tomorrow for me is the 20th, Saturday, the 20th and I’m looking at that as the last day that ducks are going to move south for the rest of people’s season.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Michael Schumer: Because after that, we hit major thaws, south winds for the most part, but here’s the deal, good rains accompanying them across kind of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and into the Southeast and so good rains, a thaw and ducks redistributing any birds that moved in, which I think are a lot of them by the sounds of it, radio telemetry birds basically are where they were going to be, they’d all moved south for the most part. People started shooting docks where they could get to them, but a lot of people got froze out. But on this thaw, there’s going to be rain with it, I’m talking like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There’s going to be a bunch of new water, too, for a lot of folks around the MAV and Southeast, so I think these birds are going to really move on that thaw and give a great end of the season.

Not As Many Mallards As We’re Used To

And boy, don’t get me and Phil to go down this rabbit hole.

Ramsey Russell: Back in early January, when we met, the birds were not in the deep south in great number, here on January 19th, when we’re recording this thing will air in mid February, the birds are not where they were then, they are down south where they can find open water and I’m hearing great reports throughout the deep south of strongholds, good old day duck hunting. And now when we started talking about where the ducks were on our last episode, 433 or 434, I should say, I asked you the question, we started talking about this subset of North American mallards that are very snow cover and weather dependent to push down because of changing landscape up in the Midwest, but there’s still a small subset of North American mallards that show up in the deep south, go to the same hunts mid to late October. You describe them as Halloween ducks and somewhere along the way you said and a lot of the Halloween ducks could be becoming displaced due to game farm genetics. And boy, don’t get me and Phil to go down this rabbit hole. Well, here we are, that’s the rabbit hole I want to go down because I know that there’s a lot of changes in North America besides just the weather. I mean, okay, we, anybody in the deep south can look around an open day. Coca Cola woods has got mallards, there are timber holes in the deep south that have mallard in mid to late October, but not as many mallards as they used to and we’ve had some other guests on here in the past, talking about this topic. Phil, let’s kick it off this way just quickly as you can. Kind of recap one of our first discussions about introduce people to this concept of game farm, how you stumbled across that research and some of the surprises and some of the findings you found initially when you stumbled across, literally, this game farm genetic in North America.

Phil Lavretsky: That’s like a 5 hour conversation.

Ramsey Russell: I know it is.

Phil Lavretsky: All right, so the short of it is, as you mentioned, I wasn’t looking for it. I was looking at black ducks, are there genetically pure black ducks? Do they exist today as they existed 150 years ago? So I was doing a mallard black duck, looking at those 2 and I started picking up this genetic signature that wasn’t – everything west of the Mississippi was this particular wild mallard genetic signature and then there’s this other thing that kept creeping up as you go from the Mississippi and real in the Atlantic Flyway and I knew the history of game farm mallard stocking, if nobody under knows what a game farm mallard is, it’s a domestic breed, right? Just like we were talking about labs. All domestic mallard breeds as we know them are from the ancestor’s mallard. That’s the wolf of all the different breeds of mallard and game farm mallards was something that, what we think started being bred in the 1650s by King Charles II and it was for hunting purposes. They wanted a mallard to shoot, but it would be more flightier and so they started picking traits, just like we picked traits for labs to be friendly, go catch ducks and so forth and by 1900 they had this thing, the first time the word game farm mallard was described was by the English in a ringing, they were ringing them and releasing them in England and they were using the term game farm mallard. Now, in North America, those things started to be brought in in the 1920s during our population declines and all of this thing, market hunting, really took a toll on all of our birds. And so people wanted greenheads in the east coast and somebody probably knew about game farm mallards and started bringing them in. Now, I was brought up on the dogmatic principle that those things did not do anything to the wild population. So it wasn’t something I wasn’t looking for –

Ramsey Russell: Because mallard is a mallard. What could they possibly do?

Game Farm Mallards

But I saw that signature, knowing the history, I went out got some game farm mallards, known game farm mallards, along with some Khaki Campbell’s, maybe it’s park duck.

Phil Lavretsky: Mallard is a mallard. But I saw that signature, knowing the history, I went out got some game farm mallards, known game farm mallards, along with some Khaki Campbell’s, maybe it’s park duck. Maybe it’s of this other thing that’s in there and lo and behold, short of it is, it’s indeed game farm mallard, no matter how many things that we analyze, thousands of samples and we always compare it against park duck and there’s just no park duck either Khaki Campbell, Calduck, whatever other breed you want to name. And it’s constantly this thing, this game farm mallard, that is interbreeding with the wild population. This isn’t just isolated in North America, we published kind of a worldview in New Zealand, Europe, all throughout Eurasia and of course, North America, Hawaii included. And everywhere where there are these feral mallards and hybrids, especially, it’s game farm mallards, these things are able to readily interbreed. So the dogma of, hey, we shoot them all or if we don’t shoot them all, they don’t survive and if they do survive, they don’t breed, is not correct. Because if that was the case, I shouldn’t find their babies unless they’re genetics everywhere and again, that’s just not the case. They’re present and so Mike and I got a large National Science Foundation, NSF grant to really dive into it in the science background and with partnerships with Ducks Unlimited and others, we’ve been able to basically extend this understanding. Trying to get ahead of it, like Mike would say, to understand, okay, so we know they interbreed, but is it a problem? How does that affect survival, fecundity or baby making? What is it doing to our populations? Could it actually have real biological implications? And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 2 years, is trying to play catch up.

A Deep Dive into the North American Mallard Population

Ramsey Russell: And what are you all’s thoughts on how it could affect the North American population? Because what sticks with me when I’ve got this Cocker Spaniel population and I’ve got a wolf population, the best I can tell, the breeding numbers and the breeding pairs numbers and the population censuses just says mallard. It doesn’t differentiate but what is it doing to our mallard population in North America or what could it be doing?

Phil Lavretsky: Mike, you want to talk about this? You want me to give a snapshot?

Michael Schumer: No, let it roll, Phil. You’re good.

Phil Lavretsky: All right, so you’re right. So we present, as a geneticist, I present this thing, I’m like, yep, there’s a whole bunch of hybrids in the past. We, most recent numbers, it’s still about a 2% chance in the Northeast, give or take. Some states are better than others, but on average, 2% chance that you’ve got a really, truly wild mallard now in your bag. It’s a little bit better on the Mississippi side so it’s about generally 40%, but it’s a completely different situation South of Tennessee. It’s actually above 90% chance that you’re shooting wild mallards and I think you guys talked about this, you alluded to this. There is a natural flow of the prairie pothole birds into the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley and that is maintaining that wild genetic signature but that is not the case of what’s happening in the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes birds, we’ve started to parse out this metapopulation dynamics that’s occurring and it’s not looking great, especially in the summer. There’s just even some states, I can’t even find a truly wild female breeding on the landscape and you guys alluded to Ben Lukenen, Doug Osborne and others that we’ve been able to partner with and put telemetry units and start asking, okay, if this bird has 30% feral genetics, old world genetics, what does it do? Does it do something different and what does that mean? And in a nutshell, as you guys talked about in that, where are the ducks? We’re finding significant differences in migration capacity, in nesting capacity and survival and so all of that encompassing explains some population declines. Now, we’re still gathering data, as Mike would say and we’re still sort of wading into the weeds here. But it’s sure showing what we can say is there is, if you have 30% or more feral genetics in you, you have a significant difference in migratory capacity and that being a more random walk where you’re just kind of like going around the country because you got to do, you got to move, maybe it’s cold, maybe it’s not and but what you’re doing, why you’re doing that is there’s a significant increase in stopover sites, meaning they must not have enough fuel to actually make it anywhere and the propensity to go back to the Great Lakes and to be in urban settings is significantly higher than if you are a wild mallard or have wild genetics. On top of it, what we’re seeing is hens with 30% or more, not all of them do it, but significant difference in nest abandonment, too, in these Great Lakes birds, compared to more wild birds of the prairie potholes. So there’s something happening to our population and it seems to be aligning with the amount of feral genetics that they possess.

Ramsey Russell: Mike if there’s some feral genetics beginning to hold up and concentrate in hold up areas further up the flyway, how is that affecting or could it be affecting migration? Like, I’m sitting there trying to, I think it may have been Bradley Cohen talking about there’s a population of mallards that will fly as far south as parts of West Tennessee and that’s it, come hell to high water if it freezes up solid, they ain’t going no further. I guess they’re out of gas.

Michael Schumer: Yeah, so one of the things that step back into Phil’s comment a little bit and then dig into your comment is that, one of the things we’re seeing is there’s very few individuals in the population that are under 70% wild, like those that exist there seem to be doing something totally different, but they don’t exist in the population in general like, it’s under 5%. So to me, it says something about that game farm genetics is getting purged out of that but it doesn’t mean that some of that behavioral attribute and such doesn’t get passed on, as well. The thing we’re seeing in, we know that the Atlantic Flyway population, especially like strong Northeast Atlantic population, through a lot of the stuff filled it is strongly influenced by game farm. As we get into Ohio, we start to run into about, only 60% of those are full blown wild mallards and then those birds that are coming out of that part of the country as Phil alluded to, lots of them with that heavy game farm background, are only moving as far south as they need to. There is some information here that says that this may be contributing to ducks, mallards not coming to what people would consider wild mallard ancestral grounds. I always go back to the Southeast coast of the US, South Carolina is the place I always talk about, because those mallards that they got came out of the Great Lakes region and as the game farm genes kind of moved into that Great Lakes region, South Carolina’s migration stopped for mallards, they shoot the heck out of gadwall, like it’s gadwall sometimes, in wood ducks, yes. But I think that the one thing that we have going on is a confounding factor of, because what I work with on foul weather podcast, which we talked about before, is the change in weather. So the change in weather happened at the same time as the game farm mallards. So teasing those 2 things apart is very difficult, the way that you, I think, can get at that, despite the – And I will say there are limitations to backpacks on ducks and tracking them. And I think that some folks on podcasts recently have done a very good job of talking about the potential limitations of telemetry. But within that understanding that telemetry has its limitations and such, I think we can start to track wild mallards with some type of telemetry, no matter if it’s implanted or backpack and we can look at wild and game farm genetics and understand that and that’s what Phil’s starting to talk about, of those things that have happened. There was a really good – I’m going to throw the Atlantic Flyway under the bus. Phil laughs, I’ve never done that before. They had a perfect opportunity with 1000s of transmitters to take genetic data and determine whether their birds were wild or game farmy and understand this, they’re spending over a million dollars on this study and they didn’t take genetic samples. I literally have heartburn and I wake up at night having heartburn about this, because I sit in the Atlantic Flyway and I try to work across, like, all these boundaries and it gives me a lot of consternation that they just called everything they tagged a mallard and I don’t think we should ever do that because there’s a lot of different mallards. These things exist in California, we’re releasing them in Texas, we’re releasing them in Illinois, Iowa. I mean, they exist everywhere and we should probably understand that they are totally different beasts between the game farmy thing and the wild thing and understand that impact to the population. I’m going to say this one more time, no, I’m going to say it a 1000 more times. We really need to get this right, Ramsey. We need to understand if this is a smoking gun and it’s what – Phil and I get on the phone and in afternoons all the time and I don’t think you understand a lot of people don’t understand how passionate people like Phil and I are about this stuff and we’re both hunters and we talk to nth degree about what’s a way to understand if this is an impact. And if it is, then we need to know it. And if it isn’t, we need to know it. But we mostly need to know about it and the scientific community probably needs to we have got on board, we’ve got a lot of collaborators. But the point is that the, we need to know what’s going on with this.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the research projects existing out there, some of the data, some of your antidotal or scientific observations that support the notion that because of game farm genetics, a lot of our birds are no longer migrating as deeply south? A lot of the mallards, I’m just, I’m asking, I mean, you already said, hey, these birds are holding up, they’re concentrating. We’re seeing this, we’re seeing that. I’m just wanting to build more into that topic about why this, I mean, because they started Atlanta Flyway, they’re drifting over the Great Lakes. Somebody told me one time that if you shoot a matter duck in state of Michigan, it’s an 80% probability it’s a game farm genetic, not a wild duck. Bradley Cahen over there and the Great Lakes doing his research. Well, hey, if all these mallards are sitting up top instead of migrating south, it ought to be up for a Great Lakes hunter. No, they like those residential areas, Phil talk about, they don’t like wild areas. They don’t, they’re peckers, not gleaners. They don’t do as well in wild environment as they do in urban settings. So I’m just trying to build more on this conversation, when people out here in the deep south, like they were asking themselves until that last big front blew in, where the hell are the ducks. Where the hell are my mallards? Hey, this may be going on. This may be contributing to the kind of mallards we’re seeing, the deep south. So kind of help me build on some of these topics and there’s research you all seen?

Researching the Game Farm Mallard 

They just need to look like a gadwall flying around or a wigeon flying around more rapidly than more flightier, basically interesting to shoot or whatever they’re thinking it might be and I think they’ve actually made a mallard that does that.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, let me start off with a few things. So like Mike said we just like, I myself starting in this whole research project, I wasn’t looking for it, it’s there and when a problem is there and you could see it, you’ve already gone past the point of it being an issue. It’s there, it’s present. And so everything we do, the null hypothesis that we’re wrong and we’re going to find something that suggests otherwise, but everything we’ve done somehow has continued to lead to a similar answer and the ultimate answer so far is that these 2 things only look that similar, but they are far from it ecologically, just generally, biologically they are just like I’ve said it in the past, it’d be like if Colorado, since they just started doing reintroductions with wolves, instead of using wolves, they just used huskies. It’d be the same kind of concepts like they look like it so I guess it’s okay, but they’re not, they’re not a wolf anymore. A few things that we’ll go with hard science and we’ll do some anecdotal science show. You spoke to Brad Cohen, we’ve been working on some of his birds and both Brad Cohen and Ben Lukenen’s birds, the ones with 30% or more genetic ancestry influence of game farm have. These have a significant increase in stop oversights, so that means they need to stop that many more times and refuel, essentially, you’ve got a jumbo jet, but you’ve got no fuel and we started looking into this in 2 ways. One, into the muscle constitution, the thing that allows them to flat and what we’re finding is the muscle fibers. This is just like completely new and Mike and I haven’t even talked about this, but we’re finding actually statistical differences in the types of muscle fibers these 2 things are having, we just see that, we just are finding it. Now, the other part of it, this is the anecdotal part, is that it seems that things while are about the same length. They are almost 300-400 grams lighter and what we think it might be occurring and this is the rabbit hole, is that they are not capable of putting fat on, so they’re the same length. So the only way to lose weight is if you don’t have enough muscle or you don’t have enough fat and both those are required to do long distance migration properly. And if either of them are even negatively influenced, because here’s the thing, so when I talk to game farm managers, people who breed these things, they’ve always told me, oh my birds flightier. And I’ve heard that term for a long time and I was like, I don’t know what that means, but I actually think I understand it better now. And what they’ve done is taken their wings are short loaded and I think they actually made it that they’re physiologically different where they don’t actually put mass on because they don’t need to survive that long. They just need to look like a gadwall flying around or a wigeon flying around more rapidly than more flightier, basically interesting to shoot or whatever they’re thinking it might be and I think they’ve actually made a mallard that does that. And unfortunately, if you put that into New York or in Ohio on a freak storm and they can’t get out because it’s got no fuel, its survival is significantly different than what a wild bird would be in the same scenario.

Ramsey Russell: That makes pretty damn good sense. Because if a guy, you got to figure if, whether it’s South Carolina or somewhere else on the Atlantic Flyway or Mississippi or anywhere, somebody’s turning out these birds to supplement their duck hunting. They don’t want a duck that’s going to fly state away, they want to kill them, they want them right there in their backyard buzzing around. I used to know a guy, met a guy in Maryland one time, his duck club was putting out, I think he said 5000 month old mallards feeding them, they’d go out and catch up the sick and crippled over the course of the year, they’d run the dogs through them to kind of keep them, quote, wild and then and then come open day, a duck season and it was a beat down of epic proportion and there was no bag limit on these particular birds because they could demonstrate the toe or the tag or whatever the case may be. And they didn’t want those birds to fly to the next state over, they wanted to kill them. So I can see why these birds are engineered to be “flightier” but not span the Mississippi Continental, the Mississippi Flyway or the continental span to migrate, they’re made to stay put.

Can We Stop the Trickle?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, no that’s absolutely correct. But the other flip side is a proportion of them do tend to pair bond actually leave and thus moving that genetics. I had another preserve guy talking to me and shit, I saw some of his band returns back in the 90s and he’s like, look, these birds are going to mostly the Great Lakes. And I was like, well, the problem like that right there is the problem. The dogma that they don’t actually, they can’t do it is incorrect. Some proportion of them can do it. And that is what is the problem, my view and that’s the polluter, in my view and so that is where we’re trying to understand how this occurs. So you’re releasing them, where are the hotspots? Can we decrease their ability to survive and even leave? Even more so if we can target those hotspots? And if we do that, does the trickle effect? Can we stop the trickle is the ultimate question?

Ramsey Russell: I wonder if we can stop a trickle, too. I know that, Phil, you and Ducks Unlimited collaborated with duck DNA. Have you all gotten any results back yet? Have you all got a better idea of what’s going on with that?

Phil Lavretsky: We just today sent out the first 500 certificates. I talked with Mike Brazier today and we were just finishing up a few of the things. And yeah, we’ve got, that was phenomenal, 4200 applicants, all 49 states outside of Hawaii covered. No duck hunting in Hawaii, so that makes sense and I mean, it’s been, it’s we won’t know until all the samples are back, probably at the end. Well, we’re at ducks nine in the beginning of February. So by the end of February, we should have all that stuff analyzed, see how we did this year, see how the hunters are doing this year and those are the DNA points that we need to find scale, understand what is occurring on the landscape. We got folks in Montana, they look mostly pure, but then we’ve got folks in the Great Lakes and I about, found just about every sort of hybrid you can imagine out there. And it’s lining up, honestly, with what Mike and I have found doing these more specialized studies when we did in Ohio, the one that we published and the ones that we’re about to publish with all the different Great Lake states and so we’re building on it with hunter support and I think that’s the most fascinating part with the duck DNA stuff. What we’re going to be able to do with that kind of data is going to be, I think, revolutionary, but won’t know until we have it.

Ramsey Russell: Based on those first 500 certificates you mailed out, is the problem worse or better than you had hoped?

Phil Lavretsky: That’s a good question. I haven’t plotted it out, I just kind of, we want to get these certificates out and like I said, it was like yesterday we were finalizing some of those calls. So I got to plot this out and actually we’re going to be plotting all of this out this week when I get back because we got to get it ready for the duck symposium here first part of February. So we’re going to have a better answer with that, but just anecdotally, it looks similar, but I won’t know until I plot everything out.

Ramsey Russell: There’s been a, this is a very fascinating topic and it has been, Phil since I first met you at SCI many years ago now, again, episode 27 of 400 some odd episodes we’ve got, you came on to explain the situation and to this day, there’s a prevailing thought among duck hunters that the mallards flyway is shifting west. These birds that used to come down the Mississippi Flyway are now coming down the Central Flyway of you all’s investigations and research indicate otherwise, doesn’t it? We’ve still got a vibrant old world genetic, North American genetic coming down the Pacific and Central Flyways, whereas we’ve got a lingering, a dribbling migration coming because of the proliferation of game farm genetics, it seems.

Phil Lavretsky: I mean, it definitely seems that way. I will note we did, Mike, help me out with some isotope work with some mallards out of Montana, correct me if I’m wrong, but we figured we were able to use the isotopic signature to locate them in about Alberta, which makes sense. But for those birds in Montana, thankfully being part of the Central Flyway, most of Montana being part of the Central Flyway, I think there was only maybe 3 hybrids out of the, it’s about a 3% out of the 100 and about 20 birds that I sampled for that kind of like local study, which is wildly different if you just go straight on the east of the Mississippi right into the Great Lakes region where in the summer, it’s way worse in most states. But generally speaking, 40% chance that it’s a hybrid, 60% chance that it’s wild. So there’s definitely a metapopulation dynamic, very distinct biological cities of these populations and that’s something that Mike and I and our partners are trying to get ahead of and try to understand how different are they? And you can always ask me the question, like, well maybe a mallard’s a mallard and there is no problems. But without a time machine going forward, I can’t be like, yep, it’s going to be a problem, but what I can say is, if you’d like to see the future, you could go to France or you could go elsewhere or you could ask the fisheries people, like I’ve talked about, they’re ahead of us. They’ve been doing this. They see the highly negative outcomes that occurs when stocking starts, there’s a reason that when you start stocking without a good program where you’re maintaining genetic diversity, you often, it often leads to forever stocking.

Reasons for Duck & Goose Distribution Changes

Ramsey Russell: I got an email last night from a group of biologists and scientists talking about the handful of duck and goose distribution change articles in recent years that have started hitting. I’m going to read a couple of titles here, spatial temple dynamics of duck harvest distributions in the Central and Mississippi Flyways, 1960 to 2019, 60 years of community science data suggest earlier fall migration and short stopping of waterfowl in North America. Half century winter duck abundance and temperature trends in the Mississippi and Atlantic Flyways, distributional shifts of wintering midcontinent greater white fronted geese, that’s a little off topic. Factors influencing autumn winter movements of midcontinent mallards and consequences for harvest and habitat management. There’s a lot of scientific, not only is it us grumpy duck hunters down south wonder where the hell our ducks are, the scientific community is beginning to recognize there are changes afoot regarding migrations and distribution of our ducks. Do you all know or would you guess, if any of these researchers are considering the game farm genetic amongst these observations?

Michael Schumer: I’ll take that one, Phil.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, go ahead. You want me to do it? I can do it.

Michael Schumer: I don’t think they, I mean, well, you can rebut me if you want, Phil, we talk about this stuff. I don’t think they are to a large degree. I mean, it is a possible factor and I want to make sure a lot of what we’re working on here are continue to be hypotheses with a lot of data behind them –

Ramsey Russell: Not proven science.

Michael Schumer: There’s no such thing. All right, I’m going to take you into this one, Ramsey. There’s no such thing as proven science so for all the scientists out there, you appreciate that comment, right? We say proof, but it’s not a thing, it’s a body of evidence that suggests a certain pattern and we see a lot of patterns out there right now. And a lot of – when Phil and I started talking about all of this mallard stuff, we came up with a lot of hypotheses in afternoon conversations over the phone and actually, the world’s going to implode because the duck symposium in Portland is the first time Phil and I are going to have seen each other since before COVID, so we feel like our combined duck energy is going to make the world implode when we actually get together for a conversation face to face.

Ramsey Russell: All those conservative biologists being in Portland and known, isn’t enough reason for it to implode, but go ahead.

Is There a Smoking Gun? 

But point is that I’m going to dodge this question, is that these are hypotheses, Ramsey and I think that there’s a possibility that game farm genetics are influencing the migratory patterns, but I think we’re very midstream on this one.

Michael Schumer: I like that. But the point is that a lot of the patterns that we are seeing now in the population are what we’d expect with an effect of game farm mallards, whether there’s the smoking gun or not, we are still working on that and I would say, I don’t know, I think if I said 5 years from now, we’d have some revolutionary results, I think we’ve nailed some and Phil’s nailed a ton of stuff down to date and Phil and I continue to work on some cool stuff and Phil’s got a ton of collaborators beyond me as well in working on really good stuff with genetics, what I really like that Phil has done is collected a group of people across the country and across North America that are willing to work on this topic and dig into these because they’re controversial topics. But point is that I’m going to dodge this question, is that these are hypotheses, Ramsey and I think that there’s a possibility that game farm genetics are influencing the migratory patterns, but I think we’re very midstream on this one.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let me ask it another way, then. Should they be looking at game farm genetics with respect to these topics and if they should, how could you possibly, hell, as far as I know, when you fly over and do population counts, you can’t differentiate, a mallard’s a mallard. So, I mean, how would you break that out? Should they be –

Michael Schumer: I think we –

Ramsey Russell: And how would you break it out?

Michael Schumer: I think we need to know this because I’ve said this on other podcasts and France is releasing like, 1.4 million mallards per year and their wintering population is 270,000. They basically have a put and take system so we have to get this right to make sure that the mid continent population is not impacted. I don’t know that they will, but we do need to get this right for sure.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. And I was just going to add, I mean, migration is dynamic, that’s the truth. Throughout time, migration patterns change and especially when you add the layer of agriculture change and how ducks just know where that AG is, that’s an important factor to consider. But what I would premise[**00:49:37] with all of this is that why not take the genetics? The hardest part about all of this is catching the birds, if you’re going to catch a bird and put a unit on, telemetry unit on it or put a band on it, take a bit of blood, obviously, live bird, take a bit of blood or a couple feathers and let’s see what you’ve got. Let’s make a foundation where you can at least have the variable saying wild or not wild and see if there’s an association. If you don’t have that variable or that knowledge, that foundation, you can’t test for it and so essentially what might happen is you’ll get a whole bunch of noise and in the end, you’ll always just come up with the weather’s got to be right for that bird to move.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to take this opportunity to throw the great state of Mississippi under the bus for just a second and I chalk it up to desperate duck hunters do dumb things. I think we can all agree, we’ve been desperate enough to go do something dumb, just trying to kill a duck, right?

Phil Lavretsky: And I think I know where we’re going.

Ramsey Russell: In the last commissioner meeting, our state waterfowl biologist, who is brilliant, who is excellent, who’s the best, we’ve had in a long time, came up and gave a spill about duck stamp dollars and proposed that the money be sent up to Saskatchewan for nesting habitat. That’s where a lot of our birds come from. Saskatchewan, Manitoba and 2 commissioners took the opportunity to say, no, there’s no science for all that mess. Let’s go to Tennessee and buy game farm mallards and turn them loose, instead, let’s take that duck stamp dollar, that money from Mississippi and go buy some game farm mallards and throw them out the truck for our hunters. Thank the good Lord almighty, 3 commissioners shot him down. It was a vote, but it struck me that 40% of my wildlife commission thought that was acceptable. What do you all think about something? And I know people turning birds loose around here. There’s a club that raises mallards, put bands on them. If you recover one in Mississippi Delta, they send you a t shirt. There’s another guy that turns out a bunch of game for mallards, I hunt some buddies of mine and they’ve got bands that say Leroy and Tom and Dick and Harry and Jane and Jill and he’s just proud if you kill one of his ducks. So that’s 2 places right there in Central Delta, Mississippi, turning out ducks, there’s got to be more. What are your thoughts on that?

Phil Lavretsky: I mean, I got to say –

Ramsey Russell: If duck hunting’s getting so bad, can you foresee if duck hunting gets so bad? Here’s what I mean, but what do you think? Is duck hunting getting so bad? Is it so grim in North America that we need to subsidize our wild birds?

Phil Lavretsky: I mean, no. And like, when we talked way back when SCI, I even came out, it was like my fear would be that one day stamp dollars would be paid to buy, essentially, pheasants and to release them and the fact that this is a reality, a coming reality it only takes one time for somebody to say it and then it’s in their minds like, oh, man, we’ve had a couple years where we’re just shooting gadwall quote, unquote, enjoy the gadwall, the mallards will come, but the last thing you want to do is put something that is at least evidently today doing something not so great to the greater population and especially in the Mississippi, where you’ve got wintering populations of birds coming out of the prairie pothole region, wintering in that area, you’re going to have pair bonding and that’s how you start to further move the needle westward, in my opinion. I just, that’s my opinion and that’s how I feel about it and Mike actually sent me something else. Was that in Alabama? Alabama –

Michael Schumer: Alabama.

Phil Lavretsky: Sub folks there?

Michael Schumer: Yes.

Phil Lavretsky: I will have to make the caveat that, that waterfowl association said they do not, you can buy mallards from them and they do not sell game farm mallards, only wild mallards. Now, I would have to tell them to send me a few of their samples and let me vouch for that, if they’ve got, if they’re listening us straight on.

Ramsey Russell: Fish & Wildlife Service may be interested to hear that.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. Because if they’re not game farm mallards, we’ve got some additional issues that we’ve got to resolve and if they are game farm mallards, they’re selling the wrong product, then their statements, not quite accurate non-GMO, but that’s how I feel. Mike can take it from here but I think we could find a better ground than just, hey, let’s, I was from Ohio, they used to have pheasants. Then they died and so then they’re like, well, we still like pheasants. So the only way for pheasants to be there is Ohio DNR goes and puts them there every year, so live and that’s the story of pheasants in Ohio right now.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Kind of like catching rainbow trout and some of these dreams, they dump the truck in, it just not the same. I mean, if you’re going to go catch a farm raised rainbow, why not just go the grocery and buy them, already skinned and ready to go. My 2 cents, Mike, how much more does rabbit hole we got to run down?

Michael Schumer: I don’t think we’d be having this conversation as much in years when mallard populations were at what, like 8 million, 10 million or whatever they were at.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Michael Schumer: I think to some extent that we also have to realize when I was in Mississippi in the late 2000s, I think we were starting to hit, like a lower duck population, there’s a period where we had a lower duck population, we had really warm weather and folks weren’t seeing ducks and everybody got their panties in a bunch about the sky is falling and duck numbers are a problem and we’re shooting too many ducks and we got to do something else. And I think that if we were at a point where we had lots of ducks, I don’t know, maybe Alabama’s always been releasing these, maybe folks have been releasing them in the south, but I’ve never heard of Mississippi thinking about releasing ducks. I think if we were at a high duck population and where people saw ducks, then this wouldn’t be a top would not even be close to being a topic. So I think what folks need to realize is that duck populations naturally cycle anyway.

Are Habitat Loss and Climate Change Decreasing Waterfowl Numbers?

We’ve got a habitat problem in North America that that we’ve got a stem and these droughts don’t help. That’s less natural wetland habitat, that’s more row crop sterile agriculture out there and maybe these birds can make a living there, but it’s certainly going to clump their distributions in other places that change in landscape. But I just heard it just thought out loud, just a rhetorical question one time that scared the hell out of me.

Ramsey Russell: They naturally cycle, but are you concerned as a scientist? Because I am. I trust, I quote, I hate to say this, but I trust the science because I trust our scientists, I trust our biologists, from the NGO, the state to federal, we’ve got the top scientists on earth managing our waterfowl populations, which is miles beyond what anybody else on earth is doing and maybe it could be tweaked, maybe – But when I start seeing and hearing that we’ve got half as many mallards as we might have had years ago, it begs the question, habitat loss, you know what I’m saying? We’ve got a habitat problem in North America that that we’ve got a stem and these droughts don’t help. That’s less natural wetland habitat, that’s more row crop sterile agriculture out there and maybe these birds can make a living there, but it’s certainly going to clump their distributions in other places that change in landscape. But I just heard it just thought out loud, just a rhetorical question one time that scared the hell out of me. And it was a biologist up in Canada wondering aloud if the Canadian Prairies were capable of producing more waterfowl in a great year than then the habitat between the Canadian border, the Gulf coast and back could sustain. And I said, is that’s what’s happening? And he shrugs, I don’t know, but it’s possible, I mean, we’re losing habitat galore. And we talk about this warming cycle that we’re in right now. To me, it’s very interrelated to that habitat loss. It could be a direct correlate of habitat loss is why the loss of wetlands, which are great carbon sinks, the loss of all this habitat, it could be sending us into a warming trend that is going to affect ducks also. So I wonder if we’re capable, if we’ve got enough in the tank that in the wet years that we can actually sustain and rebuild those mallard populations back up on the North American continent, that’s my biggest fear.

Michael Schumer: One of the things I will tell you is I was in the prairies in the late 90s. So I have, these people hold it against me, I’m from New York, but I’m from Rural New York, but –

Ramsey Russell: I know you’re from Mississippi state, Mike.

Michael Schumer: I did Mississippi state time, yes, like you did, Ramsey. I also did time in the Dakotas and in Southeast Missouri and Oklahoma and I cruise timber in the Virginias. I’ve done a ton of shit, excuse the French, but I was in there in the late 90s when it really, the water came back. And I don’t care what type of equipment you had on the prairies at that time. When those potholes get wet, they can’t farm through them anymore. Right now, a lot of what’s happening is things are dry and farmers are farming through potholes, there is drainage that is occurring, they’re taking small potholes and they’re making them and they’re moving that water into big areas and that’s maybe why gadwall are still doing well because they like big wetlands. But when that water comes back and it does cycle and it will cycle, were in a dry period now, but it will cycle unless a changing climate is something wildly different than what we’ve ever seen, it will get wet again and it will cycle and mallards will come back. I don’t see this as like a bottoming out thing. We’ve heard this before, we’ve heard the concern and such and this stuff does come back. The prairies get to a point where they are so wet that it doesn’t matter what equipment you have. I mean, there’s just, it’s, they’re potholes. They’re called potholes for a reason, it’s hard to drain. They do drain them, but there are a lot of places that are hard to drain just based on the glacial landscape that exists out there. And so I have whole faith within my lifetime and Phil’s kids lifetime that we’ll see these cycles continue for the most part.

Ramsey Russell: In episode 434, Mike, when we asked the question, where the heck of the ducks? It wasn’t about a loss of ducks. It wasn’t about the populations imploding, it was entirely about your predictive weather model. How do game farm genetics respond to your forecast? Pardon.

Phil Lavretsky: Great question.

Michael Schumer: Don’t know. Great question.

Phil Lavretsky: Don’t know. Great question.

Michael Schumer: I think we should cram that into the, looking at how these radio mark birds are moving.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Birds that we’ve at least got in the Mississippi, we’ll be able to look at and the ones that we have in the Mississippi Flyway that have multiple years, at least. We’ll see how they respond as Mike alluded to, had we had the birds out of the Atlantic Flyway, you could really see the response between flyways and see how dry years versus wet years and so forth and so and having that foundation and the genetics, then you could actually be like, okay, are there differences in responses? What’s the response rate versus the genetics? You can do a bunch of modeling that way. But if we don’t have the data, we can’t ask that question and we can all speculate, but we can hypothesize. You would expect them to die when it gets real cold too fast and they can’t fly away. But again, we need the data to answer that question.

Ramsey Russell: Last question. Can it be reversed? You and I talked about this, this past weekend. Can it be, is all hope gone or can this process, if we agree that game farm mallards are polluting our migration, our distribution and our beautiful wild mallard genetic, can it be reversed?

Phil Lavretsky: The short answer is, it seems so, because we have enough of the wild gene pool still. And the thing that also gives me hope is the data we just got, again, at the duck symposium, we’re going to showcase this, but we got historical data, 1800 until 2020, every decade, every flyway and we looked at what happens to game farm genetics across all that time. And one interesting trend is where we see it rise within a decade. If the, it seems that if there isn’t a lot of input, it goes straight back to wild within a decade. And that’s about 2 and a half generations, which is exactly what our models predicted. So there’s a strong selection by nature. So natural selection against their traits and what here’s the data suggests is the reason that they are maintained is because we continue to trickle them in. And we see these nice little ebbs and flow come, especially in the Atlantic Flyway, these are really beautiful data points. That is within what we hypothesized and expected, but it seems reversible because nature seems to not like it is the ultimate answer and we’ve got a project that’s just about to start in Hawaii, where we’re literally going to attempt to reverse a genetic signature of a hybrid population by inputting one of the other, the wild, the Hawaiian duck, into that group to see if we can naturally reverse it and given these assumptions and within 3 generations of breeding them, can we get Hawaiian duck without completely eliminating the entire population again? Because really what we want to do is harvest the wild genes that are present and swamp all the other stuff out. And that’s what we’re going to attempt to do that in Hawaiian. If it works there, which is the most controlled situation that we can get at this moment, there’s a potential that we can then translate that to North America, potentially.

Ramsey Russell: And that translation would entail not releasing additional game farms onto the landscape.

Phil Lavretsky: It would, that we have to decrease their survival further, I’m not dumb. And unless there’s legislative actions, profitable enterprise, however, I think that there could be ways that we work together where there’s means to decrease their survival further from where they’re actually. And I think that’s where we’d have to go or we include how much input there is and thus we have to know how many birds are being put every year so we can outweigh it with the other birds, this is what I can say it right now.

Ramsey Russell: Any closing remarks or thoughts from either one of you? Anything left to add, Mike?

Is Managing Genetics the Solution?

There’s a lot of this that is, that crosses between the scientific community and the ethical community. I have no interest in shooting a tower released mallard.

Michael Schumer: Yeah, I just think what Phil kind of got at, in general, is that we’re a work in operation here, we’re ongoing with this. It’s an ongoing construction site, let’s call it that and at the end of the day, managing these genetics might be where we end up. There’s a lot of this that is, that crosses between the scientific community and the ethical community. I have no interest in shooting a tower released mallard. I have no interest in going to a hunt club personally that releases these birds. But the reality is that other people want to do that and that’s up to them. I don’t really think it, like, overly unethical, over immoral like, I’m kind of indifferent to it. So where I’ve always gotten and I think Phil and I have and Phil, if I speak out of context, please let me know for you, like on this, but we’ve had enough of these conversations that we’re really well sounded like, well grounded in the science portion of this and just trying to provide that information to decision makers to make proper decisions about where to go next, because the stakes are really high. 25% of the harvest is mallards in this continent.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Yep.

Michael Schumer: Mallards matter. To the average person on the street, mallards don’t matter, but to duck hunters, mallards really matter.

Ramsey Russell: To duck hunters mallard’s matter. I can tell you that.

Michael Schumer: They matter a lot. In fact, they matter to me, they matter on my grill, they matter for my dog, they matter for my satisfaction. I’ve chatted with Phil, they matter for his satisfaction, as well, scientifically and shooting wise. Again, Phil, please speak out if I’m out of context any here, but I think we know each other well enough to state these things at this point.

Phil Lavretsky: Absolutely.

Michael Schumer: We’ve got to get this right, is the biggest point and where Phil and I are at on this is the science behind this is really important, because we don’t want to become France, that becomes, like, a put and take mallard situation. Are we there yet? Are we close to that yet? I don’t think so, could we be leaning towards it? Possibly. But there’s a lot of questions to be answered and I think our point is that we just really want to get them right and we want to work with as many people as possible to answer questions in the best possible way for the resource and for the people that enjoy that resource.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. And I just wanted to add to that, in everything Mike said is accurate, it’s how I feel, as well. One thing that I’ve said in the past is that, my overall satisfaction is that I know it’s a wild mallard that maybe one person touched and put a band on, but it’s a wild mallard coming into the spread, that greenheads has all the natural born capacity to loop me 5 times, finally see that I’m sitting there and leave and that’s what I want. How I see it is, it’s a privatized good polluting the public good, a public resource and that’s how I see it. And again, I’m not dumb and I’m not blind to the monetary value of game farm mallards and I think that what we’re building and the data sets that we’re building, I think there’s good management actions that can work in both, for both sides.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. Phil, tell everybody again how they can get in touch with you and connect with you in the world.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. Easiest way is to give me an email at phillavresky@utep.edu. You can also just look Dr. Phil Lavretsky or Dr. Phil ducks mallards and you could find me and look me up on University of Texas El Paso website. You can find me on Twitter X@LavretskyLab. One way or another, you could probably find me out there and send me an email. I’m always happy to chat, I always try to reply as soon as possible. No matter how, what your stance is, I’d love to hear it, love to hear what you’re seeing out there, a lot of anecdotal work that, a lot of anecdotes I get just through hunters being like, man, I’m seeing the same thing. We’re hypothesizing it and people are seeing it and when I see that and I’m like, man, something is definitely happening and that kind of information is gold. So please contact me.

Weekly Duck Migration Forecasts

Ramsey Russell: Mike, tell everybody how they can connect with you and tell them about your podcast.

Michael Schumer: Yeah, I got like 2 handles nowadays. Totally separate but not really, Mike Schumer. I’m at ES, so it’s Schumer with 2m’s, I’m not related to Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer and I are two different people. So don’t take away me with Chuck Schumer, Phil’s laughing, I see. So Schummer, 2m’s and look me up at esf.edu and you can find me where I teach at the Premier Forestry and Wildlife School in Central New York and throughout New York and then I’m also at Dr. Mike at fowlweather.co, which is fowlweather.co, which is our podcast on weekly duck migration forecasts that we cover.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you all both.

Phil Lavretsky: One last thing, if you haven’t done so already, go to www.duckdna.com and sign up for next year. Make sure your DU reps know that you want duck DNA to be alive next year and forever. So please make sure you sign up. Thanks. Thank you, Ramsey, man and Mike, always a pleasure.

Ramsey Russell: Go get that little girl at that chocolate lab. She’s been patient. I’m, what you going to name this puppy, Phil?

Phil Lavretsky: The kids name their little blue.

Ramsey Russell: Little blue.

Phil Lavretsky: I’m going to call it Bluey after blue wing teal. We were going to do Ruddy, but then people were like, Rudy Ruddy. I was like, all right, we’ll go with blue.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where you’ve been listening to Dr. Phil Lavretsky, Dr. Michael Schumer. Great topic, there’s so much going on, so much myth, so much legend, so much bad information and wondering aloud, where the heck are the ducks? Well, it may be more, as we’ve seen now, than just the next cold front. See you next time.