Sifting through random solving-duck-world topics like we duck hunters do is a lot like poking glowing embers around late-night campfires. Hardly anyone better to do that with, either, than Delta Waterfowl’s John Devney. He packs facts, common-sense and, optimism to the party, sharing them like cold pearly pops and brats (or smores for the youngsters). Prairie conditions, nesting ground updates, voluntary restraint, dryfield hunting then versus nowadays, duck harvests in Canada compared to the United States, and duck hunter numbers–changes since 1999 are mind-blowing–and more are discussed in-depth. Small chance these topics won’t make their way into your next world problem-solving campfire talks.
Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today I’m in the studio with John Devney, who’s sitting up in North Dakota. John, how the heck are you? Long time no see.
John Devney: Yeah, it’s been too long. Just try not to get blown away. It’s spring on the prairies, which unfortunately this spring’s meant more wind than rain, so just been blowing, blowing.
Ramsey Russell: Well, all that wind will dry things out good if it needs it, huh? We never got that miracle snow, that miracle rain we needed, did we?
John Devney: We got a pretty nice big distribution rain last week, but we didn’t get what we needed. It’s funny, I had a gentleman call me from Memphis last Friday and I think he and his buddy were having sort of a Friday afternoon late lunch and talking about duck hunting and talking about the prairies and he said, well, you got some rain, is that enough? I said, well, I don’t particularly think so, but its interesting, duck hunters are a hopeful bunch, Ramsey, and every time it shows green in the prairies, guys are hopeful that that’s going to be enough to break the drought, especially up in Prairie Canada.
Ramsey Russell: I think most duck hunters are optimist bunch. I wouldn’t say we all are. In fact, sometimes I get to wondering just on my own comments, my own self conversations while I’m sitting in a duck blind or traveling around or visiting with a lot of duck hunters, which I feel like I have conversations with duck hunters every single day of the year for the past 22 years. I wonder if we all aren’t sometimes, I wonder if reality is just never will reconcile with our expectations. And I wonder sometimes, even though I feel like because of a lot of the opportunities I have over the course of a year that my expectations are just to go out and have a good time, I do like to shoot ducks, but I wonder are my expectations more than reality? And I always have been, it may be a universal truth of duck hunting. I’m just reminded, my buddy Ryan Graves had a lot of collectibles and was showing me a journal of an old school, back in the early 1900s duck hunter that kept a meticulous journal and one day he flipped to a date and he showed me the guy’s entry and it literally said, didn’t see shit and I’m thinking, bad. I can relate to that.
John Devney: Yeah. And it’s interesting, right? Because it’s situational. I remember, we can all remember, I’ve had a lot of hunts where I’ve shot 4 mallards or 6 green winged teal drakes and had those kind of hunts that are burned into your memory. And I remember here a few springs ago, we were chasing snow geese in the spring and we shot, it was kind of an okay-ish hunt, shot 20, 25 snow geese and I remember sitting there, kind of thinking, well, that stunk and I thought, well, wait a second, I shot 6 teal one morning last year and it was a great hunt. We just shot 20 snow geese and somehow I’m not satisfied, that seemed, it was kind of a moment for me to say, wait a second, is it proportional to how much time and pain and suffering I had to deal shooting those snow geese or what was it that made my expectations be maybe pretty hard to reach in that setting?
Ramsey Russell: What was your past season like this year, John?
John Devney: It was really pretty good. I think we were lucky enough to have pretty good production right here close to home. Unlike the previous year, I was able to hunt some of my favorite marshes right here close to home, which makes life pretty easy, public water, I’ve hunted a lot, very comfortable with it, it’s the kind of place I really like to shoot ducks in. And we had a really good early season, although seemed to me like we didn’t have the blue wings around, at least in the places I was, that I kind of hoped to have around, but we had lots of green wings, had lots of pintail, pretty good numbers of mallards early and sort of did what it normally does, which is sort of lock up. We had a big, real bad cold snap and snowstorm on the 26th of October, had a beautiful hunt in that snowstorm and then we froze up hard. But one thing that almost, I think it’s the first time I’ve seen it happen at scale after we had that real brutal cold snap and snow, wasn’t a ton of snow, 9 inches I guess, we actually opened back up, and those marshes I was hunting before the storm had opened up just a little bit and we’re still full of mallards. And I had some beautiful hunts in there, frankly, in overtime, because usually those marshes freeze and that’s it and it’s over with and we’re chasing them elsewhere. But I was able to have a couple pretty memorable hunts back in those same places just because we got so mild again.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I felt like I had a good duck season, of course, I traveled around everywhere and a lot of the places I hit, some of my favorite places in North America, just, it was froze out or there were weather conditions going on, it was odd. I went up to Wyoming this year and felt cold to me, I had to put on a coat in the morning but it wasn’t cold and it was really weird hunting up there because there really were a lot of mallards around. Not that they would work, I can remember spending 3 days in Wyoming with Mojo Outdoors and wow, the mallards we would see piling out 5 or 10 minutes after shooting time to go feed versus the mallards we saw all day when it was 750, 800. And those boys up there had a record mallard year, record high mallard year and record low Canada goose year and that’s really their heartbeat or Canada geese.
John Devney: Right.
Ramsey Russell: And then a lot of the hunts I do, though, like going out to the Olympic Peninsula, going out to hunting around Puget Sound on the other side in Washington, hunting here, there and yonder a lot of the stuff we do, gosh, I spent dozens of mornings going out with the ambition of shooting 2 ducks because that’s the limit on barrels, golden eyes or scooters or whatever we were targeting. Who cares? I mean, that’s what we were there for and so even though it’s only a 2 bird limit, boom, I got my limit and so, but isn’t it kind of weird, in the one hand, how we’re programmed, we get to shoot 6 green wings or blue wings or 5 mallards in the Central Flyway, whatever the case may be, how even if a limit is 2, I got my limit, so I’m happy.
John Devney: Right.
Ramsey Russell: Sitting out there for an hour and a half to get one more duck so I can get my limit, that’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s just a weird mindset we duck hunters are in.
John Devney: I’ve seen it. I’ve watched it with myself. Again, that same marsh complex it can be a really spectacular back shooting marsh, Ramsey, so as those ducks you shoot a couple ducks on the way out as they’re flying out to feed, make a living on the teal kind of mid morning, but then it’s the big bunches of mallards coming back from grain feeding and it’s on a pretty day when those ducks are coming from a long ways away on a big blue sky, it’s a spectacle, right?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
John Devney: Big, high bunches of ducks and you’re where they want to be or you hope to be where they want to be and it’s one of my favorite things, favorite ways to shoot a mallard duck in the world. But, yeah, you’re right, I mean, you sit there and maybe you’re sitting on 3 mallards and a green wing and boy, it’s important to shoot those last 2 ducks.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy, because I can, I spend a lot of time in Canada. I do those road trips and usually, because I’m joining some friends from Canada, I usually try to hit around somewhere in Saskatchewan, 20th to 23rd-ish somewhere in that time frame of September and then I just bounce around, I mean, you’ve gone that far, you might as well stay, what’s the point, driving all the way back, going all the way back? So, I just bounce around it, really, we have relationships with outfitters so we, as their schedule allows and mine does, we will pile into an outfit for a little bit. But usually, I spend a lot of that time driving around, hunting with friends and somebody asked me, well, how many ducks do you shoot? And it’s funny how you cross that Canadian border and so many of the people I know aren’t really targeting mallards, aren’t really targeting ducks. When I go up there, really and truly, what I’m after is snow geese first and foremost, that’s what I just love to get into them that time of year and lots of Ross geese, which are not snow geese, they decoy. And we spend a lot of time driving and scouting and putting together plans and then getting up in the morning and setting decoys and it’s just completely do it yourself. And we get done and we skin all the birds and get them cleaned up and dropped off at the meat processor and then we go eat, then we take a nap, then we get up and go scout and we just repeat. And then by the time I’ve migrated way over to Manitoba, there might be a few snow geese, we have shot a few in the last couple of seasons, but now we’re targeting those great big interior Canada geese and there may be some duck fields, but I don’t care about that, John. I’m after the – again, we’re after those big ducks, we’re after those big geese and I’ve got this new hunt proof app and it is a little bit of work, it ain’t like just going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or whatever you got in your bag and checking it down in your phone, I’ll get into the species, so now you got to break them all out into species and it was so funny, after spending a month and a half, 2 months up in Canada, it was unbelievable how few ducks I shot. I’d have told you I shot, had a great duck season up there because we did get into some field mallards and some stuff like that, but it really wasn’t. It was like, wow, I couldn’t believe until I looked out the number, the summary of how many more geese we went after. You’re from up north, I mean, what is the – When I talk to a lot of my outfitter buddies, a lot of the customers they have that come up, especially from the Deep South want ducks, they want ducks and when I go up there, maybe I’m an outlier, I want geese because we don’t have that kind of goose hunting down here like they do up there. But what is it like, I mean, you’re from up there in North Dakota, is it a goose hunting culture or duck hunting culture or an opportunistic culture?
John Devney: I think North Dakota is a place that has historically had a pretty strong goose culture and you talk about goose fast that you’ve been at, Ramsey, in the past. And there used to be really lights out snow goose hunting at place like J. Clark Salyer, Devil’s Lake some of that stuff kind of in the southeast part of the state, I mean, guys I grew up learning to hunt around used to talk about hunting snow geese at oaks, I think the big game changer, but it had this duck culture, too. But the duck hunting culture here was very different than it was in lots of places around the country. If you go back and read the old literature, a lot of these guys shot passes.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s right. They sure did.
John Devney: And I mean, you talked to the guy in Minnesota that talked about the great old duck clubs in Minnesota and I’m still trying to work through his book, but Minnesota had some of that in places, too. But North Dakota duck hunting, it was kind of a diving duck pass place. But guys hunted marshes, Harold Daubert talks about hunting some of those great marshes in Central Minnesota in his books. I think what’s really changed, I think it’s changed all across the prairies, maybe even south of here, I don’t have as much experience in Kansas and Nebraska and those parts of the world, but is sort of the evolution of field hunting ducks. I mean, when I was a kid even for field hunting for geese, I grew up in Minnesota, which is sort of almost amazing to say it today with the way the goose hunting has gone in Minnesota, but we had 18 Canada goose decoys, like that was it and we weren’t a particularly goose hunters. We had duck boats and skiffs and 8 jillion floating decoys, the field hunting thing wasn’t a big deal when I was a kid, but I think this evolution of – not sure quite what’s driven it, I think it’s technology, the gear that we’re using to hunt ducks and field is so much better than it was that I think that has been a seismic shift all the way across the prairies because let’s be honest, Ramsey, if you’re watching a show on a duck hunt in Saskatchewan or Alberta or Manitoba, they ain’t shooting bluebills on a bulrush point somewhere, it’s all in a pea field somewhere, right?
Ramsey Russell: Boy, you bring up a good point, that’s a lot to unpack. I was hunting down in Mexico with some folks from South Dakota and one of the hunts we do occasionally down there is bluebill hunt and it’s stretched out on a long levee past shooting bluebills and it is so much fun, boy, it’s fun. It’s one of my favorite hunts to do and man, one of the guys, one of the older guys about my age, was just having a ball and as we got to talking over tacos after the hunt, he was saying, man, that reminds me of my younger days in the Dakotas, because some of his favorite places to hunt were passes and something happened up there, a blizzard, a drought, a flood, some kind of water, something changed up there for him to where one of his favorite passes is now 15ft below water and because of structure under the water, he catches walleye there.
John Devney: A lot of them are. If you look at where we were coming out of the late 80s and terrible drought and prior to that, water’s up, water’s down, water’s up, but those shallow lakes big sloughs, they’ve just fundamentally changed from a hydrological perspective because we’ve been wet for so long.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
John Devney: And we’re placed where we used to have beautiful hard stem bulrush, hemi marshes are now big open water marshes and a lot of passes, one of my favorite passes North and East Bismarck, where I can count on usually having really good bluebill shooting, the eastern half, it’s been underwater for about 4 years –
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that something?
John Devney: Above normal precipitation and we’ve changed the hydrology up here, too, Ramsey, and lots of wetland drainage, those wetlands, small wetlands get drained into big wetlands where those passes are changes the hydrology, changes the food resources and sometimes puts those passes just flat underwater.
Reservoir Roosting: Large reservoirs in the Midwest now provide suitable roosting sites.
Geese used to come to the deep south and they quit back in the 60s, 70s, because as the Midwest, the Upper Flyway began to change landscape level, those birds can go roost on a great big old reservoir and then fly off and feed on harvested grain fields for as long as they can access it.
Ramsey Russell: But you talk about field hunting and here’s something to unpack about that, talking about the seismic shift of field hunting Canada, the Dakotas, the Upper Midwest, stuff like that and I’ve had this conversation from a different, from the opposite side of the coin about habitat, landscape changes across the spectrum – Heath Hagy was on here recently, we were talking about some of the published papers that have empirically quantified deep south hunters observations that, in fact, the birds are, their migration is changing, their distribution is changing, then we got into the wherefores and why nots of why mallards are likely hanging 500 miles further north and it’s got to do with they will. Geese used to come to the deep south and they quit back in the 60s, 70s, because as the Midwest, the Upper Flyway began to change landscape level, those birds can go roost on a great big old reservoir and then fly off and feed on harvested grain fields for as long as they can access it, mallards can do the same thing. I was up in Kenmare, North Dakota, I used to spend some time up there with some friends and it’s amazing to me when they were showing me some of these big wetlands, it’s the self proclaimed goose capital of the world, they’ve got weekly events around this event and you start talking to these guys that back 20, 30, 40 years ago, talk about the snow geese coming in and staging. Well, break, we’ve had conversations down the deep south about 100 years ago or further when a lot of your snow geese were marsh birds. That’s why the market hunters didn’t like them, they were just foul marsh birds and then they began to evolve, the snow geese began to evolve into the rice fields as rice became an issue down in Texas. And now they’ve transitioned almost completely to agriculture where they don’t need to come, but going back to Kenmare, sitting there hunting snows one time in Kenmare, I just got to imagining 150 years ago, which is a long time ago relative to any of us, but it really ain’t in geological time in North American time, 150 years ago is nothing. But there was a time 4 or 5 generations ago that snow geese didn’t come down and hop Ag field to Ag field, all these birds didn’t jump around and begin to concentrate in Ag fields, they were just jumping around in emergent marsh wetlands, going from wetland to wetland, hitting natural foods, until they made their way into the deep south in the interest of snow geese, they would have staged, come off the Arctic and staged up in Canada and around Kenmare and then flown south to the marsh and now they don’t have to. And so I just never really looked at it how probably back in those days some of your earlier hunters didn’t hunt dry fields at all, that’s a new thing, but it’s going where the ducks want to be, it’s letting the ducks tell you where they want to hunt. Well, they’re going and hitting these Ag fields because we’ve so changed the landscape, so that’s where we’re hunting now. I drive through the Mississippi Delta now and lord have mercy, the mornings I have spent hunting, harvested soybeans, harvested rice fields or harvested some form of crop flooded down the deep south but is that where the ducks want to be or is that where they have to be with this change in landscape? It’s just a lot to unpack in this subject here about dry field hunting, I think.
John Devney: Well, I think there’s a lot of it, that is the hunting population is getting older. I mean, we know the demographics tell us that and the reality is I mean, I remember here a few years ago and off saying, hey, you want to go duck hunting tomorrow and talking to guys that were North Dakota sort of true North Dakota waterfowl hunters and you’d have to try to rustle up a pair of chest waders to take them duck hunting because they didn’t spend any time in the marsh.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
John Devney: And so it’s sort of interesting and listen, I’ll be honest, I got an absolute crap ton of field hunting gear, more than I care to imagine, 6/12 trailer and I got all that stuff. I’ll be honest, I haven’t done it in a number of years just because it’s gotten so bloody competitive.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
John Devney: And I’d much rather shoot a mallard in a cattail marsh than shoot them in a barley or a cornfield. Now if that’s where they are and that’s where we can get them, I’m going to go get them in that cornfield, I’d much rather hunt them over water.
Ramsey Russell: I like to hunt it all –
John Devney: I mean, in the minority.
Ramsey Russell: Somebody asked me one time, we were in a group podcast, long time ago, when podcasts were invented. Somebody asked me one time, where’s your favorite place to hunt? And I think the context of the question was a geography or a country or a state. And my favorite place to hunt is in knee deep water, probably backed off into cattails or backed off into some willow trees or button bush, something like that, that’s my wheelhouse. But golly do I love to hunt dry fields and my dog loved to hunt dry fields because she can get up and go. It’s a lot to be said for driving out normally to where you’re going to set up, you’re 10ft from your truck and you put on your rubber boots, not your waders and go, it’s windy or it’s cold and you huddle down into a blind. Now I’m in this little warm cocoon. There’s a lot to be said for an old guy.
John Devney: I agree. And I think it’s got a lot of appeal plus if you’re going to drive to, you’re going to travel to Saskatchewan or North Dakota, Alberta or Manitoba and you hunt in South Carolina or Louisiana, it’s a different experience.
Ramsey Russell: It’s a different experience.
John Devney: Watching those big bunches of ducks grind a grain field is a spectacle, it’s a wonderful thing to see.
Ramsey Russell: And there’s a lot of conversation around dry field hunting. I hear a lot of folks that finger point to it, they’re killing all them ducks up there in them dry fields, like maybe it’s somehow cheating and as hunters have evolved with that seismic shift to dry fields in Canada and in the prairies, it’s almost become taboo. And some of the locales I hunt at, it’s become taboo to hunt the water because that’s kind of like a arresting area, don’t shoot the water, shoot the dry fields, leave the water alone so the ducks will stay in the area. Man, that’s a lot of changing and going on, since back in the day on that old Minnesota book you’re talking about, they would lay rail track and go all which ways to go around those historic marshes because they knew those crazy duck hunters will buy tickets to go to those areas and we’ll make sales. That’s crazy, isn’t it? How we’ve changed. We, ducks have evolved, the landscape changed, ducks evolved, hunting evolved. I mean, it’s crazy.
John Devney: The thing I’ll say about it, though, is – and you’ve spent a lot of time in the prairies, I’ve spent a lot of time in the prairies, number of your listeners have. That’s not the great dry field hunt is not an infinite resource. You don’t just drive around, I think they watch TV that have never done it, think, oh, my goodness you just drive around your truck and there’s 5 tornadoes of mallards from every direction, from wherever you park, whatever hillside you’re parked on, the reality of it is that isn’t the case. And so it’s always been a scare, that experience has been a relatively scarce resource, which means you have to go work hard to go find it, which means there’s a lot of competition for that sort of experience, which I think it’s really impacted way hunters interact with each other, I think it’s interacted, I think it drives a lot of the conversations about perceived competition and conflict. And I think it’s really changed the way because we’re hunting, because we’re all chasing what is a very – even in historical terms, relatively scarce resource, I think it’s created a lot of competition, urgency, etcetera, that then results in a lot of land being tied up and etcetera.
Ramsey Russell: Talk about a limited resource, man. But last year up in Canada, you bring up a good point, the ducks aren’t everywhere, the geese aren’t everywhere and I know some of the areas I hunt out in Western Canada in the afternoons, one truck goes one way, we cover one quadrant, one truck goes the other and we cover a lot of ground and the drier it is, the more ground we have to cover, because in some years, in great wet years, it may be that within an hour radius of where we’re staying, there’s a half dozen –
John Devney: There’s a bunch of them.
Ramsey Russell: Well, there’s a half dozen areas that are holding birds because of water, they get off in that water, then they go and feed in surrounding areas. This year, this past year was horrific, it was horrific. You would drive forever and not see anything and then you would find an area with waterfowl. Now, again, we’re chasing white birds and there would be white trailers and trucks galore. And I actually went, I left my newfie buddies and drove just a little bit west of there and all the folks, all the freelancers I had seen where we’d been hunting, plus all the other outfitters that coming from a long ways away, were clobbered up in that area, it could be that you might see 10 or 15 trucks out scouting around and because the birds were so concentrated, which brings me to the point and I’m building up to my big question for you is, I’ve seen Canada comes and goes, that prairie ecosystem is, I just imagine the water distribution that is so dynamic, it almost to me like if I imagine a cloud shadow floating over slow motion, floating over the prairies, I see the shadow over there and that’s going to be wet next year and I see the shadow over yonder and that’s where it’s going to be wet the following year, just those water levels will – at times, it’ll be everywhere, but at times it’ll be just real patchy, increasingly so. But, John, for the past 5 years, 6 years, whatever that I’ve been making the run up to hunt with the Newfies, it is just getting drier and drier and drier and some of the stuff I saw last year, like these cattail marshes that I wouldn’t have stepped off into on a dare or a lost bet, just bottomless cesspools, chest deep, they were bone dry, you could drive your truck out through them and it was over. It wasn’t just in one little area, it was from Alberta clear out into Manitoba, I mean, you might drive an hour and a half and not see a drop of water and because you got a lot of these real deep wetlands that those road that the highways across and they were just bone dry and I’ve never seen anything like that. And from what I’m hearing, it’s only gotten worse, not better.
John Devney: I don’t know if it’s gotten a lot better, I don’t know if it gets a lot worse.
Ramsey Russell: How could it have gotten better, John, it was 540 in Edmonton, Alberta, it was warm and they didn’t get the snow pack, you didn’t get the permafrost. You didn’t get the 12ft of snow, you didn’t get a monsoon, Noah building ark rain. It can’t be any – it can’t be improved.
John Devney: Well, I think areas of Alberta have actually had some decent snow here over the last month. Saskatchewan’s had some rains and some snow, I mean, we’ll know here well enough here as they start flying surveys. But the thing about it is, as you point out, Ramsey, is it takes a perfect storm to have the penultimate kind of duck production we want to have. You’ve got to have it water spread across that massive geography and we don’t just, I think and it depends, but we don’t just get there off of one rain or one snow. You get there off of starting going into the fall with a good frost seal, meaning you got moisture in your soil, you get good snowfall over the course of the winter and then you get some timely spring rains, that’s the way you get there. Now listen, there’s years where I’ve come through the winter, been real worried about the drought and then you get 2 weeks of frog choking rain and you’re all sudden, man, you’re back in business. In some years, you may not have the soil moisture, but you get the right kind of snow and you get the right kind of melt and some spring rains, but you just think about – you think how big the prairies are, go from Des Moines, Iowa, to north of Edmonton, Alberta, think how big that geography is and for it all to be crazy wet at one time. We know it happens I mean, it would, we know what happens when it happens is 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. Man, you crank out some ducks late 90s was another period, but it’s pretty rare where the whole of the prairies wet at the same time. And so, what you typically get and the way the system seems to be these days is the US prairies has been asked to carry a lot bigger chunk of load because we’ve been wetter, while Prairie Canada has been drier.
Ramsey Russell: Gosh. I was at Ducks Unlimited Wetland Center over in Manitoba, I don’t know, last year or year before and just walk around and reading some different, looking at some different displays and reading some different stuff and I thought I read that Canada has 1/4th of the world’s wetlands, it was some mind blowing number. 1/4th of the world’s wetlands are in Canada, something I think I read that just blew my mind and it made me wonder, I wonder what percent of North American ducks are produced in Canada or does anybody even know? I wonder how many of the fall flight come out of Canada? Their landscapes changing, too with the agriculture, but at the same time, that’s a big country.
John Devney: It’s a big country. A lot of that wetland resource, though, is boreal, Ramsey and so it’s really low density compared to what we see on the prairies. But I mean, it’s interesting, you talk to guys in their 70s and 80s and it’s all, Prairie Canada. If you look at where we’ve been making ducks here the last 20 years, it shifted to the US Prairies. Now, part of that is we’ve generally been a little wetter than they have. Our wetland resource is in a lot better shape here, Ramsey, than it is in Prairie Canada. The loss rate for small, shallow wetlands in cropland in Canada is 0.88% a year.
Ramsey Russell: Say that again.
John Devney: The loss rate for small, shallow wetlands and cropland in Prairie Canada is 0.88% a year. And that’s dated, that’s probably, there’s a lag in time, so it may actually be a little worse than that in contemporary times. And listen, if your money manager, if you went down and sat with the guy, that was your stock jockey Ramsey and he told you, man, Ramsey, we had a kick ass year, we got a 0.88% return, you’d fire him, you’d say, time to look for another guy. Here’s the thing, though think about it in the inverse, a 0.88% wetland loss rate on top of the historic loss rates that we’ve seen in Prairie Canada and Prairie US, for that matter, that means assuming I don’t get hit by a bus and eat more salads and jog more, I live for another 30 years, I live to be 83. If that loss rate is sustained at that levels, we’ll have 25% less wetlands than we do right now.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
John Devney: And remember, you and I’ve talked about it a jillion times, those small, shallow wetlands and cropland are the engine that has to kickstart the duck factory.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
John Devney: And so that’s happening and it’s been happening in Prairie Canada for quite some time and yeah, we’re going to have wet years and yeah, we’re going to have dry years, the thing that worries duck managers up in this part of the world is if we continue to lose those basins, we turn it into perpetual drought.
Ramsey Russell: That’s the scary part. John, how would you compare the current wetland situation, current habitat situation in Prairie Canada, Prairie United States, as compared to the 70s or 80s? Back in what I think of as good old days, that’s back in the back when I was younger. But how would you compare? I mean, how much have we lost? You’re talking about 25% loss over so much time. Well, have we lost 25%, 30%, 40%, 50% since then?
John Devney: Probably since the 70s, no, but remember we drained a hell of a lot coming out of World War II.
Ramsey Russell: Heck, yeah.
John Devney: 60s and through the 70s, I mean you’ve got places like North Dakota. North Dakota, which has an incredible wetland resource, Ramsey, we probably lost half of that or more in parts of North Dakota. You go into Iowa they’ve lost probably 90, 95% the Ag landscapes of Minnesota, probably 90% wetland loss rates, especially those small, shallow wetlands, big chunks of South Dakota. Obviously, Prairie Canada has seen that same historic trend. The thing that’s held it up, that’s got the wetland resource in better shape in the US Prairies versus Canada are 2 things. One is duck hunter started buying wetland conservation, wetland easements in the 60s through the Fish & Wildlife Service, through our duck stamps, that’s protected more than a 3rd of the wetland resource in the US Prairies, it’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
John Devney: And then you’ve had Swampbuster as part of the farm bill since the 1985 farm bill that says farmers can’t drain and continue to retain and continue to receive federal farm benefits, that’s been on the book since 1985. And listen, that’s got its wards, but it’s providing a level of protection for that wetland resource out in agricultural landscapes.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s just what I’m seeing happening increasingly, I’m going to say the last 10 years, but this year, it just seems to be hitting a fever pitch. This drought, this low productivity is all is on everybody’s mind on the heels of a warm winter that even what ducks came south, most of them came south late you got a lot of –
John Devney: You’ve got smarter, old adults.
The Complexity of Management: Understanding the complexities of waterfowl management.
Boy, I was on such a tear about adaptive harvest management, which I don’t understand. I’ve had smart guys like Todd Arnold, like Brad Bortner, they’ve been on here talking about this stuff, so I do understand it better now.
Ramsey Russell: Smarter, old adults, you got a lot of disappointed duck hunters and I’ll share this with you, I can remember 2 seasons ago, maybe 3, I was on a tear. Boy, I was on such a tear about adaptive harvest management, which I don’t understand. I’ve had smart guys like Todd Arnold, like Brad Bortner, they’ve been on here talking about this stuff, so I do understand it better now. But I didn’t understand it, all I knew, John, as a duck hunter, all I knew was I didn’t have no ducks. Where the hell are the ducks? You know what I’m saying? Because back in the 90s, when I was in college, had a lot of time to hunt but didn’t travel as far. I was hunting, I mean, the most unlikely areas, I wouldn’t hunt now, I can tell you that. But that’s what I hunted and I killed ducks. Where in the hell of the ducks? Why are the ducks becoming more and more concentrated in areas that I’m not hunting every day in Mississippi or Arkansas or abroad? It’s just, it’s crazy. And so I really got that, I really felt, went down a tear of because I didn’t understand it, because it didn’t reconcile with what I was seeing anywhere, because it didn’t seem congruous with what all the duck hunters I’m talking to on a daily basis are saying that adaptive harvest management is a bunch of junk science. I really fell off as rabbit hole and I can remember one particular night that one bourbon led to another and another at camp. One of my buddies just got to be where he popped in and goes, he’s still talking about that and he’d leave, you know what I’m saying? I was railing on the system, son. But I feel like I’ve learned a lot and what I feel like I’ve learned in meeting with a lot of people like yourself and many others, smart scientists. Number one, they’re all hunters, there’s no conspiracy, there’s no collusion and number two because they’re duck hunters, man, they want ducks just like I do. They committed their lives and their careers and the focus of all their energies onto sustainable waterfowl populations as I began to understand it and then I became aware that relative to anywhere else on earth, outside the United States and Canada, anywhere, it’s not that we just got the best science, we got the only science. And now I see a lot of policy pushes, I see a lot of smart, serious, articulate, ardent, long time duck hunters frustrated and grind an axis, we need change, something’s got to change. This thing as we think about it, those of us that can go back to the 70s and 80s and think about it, go back to the 90s and think about it, to now. Something’s got to change, John, I don’t know what it, so anyway –
John Devney: Yeah, the thing that’s interesting, Ramsey, is I got a dear friend of mine in Oklahoma City who loved to quail hunt. And I don’t know that much about quail, I don’t know that much about quail hunting, although I figured out in a real hurry that shooting wild quail is a big difference in shooting pen race quail faster and took me a long time to ever shoot one. But you go to places like some parts of Texas, some parts of Oklahoma, those folks were the quail populations because I think drought primarily, I’m sure, habitat change and some other issues. I mean, you had guys that were committed quail hunters selling their bird dogs and then all of a sudden, the right environmental conditions came back and you couldn’t find a good bird dog in Oklahoma or West Texas.
Ramsey Russell: That’s true in Texas and Oklahoma, but east of the Mississippi River, Dr. Kapooth introduced me to the founder of the Bird Dog Museum over in Grand Junction. And I really, because quail hunting ain’t really my wheelhouse, I really kind of blew it off initially as we got to talking about it and thinking about it, yeah, I want to meet this guy and because here we are, what I feel at times, what I personally feel about duck hunting and the changes, where the hell are the ducks? Why can’t I go out to this place near Stockville, Mississippi, this creek and shoot ducks like I used to? Why can’t I go just anywhere and shoot ducks? But what I feel is this truncating of this cultural experience, this experience that I know and am passionate about and passed on to my kids, they’re not having in their 20s and 30s the experience as I did on an often enough basis, their experience doesn’t seem the same I had, okay, they’re not building those stories like we were. And so hang on with me while I’m muddling through this, I go and meet with a 100 year old quail hunter since the day is long, I mean, he and his family had raised bird dogs since he was – Before he was born. They had a backyard full of them and they could leave their house and go hunt bird dog, hunt quail all day long. I listened to my wife’s stories of my wife’s grandparents, same thing, we still hunt that farm some. My brother in law carrying over from that bird hunting still die hard, but it’s not what it was and quail hunting in the deep south, the lack of wild birds through that hay day, when you might go get a dozen or 15 or 20 coveys on point a day, it’s been since the 60s and 70s since that happened according to the old timer I talked to, it’s gone and a lot of it’s got to do with what changing landscape and a lot of the topics we’ve already talked about, a lot of topics I’ve had a lot of guests talking about whether it’s birds migrating – later birds migrating, staying further north, birds some species coming further south, it’s all got to do with a changing landscape at the continental level. And it’s hard for me to believe, but one time in the deep south, quail hunting was ginormous. I mean, I hadn’t seen no labs mounted, but to walk into the Bird Dog Museum and see a pointer that was so good and so beloved and so famous that he was mounted in the late 1800s because the landowner had a – The owner had buried that dog with a broken heart and 2 or 3 days later dug him up, he just couldn’t bear to have that dog not be in his life anymore when he’s still sitting in that museum, it’s a bygone era and that there have been times in the past, like when I was writing on the system, that man duck hunting is entering a bygone era. And that’s so, John, I’m getting – now I’m going to get down to a number I wanna talk about. And I’m seeing other people, I’m hearing other people frustrated, not just a few, a lot of frustrated folks, death by a thousand cuts we’re dealing with, so I’m digging around, trying to make sense of some numbers. Somebody had posted up, I don’t know, somewhere along the lines and Canada had killed 350,000 mallards, which, honestly seems mighty low to me, that does seem like a low number. But then again, what I tell you, most people I know up there are targeting geese, it’s a goose culture and all the boys I hunt with, given all the locals, they all want to target geese and I like to target geese up there. So I started doing a little bit, well, what does that mean? So I just googled, thank you and I stumbled across a number and this number really made my head explode. That in the 21, 22 season, the United States shot 8.2 million ducks, not waterfowl, John. Ducks, not ducks and geese and snow geese and speckle bellies and Canadas and resident birds. Ducks, 8.2 million ducks and my head exploded and I know that the harvest in Mexico, I met with the head of Mexico, Ducks Unlimited and very intelligent guy, got his hands in all the pieces down there and he said, what, it might be a little low, but we believe 100,000 ducks, which sounded terribly low to me. Are you kidding? Based on my experiences in Mexico, 100,000 ducks ain’t no way. Well, this year I had time and I started spitballing and I don’t mean just 5 or 10 minutes, I had to break out the calculator and a piece of paper to keep the numbers going. And I made some phone calls and there are 20 outfitters in all of Mexico. And I’m talking from the Gulf of Mexico clear out to the Pacific Ocean, there are 20 outfitters. And a lot of them, just because they got permits and just because they got a business and they keep their umas going, they register, an outfitter doesn’t mean they’re really putting up numbers, it really doesn’t. I’m the outfitters I’m working with and some of the outfitters I know that I’m not are putting up numbers, putting up serious numbers. And so I’ve got this one outfit out in western Mexico, the math is real simple, stupid. I kind of know how many hunters go, I know what the limit is, I know them boys stop at the limit and it’s just as simple this time boom, 12,800 ducks a season.
John Devney: Wow.
Ramsey Russell: On the one hand, John, that’s a lot of dead teal and shovelers. On the other hand, I never forget meeting with a sheriff out in somewhere near Sacramento, California, one time and he had a club. He was the president of a duck club in California, in the grasslands and they shot that many ducks a season. One club in the grasslands, one duck club in California shot that many ducks. So I take that number and say, well, I know that only a half dozen outfitters, if I say about a half dozen outfitters down here in Mexico are putting up those kinds of numbers and I know for a fact they are not, that’s why we don’t work with them, then I’m looking at about 100,000 ducks. But if I assume that all the outfitters are putting up those kind of numbers and I know for a fact they’re not, still, I’m only looking at a quarter million ducks, which pales greatly as compared to 8.2 million ducks. I don’t know what the goose number is, but I’d say it’s at least another 2 or 3 or 4 million. And okay, so almost, let’s just double that number and say, well, crap, I’m just going to get crazy here and say a half million ducks get killed in Mexico. Plus, in the last 20 years, 600,000 at the high point reported in Canada and by all indications, anybody in the biological field on our side of the border says that Canada’s estimate harvest estimates are way more accurate than ours. We’re looking at 1.1 million ducks as compared to 8.2 million ducks.
John Devney: And that’s a low number for the US.
Ramsey Russell: What would be a high number for the US? 10 million, 11 million.
John Devney: North of there, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. See, John, when you think about Mexico, all the pictures we see in Mexico, if I just absolutely extrapolate, jackpot crazy high numbers rounding up and doubling, just for the hell of it, coming up with a half million ducks, there ain’t no way. It’s really closer to about 200,000 than anything else. By comparison, America’s killing 8 million more ducks, that’s crazy. Those numbers, the amount you talk about the pressure and talk about the serious hunters and that’s just a mind blowing number. Now, here’s what really made my head spin. Well, never mind, the fact is there really aren’t harvest numbers for the rest of the world. But when I started adding and extrapolating Mexico and knowing the numbers of Canada as compared to the United States and just what you’re saying is just a regular number, not a high number for the United States, 8.2 million. I’ve said several times, I believe this to be true that if you took the harvest for anywhere else in the world, I’d say we equal the top 5 countries or more. But truth matter is probably the United States is killing more ducks than everybody else in the world combined. That’s unbelievable. We’ve got that much and it’s guided not by people’s opinions, because if we start going in a popularity opinion contest on what the world’s saying, forget the science, John, let’s just throw adaptive harvest management to science and everything else, just throw it to the curb, it’s junk. Let’s go with what I see. How would that change bag limits if California got to raise their hand and vote on what their limits are going to be every day? If guys in Mississippi got to raise their hand and say how many ducks they’re going to shoot every day, if we all just said, look, we know what’s what, here’s what we’re going to shoot, it would totally change. I guarantee we wouldn’t have a one pintail limit.
John Devney: You can bet your –
Ramsey Russell: It’d be some 7 to 10 pintail limits again, somewhere based on personal observations. And that’s how I’ve come from adaptive harvest management to, wait a minute. it ain’t perfect science because what is? But it’s the best science we got, I’d rather stick with it than somebody’s personal observations. But here, getting back to that 8.2 million number, so I dig a little deeper and out of 8.2 million ducks, which – prove me wrong, if anybody listening knows the numbers and knows that I’m wrong, please let me know and I will correct this, but until somebody proves me wrong, I’m going to stick to my final answer, which is 8.2 million ducks killed in the United States in 21, 22 equals way more ducks than killed everywhere else worldwide combined. Out of that number, 5 states, California, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Minnesota, killed over half of them. No wonder there’s some disgruntled hunters around. I mean, wow. 5 states killed over half the number of ducks killed in the United States of America. 4 of those states got rice. 4 of those states are among the 7 big rice states, which says a lot about the benefits of rice relative to agriculture. But still, John, when you start looking at these numbers like this, it’s like, on the one hand, what the hell have I got to complain about? That’s where I’ve come. What do I got to complain about? Holy cow. We Americans are killing more ducks than all the other countries combined.
John Devney: But that’s not why we do this and I think the tension is okay and appropriate to a point. I mean, the American duck hunter has also invested more in conservation than anybody else.
Ramsey Russell: Billions more.
John Devney: The American duck hunter has raised his voice on things like the Pittman Robertson tax on the North American Wetland Conservation Act, on the small, the Mike Bird Conservation fund. So the reason I think that you get this tension is the level of passion and commitment is so high. Not to mention the fact that 40 years ago, how many fancy duck clubs were there in Arkansas or Illinois or we just talked about Minnesota, which is kind of an interesting outlier. People have invested that huge sum, both philanthropically and then on dirt they own, to shoot ducks, primarily mallard ducks, if we’re being really honest about it. And so when that experience doesn’t live up to the expectation, going back to the conversation we started this with, it creates a tension and I think the tension is natural and it’s wholly appropriate and I think duck hunter should always be wanting more, but let’s go back to quail. So the reason quail blanked out in the east, the sort of old, traditional quail range, not that dry stuff in the plains. What caused it? Ramsey?
Ramsey Russell: Habitat changed, son. Our timber got thick and grew up, we quit, we’d suppress fire. It’s a totally changed landscape from back what it was during the heyday of quail hunting in the deep south, the landscape is totally different.
John Devney: Totally different. So let’s look at the landscape we have today. I’d make the argument. So let’s stack all the factors, at least for the contemporary time. 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 told us this landscape is still capable of producing a hell of a lot of ducks. You go back and you look at the harvest estimates and those the harvest in places like Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, like it was a monumental pile of dead ducks, we were wet. Did we have less wetlands and 2010 than we did in 1999? There’s no doubt about it, on the prairies, do we have less wetlands in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 than we did in the 70s? There’s no doubt about it. But this landscape is still capable of those big booms, but we got to be wet. And so that’s what’s happening on the prairies, we got wetland loss rates, we have high predation rates, we have lower production in lots of places, which all negatively influences how many ducks leave here to fly soft and fall. But then let’s go to the south. Let’s look at the Louisiana coast and how much rice has been converted to sugar cane production –
Ramsey Russell: Or crawfish, prawns.
John Devney: Let’s look at how much rice is left the Texas Gulf coast. Let’s look at how many less food resources are available to ducks in the Mississippi Alluvial valley than there was 25 years ago. Let’s look at how much less surface water is on the landscape today versus when I first saw it in 1999. And so, yeah, quail got caught in a confluence. Quail, I don’t know what the hell the home range is of a quail, but if it’s a mile, that’d be pretty remarkable.
Ramsey Russell: That’s probably about right. A mile, mile and a half.
John Devney: From birth to death, a mile. Now take this take a mallard duck who’s breeding in the Eastern Dakotas, Saskatchewan, wherever that mallard is coming from and then send it on a pike and see how much landscape change that duck is seen since all the stuff those guys in South Louisiana and all the history and tradition. Who’s the guy with the great duck all collection and you’ve had him on your show, Ramsey, a bunch of times.
Ramsey Russell: You talking about Ryan? Yeah, you got to be talking about Ryan.
John Devney: But I mean, you just think of how much this has changed. Now, I think that puts responsibility on us as duck hunters to care about it as much as we do. Guys like you, guys like your listeners, about a million of us in the United States, which ain’t very many human beings. How are we going to respond? How did we respond? And when things got tough in the 60s –
Impact of Hunting Pressure and Access.
As waterfowl distribution is changing and you’re seeing areas that have, areas that have not, whether it’s hunting pressure, whether it’s access, whether it’s changing landscapes, whatever it is and I hear it and I hear it.
Ramsey Russell: We’ll see that. That’s what worries me is why I try to keep it positive is increasingly, as waterfowl distribution is changing and you’re seeing areas that have, areas that have not, whether it’s hunting pressure, whether it’s access, whether it’s changing landscapes, whatever it is and I hear it and I hear it. Have it directed to me at text, have it said to me, I read it posted up everywhere, we need less duck hunters and John with 70 some odd percent of waterfowl habitat as expressed in kilo calories being on private lands, we don’t need less duck hunters. I don’t, I’m scared that it’s going to be the guys that are spending all that time and money you’re talking about, they’re so passionate. Not just spending it on shotguns and duck calls and fun stuff that goes into Pitman Robertson, but I mean, the guys that are impounding water and pumping water and planting crops and managing more soil and protecting lands on private property if we start calling for just arbitrary restrictions and a push for limits without ignoring the science, I’m scared if we – that for whatever reason, a further decline in duck hunters happens, it’s not going to be the guys at the public boat ramp that quit as much as it’s going to be the financial investments of the guys on private property. And we all know, I’ve heard this, too there’s a lot of guys that resent the private landowners, but those ducks don’t just sit on them property. They’re attractive and hold within that geographic area and they fly to other properties, too. It benefits the waterfowl on a continental basis and I’m scared that if we start losing the financial investment of private landowners that are managing habitat for waterfowl on private property, where 70 something percent resides, we’re losing more habitat, we’re losing a lot of critical habitat. We can’t lose duck hunters and fight the fight and continue this tradition.
John Devney: No, what we need to do, though, is our public lands, especially in the south, need to contribute more. And we talked about it, Ramsey. I mean, we did an assessment back in 2020 during COVID nobody was going in the office and all the rest in the early days of COVID, we did, worked with Ed Penny, who you know well and we did an assessment of failing infrastructure for priority waterfowl refuges to manage waterfowl habitat, Ed and I, Ed went through his DU channels, I went through mine. We brought the list together, merged it, it’s a $250 million problem, Ramsey. Just on national wildlife refuges, we did the same thing on state areas, again, priority waterfall and wetland habitats on state areas, it was over $600 million. Well, if you’re the guy that’s going to pay $15,000 an acre to buy green timber in Arkansas or whatever the going rate is in North Louisiana and Mississippi, I bet you your levees and water control structures work and my concern about, especially in the south, is that our public trust resources haven’t kept pace with management and infrastructure. Imagine all the good work that’s going on, on private habitat management, imagine if we could manage our public lands the same way that the guy and his son or daughter from Clarksville, Tennessee, could go to a national wildlife refuge that’s well managed, that has the infrastructure, that has the personnel, that’s managing the kind of quality habitat that’s happening on the private sector. Isn’t that better for everybody?
Ramsey Russell: Right.
John Devney: And I think that’s one of our biggest challenges, is, as we’ve seen agriculture change in place like the Gulf coast and in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, we need more, way more out of our public lands, both for providing high quality habitat and then also providing high quality hunting opportunities.
Ramsey Russell: More is more, we need more. To your original question, though it wasn’t even a 100 years ago, it was within my granddaddy’s lifetime. We didn’t just have a drought like we got a drought now, we had a dust bowl drought. The financial institutions crashed, it was so bad, the Great Depression became out of it and at the time, because it was so long ago, we probably had more than 2% of our native prairie remaining up in your part of the world and still, it was just a dust bowl, horrific drought and those old guys didn’t have social media, they didn’t have whatever. They didn’t finger point at everybody and everything and every decoy company and every ammo cup. They didn’t finger point at all these little symptoms and pointed everything at everybody but themselves. They rolled up their sleeves and founded an organization that became Ducks Unlimited, the greatest wetlands conservation group on earth. And men like James Bell Ford converted his private recreational club into a research center that became Delta Waterfowl. It took vision, it took commitment, but it took people working together and getting on board together. And when I understand the disappointment, I understand power’s beyond my control, but I don’t understand the divisiveness, because back in those days, I’m guessing, the Great Depression, you might have had 2 million or more duck hunters. Now we’re down just below a million. We got half as many or less than what we had back then. We need everybody, it’s like Game of Thrones, winter is coming. We need everybody on this side of the wall fighting for it.
John Devney: The thing about it is and I don’t know what’s happened, this is a broader cultural issue. But I’ll be honest there are people running around this fall talking about paper ducks. I don’t know where the paper came from because I know what our press release said, Lois Mallard counts since 1993. We talked about how dry it was, DU and the Fish & Wildlife Service said the same thing. There seems to be and I not just about ducks and duck hunting, it’s about all of our society. Maybe 2 weeks to flatten the curve pissed everybody off enough where we’re just going to discredit any authority, who’s making up, who’s fabricating the mallard breeding population and who’s saying there’s more pawns than there are. The reality is these are empirical, objective measures, now, you can say that maybe we should have more moderate and restrictive seasons under AHM, but attacking the fact that we got people are saying there’s way more ducks than there are, who are those people? And what’s their benefit for saying that?
Ramsey Russell: And who told them we were going to have a great duck season this past year?
John Devney: I know who didn’t.
Ramsey Russell: Because I know looking at all the numbers, when the numbers came out, it wasn’t nothing to get excited about, it wasn’t nothing to bet the farm on.
John Devney: Well, I mean, here, I’ll give you the number. 7 out of the 10 species declined from 2022 and mallard’s were 23% below long term average. Breeding estimates had the lowest total duck count since 2005 and the lowest mallard count since 1993.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
John Devney: Now I get why people are frustrated by that. But the reality is that system is totally driven by what’s happening in South Dakota, North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in the form of precipitation.
Ramsey Russell: Brad explained to us why there’s a 2 year lag time, it’s just by necessity, it’s the politics and the policy of it all. But to those that think adaptive harvest management ought to be going into a more restrictive season, I’ve just got this sneaky feeling. It’s coming. Oh, you want to shoot fewer ducks because of adaptive harvest management? Let the numbers catch up, it’s coming. I personally don’t see how in the next year or 2 we’re going to continue short of Noah building ark, rainfall and environmental change up there that makes things wet again. I’ve heard people say, well, we’re only 3 big rains from great conditions up here. Well, yeah, it could be 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 years before we get those rains. We don’t know, we don’t have a spigot we can turn on, that’s all in God’s hands. We have no idea what’s going on.
John Devney: I think the other thing is we’ve talked about declining duck hunter numbers, you look at what’s happened to the duck harvest. We’re harvesting less ducks than we have in a very long time because we have less guns in the field. Now, I get it. It’s hard to reconcile that when you’re at the boat launch at Dave Donaldson and that’s a concentration of hunters. And you had the guys on for Manitoba, I have my experience in North Dakota, Kansas is doing what Kansas is doing. So competition for duck hunting is really intense, but the reality is you look at the numbers of duck hunters in the United States and Canada, it’s in decline.
Ramsey Russell: Well, John, there are some people that believe Canada’s killing too many of our ducks, never mind the fact they produce most of them. They’re killing too many. but how many –
John Devney: In 1974 –
Ramsey Russell: How many, when it’s easy to see – Boy, I tell you what, the week I spent up there west of our location and was bumping into 5 or 10 trucks a day, I might go, I might find my way turning left and right, going straight to that cloud of birds I’d seen from a couple of miles away. When I get there, there’s 2 or 3 other trucks already watching the field, it might seem like there’s a lot more people in Canada, but what do the harvest numbers say now versus the 70s and 80s? And put me relatives to some different states on a map. What are we looking at?
John Devney: 1974, both Saskatchewan and Alberta shot more mallard ducks than Arkansas did.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. 1974, how many more ducks?
John Devney: Quite a bit, I think each of those provinces were shooting 50,000 or 100,000 more mallards than Arkansas was in 1974.
Ramsey Russell: So back in the good old days, the real good old days –
John Devney: Everybody loves –
Ramsey Russell: The real good old days. The days I wish I could go back and live forever.
John Devney: Right.
Ramsey Russell: Canada was just one province was shooting 50 or –
John Devney: 2 provinces.
Ramsey Russell: 2 provinces were each 50,000 or 60,000 more mallards than we do now.
John Devney: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s sobering.
John Devney: Well, it’s what kills ducks. Shotguns kill ducks and shotguns in the hands of duck hunters kill ducks. If you have less duck hunters, yeah, you’ve got Saskatchewan’s resident duck hunter population has declined very significantly. Yeah, you’ve made up for a part of that with Americans going up there and hunting, both as freelancers and guided clients. But the reality is there just isn’t the days in the field with a shotgun and the same can be said about the US. If you start looking at the harvest numbers, go back to the Mississippi Flyway and I think these numbers, I may miss the years a little bit, Ramsey, so give me a little grace. In 1999, there were 553,600 estimated duck hunters in the Mississippi. Yeah, in 1999, 553,600 by the – right before 2020 and I don’t have the year exactly, we’re down to 386,100 duck hunters in the Mississippi Flyway. That’s a Mississippi Flyway, that’s a breadbasket.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
John Devney: And you start looking at duck hunter days of field, which is what really drives harvest. In 1999, that was 4.3 million by here, again, I didn’t, for some reason, I didn’t jot the numbers down, but I think it was 2019, maybe 2020, that number was down to 2.3 million. So 2 million less 100 days of field.
Ramsey Russell: Say it one more time. Because I am writing it down when you say it. Say it one more time.
John Devney: In 1999, yet 553,600 active waterfall hunters in the Mississippi Flyway. Estimated hunter days was 4.3, over 4.3 million. In the more contemporary value, again, I think it’s 2019, 2020, 386,100 active waterfall hunters.
Ramsey Russell: We lost about 30 or 40%.
John Devney: In our hundred days of field were reduced by not quite 50%, but by straight 2 million days of field.
Ramsey Russell: That’s pretty serious stuff. Wow, that’s pretty serious stuff. Now, John, building on that and changing the subject is, as far back as I can remember, Delta Waterfowl didn’t you all use, am I just a dream or imagining something? Because as far back as I can remember, it seems like Delta Waterfowl maybe even had a sticker that –
John Devney: Voluntary restraint.
Ramsey Russell: Promoted voluntary restraint. Now, I’m going to ask you a question facetiously and every single duck hunter that I know to a person, I could ask this question and get the same answer. Do you go out and target hens?
John Devney: I know I can tell you exactly how many head mallards there are.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. Because I struggle, now 127 – let me be the guy to say this first. All the 127 some odd species of ducks, geese and swans I’ve shot worldwide, I can count on 3 fingers, Maccoa duck the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I jotted it down the other day somewhere that I have not shot a hint of, I mean, all the North American species, I have shot hens and but let me say this pretty clearly. When a flock of ducks comes in, name the species, name the species of duck, when he comes in, nobody I know or have ever met or hunted with said, I’m shooting the brown, except for the guy that one of the provinces in Maritime Canada, they target the hen eiders. That’s what they eat, they’re easier to skin, that’s what they want, they’re the single exception. Everybody else in Canada and throughout the United States I know when the birds come in, everybody’s grabbing the drakes, every single one of us, but we probably should be grabbing the drakes and we’ve had some really nice conversations recently with guys like Todd Arnold, guys like Brad Bortner, about the hen, the whole hen ideal and stuff and it’s like, but I’ve always wondered, out of all these species of ducks and geese and swans, for that matter, as few as them get killed in North America that are hunted, only our beloved mallard duck has a hen limited all. And I wonder what’s special about them? What’s special about – and I’ve been in a lot of clubs and know a lot of folks that are just as passionate about shooting hen pintails and I’m just, I get it. Dead ducks don’t lay eggs, it’s just that simple and they don’t make a pretty picture either. But at the same time, it doesn’t appear to be shooting hens of blue wings when they come in the fall or for that matter, geese especially, it doesn’t seem to be hurting the population any. Do you think that goes back to shooting antler, this deer, this mentality we’ve got as hunters?
John Devney: Well, let me go back to VR. Remember what the origin, the context around VR and I wasn’t here, shit, I was a high school kid, college kid, when all that happened. But the original impetus was keep hunting and if you want to pass on hands, that was the impetus of it.
Ramsey Russell: Yep.
John Devney: And I think in the current time, here’s the deal, I’m pretty confident the Fish & Wildlife Service isn’t going to rid the world of hen mallards. I know that because we’ve got extraordinarily restrictive pintail limits. We’ve got extraordinarily restrictive bluebill limits, the point where I can shoot one bluebill a day. So biologically, probably not a big deal, the question though, is and I think that – and this conversation is coming up internally at Delta because people are passionate, because people are committed, because people care more about ducks than almost anything else. Is this a thing that we can do to perhaps make the world a little better place and so it becomes Ramsey, maybe way more about social -?
Ramsey Russell: Social engineering, if it feels good, it’s good for morale. I see that I can get on board with. I’m trying, it’s something I can control, so I’m trying to do it.
John Devney: I can’t control if it’s going to rain in Saskatchewan.
Ramsey Russell: And I think it says a lot. I think it says a tremendous amount about the American duck hunter.
John Devney: Right.
Ramsey Russell: That will say, the science says I can shoot 6, but I’m willing to shoot 4 and be just happy because it’s something I can do now that I can accept, that I can buy that I can buy. But, where I get bogged down is heard a conversation about, hell with adaptive harvest management, let’s shoot less. I’m like, it didn’t work with pintails. We’ve been on restrictive harvest pintails for 30 years and they ain’t bounced back. Why will it work with mallards? It didn’t work with pintails.
John Devney: Let’s focus on the things that matter most. Let’s think about them, so let’s start on the prairies. We can’t make it rain, but we can reduce the loss rate of small wetlands if we care enough. Let’s do that, let’s make sure the places have high reproductive potential through using, whether that means maintaining native grass, whether that means managing predators, using henhouses, let’s focus our dollars to make sure we’re sending ducks south. Let’s do that on the prairies and let’s go to the south and make sure our public trust resources, whether we’re talking about a WMA in Arkansas or refuge in Mississippi, has a staff, the people in the infrastructure and operations budgets to manage habitat as well as the private sector does. If we do all that, we’ll have happy duck hunters again and it rains. We need it to rain in Saskatchewan for love of God.
Ramsey Russell: Nobody’s complaining when the ducks are down, that’s the truth. And John, it’s like, I’m so appreciative to have conversations like this with people like yourself that know the numbers and know the science and it’s why we’ve really been on a tangent lately about getting all these folks and doing these interviews around these topics, it’s because I don’t know. I just know what I see over the duck blind and I know what I feel and man, I just, I know if I ain’t learned, but one thing in 58 years is a whole lot more I don’t know than what I do know and that I probably ought to be listening and exploring and finding out things I don’t know so I can make a better, be a better human being, be a better duck hunter and that it’s very important. It’s very daunting and challenging times in the world of duck hunting.
John Devney: But the thing about it is and the thing that I’m probably proudest about duck hunters and getting to work for duck hunters every day is they care enough to care, right.
Ramsey Russell: I’m going to go there, because you said that and this what I was getting at. 8.2 million ducks, we’re passionate, we care. Every duck hunter I know wants to know more about these topics, they want to know. They want to understand more about the habitat, more about the system. And you hear a lot of belly aching and going on and I’m right there with them down here in the deep south, right? And I’m a friend of mine out in Utah pointed this out to me, because they’ve got, you go out west, you got a lot of places around the United States have really good duck hunting. But you know what they don’t have? They got a lot of duck hunters, they got a lot of good duck hunters, they got a lot of traditions, but what they really don’t have is culture. And what I mean by that, he said you all got a southern duck hunting culture, Ramsey, that doesn’t exist. And I think it’s because you talk about us caring, it’s because that mallard duck and those ducks are not just a trigger pull. They really, truly are a part of our cultural identity and we don’t want to lose our cultural identity.
John Devney: Who in the world, I mean, I think this is the beauty of duck hunters, who in the world is we should cut bag limits and we should have a short – I haven’t heard too many people talk about a shorter season. These people are saying, this means enough to me that I’m willing to reduce the thing I love most.
Ramsey Russell: Exactly.
John Devney: And that’s a wonderful thing, culturally about duck hunting. Now, I may tell you, we should spend more time thinking about the refuge infrastructure and refuge staffing levels or the wetland loss rate in Saskatchewan. But I also know that I don’t have an answer for a duck hunter, whether that duck hunters in Alabama or Louisiana or Kansas, that the things that we’re working on today are going to conserve wetlands at the scales we hope to, that’s all about convincing government to do the right thing and frankly, my appetite for dealing with governments lately is in a pretty low lap. But I think the beauty of it is that passion, that commitment, that energy then gets translated onto guys like me that I know what my job is every day. There’s lots of people at Delta, there’s lots of people at DU, there’s lots of people at the Fish & Wildlife Service, there’s lots of people in game and fish agencies, guys at the California Waterfowl Association that are as driven by that passion as duck hunters are and I think if there’s one thing that disappoints me about this chatter is thinking that somebody somewhere doesn’t care as much is the guy that’s shouting at the moment.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, I really think wherever that’s coming from, I think that everybody’s heart’s in the right place and I think that there are people out there creating great conversation around this topic. It may not be exactly how I see the world, but it’s a necessary conversation. It’s just, I hate to see the message be interpreted as we need less duck hunters, to your point, there’s 50% less man days in the Mississippi Flyaway than it was in 1999 and I don’t want to deal with no dang politician, I don’t trust them all. But the same way numbers and money is political relevance and if we’re going to talk to them and we’re going to institute any changes whatsoever to hold the fort, then we got to all be hand in hand fighting the white walkers to go back to that narrative. We got to be in this together. We can’t lose anybody. We need to recruit folks on our side and to fight this fight. We can’t control the water, but we control the grasslands. We can control the habit. We can control what habitat we can. We control the culture. And I just believe Anthony Fauci ought to be crucified in a duck swamp somewhere for creating so much mistrust in science.
John Devney: I think Anthony Fauci a part of it, but I think there’s, I don’t know what it is, I’m convinced about half of America right now. If you told them the sunrise in the east would be up at dawn to double check it.
Ramsey Russell: Not a duck hunter, buddy. I guarantee us duck hunters know better. But anyway, John, I appreciate you, I always have a great conversation, it always makes me think when I have you on and I appreciate it. I pass through this fall, I’ll stop by and see you, we’ll go get a hamburger.
John Devney: Sounds great. The passion is great. I just want you, I want all your listeners to know everybody’s listening, everybody’s trying as hard as they can to do the things within our control. Let’s focus on the things that we think have the most potential. Let’s talk about public lands, especially in place like the south in a way that we haven’t because I’m concerned, I mean, I’ll be real honest, Ramsey, let’s say we get wet again, maybe next spring, let’s go back to 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, big boom in production populations go through the rough again, my concern at the end of the day is who’s going to be able to enjoy that resource.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
John Devney: Right. And is a guy that doesn’t own or lease an acre ground and kind of unrepentant public land wandering duck hunter in North Dakota. I want to make sure that opportunities accessible to lots of people for a very long time.
Ramsey Russell: Somebody to cut his teeth on public land and still hunts public land. It is one of the most – I’m not trying to marginalize anybody. Don’t think that at all. I mean, I think it’s vitally important, John. I mean, what do – As somebody that has done a lot of work in policy, what can a regular guy like me do? Show up at commissioner meetings?
John Devney: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a big one. We got to unlock some big buckets of federal money, frankly. I think everybody grumbles, I remember working with Ed Penny when he worked at the state of Mississippi, they were trying to pass license bill increase and everybody howled because the crappie tag was going to go up $3 and duck license was going to go up by $4. Well, how the hell are you going to fix those water control structures on WMAs if you don’t have money. Who’s going to pay the diesel to pump and who’s going to be the guy out disk in those moist soil units. Like if we want high quality public lands we’re going to have to convince government to invest in it. And I think there’s some people, there’s some key people in Congress, whether it’s Roger Wicker in Mississippi, John Bozeman in Arkansas, Bruce Westerman from Arkansas, there’s people wanting to have this conversation and I think we got to have it. Again, I want to have big fall flights ducks, that’s a big part of what I want to do every day but I want to make sure that people have access to it too.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That’s the other side of that coin. Yep. John, thank you very much. Folks, you all have been listening to my buddy John Devney up at Delta Waterfowl in North Dakota. Thank you all very much for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Lot to unpack, lot to think about, winter’s coming, guys we got to hold the fort. See you next time.
[End of Audio]
LetsTranscript transcription Services
