EP 423. Harlequin Ducks in the Balance in Washington State

 

The Collector State

They’ve got the puddle ducks, they’ve got the geese, they’ve got some cool stuff but for a long time, especially out here on the Olympic Peninsula, sea ducks and those collectible species have always been the draw.

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am sitting on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. I go out with a tour with my host today. We’re just driving around, getting licenses, getting sorted, and the very first pair of ducks I lay my eyes on down by the marines is a pair of Harlequin ducks. I saw them from a mile away. I couldn’t believe it. It was amazing. What an amazing resource Washington state is. They’ve got the puddle ducks, they’ve got the geese, they’ve got some cool stuff but for a long time, especially out here on the Olympic Peninsula, sea ducks and those collectible species have always been the draw. Today’s guest is Kyle Spragens. He is the state waterfowl manager for the state of Washington. A lot of cool issues we’re going to talk about today in terms of waterfowl management strategies in the state of Washington. A lot of species that aren’t just mallards and pintails. A lot of unique waterfowl management strategies out here and, also understand I’m right across the sound from Seattle. We’re talking tremendous amount of west coast humanity that doesn’t necessarily agree with waterfowl hunting, that doesn’t understand hunting at all, that is oblivious to what is necessary for sustainable populations of waterfowl, whether you hunt them or not, and their habitats. It’s going to be a great episode today. Kyle, how the heck are you?

Kyle Spragens: I’m great. It’s nice to meet you.

Ramsey Russell: Where are you coming from today? You’re not out here in Port Townsend, man. You drove somewhere to get here. Did you have to cross the ferry?

Kyle Spragens: No ferry today. But I do live down in Olympia, the capital of Washington state.

Ramsey Russell: Seattle’s not the capital.

Kyle Spragens: Seattle is not the capital. Little, teeny, tiny Olympia, Washington, down at the southern end of the sound is the capital. It’s a tiny, little 18,000 person town, but it’s where a lot of the main state office buildings are. So the headquarters for Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is based in Olympia, Washington, and that’s where I’m stationed.

Ramsey Russell: You told me earlier you’re not born and raised in Washington state.

Kyle Spragens: I am not. I am actually from the San Francisco Bay Area of California. So I was one of those highly urbanized kids that didn’t know anything about waterfowl growing up or waterfowl hunting growing up, my family was not waterfowl hunters. So it’s been that trajectory to get here.

Ramsey Russell: What did you do growing up in the Bay Area? What was your childhood like? Because you didn’t grow up, maybe hunting and fishing a lot like kids did in rural areas, but yet here you are.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Recruitment, Retention, and Reactivation in Hunting

Ramsey Russell: So what was your childhood like in that area?

Kyle Spragens: Yeah, well, I guess-

Ramsey Russell: Hanging out down on Hyde Ashbury.

Kyle Spragens: No. I was born in Oakland, so highly urban. But my parents moved when I was 3 up to the North Bay kind of wine country, what people know as wine country. So we were sort of rural, rural for the Bay area, but I would attribute it to my mom always had a hobby farm. What I’d call a hobby farm, basically chickens, ducks around, sheep, goats. You know, it’s typical little small scale hobby farm. So going out, feeding the animals, picking up the ducks, dealing with eggs-

Ramsey Russell: Was your mom raising those animals for pets, or was it like a-

Kyle Spragens:It was largely kind-

Ramsey Russell: Was it kind of a sourced meat?

Kyle Spragens: No, it was largely pets. I mean, we used the eggs, but it was mostly just to have the pets around like that.

Ramsey Russell: Have animals around. That kind of spawned your interest in your relationship with what became wildlife?

Kyle Spragens: Yep. We had some geese and ducks that would, and a little pond and a creek that ran through. So we were on a little bit of acreage, so that was not totally, you know, highly urban area, but going out chasing tadpoles in the creek, watching the birds on the pond, going and find where the goose is nesting, because you could tell that the male is being protective, those types of things. I think looking back on it now certainly spurred my interest about asking questions why are these animals doing.

Ramsey Russell: Boyhood with this affinity for the outdoors?

Kyle Spragens: Right. It wasn’t hunting base. My parents weren’t in hunt, grew up hunting. They grew up in more sort of urban areas, too.

Ramsey Russell: When did you start hunting?

Kyle Spragens: So when I was 11, 12 my stepdad and his brother-in-law actually were getting back into waterfowl hunting. So it was sort of the classic. It was everything, recruitment, retention, and reactivation all going on in terms of where I fit into it. So, ironically, growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, we would drive 2 hours to the central valley of California to go hunting for ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Puddle ducks, I’m guessing.

Kyle Spragens: Mostly puddle ducks-

Ramsey Russell: Not the bay Area. Not the scoters and the canvasbacks and the golden eyes and-

Kyle Spragens: No. I remember doing a youth hunt in the north Bay, probably first year that I went hunting, but it was mostly focused on the rice fields of the Central Valley California, and so targeting dabbling ducks and just trying to get into it. Basically what came out of that is I started asking too many questions, and they’re like, well, you know what? There’s these biologists at this refuge here. You should go in there and ask them a bunch of questions. So the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge complex got to meet some of the biologists there, started asking them as I was growing up, where did they go to school? About 9/10 of them at that time had gone to Humboldt State University of Northern California.

Ramsey Russell:  Yeah

Kyle Spragens: When I was a junior in high school, I knew that I wanted to go to Humboldt State University to do something with waterfowl.

Ramsey Russell: Is that where you got your degree at Humboldt State?

Kyle Spragens: Both my undergrad and my graduate degree.

Ramsey Russell: Wow

Kyle Spragens: yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be danged. So, just interested, why did your stepdad and uncle get out of duck hunting and then back into it? What events conspired it? Was it access?

Kyle Spragens: Career-

Ramsey Russell: What? Back in the 80s, 90s?

Kyle Spragens: This would have been early 90s. So-

Ramsey Russell: Around that steel shot era. They say we lost about a million duck hunters with the inception. Now, there was a lot going on in that day. One it was beyond just steel shot, but when they mandated steel shot around that period of time, we lost half our duck hunters. What was twice as many duck hunters as exist today? Half of them got out of it. But there was also some wonky things going on with duck populations, bag limits. It was a tough time to be a duck hunter.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. My first or second season was when it crunched down to, I think, a 4 bird bag limit in California, which is really low. That’s really restrictive, multiple factors. They got out of it just because of family and careers and time. Money and time are precious. So how do you spend it. I think that was probably what drove them away. What got them back into it at that time, I’m actually not sure. Cause it was a wall. It was sort of a bottom out period in that early nineties, just before adaptive harvest management.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. Right about that era right there. What was your first duck? Do you remember?

Kyle Spragens: Oh, yeah. Crystal clear. Northern pintail.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Drake?

Kyle Spragens: Nope. Hen.

Ramsey Russell: Hen. Okay.

Kyle Spragens: At that point, I wasn’t selective. I was just 11, 12-year old trying to figure out, what is this?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kyle Spragens: The fact that I hit anything was a small miracle, but it was a hen. I remember we were actually with a guided outfit in the east side of Central Valley, and all four of us got a bird, but I got this hidden on the left side of the blind, so I still very clearly remember it. Later on, my first bird that I got solely on my own, under my own calling and figuring things out was a Drake northern pintail.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What kind of questions were you asking them? That they just said, golly, this kid. I mean, what were you asking them at the time?

Kyle Spragens: Why can we shoot these birds? How do we know how many we can shoot? I started asking all these how do we know this is okay type questions.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. In terms of just sustainability.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah, I think it was more from that standpoint. Then I hadn’t shot a banded bird, but there was a banded bird shot at some point. I started asking, like, well, who puts this on? Who gets to do that?

Ramsey Russell: Oh.

Kyle Spragens: What kind of information is tied to that? Right. So just out of curiosity, questions were.

Ramsey Russell: But I think it’s kind of cool that these 2 grown men thought enough of your question and your inquisitiveness to take you and introduce you to biologists nearby.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: So they took you to a interpretive center at a refuge.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah, my step uncle, he knew someone there, and so just thought it was a good idea. You’re asking questions that biologists probably know.

Ramsey Russell: Was it like a one time visit?

Kyle Spragens: It turned into multiple visits. I would say that one person I point at as a mentor was Greg Mintzig, who was the manager at Sacramento refuge for a long time. Greg was a huge connection for me to try to, in terms of just tangibly making sense of all of this from someone that didn’t grow up in that side of the world, especially the wild waterfowl migrating from far away to wherever it was we were hunting in our blind. That was just a different concept for me. You get so used to just seeing what’s right in front of you, you don’t really think about, where are these birds coming from?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kyle Spragens: What do we know about them? Just all the questions. Greg Mintzig was a big influence on that. So, it turned into multiple visits and as I said, just trying to ask, well, how do you get to do this? Where do you go to school to do something like this? And Humboldt-

Ramsey Russell: And in a lot of ways, he put you on this path, didn’t he?

Kyle Spragens: Yeah, that was definitely a fundamental piece, was my stepdad, step uncle, and then certainly the introduction to the refuge staff, and particularly Greg.

Ramsey Russell: As you went up to Humboldt State university, got an undergraduate degree and then a Master’s, I’m assuming.

Kyle Spragens: Went away for a little bit and started working as a technician for USGS down in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, ironically, got to get into some field biology, where I grew up. That was the only project that has never been about waterfowl, but it was all marsh and wetland related. So getting to explore my broader backyard, that I grew up in in a whole new light was definitely phenomenal. I did that for about a year, and then I went back from my Masters up at Humboldt State.

Balancing Perspectives

So balancing the 2 perspectives in every wildlife management story was definitely in retrospect an important learning lesson.

Ramsey Russell: And what was your thesis?

Kyle Spragens: It was looking at field use by Aleutian Canada geese at that point, Cackling geese now, but Aleutian geese using dairy pastures of the Humboldt Bay region.

Ramsey Russell: And they do. They sure do.

Kyle Spragens: They absolutely do. In fact, you could very easily argue that the rebound and delisting of them off of the endangered species list was largely because of the egg world.

Ramsey Russell: Because of dairy probably around those dairies and stuff up there.

Kyle Spragens: Green growth grass-

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?

Kyle Spragens: A population that at one point was at best they could tell something like 790 individuals left and now it’s well over 200,000.

Ramsey Russell: Always a bunch of them.

Kyle Spragens: Yep, it’s a lot of them. They had just right when I started my masters they had just been delisted. So that was sort of the, what do we do now? Now we have management responsibility for this bird that was in trouble for a variety of reasons and now is doing so good we might have done too good. So that was my masters, was that sort of interface of how do you take a conflict in some people’s perspectives? The dairymen don’t necessarily like a bunch of geese eating grass that they’re dependent on for producing milk. Meanwhile, a whole other set of folks are very excited that this bird actually was able to rebound. So balancing the 2 perspectives in every wildlife management story was definitely in retrospect an important learning lesson.

Ramsey Russell: We’re going to talk a lot about balance today, I believe.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: It is a balancing act, especially in this daunting time. I’ve said this a million times, but it’s like our past is meteorically colliding with the future.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: I mean we’re sitting here and it feels like we’re the only people on the island. But not too far away from here is mass humanity.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: You want to talk about some converging ideologies. It’s very evident out in this part of the world. So you get your education, then what? Were you working in California initially or did you come straight to Washington state?

Kyle Spragens: No, I took a long path to get to this particular job, but I went back to that USGS office in San Francisco Bay. That office was being led by John Takakawa who was a longtime waterfowl researcher out west. John was a lead USGS researcher for the majority of his career. John is also someone that played a big role in sort of the variety of waterfowl projects I got myself into. I worked at that USGS office off and on for about a total of 6 years, and in between that I went up to western Alaska and worked on the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge-

Ramsey Russell: Wow, talk about that. You didn’t know a guy named Fred Brewerman up there. Did you?

Kyle Spragens: I met Fred. He was not part of the refuge when I was there, but I did meet him.

Ramsey Russell: He may have already gone into helicopter pilot or something.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Kyle Spragens: I did a 3 year stint as the lead waterfowl biologist up there. The longtime biologist who had been there for more than 30 years, Mike Wiggy, had retired, and an opportunity presented itself. Somehow I convinced my wife to move to Bethel, Alaska, which you can only get to by plane. And we-

Ramsey Russell: I bet she still talks about that experience.

Kyle Spragens: We have many stories about western Alaska, though-

Ramsey Russell: I bet you do

Kyle Spragens: Some good, some remembering why we moved, but it was definitely a huge opportunity, and one that I wouldn’t trade at all.

Ramsey Russell: It must be to do waterfowl management up in that part of the world. It’s not like just Mallard or just pintails, there’s a lot of stuff going on up in that part of the world.

Kyle Spragens: There’s always this funny argument about which refuge is the biggest refuge in the system. But Yukon Delta, the borders are 24 million acres of refuge.

Ramsey Russell: Golly bomb.

Kyle Spragens: After a 2 hour plane ride, you can’t see the other side of the refuge still, and you can’t get in there, anywhere without a float plane or a boat or both. Our projects were largely focused in what’s referred to as the central coast, or Hazen Bay, where a lot of the Brant colony work that folks have, I’m sure, talked about is focused because of all of the breeding geese and Eiders and just a whole smattering of shorebirds and waterfowl and everything you can think of, cranes, loons, turns.

Ramsey Russell: Somebody told me at one time, and I don’t know what the statistics are now, but when the prairie is dry, as much as 30% of the continental population of pintails will breed up there in Yukon. It’s a lot of them.

Living the Dream

Now all of a sudden you’re in a 24 million acre refuge with all those birds to handle and touch and learn about.

Kyle Spragens: If the prairies are dry, a bunch of birds move north, either into Canada or parts of Alaska. We would see it in the duck banding operations. You would see these hens that are well, they haven’t molted yet. Where did they come from? And very likely, they either attempted or just fully bypassed the prairies. So that’s one of those. Up on the Yukon Delta, big work on the geese. The big 4 geese, Brant, Emperor geese, white fronts, cackling geese, and then also duck banding during the, during the summertime. But the bulk of the banding is actually, northern pintail banding.

Ramsey Russell: You want to talk about the heyday of going from a 12 year old kid with all these questions?

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Now all of a sudden you’re in a 24 million acre refuge with all those birds to handle and touch and learn about. You must have been living a dream, man.

Kyle Spragens: I was. I certainly couldn’t have plotted that course. There’s certainly a lot of folks that I can point back at that helped me along the way. Being a kid that had no clue about waterfowl management or what that meant, or what waterfowl hunting was to now this and all of those experiences, couldn’t have scripted that, but certainly I’m thankful that all that came together the way it did. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Its been an awesome mixture of research with USGS, management with Yukon Delta, thinking about breeding and wintering, and then my specialty has always been sort of migration, Birds getting from the breeding areas down to the wintering areas and back and those stops along the way. That is where when this job came open, it was sort of the perfect fit. Washington is all of that in one big bucket.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a lot of the same cohorts. Had you been up there the time of year and come down here the rest of the year, you’d have been dealing with the same exact birds.

Kyle Spragens: I deal with a lot of birds that are coming from Yukon Delta in this job. Getting that, you know, a lot of times in the technician jobs, like summer jobs, that, that I was able to do, you know, you’re always encouraged to try to broaden and spread out, and while it was largely waterfowl focused, instead of, going to different flyways, I stayed within the Pacific Flyway, but I went from breeding areas down to wintering areas of San Francisco Bay and California Central Valley. I got to see the full life cycle within the flyway. That was sort of the-

Ramsey Russell: You’re still a young man, and it’s pretty impressive to me that, from a 12 year old little kid going out with the first duck hunt, with a stepdad, step uncle, being introduced to refuges, going into an academic background in this field and in a very short amount of time you’ve gotten to work with the birds in the breeding areas and down the winter area, the same birds. It’d be different if you were working in different parts of different flyways and different parts. No man, the same little stretch, the same birds. Your knowledge base in those species is pretty substantial. Wow.

Representing the Pacific Flyway

It’s more than just your state and trying to piece those parts of the puzzle of ecology together, and for me, waterfowl has always been fascinating because every species has a slightly different storyline, and you can’t just assume this is the same.

Kyle Spragens: I think for me, one of the tasks in this state agency job is to be a liaison with my colleagues in the other states of the Pacific flyway. That has always been attractive to me as I went on into my career, just because it’s more than your state or your backyard influencing what it is that we see every fall, winter, spring, or wherever you are in latitude. It’s more than just your state and trying to piece those parts of the puzzle of ecology together, and for me, waterfowl has always been fascinating because every species has a slightly different storyline, and you can’t just assume this is the same.

Ramsey Russell: There you were at Yukon, working with the sea ducks and different cadres of geese and puddle ducks and divers, the whole range of them all in one spot. That must have been daunting, must have been fun, must have been challenging because you got a lot of irons in the fire to rattle at one time.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. I think that that position up there was where suddenly the idea of it’s nice to be able to focus on one particular species of interest, but if you’re really trying to make this puzzle come together, it’s the fact that there’s dozens of species that are overlapping and potentially influencing each other, so you can cherry pick your favorite, but that doesn’t mean you’re actually watching the entire field.

Ramsey Russell: It’s almost like you’re in a security room and you don’t have just one monitor. You’ve got to watch all these monitors at one time, all the doors, all little rooms. You gotta watch everything at one time to be a good sheepdog in this field.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: And you bring up a good point. Unlike managing any big game species, we start getting into these migratory birds. It’s a continental effort.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: It’s continental in scale.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not just this area just this part of the life cycle. We’ve got to satisfy all aspects of the same life cycle. It’s a very daunting and challenging process that not one person, one agency can take care of. It takes a team effort, continentally and across international borders to really safeguard migratory birds.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct, and Sea ducks, which we’ll touch on more. Sea ducks and arctic geese are those two species groups that we have formal working groups, I guess you could call them technical teams, that think about how is it that these 3 countries that are part of north american waterfowl management plan, how is it that we work together, collectively within this sort of interest group and those partners or organizations outside of us to collectively influence those birds getting back. Whether that’s back to the breeding grounds or back to your pond in your backyard.

Ramsey Russell: Now some of the, some of the treaties are even bigger. It’s like Russia, Japan. There’s these other protocols, because I know the pintails, a lot of pintails you had been dealing with weren’t just coming down to California. They were going to Japan to winter or flying over into parts of Russia.

Kyle Spragens: The snow geese we get here in Washington come from Wrangel Island, Russia. So we have direct ties with that, with that population and sort of that part of the treaty and that’s why in the Pacific flyway, that tie is always why snow geese have been managed differently.

Ramsey Russell: Were you putting your hands on in that part of the world? I have no idea about these animals, but were you putting your hands on any steller’s or spectacled up in that part of the world?

Spectacled Eider Nesting Ecology

So we were catching hens and monitoring their nest success site fidelity over decades, trying to just monitor their breeding ecology. So, there was a whole camp that the refuge ran in the early part of the nesting season that was devoted towards Spectacled Eider work.

Kyle Spragens: One of the big camps was actually a long time nest ecology project on Spectacled Eiders. So we were catching hens and monitoring their nest success site fidelity over decades, trying to just monitor their breeding ecology. So, there was a whole camp that the refuge ran in the early part of the nesting season that was devoted towards Spectacled Eider work. The YK Delta, the Yukon Koskokwim Delta so two big rivers of Alaska, the Delta fan between the 2. That’s what this Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge protects. Universities, USGS, academic research, governmental research agencies, the state and federal agencies all had different camps going on in this place. So, there are Brant camp, Emperor camp and the Speck Eider camps and so trying to make sure that everybody got in safe, everybody’s got their permits, right? Nobody’s getting themselves in trouble that was all sort of-

Ramsey Russell: Kyle, working that far north, working with all those different species, did you ever put your hands on, like, a pintail that had been banded in Japan or something that had been banded in Japan or Russia? Did you ever put your hands on anything like that when you were doing that work up there?

Kyle Spragens: Not as part of any of the camps out on the Yukon delta, although those types of events certainly occurred just not where I was involved. When I worked with USGS prior to the Yukon Delta, one of the big projects was related to avian influenza. This would have been in the 2005, 2008 time period when a big die-off of Bar-headed geese occurred in central China, a lake called Qinghai Lake and my employer at the time, USGS, the principal investigator, John Takakawa, was very involved in Bar-headed goose ecology and also just sort of avian influenza topics. That launched a series of projects where we were tasked with going into different countries, working within country biologists to mark different waterfowl species with transmitters, to just document migration, timing, and chronology, and where the breeding and wintering areas were, largely because those teams or those countries didn’t have the sort of resources or the support to be able to do that themselves. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have done it. It was just that that wasn’t a high enough priority. It was a great reminder that in North America, we’re often spoiled with how much monitoring and research we’re able to get done because of the support that there is behind that.

Ramsey Russell: Because even if those countries were leg banding birds, there’d be no recovery.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. Yeah, that’s a good point.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s go put a GPS monitor on them.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right, because there’s not a lot of harvest to begin with. If you’re putting a bunch of metal bands out, hoping that a recovery happens. It’s a shot in the dark that you’re going to get one, and one is not enough to get the type of information you need for deriving survival or harvest rates or those types of information that people are usually after. We in North America, because we have that harvest piece, are able to crank up sample sizes and get valuable pieces of information through that method of data collection. So it’s a great reminder that we get to do a lot of stuff in this country that 1) isn’t supported broadly elsewhere just because of the systems that allow that to happen here, and 2) that it takes a lot of money and effort to actually understand what is going on with some of these populations and connecting those dots so that we can make better informed management decisions.

Ramsey Russell: Qinghai Lake, China.

Kyle Spragens:  Yep

Ramsey Russell: Bar-headed geese. Must have been their wintering grounds, because I know a lot of the birds are breeding up in Mongolia.

Kyle Spragens: There’s a little bit. So Qinghai Lake actually serves as this sort of both. It is a breeding lake as well. There are Bar-headed geese that come from Mongolia that wind up in India during the wintertime.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. I’ve understood that the primary wintering ground, a lot of, a lot of winter ground for bar headed geese is explained to me, are literally on the political boundary between Pakistan and India. That’s like, boom, the epicenter that popularity.

Kyle Spragens: A lot of those birds are the ones that are coming from Qinghai Lake region.

Ramsey Russell: Really. Wow
Kyle Spragens: Yeah, they’re breeding there. There might be some that are coming from Mongolia, but when those mongolian birds were marked, they cross over the Himalaya drop all the way down to sea level in India. So they conduct the largest altitudinal drop of any waterfowl that we’re aware of. There was a lot of interest around that. There’s a lot of interest because they are a highly, just sort of coveted species there. But what we knew about them wasn’t very good. So when that event happened, when there were thousands of birds dead on Qinghai Lake, a lot of questions got asked and you need to be able to answer that with methodologies that we could do. So putting transmitters out was really the only good way to reliably get information about trying to connect those dots. Where did these birds wind up going?

Ramsey Russell: Some point in time in your formative years, your 12 year old, little old boy hunting down in California, and you wonder what that piece of metal on a duck’s leg is you ask your uncle who takes you to a refuge, you end up going to college, end up going to the Yukon Delta and working on all kinds of stuff. Did you ever pinch yourself? I’m in China banding Bar-headed geese. Come on, man, who does that?

Kyle Spragens: No, and I actually didn’t get to band Bar-headed geese. I did get to band Ruddy shelduck. But no-

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Same thing-

Where Waterfowl Management Can Take You

North American model is money for monitoring and research and harvest estimates and all this good stuff and it’s funded. It takes money, a lot of money, which is funded by hunters, you know what I’m saying? 

Kyle Spragens: Those types of trips. Never even a thought of, like, yeah, this is where waterfowl management’s going to take me. I was just thrilled to even know that that was something you could do. So it was circumstance and coincidence, pure coincidence of having some job opportunities that just appeared, mentors that were helpful and kind of bumping me in certain directions, or just those connections that they had. A lot of it, honestly, in retrospect, is a fluke and a great fluke. I wouldn’t have traded for anything but being one of those kids that grew up in a more urban area. I wouldn’t have known that was something that you could even think about. I’m thankful that it wound up that way. But funny, what happens when the opportunity to learn about some of that stuff is given to a 12-year old kid to, ask questions and go and explore some areas of the world that you probably couldn’t have even pointed to on the map at the time when you were a kid, right?

Ramsey Russell: You touched on a topic about the cultural value, the model of waterfowl management elsewhere outside the United States. A lot of the reasons we are so blessed in America that we have the opportunity even to go over to a foreign country to help, is because of the north American model. North american model is money for monitoring and research and harvest estimates and all this good stuff and it’s funded. It takes money, a lot of money, which is funded by hunters, you know what I’m saying? And I’ve started seeing Kyle, there’s other countries that want to have it, but they’re unable to get it off the ground and make it happen. I’ve even had hard discussions down in Argentina, which believe it or not, is hanging by a thread. If they’re unable to get a model in place that generates money, that benefits the local communities, the provincial communities, the federal government, the wildlife and the habitat, is gone. Which is why I say, not a Debbie Downer, but just a part of me feels like that because of the mass civilization and population by humanity and the competition for resources, we’re losing a lot of habitat worldwide. But I believe that if we are walking through the end of an era, if hunting is in peril because of loss of humanity, to sustain the way we’re approaching harvest of animals right now in hunting, I believe that North America is going to be one of the last places to fall. I believe hunting is going to persist here because we have all of that stuff in place you’re talking about.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. I hope it doesn’t go that extreme, but it is a good reminder that, even if harvest went away, which I’m not saying that’s any, hopefully nowhere on my horizon, but that crux of that habitat is the piece that we are trying to influence to make sure that the longevity of being able to participate in those types of activities, whether it’s harvest or otherwise, that is the common cause. We’ve found a mechanism to allow us the opportunity to monitor, manage, feed that information back to do better next time around. That type of way of going about management, adaptive management or user-funded management is a huge piece. I think it often gets lost that, things are so impacted that waterfowl management, while harvest is a piece of it, that is one piece of many things that we’re trying to accomplish by monitoring populations, influencing habitat. In the end, to some folks in North America, it’s food. Yukon Delta, the terminology up there is, it’s food security.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Kyle Spragens: The biggest part of the job is making sure that those birds come back so that there is food. Because buying a $10 bag of potato chips or a $20 block of cheese or a $10 gallon of milk is not something that you can sustain even if you wanted to. By the way, this is protein.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kyle Spragens: That is an important reminder sometimes of like, hey, this is something that, it’s about as green and carbon free as you can get as wild birds flying from Alaska down into the wintering areas further south. It is something that I hope we can sustain long term. That is exactly why we try to get better information to help us manage for that long term, so that my kid gets to do what I did and on and on. It’s not just about let’s get what we can now. Let’s keep it out there.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll tell you what, you sure got the background. Having gone to Alaska, having traveled through USGS, doing those kinds of projects. That’s really kind of sort of prepared you for your present position here in Washington state, whereas a lot of states are managing for geese and ducks. I’m thinking state of Mississippi. It’s challenging and complex in the state of Mississippi.

Kyle Spragens: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But now, all of a sudden, here you are in Washington state, where you’ve got different geese, Brant Sea-ducks, Puddle ducks, Divers. Right here in the shadow of unbelievable humanity-

Kyle Spragens: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Relative to state of Mississippi. In your toolbox, you’ve dealt with those complex issues before.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah. Humboldt state sits right on the ocean. Humboldt Bay is a huge Brant eel-grass epicenter for the Pacific Flyway and in retrospect, that couldn’t have been more important, the fact that, getting exposure to different wetlands. A lot of time when folks think about hunting ducks in their wetland, they’re talking about some rice field or some sort of seasonal wetland or something like that. Those are a couple types of wetlands. But there’s a whole variety that things like sea ducks and Brant and these other species are reliant on. If you’re too focused on one and missing the mark on the other, then you shouldn’t be surprised that maybe one species isn’t doing as well.

Ramsey Russell: I introduced you as a State Waterfowl Manager for Washington. What is your official title?

Key Species in Washington’s Harvest Data

I oversee a team of biologists that are out collecting, survey data from the air, banding data from different species, largely our big harvest species like dove, mallard, and Canada goose. There’s a variety of other species that we get ourselves into.

Kyle Spragens: My official title is Waterfowl Section Manager for Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. I oversee a team of biologists that are out collecting, survey data from the air, banding data from different species, largely our big harvest species like dove, mallard, and Canada goose. There’s a variety of other species that we get ourselves into. I’m fortunate to have a team in this waterfowl section that I oversee, but we work statewide, and then the other part of my job is to liaison with my counterparts in the other western states as part of the Pacific flyway, which includes Alaska and all the states west of the Rockies. So we are tasked with going through status and harvest assessments that are coming from either our federal partners or those that we’re collecting ourselves and developing management plans for things like the goose populations that are coming from Alaska and Canada.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s continue talking just a little bit more about these management responsibilities. How many biologists do you have? What specifically are they working on? I know banding. What kind of banding projects? What kind of surveys? What kind of estimates? Let’s dig just a little bit deeper, because you’re not just managing primarily puddle ducks and snow geese. This is broad scale. I mean, practically every cadre, and I’m sure you’ve got some swan, I saw some swans driving over Washington. You’ve got quite a few Trumpeter swans. Even though they’re not hunted, there’s got to be management consideration for them. Basically, you got the whole cadre of north american waterfowl right here in your backyard. That’s got to be managed.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. From the outside, when this job came up, which I was not looking for, I was actually about to go back to grad school with John Eady down at UC Davis. Sorry, John, really and then the next week, this job was offered, so I declined my PhD opportunity, which was going to be related to canvas backs, and took this up. What was attractive about this was that diversity. We have regularly 27 species of ducks, 6 species of geese from 14 different management populations, and then we have both swans, both native swans, Trumpeters and Tundras, and in fact, in the very eastern part of the state, we have some nesting Trumpeter swans. So it’s the full breeding and wintering, and maybe even more so migration. That sort of mixture of things is definitely what was attractive. But it’s also why I’m so dependent on the biological staff that’s here with the department, not only within my section, which I’m fortunate to have 3 permanent biologists and a few seasonal or sort of temporary biologists that plug in on different projects here and there and then our regional biologists, folks that are actually out in different parts of Washington state.

Ramsey Russell: How big is your staff doing this important fieldwork?

Kyle Spragens: My direct staff is about 7, but we rely on about 30 regional biologists all over the place trying to do everything from butterflies to bears. Then I come along asking them to band some doves and ducks. We couldn’t do it without that. It’s that team effort piece of it. It’s like if we tried to do it all ourselves, we wouldn’t accomplish it. You’re correct, we are involved in all sorts of things. Like I mentioned, the banding, morning dove, mallard, Canada goose, those are big harvest species for us here in Washington, but we’re constantly involved with other migratory game birds, such as Band-tailed pigeon or Trumpeter swans. We deal with a lot of lead exposure death up in northwest part of the state. So we’re having to pick up and respond to something like 500 mortalities a year that are still a result of legacy lead in the system. So that sort of mixture, it’s not all harvest. Then a large part of it is working with our wildlife areas to improve wetland habitats. Again, the funding for that is directly user derived. It’s from the sales of what originally was the state duck stamp, but now it’s just sort of a permit validation, but that dollar amount goes into doing wetland work here. So, we have to work with our wildlife area staff to try to improve wetlands, figure out sort of what we could do better to, to target that variety of species that are coming down through Washington or nesting here in Washington. It keeps us on our toes, that’s for sure. There’s never a dull moment.

How Societal Views Play into Waterfowl Management

How daunting is it to be out here, what I’m calling West coast ideologies, which are not just west coast, it’s worldwide now. It’s Argentina, it’s Australia. It’s throughout the United States. 

Ramsey Russell: How daunting is it to deal with different societal issues? Like back when I was in the field back in college, those old professors would talk about biopolitics, things of that nature. What I’m getting more at is this shift in ideologies, non-hunters and hunters, you know what I’m saying? It’s got to be very daunting because all of humanity impacts your job as a biologist in terms of habitat quality, water quality, things of that nature. How daunting is it to be out here, what I’m calling West coast ideologies, which are not just west coast, it’s worldwide now. It’s Argentina, it’s Australia. It’s throughout the United States. A lot of people don’t hunt, fish, understand the importance. Think about this, we were just talking about Turks or Chinese or whomever, not having the resource, because don’t have the interest to go out and monitor and band and do a lot of this kind of stuff. There’s a lot of Americans among us. We duck hunters are a very small minority just in the United States and a lot of our, the people we’re sharing grocery space with or something, they don’t understand.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah. I think the daunting part when it comes to waterfowl and the migratory game bird side of things is that whether a hunter or non-hunter, folks often don’t realize that the birds that they’re seeing out on the agriculture fields in Skagit Valley are snow geese coming from Wrangel Island, Russia, and Trumpeter swans coming from the Boreal forest of Alaska. Sea-ducks coming from all over the place, right. So, there’s a lot going on, right. I mean, there are a lot of big things going on in the world. So trying to draw attention to something like, well, why should someone care about ducks? It’s not always a straightforward path. But I guess speaking from my background, it’s one of those, yeah but if you’re given the information even to just know what questions to ask, I think a lot more people are willing to engage in that conversation and hear out sort of what is it that allows us to even think about offering something like a harvest season and reassuring them that. It’s like, well regulated harvest is possible because we monitor, because we rely on our hunter population to report information to us that helps us keep better tabs on this stuff? I think just a lot of people don’t know. So it’s challenging because it’s extra conversations and you’re always going to find folks that are just purely against harvest altogether. I’d actually say that’s a minority in the conversation a lot of the times, mainly because there is a common interest in assuring that long term presence of that species of interest, whether it’s, the Snow geese and swans up in Skagit or something else. It’s like connecting the dots of like, well, by the way, those are there because the dairy farms and ag producers are providing a lot of food that we don’t do on our public lands. So how do we work collaboratively with that side of the equation? Because if that goes away, populations are going to drop. It’s kind of knowing that folks don’t have that sort of starting point, and I didn’t growing up, you know, but I at least had some exposure to the hobby farm that my mom had. But that sort of like the connection of, to get the birds back up to Alaska, we’ve got to have food here, and we got to make sure that there’s enough that are able to breed and get back the next year. Right. I think a lot of it’s just education, it really is. People don’t know, that’s a thing. They don’t know what to ask or how to contemplate. So it adds a definite big layer of, it’s more than just the biology. So, for me in my position, my main role is serving as sort of a technical advisor. Here’s information you need. Here’s what this information seems to be telling us. I’m not supposed to drift in a policy or the sort of social dynamic piece of it other than to be aware. That’s obviously something that we have to take into account, and so trying to find the right space for those conversations to happen and providing the information to folks so that they know that, yes in fact, we do have information to inform some of these decisions takes up a lot of my time. That’s why a lot of my time is administrative and not in the field and why I have an army of biologists.

Ramsey Russell: I’m leading into this ideology, this approach to use of nature.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Non hunters. Hunters. Now I’m taking a step further. I’m getting into just the hunter ideology. How important is hunting to management and conservation of waterfowl in Washington state?

Kyle Spragens: Big time. I mean, my shop is almost exclusively funded by what I would call hunter derived funds. There’s a little bit of appropriation from state and then we rely heavily on appropriations with our federal partners who are doing some of the other surveys or banding. In terms of what allows us to conduct the monitoring and all this work that I’m describing that gives us that information. Yeah, it’s critical. Without it, I’m not sure where the funding would come from, right. To add particularly at a state agency level for game management species, that is true. You can’t argue that. So, unfortunately, sometimes, hunters are also not aware of everything that they are feeding into and how important that really is-

Ramsey Russell; Like what?

Why Hunting Doesn’t Negatively Affect Waterfowl Populations 

That’s a premise of wildlife management, that if we set these bag limits and we set these days and we operate within these parameters, that hunters going out and shooting their ducks, mallards, pintails, whatever, doesn’t impact the breeding population. 

Kyle Spragens: Whether that’s reporting bands or even things like filling out the harvest information program questions. When you go and buy your license in every state that you go to. I can’t stress enough how important that initial question set is in the trickle down effect of how we, as waterfowl managers, monitor harvest so that it feeds back into assuring that we sustain long term opportunity. That is one of the key goals for all of the waterfowl management harvest is, long term sustainability of harvest.

Ramsey Russell: But not all hunting is good.

Kyle Spragens: Not all hunting is good. I would say that’s something that we often fight as we’ve drifted into this period where obviously waterfowl hunter numbers are down from the 70s. I don’t think we’ll ever get there and personally, from a harvest management standpoint, holy moly, I hope we don’t get back to that kind of number because it would be hard to manage with the constraints that we have right now. There is less habitat and less habitat allows fewer birds to actually be in a spot. So, my point there is, with that kind of charge of, we need to recruit, we need to retain, we need to reactivate, which I’m a firm supporter of. We often have let slip, like hunting has no impact. It’s like, most of the time that’s true, but there are cases where harvest can go too far. You can take too many out of a particular system where the next year’s breeding season can’t catch up.

Ramsey Russell: I know what you’re getting at here because of the pre-game we talked but the accepted assumption is that regulated harvest of ducks doesn’t impact populations. Pintails, for as long as that population is above 1.75 million, there’s a really good chance that in the 2024-2025 season, the lower 48 is going to be entitled to shoot 3 pintails, because it really doesn’t matter if I’m shooting one or shooting 3, It doesn’t affect the breeding population. That’s a premise of wildlife management, that if we set these bag limits and we set these days and we operate within these parameters, that hunters going out and shooting their ducks, mallards, pintails, whatever, doesn’t impact the breeding population. Right.

Kyle Spragens: Yes. I would add to that that for those types of species, that is why there are national strategies. Right? Mallard sets sort of the stage of days and the bag limits. Pintail, Canvasback, Redhead, Scaup, all have these national strategies that a lot of smart people have sat down and thought through, but they’ve been able to think through it because of the band reporting, the harvest reporting, the monitoring that we’re able to conduct, the big US Fish and Wildlife Breeding pair of surveys. That’s all appropriation dollars. That’s huge money between Canadian Wildlife Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service, but the fact that we have that information allows us to get into those conversations. That does not mean we’ve had that ability to get into some of the other ducks that have more complicated life histories, meaning how many young do they produce? How often do they breed? How broad is their breeding landscape?

Ramsey Russell: How broad is their wintering ground?

Kyle Spragens: How broad is their wintering ground? What are the foods that are influencing that? How directly can a manager influence that? Planting cover crop and providing seasonal wetlands. Dabbling ducks will succeed forever as long as we’re able to contain that, but there’s some species that trying to influence the food that’s actually on their wintering area. For example, bivalve, you know, clams, mussels, the things that sea ducks eat, that’s a hard thing to actually directly influence. So trying to find a similar mechanism as what we’ve had very high success with dabbling ducks is more difficult. It requires more information. We’re really fortunate that those big, broad surveying efforts and the massive banding efforts have gone on since the 50s. But that’s not true for all of the ducks and that’s very similar to what we were talking about with the foreign countries. If you don’t have it, you don’t really have a way to gauge how much are you taking.

Ramsey Russell: All right, Kyle, then let’s quit beating around a bush and talk about some of those other species. Let’s talk about the Harlequin duck, the river jester, the Blue ducks, that in the lower 48, for as long as I can remember, the state of Washington almost singularly offered the opportunity for hunters to come and shoot one Harlequin duck. Not 6, not 7, not 8, not 4. 1 per season, year, and very recently, year 2, 3. Washington said, nope, we’re going to close the Harlequin duck season. Which shocked me. So, obviously the Harlequin duck doesn’t share the luxury of a mallard or a pintail or a Canada goose. It doesn’t have those plasticity.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct.

Ramsey Russell: What’s going on? Why in the world did you all shut the Harlequin. I started off the episode, go over here to Marina this morning. We’re just driving in. First two ducks. I lay eyes on a pair of Harlequin ducks as we get out to look at them. Here comes another pair swimming around, seems to be everywhere. Why did Washington state shut the Harlequin duck season? What’s going on with Harlequin ducks?

Kyle Spragens: That’s right. Well, you said Harlequin ducks are not mallards.

Ramsey Russell: They are not mallards-

Kyle Spragens: That matters. I guess, to take one step back to get there is we’ve long had these breeding surveys since 1955 for things like dabbling ducks and diving ducks that have allowed us to craft regulations across the country. Some species, particularly the geese and sea ducks, don’t fit that monitoring strategy well. Their breeding range is either too concentrated in certain pockets or they are just in tough to find regions of the continent to observe them during the breeding season. In addition to that, sea ducks have a complication where you can’t band them very easily like you can a mallard. You can’t set up a baited swimming trap and band thousands of mallards year every year for always. The reason that is both-

Ramsey Russell: You can’t do those swimming traps and band thousands of Harlequin ducks like you’ve done mallards-

Successful Monitoring of Dabbling Ducks through Banding and Surveys

So dabbling ducks play into that really well. You’re monitoring status of the population through the breeding survey, you’re monitoring harvest rate through the bands, how many were taken out of, how many were there, and then you have this final piece of, and you’re getting that harvest sampling from across the continent, so you get a really good estimate of harvest.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah, none of the sea ducks, can you really get big banded samples of. Then the final piece of that is, and there’s not a lot of hunters or more importantly, there’s not a lot of spots on the map where the hunting is occurring for those band recoveries to be coming from. It’s a real small sample site that you’re trying to hopefully get a piece of information from. So dabbling ducks play into that really well. You’re monitoring status of the population through the breeding survey, you’re monitoring harvest rate through the bands, how many were taken out of, how many were there, and then you have this final piece of, and you’re getting that harvest sampling from across the continent, so you get a really good estimate of harvest. Seaducks and Brant are examples where that classic monitoring methodology gets tossed out the window. You can’t monitor them on the breeding ground. You can’t really band a lot of them, and harvest is going to be super concentrated. So in the early 90s, Washington state recognized that sea ducks are kind of a species of interest. I wouldn’t say focused interest, but it was enough that they could see that they couldn’t offer the full bag limit of 7 in the Pacific flyway. So the piece to acknowledge is ducks are managed in the aggregate at a federal level. When we are given a 7 bird bag limit, the 7 duck bag limit, that’s all ducks, unless you’re in one of the flyways that separates out Mergansers or something like that, but 7. So in Washington, if we were just to accept the federal bounds, it would mean you could shoot 7 of any duck. There had been some monitoring during the wintertime that suggested, I should say, that there were some drastic declines going on in particular Scoters, which are by far our most predominant, most numerous sea ducks that is out on the Puget Sound. So, in the early 90s, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife initiated this elaborate, rigorous, repeatable aerial survey that spans 4000 miles of transects across the open water every winter. So, for 27 years, a crew of very highly trained observers goes out there and registers everything that they see as they’re flying along out in the Puget Sound. So that suddenly gave us a way to monitor population status. How many of them are out there? and repeating that over years we could establish trends. Is it going in a good direction or is it going in a bad direction? The piece we were missing was harvest. And so in 2004, Washington state initiated a mandatory harvest report card. Because those hip questions, the harvest information, while that does provide really good information about Dabbling ducks and Diving ducks, it’s really hard to find a sea duck hunter because there’s not a lot of sea duck-

Ramsey Russell: Not a lot of them.

Reasons for Mandatory Waterfowl Harvest Cards

…let’s target that information so we get better harvest estimates because we’re not going to be able to band them and we’re not going to get harvest information from some of the traditional ways like band reporting and also the wing bees.

Kyle Spragens: So Washington decided, let’s target that information so we get better harvest estimates because we’re not going to be able to band them and we’re not going to get harvest information from some of the traditional ways like band reporting and also the wing bees. Wing bees work really well for species that are widely distributed, highly harvested samples all over the place for something like a seaduck. Sometimes people are unwilling to chop off a wing from a seaduck and send it into the part-

Ramsey Russell: That’s a trophy

Kyle Spragens: Because they’re wanting to taxidermy it, and that’s a known expectation, but it also potentially influences those traditional ways of getting harvest estimates. So in 2004, Washington initiated a harvest report card, a mandatory harvest report card where a hunter had to say, I’m going to go be a Sea Duck hunter this year. Great, here’s your card. Fill out what species and how many you’ve harvested.

Ramsey Russell:I bought my license today and I got one of those.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. So since 2004, that’s been implemented in the state at that time. So at 2004, they had already had about a decade of that aerial survey information for setting trends. We could see Scoters had plummeted close to about 45%, like declines from the first surveys that they did in the early 90s to that early 2000s period. Again, basically what that meant was go to populations had gone from about 100,000 during the winter to about 60,000 during the winter. And was that harvest? No. That wasn’t harvest, but that’s that piece of, well, something else in the system is going wrong, and if the system can’t hold as many, then you can’t take as many. You can’t take as many out without expecting things to go wrong. So that harvest card actually was implemented for Scoters, Goldeneyes, Long-tailed ducks and Harlequin. As you alluded to, starting in 2004, Harlequin was a one season limit.

Moratoriums on Hunting Harlequin Ducks?

They have high site fidelity to their wintering area, and unlike a dabbling duck, where if you shoot the next year, there’s very likely going to be more that fill in. 

Ramsey Russell: One duck limit per season.

Kyle Spragens: Yep. If you got that card that basically allowed you the potential of pursuing a-

Ramsey Russell: Which is plenty. As a guy that shot a half dozen over the years in Alaska, I don’t ever want to shoot another one. I’m guessing Harlequin has always been, in the modern era, a trophy duck. I don’t think anybody, I don’t think anybody’s going out and shooting them for the pot, for gumbo. I don’t think so. But regardless-

Kyle Spragens: People go out for a variety of reasons and use things in different ways, and that in the sort of harvest management standpoint of things doesn’t really matter. I just need to know how many.

Ramsey Russell: Right. How many of them.

Kyle Spragens: That’s what’s important is that a better record of total harvest being taken? Because from those aerial surveys, Harlequin, we know that in our part of what is broadly called the Salish Sea, that’s the BC side and the Washington side, the Puget Sound, the south side, the US side of the sailor sea, our estimate is something like 4000 to 4500 Harlequin duck that winter.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it?

Kyle Spragens: That’s it. 4500.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Kyle Spragens: Less than 4500.

Ramsey Russell: Right now I’m sitting here the whole time thinking, wait a minute, how many people are really coming from around the United States to get that one Harlequin for their collection? So what if it’s 250 or 500? That 500 leaves a footprint when there’s only 4000 of them and figure a lot of them are females anyways. I mean, that’s a huge footprint. Wow. I had no idea.

Kyle Spragens: Correct. So to put that into a little bit more context, since the 80s, the east coast, the Atlantic Flyway, has had a moratorium on Harlequin duck.

Ramsey Russell: They have, how many do they have?

Kyle Spragens: About 4000 Harlequin duck. Now the winter range over there spans multiple states because of how small the shorelines are of those different states, and so from a management standpoint, it would be mind boggling to try to manage some sort of allowable, take quota between multiple states. It just wouldn’t work. So since the 80s, it’s been a moratorium because it’s a small, isolated population there. Now, on the west coast, there is a more broad distribution of Harlequin duck. There’s Harlequin duck up in Alaska. Some Harlequin duck winter as far south as Humboldt Bay, North California coast, but the heart of the population for us is actually on the BC coast. So we actually sit as this bottom out winter zone. The part of this Harlequin ducks, and sea ducks in general, are not mallards. That matters is they act more like geese. They have high site fidelity to their wintering area, and unlike a dabbling duck, where if you shoot the next year, there’s very likely going to be more that fill in. That fill in is only as good as your production is for something like a sea duck. So if there are new males to move into the system, then sure, it’s going to refill. But sea ducks are long lived. They produce very few eggs, their clutches are not usually super big and their duckling survival is usually very low, and in the particular case of Harlequin duck, which you alluded to is a stream nester, they actually are nesting up in the high tributaries of the mountain ranges, cascades here that divide the Pacific side from the inland side of Washington and Oregon, and then the Rockies. There’s birds that are coming from Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Alberta, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, into the Puget Sound. We don’t know how many of that like the mixture, we don’t know that sort of stock composition. But those inland areas there has been monitoring from forest service and national parks, because it’s so high up the breeding area that it’s actually out of the jurisdiction of a lot of the classic waterfowl management agencies, like state agencies or us fish and Wildlife service. But in some of those streams, when they do brood, like pair or brood surveys, you’re talking about a dozen pairs being a lot on a particular breeding stream.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely right.

Kyle Spragens: So anyway, how broadly distributed is it? It’s not broadly distributed, and how narrow of a sort of habitat niche are they targeting? It is extremely narrow because they are raising their ducklings up on these high tributary streams, sometimes in the alpine, sometimes real high stretches. So we don’t monitor their nests because we can’t. So what we do is, on the wintering area, count how many are there. The other piece that we try to get information on is how many are adults and how many are young to get some sort of productivity estimate so that we can balance that? How many can you take out of that equation and expect a stable population going forward?

Ramsey Russell: You mentioned that Scoters decline 40 some odd percent.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What about Harlequins? Is that a stable since the survey started, or is that the, what’s left from a decline?

Kyle Spragens: Long term average for Harlequins is right above 4000. So since the beginning of that survey, early nineties, the long term average is something like 4200 birds. There have been highs up close to-

Ramsey Russell: What’s a 5 or 10% decline right there?

Breeding Habits of Scoters, Harlequins, and Long-Tailed Ducks

Then the other part of the Harlequin, particularly the Harlequin, although it’s true in the other sea-ducks, as far as we understand but we have better information about this. 

Kyle Spragens: So there have been highs in the low 6000s, but that was earlier in the series, and we have had lows in the high 3000s, which was as early as 2 years ago, where we were around about 3900 on the count. Again, this is a repeated survey, so the transects that the observers are covering are the same sampling area, so that you’re going over the same stretches of rocky shoreline and open water. It’s a mishmash. But the other part about Harlequin is when they’re on the wintering side, they are what we would call, sort of a rocky shoreline specialist. They aren’t just everywhere in the Salish Sea.

Ramsey Russell: No, that’s the deal, is the way those Harlequins are. It’s almost like, okay, they’re coming from Wyoming. It’s like they’re leaving their home and going to a specific beach Cabana. Going to a bar on the beach. That pair of Harlequins is not going to, is not going to go up and down the shoreline for 50 miles. It’s coming to a hundred yard stretch. That’s where it’s going to make its living. Like we watched this morning, they were sitting there feeding on that little stretch right there. They swam out and they sat up on a piece of driftwood that was floating. The gulls ran them off. They came right back that little stretch.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: That’s sort of it.

Kyle Spragens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: You know, Mallards by comparison, because you were talking about the puddle ducks versus sea-duck. Mallards will fly down to Mississippi and hit this wetland, fly 45 miles to hit that rise. It rains a little ways off, they’ll go 30 miles more. They’re all over, north, south, all around, exploiting the resource and for some reason, these little Harlequins and perhaps other sea-ducks are not like that. They are cued in boom to that whatever they’re eating in that particular spot, that’s where they’re setting up shop for-

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. That part a bit about, how tuned in are they into a certain region? We have some ideas from old research, but basically, starting in November, where you see them, that’s where they’re going to be.

Ramsey Russell: That’s where they’re going to be.

Kyle Spragens: That’s true for scoters. That’s probably true for long tails, although we don’t have as much information because they sit further offshore. From our surveys, the way that they’re collected, they’re what are called spatially explicit. So the survey drops a point on the water or wherever they are in the aircraft transect so that we can make distribution maps. So we have sort of this, like, long term understanding of, like, well, Harlequin down in the Hood canal and the South Puget Sound are not prevalent. It’s not a common thing. It doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means they’re in a handful of known spots, and that’s it. There are some hotspot areas. You know, like the San Juan Islands, the grouping of islands that’s out in the middle of the Salish sea that’s on the Washington side is a great example. There’s a ton of Harlequin out there relative to the rest of the sound. But if you think that that kind of density, like how many you would see on any one point, is representative of what you would see elsewhere in the Puget Sound, then you haven’t seen the rest of the Puget Sound.

Ramsey Russell: You may go quite a ways before you see another density like that. It could be dozens of miles or a whole different. I mean, forever.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. Then the other part of the Harlequin, particularly the Harlequin, although it’s true in the other sea-ducks, as far as we understand but we have better information about this. So they nest on the streams, right? The pairs go up the streams together. When we’ve done projects, you can catch the pair in a mist net that’s across the stream, mark them, put transmitters on the males as what we have done in the past. But the interesting part is the second that nesting initiates, the males all boogie off and go back to the saltwater to molt during the summertime.

Ramsey Russell: Albeit

Kyle Spragens: So they’re in a completely different region than the female and the ducklings if she’s successful, and then at some point, we know from marking studies where they’ve put bands on the pairs. At some point, those pairs reestablish.

Ramsey Russell: They find each other.

Kyle Spragens: They find each other. Now, when is that? It’s probably more in that November time period. So, when folks say they see a bunch of bachelor flocks of just males out in the Puget sound. If that’s in September, so probably a male that’s just waiting for his female.

Ramsey Russell: Are you saying that they have long term pair bonds?

Kyle Spragens: That is correct. They are more like a goose in that they establish long term pair bonds.

Ramsey Russell: And separated by a thousand plus miles-

Kyle Spragens: Yeah. Thousands of miles

Ramsey Russell: He’s out there hanging out with the boys.

Kyle Spragens: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Until mom and the babies catch up and then like, hey, baby, good to see you again.

Kyle Spragens: That is correct.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I had no idea.

Kyle Spragens: Crazy right? Whenever that is that they meet up and wherever it is that they establish by something like November, that’s where they’re going to be for the rest of the winter, more than likely. Now, there’s a lot of pieces of that story I wish we had better information on because it is. It’s such a unique breeding life history sort of saga. Males going to the salt, females hopefully being successful on the freshwater rivers, and then the sort of meetup in between. If we had more information, we’d be able to sort of dial in management at a way finer scale. If you try and push it too far without that kind of information, then you can’t turn back. If you go too far, if you push it too far, you can’t turn back unless you basically take more drastic restrictions. So in 2019, which was before COVID, point that out, the 2019 to 2020 season, we suddenly saw an uptick in the total harvest that was being reported of Harlequin on our card.

Shifting Hunting Ideologies

I think that sort of mentality, what I often refer to as, like, bucket list or scavenger hunt mentality, is a new way that people are approaching waterfowl hunting more specifically.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you. My very next question, we start off talking about conflict and ideologies. Well, hunting ideology, I think, and I’m asking, has shifted a little bit. It has in the past five or ten years, this collecting deal is a big deal. Hunting is conservation until it ain’t. All of a sudden, our interest in getting our hands on the 41 or the 58 or the 150 or whatever species you know, you can collect that turned into a big deal. Is that what you saw happening?

Kyle Spragens: Well, you’re correct. I think that sort of mentality, what I often refer to as, like, bucket list or scavenger hunt mentality, is a new way that people are approaching waterfowl hunting more specifically. I think it’s just a different way that people have gained interest in different waterfowl species, right. In retrospect, the only reason we were able to pick up that there was something going on was because we had that mandatory harvest report. If I had relied on any of the other-

Ramsey Russell: How big was the increase in 2019? Just ballpark, if you don’t know know-

Kyle Spragens: I’m not going to have specific numbers except for the point was from about 2004 to through the 2018 season, the average annual harvest was something like 100 to 130 Harlequin duck.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah. That next year, it suddenly drifted up closer to the low 200s, and in our final open season, the 2021-22 season, the estimate had jumped to around 300.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Tripled.

Kyle Spragens: Tripled in a 3-year span that started in 2019, pre COVID. So that-

Ramsey Russell: When did a guy like yourself or your staff that’s looking at these numbers and these harvests go, okay, it’s been around 100 forever, but wait a minute, it just doubled. Was it that first uptick in 2019 that you all started looking at each other and going, hmm-

Kyle Spragens: No.

Ramsey Russell: Or was it the last year when you go, hold, wait a minute.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah, that’s a very good question.

Ramsey Russell: And you’ve got to ask a question. If it kept on going with it now 10 times as many. I mean.

Kyle Spragens: Correct. That’s a great question and the answer is in 2019, no. We weren’t paying attention to that at all because one part that we hadn’t quite figured out how to monitor was that change in the way that people were approaching, you know, sort of the scavenger hunt model of waterfowl hunting, was bringing in out of state hunters to go after that. That’s not an unexpected thing to occur. The rate at which that started happening was the part where, well, wait, are we prepared for the fact that an out of state Hunter is actually probably a lot more efficient? Maybe efficient isn’t the right word, a lot more targeted in what it is that they’re after versus just the average Joe Sea-duck Hunter who lives out on the peninsula here and is just going out for the day and might whack a Scoter, Goldeneye, if it flies by and if it’s their Harlequin duck year, then sure, they’re going to go take one. So just on sort of without any additional constraints other than some bag restricted bag limits? From 2004 to 2019, it had just run along at about 100 to 130 Harlequin duck a year. So when we started looking, asking the question, well, wait, is as an in state hunter, does that Hunter act the same as an out of state Hunter? It was very clearly apparent that, No.

Ramsey Russell: No, they were coming here for that.

Kyle Spragens: So on a resident card, Harlequin was expected about 3% of the time. On an out of state card, it was expected over 50% of the time, and the only reason it was that low is because we have a lot of Oregon hunters that hunt the lower Columbia river, and they’re required to get a sea-duck card, and they’re not after Harlequin, they’re just, they have the card because Goldeneye are part of it and if a goldeneye comes by, they need to have their card. So once we started looking at that and tracking that, we could see, whoa, wait a minute we’re seeing this uptick in sea-duck effort that we’ve never expected before. While it was more apparent in the out of state, there was also activities going on in state that was driving it as well. One of the big changes was there was some fishing closures here on the peninsula specifically for steelhead, where there were folks with boats and gear that were used to the big open water that were normally taking buddies or clients or whatever out fishing at this December, January time period. There was suddenly a closure in that 2019 year, and so even though that wasn’t necessarily out of state hunter, it was folks suddenly providing sort of buddy hunt scenarios. Do you want to come out hunting? Oh, you want to go after a Harlequin duck? Sure, let’s go after Harlequin duck. Right. So again, it was just sort of a change in the, how much effort was being focused at this little narrow sliver that hadn’t been like the previous 15 years, where it just had run fine, like, we didn’t have to think more about it. We just had to monitor. Well, we’re not seeing a trend in the population, and our harvest is pretty predictable. In 2019-2021, there was suddenly this very dramatic, more than doubling, almost tripling of some of the very particular targeted species and the fact that there’s only that count of 3900 Harlequin duck was during the 2020 year. Suddenly we’re at this like, we’re taking a lot more out compared to what was there. Is that sustainable?

Ramsey Russell: Even with the best technology and the efforts and everything else, it’s very hard to really track full time, like a mallard to keep up with. I mean, as a manager, there’s only so much you can do to protect that resource, you know, in terms of its population and its harvest estimates and everything else. I mean, it’s a very daunting process and fair disclaimer. I’m a collector. Now I collect experiences by way of chasing species, and I love guys and think everybody should go out and target these species, but Washington state, for example, I was thinking, is not the only state that has had to respond to the scavenger hunt of the modern day hunter. The state of Utah, we can shoot up to 20 Trumpeters and then we’ll shut the season down and it hit a fever pitch, and I don’t know the details like I just heard it explained in regards to Harlequin but I know this, don’t shoot Trumpeters in Utah or we’re going to confiscate the bird and you’re not coming back to hunt with us for a while. They’re having to put teeth into it because the guys want to go shoot target species, which on the one hand, I support it until I find out, I’m starting to hear what you’re telling me about how my actions could imperil the sustainability of a population.

Hunter Behavior & Sustainability

That is exactly what I mean by a limited user entry system, is that what has often been sort of the misconception is that there is no available harvest of Harlequin duck. The season didn’t close.

Kyle Spragens: Well, I think that the parallel there is, what changed was hunter behavior. Hunter behavior suddenly went from the oopsie model of what you were describing in Utah, which was what the intent was. It’s supposed to be oopsie, so that you’re not creating something illegal to a targeted model of, I’m going to go and get mine.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’m going to get mine.

Kyle Spragens: So that works if there’s not a lot of hunters doing that, and that was what happened for the first 15 years of Harlequin harvest management with this restricted 1 per season. What changed was there were a lot more people that suddenly decided to say, I’m going to go get mine. In Washington, the sort of second part of the problem statement that we’ve been wrestling with is, unlike a lot of other states, and this is going to sound like a no duh statement, except for Washington state has never had a limited user entry model for waterfowl hunting. So, what do I mean by that? I mean that there are cases where we’ve closed things before. Dusky Canada geese down in the southwest corner, but that’s closed to everybody. So nobody’s allowed to partake in that. Other than that, there has never been sort of either everybody gets to play or nobody gets to play. We’ve never said only a certain number of people get to come through the gate and participate in this particular thing. Now, that’s common for big game species. That’s common for other waterfowl species in other states, but that’s where state level management kicks in. Things that are tied to dollar amounts or processes have to go through legislative approvals.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, there we go. So are you, so are you, are you saying that there are discussions that involve politics, politicians, your state representatives? There are discussions that maybe in the future you could go to a limited draw that would get you down to a comfort level of harvesting. I think like they’re doing with Emperor Geese in Alaska. There’s a chance that maybe we’re going to let a number of tags in the future.

Kyle Spragens: That is exactly what I mean by a limited user entry system, is that what has often been sort of the misconception is that there is no available harvest of Harlequin duck. The season didn’t close.

Ramsey Russell: What was the public response to that?

Kyle Spragens: It was mixed. So it has been closed. It was closed during the 2022-23 season. It is closed this season, the 2023-24. We are not in the process of knowing what the future holds just yet because that will depend on-

Ramsey Russell: Those big wheels take time.

High Site Fidelity of Sea Ducks: Returning to the Same Locations Annually

That’s specifically there because we know that we can’t rely on the big national surveys. We have to do something that’s more focused on here and that misunderstanding about this area in front of us of the Puget Sound, because these birds have this high site fidelity meaning they come back to the same place year after year.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah, it takes time and it will depend on our monitoring data and what we know about the system at hand, and if we can establish a limited user entry. The closure in general on the surface level wasn’t received well because a lot of it was received as we were just jumping to some unsupported conclusion and that that was sort of the hammer that we had to drop. Unfortunately, folks aren’t aware of the fact that we do a lot of intensive monitoring towards sea-ducks that 4000 miles of transects every winter. That’s specifically there because we know that we can’t rely on the big national surveys. We have to do something that’s more focused on here and that misunderstanding about this area in front of us of the Puget Sound, because these birds have this high site fidelity meaning they come back to the same place year after year. It is a game of how fast do you take away and how fast will it refill? and something like a mallard refills really fast, but something like a Harlequin duck or even a Scoter, not as fast because they don’t produce as many young. So that lag time of being able to rebound takes longer. The other part of it was 2 summers ago. I guess the point is the concept of what actually influences these birds on the breeding grounds is so different compared to some of the dabbling ducks as well. They breed on mountain streams that are often snowpack fed. So, if you get a warm spell that melts a bunch of ice pack during June, that water is going to flush out any of the food and potentially the ducklings that are trying to rear on those streams. It’s not about drought in the ag field of the prairies. It’s about big storms or big melt off runs like what happened in Yellowstone a couple years ago. That event is in Harlequin streams. How do those types of events influence productivity? Well, we’re not monitoring the breeding side, but we would see it on our side because we conduct these surveys that tell us how many adults do we see, how many young of the year do we see? That gives us some estimate of, how fast is it refilling? and so taking all that into account is the way that we would be able to say, yes, there is an appropriate quota. We’ll say some number that I can identify that is an acceptable sustainable harvest going forward. So that’s one piece, can you identify the number? The other part is how do you administer that to a limited user of hunters? because we are past being able to just let everybody through the gate. I think the part in the last 2 years of the season that really kind of got people a little more on edge was the number of those harvest cards that were going out suddenly exceeded the total number of Harlequin duck that were out there. Now I mentioned, I mention that we don’t expect every card to go after a Harlequin duck, but to say that we allowed 4500 harvest cards and there’s only 4200 Harlequin duck is not a comfortable statement to make.

Ramsey Russell: What’s the number of Washington resident hunters, number of non-resident hunters versus populations of these trophy species to Harlequin?

Kyle Spragens: That’s a great question. So ballpark, the number that was in the more recent seasons, there’s something like 4000 resident hunters that are asking to be sea-duck hunters, and there’s something like 400 to 500 non-resident hunters asking to be sea-duck hunters. That’s a big discrepancy. That’s not the same, but remember that I told you at least half of the non-resident card you basically can assume is going to turn into one of the species of interest. So, 200 Harlequin ducks is already past the game and that’s before you even ask how many residents. So let’s say 4500 residents, 450 non residents. The Harlequin duck, I keep mentioning that long term average is somewhere around 4200 individuals. Long tail ducks, a little bit more than that. It’s kind of like about 5000 individuals. The other species of interest that I think a lot of folks come into Washington for is Barrow’s Goldeneye.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Kyle Spragens: Drake Barrow’s goldeneye.

Ramsey Russell: Go ahead.

Kyle Spragens: But that species we’re talking about more like 15,000 to 20,000 Barrow’s goldeneye that winter here.

Ramsey Russell: My very next question was, do you worry about the other cadres of trophy species that may attract trophy hunters to Washington state? and Barrow’s is a big one.

Kyle Spragens: Yeah. The first part of that is we know that’s a thing. Like I keep saying, I know that there’s folks that come and see that Washington has this sort of-

Ramsey Russell: Oh, there’s one sitting right off table right now interviewing you.

Kyle Spragens: Right.

Ramsey Russell: So go ahead.

Kyle Spragens: You know, so we know long tail ducks, Barrow’s goldeneye, probably white-winged Scoter, are sort of 3 that probably draw people’s attention to why would you go after birds in Washington? What I can tell you is that same game of taking the survey data and this harvest report data, we’re not even close to the percentages that make me concerned in terms of harvest rate. How many are we taking out? Population status, while the scoters have been depressed, harvest isn’t driving that. Other things are driving that, but as long as we keep the harvest rate in check, then that’s the game, is you’re not taking out more than what can be refilled in any one year. At this point, no, there are none of the others. Not Barrow’s goldeneye, not long-tailed duck, not any of the scoters, and I guess the other part to point out is Alaska has always been the spot that folks go to for sea-duck harvest. I would say COVID probably drove that. Washington is a lot closer than Alaska, and it might be a little bit easier to get to-

Ramsey Russell: A little cheaper

Kyle Spragens: Alaska, so a little bit cheaper. We now have as many registered sea-duck hunters as Alaska has, waterfowl hunters in total. Let that sink in. That’s the part where it doesn’t take a lot of people to drive a species that doesn’t have a strong reproductive rebound potential in their life history like a Mallard does. So you have to play the long game. It’s about 3, 5, 10 year time spans, rather than 1-3 year time spans with a mallard of how fast could something actually catch back up? So that’s the game, that’s why we look at the sort of harvest rate versus what’s out there. That’s why we continue our monitoring. I guess the one piece I didn’t say explicitly is that harvest report card comes with a fee. It’s an additional fee. So that’s maybe a deterrent to keep not everybody from becoming a sea-duck hunter. Those funds directly go back into the monitoring that we have to do because of how sensitive the mistake could be on something like a Sea duck or a Brant. So, again, user derived funds is feeding right back into our ability to manage better. It would be very easy to close everything and say, that saves me a lot of money for monitoring if I don’t even have to worry about that, but that’s not the only reason that we do the monitoring. We would never have detected the large declines in scoters and that’s a habitat question. It’s about food. It’s about trying to work with aquaculture in the area, trying to work with other entities that are influencing eel-grass beds and other sort of habitats that things like scooters are going to focus on. It’s not as easy as just drawing down the water, planting some seeds and seeing what happens and how good the habitat turns out. So trying to play that long game on a species that there’s not a lot of options to flip the switch of how well their population is doing. So harvest really is the tangible tool that we can manipulate. But we do our best to make sure that we’re not going to the full, like we’re just going to close it down. We’re trying to manage more in the longevity, the sustainable harvest into the future side of things. So that’s why we have those, we take bag limit restrictions on those specific species at state discretions, not because the federal government’s telling us to do it, because we have other data telling us, if we didn’t do that, this system would go sideways really quickly and we would have zero way of recovering or even attempting to influence recovery in a helpful way regardless of harvest. So keeping the monitoring aloft is actually one of the biggest reasons that we continue to do the monitoring and try to get that better information to help us manage and especially in those riskier management scenarios like sea duck and Brant.

Ramsey Russell: Do you worry that shutting down a season, however temporary, because now that it’s closed. First, is it within your discretion, state discretion, to just open back up if you want to. But do you worry at all that for reasons it was closed and that it’s closed, that non-hunters or anti-hunters might induce some form of, might try to leverage that into ensuring that it stays closed? I kind of worry about some west coast politics on this stuff.

Kyle Spragens: That’s where the process side that comes into play, and that’s honestly, outside of my job description. Like I said before, I’m a technician, like a technical advisor. I provide information and a proposal. So pending the information that we get from this winter’s survey that’s getting ready to start up, the crews are getting all the aircraft prepped and all the instrumentation wired up and checked and all that kind of stuff. So they’re in full force with a target of having the survey start in December again for the 28th year of doing that. So that will continue and once I get that information, there will be a proposal that says, based on this information, and if there is a limited user entry system, yes, there might be a potential to administer a season. That’s as far as I can take it before the process, like what you said, comes into the mix. So it is not impossible that it could be influenced by perspectives that don’t agree with just the value of whether or not it’s right or wrong to have harvest. That’s not my question. My game is I am charged with managing appropriately the harvest species that we have in the state, and so given that, what is the appropriate level of harvest? So I don’t know, is the unfortunate answer, but that is what we’re gearing up for right now in the background as season is underway. The current season is that we are trying to get the monitoring, the harvest assessments and other pieces kind of in check. I would add that in addition to our traditional surveys, the aerial survey, this has prompted us to have to do more, not less. That’s often a misconception that we get is like, you’re not having to do as much monitoring. We do these boat based surveys to get that age ratio piece that I mentioned. How many adults, how many young we’ve reinitiated that this last spring. We’re doing that again this spring to get that kind of information. The other part is we’re working with someone you’re familiar with, Phil Lavretsky and his lab to establish a genetic sampling methodology for Harlequin so that we could actually ask that question about stock composition. Do we see an abundance of birds from Alberta or British Columbia versus our own cascade birds here?

Ramsey Russell:Wow.

Kyle Spragens: Because if you’re disproportionately shooting a small breeding segment like the cascade birds, then you should even be more worried, but we don’t know that.

Ramsey Russell: We don’t know that.

Washington Management Plans for Waterfowl

But in addition to Harlequins, you’ve got long-tailed, Scoters, goldeneyes. What about the Brant?

Kyle Spragens: And so that genetic technique that Phil and his lab have developed has opened up an ability where my hope would be that we would go out and establish, is there a difference between rocky and cascade? and then hunters could be, if there’s a season in the future, would be able to provide samples that then allow us to say, yeah, this bird would be of that stock origin or that stock origin. The more that we could build that up, it would tell us, okay, we’re less concerned because there’s a lot of Canada influence, or maybe there’s no Canada influence and we should be more concerned than we’ve already been right. That piece of you can manage better with more information, but you have to kind of play this benefit to the resource in those instances where you don’t have everything, you have some uncertainty and so you can either full throttle it and go too far, or you can manage wisely and take time to actually see what’s appropriate. That’s where we’re at right now. I think that’s some folks struggle with that patience game, and I get that, but that long view of, you know, I’ve still got probably 30 years in my career of thinking about this. Is that 30 years from now, there’s still some kid that could go out on a youth hunt and experience a Harlequin harvest? That’s my hope, so.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I now know a lot more about Harlequin ducks and Harlequin ducks in Washington state than I ever imagined, and for that I’m thankful. I want to shift just a little bit. I know that Harlequins are part of a Washington management strategy. In other words, federal guidelines. Now, Washington takes ownership and manage them a little more intensely. But in addition to Harlequins, you’ve got long-tailed, Scoters, goldeneyes. What about the Brant?

Kyle Spragens: Brant? Yep that’s-

Ramsey Russell: Is Brant within your Washington strategy, just like the Harlequins?

Kyle Spragens: Sort of. There’s a little bit of difference. As I mentioned, ducks are managed in that big aggregate. A duck is a duck, unless you say otherwise. So that is why we have to take this extreme decision process, I guess, around the sea-ducks that you mentioned in gathering better information. In relation to Brant, Brant is managed at the flyway level. There is a Pacific flyway management plan for Brant and each state has a statement about harvest strategy in that plan that tells us if the population is this, here’s some of the considerations that requires us to think about season length, bag limit, typical ideas, but the constraints around it are specified in that management plan. Washington, as usual, plays a unique role in the flyway because we don’t get a lot of the Brant that are coming from the YK Delta. Those are the Brant on their way down to Mexico.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Kyle Spragens: During fall migration, a large chunk of those Brant pass through Humboldt Bay during fall migration, but we don’t get a big fall surge. We don’t get that pulse. What we get are Brant that are coming from higher up in the Arctic and so they come down later. So unlike Humboldt, whose season is about to open up, our season is in the middle of winter. So again, it falls more into this model of you’re not getting birds as they’re passing through, and there’s always going to be migration, so you can just take a sample, a small snapshot out of it. Our birds where our harvest season occurs are wintering birds. It’s how many are in the bucket and how fast-

Ramsey Russell: Very discreet population coming to a very specific part of the world.

Kyle Spragens: That’s correct. So how fast you take birds out versus how fast they’ll refill the bucket is a much more risky situation in a winter ground hunt. Our number of days are much more restricted, and we have a harvest card very similar to the seaducks, because we’re trying to keep tabs on how many Brant out of how many total did we record. It’s a great opportunity. There’s only 4 counties in the state that we actually have open to Brant because there’s a minimum number that triggers the harvest. There has to be 1000 birds during the winter time to even consider days. One of our biggest considerations in Washington that’s different is that we have this other unique little breeding segment that’s often referred to as Grey-bellied Brant or western high arctic Brant.

Ramsey Russell: Are they a subspecies or a color morph? There may not be a definitive answer.

Kyle Spragens: There’s some genetics that are running right now to try to clarify that. To our best knowledge, they are not a subspecies, they’re not their own unique little subspecies, but they are this sort of consistent hybrid between Atlantic Brant and Black Brant way up in the arctic islands. They’re keeping themselves aloft enough with breeding that you can see them like, you can absolutely see a gray bellied Brant, and you see pairs of grey bellies, and you see pairs of grey bellies with young, but they’re very sight faithful to Padilla Bay, which is east of here as sort of the winter terminus. So there’s a bulk of them in Eisenbach, over in the Moffet lagoon, the easternmost lagoon of Eisenbach and then there’s this winter cohort that come down to Skagit County, Padilla Bay, and they don’t go much further than that, but in that bay, there are more than 25% of the Brant that are wintering there.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Kyle Spragens: So trying to not go too far on this one little group of Brant that people, whether you think it’s a genetic diversity that you’re trying to keep aloft or just sort of the tradition of, they’ve always said that there’s gray bellies in that Padilla Bay. Since people have been hunting that bay, there has been higher sort of constraint around the management in that bay. That’s all spelled out in this Pacific flyway management plan, and that’s the difference. Each one of the goose populations, we, as collectively as the states in the flyway, sit down and say, well, knowing that these birds are passed through our states collectively, how do we manage that so we don’t, you know, turn it sideways, even though we’re trying to get Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Mexico, and BC all opportunities to harvest Brant. I would say in the goose world, the states with our federal partners and our Canadian wildlife service partners, are much more engaged in trying to refine the Brant and other goose harvest conundrums. That is why we had that same harvest card is because it’s such a select group of hunters for such a limited amount of days and such particular spots on the map that if 10 wing or if 10 wings or tail fans show up in the parts collection survey, the wing bee, that’s a miracle. Just don’t get that sample very well. So we know that we can harvest anywhere from 250 to over 1000 between those 4 counties in 3 days of harvest. So, while it’s a limited number of users.

Ramsey Russell: 3-day season.

Kyle Spragens: 3-day season, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Those Brant hunters are a hardcore lot when, you know, the guys that are willing to run, take a big boat with a lot of decoys and run 17 miles across open water to get to the honey hole and then wait in hopes that the birds will come through while they’re there in the 3 days. If the weather’s good for three days, enough to run that 17 miles, that takes an extreme level of commitment on the hunter’s part. That’s about as hardcore as anybody I know.

Kyle Spragens: It’s good that you said that because the sort of context, big picture. Sea duck and Brant harvest in Washington state is less than 1% of our total harvest.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. Wow.

Kyle Spragens: It’s tiny, and if you were to ask, if you were to send a question to all waterfowl hunters and say, how popular do you think sea duck hunting is, or how popular do you think Brant hunting is? It would be this bottom of the barrel, it’s not that popular. If you actually ask sea duck hunters and Brant hunters, is sea duck hunting and Brant hunting important to you? They’re going to say, yeah, this is my life, this is a tradition. This is something that I grew up doing, and it is. It’s a different style of hunting. It’s a completely different setup. Just the idea of keeping tabs of tides, knowing where eel-grass beds are so you don’t get your prop caught up in it. All of that, that whole game of just being able to read the system is a lot more complex. It’s a traditional use. Clallam county, which is just adjacent to where we’re having this meeting right now. It had been decades before we opened up the Brant season in Clallam county for the first time in 50 years or so. There were old Brant decoys in people’s garages from 50 years ago that they were dusting off and being able to reuse or show their grandkid or whatever for the first time of like, this used to be a thing, but then numbers tanked, couldn’t sustain it. Now we’re back to a number where as long as we don’t go too sideways, we can sustain it. So that was a hunt that just came back after 50 years of closure in the state, and that sort of tradition of the saltwater hunting is obviously something that it’s hard to get folks that are more used to inland hunting sort of to get their head around. It’s similar to diving duck hunting on big water, but it’s even more crazy than that. You know, I say fanatical. I guess sometimes fanatical is taken a wrong way. I don’t mean it bad. I mean, it’s a focused group.

How to Continue the Tradition of Hunting

My philosophy and all that is I want that tradition to continue and it can continue as long as the numbers allow it, and the hunter pressure, number of days, number of hunters, the combination of those two can be balanced so that you’re not taking too many out of the system for what we know can be replaced. 

Ramsey Russell: I would call them fanatical. You’ve got to be fanatical about Brant and about the methodology and about the tradition to go to that extreme, because those Brant aren’t coming in at daylight to feed. It’s on the tide. It’s to the feed source. If their migration is here yet, if those 3 days when it happened, you’ve got to be committed and at best, to go out and go pull the trigger twice.

Kyle Spragens: My philosophy and all that is I want that tradition to continue and it can continue as long as the numbers allow it, and the hunter pressure, number of days, number of hunters, the combination of those two can be balanced so that you’re not taking too many out of the system for what we know can be replaced. That is going to change across the years, and that’s why we monitor. Sometimes there’s the idea that we’re acting too fast on something, I would say we reacted 2 years too late on the Harlequin issue in retrospect, once we figured out how to look at it, we were probably 2 years too late in the closure side of things. So now we’re trying to catch up for that. The part that does go sideways in these periods where you have closures of these species that have higher bars of participation because of the harvest record card, more sensitive management because of the amount of information that it takes us to get there, those harvest cards are essential. Unfortunately, what has also happened in parallel since that 2019 season is that our compliance rate, how many of those cards are actually getting reported, has been declining substantially.

Ramsey Russell: Why?

Kyle Spragens: I don’t know why.

Ramsey Russell: Is it Non-Hunters? Is it out of state hunters that showed up, got their bird and just, I got to get my flight and going home. I mean, something like that.

Kyle Spragens: Maybe just the compliance is kind of similar across resident and non-resident, so it’s probably just more of a behavior thing. The last season that we had Harlequin open, the compliance went down to about 25%. So one out of four cards are actually getting reported. The reason I bring that up is just to reiterate that fact of, like, we can manage better if our information is better. If our information starts to drift to more uncertainty, we have to be more cautious about how hard do we throttle up. At the same time of total harvest going up, compliance was going down. So uncertainty was growing. While I say that last season had to my best estimate from the actual cards and running the stats, about 297 total harvest, it could have been over 350. It could have been closer to 400 because the uncertainty was so wide, because hunters stopped reporting their cards consistently. I know oftentimes it feels like state agencies or federal agencies are out to get the hunter or something, but a reminder that that information is vital to help us manage better, regardless which direction they go.

Ramsey Russell: It’s incumbent on us as hunters to do everything we can to aid the system. I’ll say this Kyle, the fact that we spent so long talking about your extensive background in research and management, applied sciences, not just in the Pacific flyway, but worldwide, and the fact that you’ve been hunting since you were 12 years old. So this is not coming from a unknown, left leaning bureaucrat. This is coming from a duck hunter himself, which speaks volumes to me. That’s why it was important to me to have you come on here and explain this because you are a very capable waterfowl manager, but at the same time, you’re one of us. You’re a duck hunter. That makes a difference to me. So thank you.

Kyle Spragens: Well, I appreciate that. I guess for me it is. It’s like I didn’t expect to get here, to these types of conversations or even topics when I was a 12 year old or !1 year old that didn’t even know what waterfowl hunting was. I think it’s a good reminder that information and conversations go a long way towards bridging some of those, what seem like large divides. I don’t think it’s as large as we think sometimes, but it takes the right people to sit down and have those conversations and be open to listening to information and have a dialogue. I’m all about that. I think that is maybe the more it can be challenging, but it’s the more rewarding side of waterfowl management in general, whether that’s my colleagues in other states or whether that’s dealing with the public, whether they’re hunters or non-hunters. I appreciate the opportunity, Ramsey. I think it’s been great to walk through that whole process.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, you all been listening to Kyle Spragens, the state waterfowl manager for the State of Washington. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere, podcast. Lot to think about, isn’t it? See you next time.