EP 429. Chasing Living, Breathing Waterfowl Fossils

 

Working the Land: Blood, Sweat, and Tears

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I have got Dr. Phil Lavretsky in the field on the hunt for genetics. What are you doing, Phil?

Phil Lavretsky: We are on location, finally.

Ramsey Russell: We got here 2 and a half months ago.

Phil Lavretsky: That’s right. We are on location, finally. Not in a booth, not across the pond talking to each other. This has been phenomenal. I mean, just working with the people here, working on the land, being out there, blood, sweat and tears. It’s been great.

Ramsey Russell: I say it feels like 2 and a half months ago. Because it kind of sort of does. And I think it’s been like a week. But we got a lot done in a week.

Phil Lavretsky: Got a lot done.

Ramsey Russell: It seems like a month ago that we were in Melbourne.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Because we got so much done. And the time flies. I mean, it’s just like literally getting up at 03:00 or 04:00 in the morning and going to bed for May 9, sometimes later and getting up and repeating. And it’s just so much wham, wham. And if you all weren’t here, if you and Andy weren’t here. The scientists we’ve been calling you all, if you all weren’t here, I didn’t just come over and gone duck hunting, but we’ve done that. But it’s been so much more than that. What brings you to Australia?

Duck Research Across the Globe

This is something I’ve been dreaming about, extending my research geographical reach. We’ve had studies in New Zealand, the most eastern part of their range in American Samoa. It was natural that we were going to be coming here to Australia to collect specimens to further increase our understanding of the species.

Phil Lavretsky: Man, what brings me to Australia. The first part is that the opportunity this is something I’ve been dreaming about kind of extending my research, geographical reach. So we’ve had, if people have listened to the other podcasts I work on mallards. Mallard like ducks, I mean, waterfowl more generally, wildlife even more generally, but really focusing on mallard like ducks. Mallards, Pacific black ducks, black duck, American black ducks, African black ducks. And again, here in the Australasian Pacific, the Pacific black duck. We’ve got studies in New Zealand that we did in 2018. I’ve had crews catching Pacific black ducks in the most eastern part of their range in American Samoa. And so it was a natural event that we were going to be coming here in Australia and collecting these birds, these specimens that are going to further increase, kind of complete that geographic reach so that way we can understand the entirety of this species and what’s occurring at the unseen level or the genetic level.

Ramsey Russell: For those, and I can’t imagine that haven’t heard you before. I’m going to post some of the times you’ve been on this podcast before, we’ve talked about mallards, we’ve talked about black ducks, we’ve talked about the North American mallard like species, and then we talked about the dusky ducks, what’s going on down in Texas. And that’s really getting off into applied type, how genetic works to 4 hunters and really applied science. And then we’re going to talk – What else we did. We did one about Africa, about those African species down there.

Phil Lavretsky: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: But why the black duck in particular? Like, I went to Africa and we did the yellow bills and black ducks, and then you kind of sent me a wish list, now, bigger than Australia. But Australia was important to you. What was missing? What was it about this black duck? You’ve had some people doing research and stuff like that.

Researching the Pacific Black Duck

Is this a case of maybe a black duck, a mottled duck and a Mexican duck or something else? Only one way to find out is to go and get these birds.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So we’ve done some research on Pacific black ducks. A lot of those samples were older generationally in the 90s to early 2000s. And we wanted to – and they didn’t have the kind of data sets that we’ve been collecting here. They’re not complimentary. We’re doing all these pictures, morphological assessments, understanding how they look and so that that way we can take that information and correspond it with genetic information. And again, we’ve got those studies in New Zealand and American Samoa. And one thing that we’ve learned is that while people always thought things were on the island should have come from Solomons, our genetic data suggests and supports that somehow Australian birds made it to American Samoa. How did they do that? We can’t answer that without the true source and the more contemporary source. So we needed to get some of these birds. But on top of it, for Australia itself, we know that mallards, particularly game farm mallards have been released here just like they’ve been released in New Zealand. And we’ve got several papers coming out where there are only small pockets of what we consider pure, genetically pure New Zealand gray ducks left in New Zealand, where we’ve identified them and the rest of them are really these mallard hybrids. The mallards are winning in New Zealand. So the question is, what’s happening in Australia today?

Ramsey Russell: Right about time, I think I’ve hunted a little bit, put my hands on a lot of birds. I read my duck book, my duck Bible. I called it right about time, I think I know a little bit. I spent a week with somebody like yourself and realize how little I know. For example, we weren’t even here yet. I think we were in an airport somewhere and talking about this and you kept talking about a New Zealand gray duck. Well, the first Pacific black duck I shot were in New Zealand. Then I came to Australia and you started talking about no, no. That’s a different species. It’s fixing to change. I’m like, I don’t believe it. I read my damn bird book, man. There it was – I said, how did I miss this before? So really and truly, it’s a Pacific black duck in New Zealand. It’s a Pacific black duck here, but it really ain’t. It’s really, they’re isolated enough that they’re basically 2 species.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. If I remember correctly, our last time estimates were something like 150,000 years ago. Pacific black, it looks like Pacific black ducks colonized Australia to New Zealand and then isolated and then they started to evolve and adapt to the New Zealand ecology, and then they became different. And genetically, they’re different. And in taxonomically, we consider them subspecies. Superciliosa and regesirae. Regesirae here in Australia, supersoliosa in New Zealand. Now, there is a consideration that these islands, these birds really only described in the Solomon Islands, potentially is a 3rd subspecies. And again, they thought that range went all the way to the Samoan Islands and that should have been this 3rd, but we just didn’t find that. We found that those birds are actually still Australian. And so there’s going to be some discussion, some probably reevaluations by the taxonomists, if they feel like it. 2, 3 subspecies, definitely 2, though. And then within Australia, what’s interesting is that we’ve seen in our previous work that there’s actually some substructure, right, so we talked about – Well, we didn’t talk about, but what we’re talking about right now, these birds don’t really migrate. They’re nomadic, but they’re nomadic within themselves and right in the middle of this entire country is a huge desert. And oftentimes those birds probably don’t want to fly over that desert. And what we’re finding is that in the north, where we are right now, in the southwest, where we were Melbourne, as well as the southeast, it looks like there’s distinct population structure, meaning those birds are really specific to those regions. And so additional questions just for the Australians is like, how different are things around here? Is this a case of maybe a black duck, a mottled duck and a Mexican duck or something else? Only one way to find out is to go and get these birds.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of mallards, let me back up and say this, man, I’ve been scratching down on my little bird bible, you know species, subspecies and I’m a splitter. I was hunting with John Otto up in Washington state and there’s splitters and lumpers you got people that say Canada’s and cacklers, and you got people to say the different subspecies of Canada Goose, different subspecies of cacklers. And I like to follow neck, give me something to chase. And I said I need to figure out. I need to go through my notes and do everything, and I got a 16 hours plane ride to do it. So I pulled out my laptop and built a spreadsheet and know how many subspecies I got. But now the list gets confusing. Because now I got gray ducks over in New Zealand. Now I got pacific black ducks. I got 2 subspecies and I’m a splitter man. I’m 4 – But you said something really interesting to me about those New Zealand mallards are soon becoming another species or species or subspecies.

Phil Lavretsky: No, they’re not a –

Old World Genetics: A Mallard is a Mallard

Game farm mallards came in hybridized with gray ducks. 

Ramsey Russell: It’s a mallard and a mallard.

Phil Lavretsky: A mallard is a mallard.

Ramsey Russell: But you talking about Old World genetic.

Phil Lavretsky: This is Old World genetics in New Zealand, they were the source of those birds, was originally game farm mallards. Game farm mallards came in hybridized with gray ducks. And essentially what we show is that hybridization provided some of that New Zealand genetic variation. Things that are important to New Zealand, when to fly, how to fly, where to go, how to live. It’s basically how –

Ramsey Russell: Kind of helped them make the leap between a chicken like pecker farm duck to more of a landscape.

Phil Lavretsky: Exactly. And in New Zealand, you don’t have really strong seasonality. You don’t have migration, you don’t have a lot of predators. So there was enough time to allow this. Probably, not probably this kind of poorly adapted duck to then have enough time that it all of a sudden is doing quite well. I mean, there’s 3 million of them. 3 million mallards now found or that’s what their estimates are of population size for New Zealand. So they went from about 30,000, that’s about how many birds they used. They collected them out of Europe and even went to North America and picked up mallards because they thought they were getting wild. But all they did was buy game farm mallards, which were the same thing that they bought in Europe and they brought them in, released them and away they went. And so what we show is that they’ve actually sort of gone through adaptations that they no longer look like a game farm mallard, genetically they don’t look like a New Zealand gray duck. They don’t look like a wild mallard. They’re like their own thing genetically. And so, again, there’s a lot of discussion in conservation science, when are we going to be able to really stop invasives? How long have those invasives been around? That’s a discussion that’s ongoing and be like, maybe we need to naturalize this. Yeah, we were the problem, but now they’re doing well and especially as other species don’t do well, there’s even discussions of, like, well, if the hybrid or this other thing does the job of what used to be here, is that good enough? And that, again, is a discussion that if –

Ramsey Russell: It’s like, once a genie’s out of the bottle, you can’t stop it anyway.

Phil Lavretsky: Well, unfortunately not. We sure try, but unfortunately, sometimes it’s hard, because some, oftentimes, those invasive species, it’s a trend that occurs where an invasive species comes and there’s no limitations anymore. The predators and the food resources limitations that they had in wherever they were from, they no longer have them. And so all of a sudden, you always see this kind of explosion amongst the invasives because they’re not limited like they were from their origin. So anyway, so in New Zealand, lo and behold, these ducks are doing quite well. And we even modeled forecasts into the future with what the climate is thought to be in the next 25 years in New Zealand. And fortunately, unfortunately, the mallard shows a higher adaptive landscape than the gray duck. And so that’s up to New Zealand. And how they – we’re going to publish it. That’s the data. It’s not my job to make future decisions. But if you thought that –

Ramsey Russell: We report, you decide.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, we report, you decide. That’s what they get paid to do.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, very interesting. We had this conversation, I don’t know, let’s say a year or 2 ago, you said, hey, Pacific black ducks and I said, I can make it happen, but I can’t. Again, it’s why I like traveling with smart people is I said, Phil, I’d have to smuggle that stuff out and I can’t do that. And he said, nope, I think we can get permits. In comes our next guest, Andy, a museum guy that’s collecting similarly to what you’re doing, but not genetic, just more for posterity. And, well, if we’re going to come this far and because they’re fixing to close the hunting season down and I’m going to ask you your sense of that, but why not get all we can? And so what all species, so we did we – So that’s why we went to Melbourne, because a lot of hunters, never mind the fact they’re going to shoot 4 ducks a day this year. A lot of hunters laid away their birds. And man, I never forget the dad and his 2 little kids coming in and those were beautiful taxidermy quality. But those birds he had cherry picked from his season to get taxidermy, but he donated to the call. So talk a little bit about those first 3 days. What species you all collected, how many you collected and what you going to do with all that data.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, so, as you alluded to, it’s not always easy for everybody to get specimens out of the country. And so we started going down the rabbit hole of scientifically collecting specimens and getting the right permits. You need import, export permits. And thankfully, I immediately reached out to Andy and University of California, Davis, Andy Inglis and Irene Inglis. Irene, his wife, actually, is the one that was with me in New Zealand. And so, lo and behold, it’d be Andy and I that are in Australia. But he thankfully knew the process. He worked here in Australia a long time ago when Ducks Unlimited was here and knew the people, knew what we had to do. And so I said, hey, I know this is something important for you, something that you’ve been wanting to do. So we joined forces, he was able to get a lot of the permits on this side and I was able to help get the permits on the US side and we were able to get about 10 per species, 12 for a couple of them. And so we went for the things that are huntable. So things that are in season. So that way we’re salvaging from those hunters that are donating all those specimens. So we went, obviously, for Pacific black ducks, grey teal, chestnut teal, pink eared duck, hard head or not hardheads, mountain duck or their wood ducks. What else do we get? God, that seemed like a month ago.

Ramsey Russell: It does. You all got a lot of the wood ducks.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Remember that? I know you got some beautiful shelducks.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. Shelducks.

Ramsey Russell: Black ducks, by the time we came up here, you lacked a lot of black ducks. Yeah, I think people are eating them. And the whistling ducks and of course, the venerable magpie goose.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So again, we didn’t hunt, right, like you said, we didn’t hunt in Victoria. And so is all hunter donated birds and specimens that are going to be coming to the collections. And what we’re really doing here is salvaging these birds so that way they can be in the collection for future generations. We’ve been talking about this entire trip, like, what’s the real impact? There’s a clear impact for the Pacific black ducks, that’s a main objective, a goal of mine. But these other species, it’s really making sure that that species exists somewhere as a catalog for them, as a representative. So that way, students that probably may never step foot onto Australian ground, we can teach them, we can showcase the biodiversity, hopefully is, but potentially was in Australia. And to further the fact what these collections mean, especially the fact that we’re taking genetic data or tissue samples that will be cryo frozen for future scientists to use, how do you think cloning is going to occur or how bringing species back, having that tissue cataloged in museums is how a lot of these species are being or attempted to be revived.

Ramsey Russell: Shouldn’t it be revived, Phil? I mean, if something went extinct you got to figure the world had changed a lot, like the Labrador duck.

Phil Lavretsky: Labrador duck.

Ramsey Russell: Labrador duck went extinct before European settlers wiped it out, my understanding. It was kind of on the way out when they showed.

Phil Lavretsky: Well, we don’t know. So my theory, my hypothesis, how, if I can get a few of the samples, I think it was a hybrid, the hybrids, it was like a –

Ramsey Russell: Can you get samples?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, they’re in at the Cornell has them, Smithsonian has them. We’ve got a, I’ve got a colleague that’s stand a bit –

Ramsey Russell: So you can go back and look at this data from way back when.

Phil Lavretsky: And test that theory.

Ramsey Russell: 200, 300 years ago and figure out what it was a hybrid of and how they evolved.

The Importance of Getting Duck Specimens into Museums

If you can’t get them into a museum, you’ll never know what you had.

Phil Lavretsky: If they were. Yeah. No, and that’s the beauty. That’s the reason that these specimens are so important. If you can’t get them into a museum, you’ll never know what you had. If you don’t preserve it in one way or another, you’ll never know what you have. At this point, hunters are out there harvesting these ducks. Why not get a piece of them for the future? Why not? The hardest thing to do is to get a specimen, whether it’s a duck, a mammal, a plant. I mean, there’s a reason that we have underground bunkers in Sweden holding every seed of every variety of plant possible, assuming that the apocalypse might happen. Without them, we have nothing to build on in the future.

Ramsey Russell: I didn’t even know that. I didn’t know something like that existed.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, it’s underground. I forget how many feet, but it’s meant to withstand an apocalyptic war.

Ramsey Russell: I had no idea. Talk about the Labrador duck being a hybrid.

Phil Lavretsky: Tell the hypothesis.

Ramsey Russell: No, I know, but back when the early naturalist Audubon –

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. That’s who described –

Ramsey Russell: Came through North America and explored. He named the brewers duck, just like the mallards and the pintail and all this stuff.

Phil Lavretsky: Exactly. And there were enough brewer’s duck.

Ramsey Russell: And it was just the hybrid.

Phil Lavretsky: That’s right. And there were enough – But that’s the whole thing. There were enough brewer’s duck.

Ramsey Russell: He exceptionally the common bird.

Phil Lavretsky: That it’s like, oh, they’re, it’s common. Maybe it’s slightly uncommon, but shit they’re out there and so why not the Labrador duck where it’s like, yeah, there’s a few of them around. That’s cool. And obviously if you only have a few, it’s not that hard for things to go south.

The Labrador Duck

 A scoter and a long tail.

Ramsey Russell: What might a Labrador duck been in hybrid of?

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, I think it –

Ramsey Russell: A scoter and a long tail.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, that’s exactly what I think.

Ramsey Russell: Really? That’s what it looks like.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, it does. So, in the reason that I think this –

Ramsey Russell: I mean, what if it’s just a little micro population –

Phil Lavretsky: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: Of like brewer’s duck?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, I think that’s exactly. I think I have no data.

Ramsey Russell: When you go crack the vault and find out what’s what.

Phil Lavretsky: Hopefully in a year, we got this. I have a colleague out of, where is she now? UT Arlington. Anyway, so she’s been working on them, they did a mitochondrial DNA study. It’s a sea duck, but they don’t know the parentage of it yet. So we’re going to try to do that. But you know where this comes from. I mean, we published when was that? 21. Not looking for it, just wanted to do a sea duck phylogeny. North American sea duck phylogeny. Just like every sea duck you can think of, we sampled 5 to 15 of them and we build a phylogeny. But from that we were able to find out that the steller’s eider is a hybrid, what appears to be a hybrid, a mix of long tail and eider and its eider ancestor. And the funny thing is, long tail ducks, for some reason, I think because of this, have the most genetic diversity of all sea ducks. And my hypothesis that we presented in the paper is that eiders and long tails interbred, moving some eider into long tail, increasing that genetic diversity. But then the hybrids themselves evolved into what we consider steller’s eider now. That was the hypothesis and it looks that way because we got full genomes and it sure, it still looks to be the case, but further investigation.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s pretty interesting stuff, man. And such has been the week of storytelling, this week. I mean, it’s been just every day has been stuff like this and I love to hear this kind of stuff. Brewer’s Duck Audubon, I read this book recently, Phil and I thought about you and it didn’t have anything to do with duck hunting or genetics, it was called The Feather Thief. I recommend everybody read it. It was the best book I’ve read in a long time. But to build a case like chapter 3, when this kid got real big into this ornate salmon fly time broke into this museum, this elaborate museum that had treasures collected by people like Darwin. And he stole these birds, lots of them, 300 birds, to make freaking flies with that you don’t even fish with, that you tie with using fancy feathers gathered from around the world. But chapter 2, they really got deep into kind of build up. Chapter 3, they got deep into, like never thought about it, but back in the day, a long time ago, when British empire was everywhere and the world was being conquered, they had people like Audubon and Darwin and all these folks out clambering around, naming all these species and they talked about a guy named AR Wallace, who was the first guy to go down the Rio Negro. He was there for, I don’t know, 10 years and collected just thousands and thousands of insects and plants and animals and birds and all this stuff. And just on the way home, a ship burned and he lost it all. And under tyranny, went back and come to find out, he absolutely, he and Darwin supposedly independently arrived at the same conclusion of species, origin of the species and stuff like that. But they just said, I never thought about it. But they said by the end of the 1800s, the natural world had been discovered. And I love these conversations with you, Phil. Because it just dawned on me when I was on the big long flight coming over here, I said, man, I’m with another Wallace. I mean, this kind of stuff you’re talking about, though. All this stuff’s been catalogued. Open up a bird book. There’s all these pictures of birds, there’s all these pictures of animals and all this information on Wikipedia and elsewhere, but through the world of genetics, it’s like a whole rediscovery. Is that an oversimplification? Because to me it really is a Labrador duck, it’s extinct. Well, it may have been a hybrid. There may be a real scientific explanation for stuff like that and for stuff that brings you here about the Pacific black ducks, about the mallard, the black ducks, the African yellow bills. I mean, it’s almost like rediscovering everything.

Phil Lavretsky: I mean, I’m biased, right? I’m a geneticist. I think genetics is the unseen world that we’ve never been able to see, obviously. And so it provides this foundational data that allows us to piece those puzzle, put the puzzle together that we couldn’t otherwise. It provides us information, everything from how exactly a chihuahua came from a wolf to how duck species evolve and adapt to different parts of the world. I think it’s just like you alluded to, it’s like we knew everything. Well, hell, Mexican duck, we didn’t know much about. And so my team really explored that duck and we started to find certain patterns and come to find out, everything we really knew wasn’t right, it was based on good science of the time, but it was biased based on, because you just didn’t know. You didn’t know what was happening underneath the skin. You were just looking at the bird.

The Uniqueness of Hybrid Mallards

In New Zealand, mallards hybridized with gray ducks, creating a unique genetic variation. They no longer look like a game farm mallard; they’re genetically distinct, almost their own thing.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, by the same token, our very first episode, you were looking at black duck mallard hybridization, because it’s a given that because mallards have been introduced to the Atlantic Flyway and they do hybridize, that the black ducks going to be hybridized into extinction. I can remember professors talking about that 25, 30 years ago in college.

Phil Lavretsky: That was it.

Ramsey Russell: And there are a lot of traits in hybrids, but because of black duck is related to a mallard, it also had a lot of traits, anyway.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, that’s right.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s not until you go to the Smithsonian and start digging up genetics from 150 years ago with modern genetics that you say, no, that just a mallard will breed with a black duck, but it won’t breed with the f one, so it’s not going to – 25% are hybrid, but 75% are just like they were when they were initially collected. It’s like a baby.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It brings clarity.

Phil Lavretsky: And putting that on a map where those pure birds and hybrids are became made things very clear you got boreal forests and salt flats during winter and you got pure black ducks. You got interior US, not so great. That’s where the hybridization, now that we know, that’s where the game farm mallards and so forth are and that’s where the increases are. But again –

Ramsey Russell: Wait. Now, are you saying that if I’m in Arkansas and flooded timber and killed Anas rubripes, a black duck, if I have some mallard in it or –

Phil Lavretsky: Well, I’m not saying that.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a different divergence of black duck that the salt marsh.

Phil Lavretsky: No, no, it’s where you are. So, like, we thought that black duck, we were focusing strongly in the northeast where it was like trying to figure out what’s occurring on the landscape. So I can’t tell. No, if you shot a black duck –

Ramsey Russell: Okay. Black duck is black duck.

Phil Lavretsky: Hey, I shot black ducks that I genetically vetted are black ducks. In Ohio, my own ducks, so there’s black ducks out there. It’s just when you’re in the middle of New York versus salt flats of, I guess, the Chesapeake Bay, you’ve got a different proportion or probability of getting a pure black duck versus not. And so that’s what it is. Now, we haven’t dug into that hole yet because funding hasn’t been there. And I guess people were like, well, I guess black ducks around. But we hope to continue that story and try to understand it at the landscape levels that we’re now understanding for mottled ducks and Mexican ducks and obviously mallards to determine exactly that question, like, if you’re in Arkansas and you shoot something, what’s the probability of that thing being a black duck? It’s something that we’re happy to provide the hunters, if they’re wanting to send us a sample.

The Original Waterfowl Species

It was Vegavis. 

Ramsey Russell: What do you think the original duck species was?

Phil Lavretsky: The original duck species.

Ramsey Russell: The original waterfowl species.

Phil Lavretsky: It was Vegavis. It was this –

Ramsey Russell: What?

Phil Lavretsky: It was –

Ramsey Russell: It was a dinosaur.

Phil Lavretsky: It walked with the dinosaurs. I knew where this was going. Also, dinosaurs, not lizards. I even had to look up a phylogenetic tree right before our conversation. I was like, yeah, no, that’s right.

Ramsey Russell: You won’t write into it.

Magpie Geese: The Ancient Survivors

Birds didn’t fly until all the dinosaurs died. Once they were gone, these birds took over the skies. Magpie geese are a relic, sort of a dinosaur, coexisting with modern waterfowl.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, no, what was occurring is that there were these species that were starting to diverge from the pterosaurs, think of, like, raptors, think of t rex. Those are the things. And there was the earliest ancestor that someone dug up in China was about 75 million years old. So that means for at least 10 million years, this chicken duck like thing walked with dinosaurs. Now, dinosaurs went extinct, true dinosaurs. But that thing continued. And because the dinosaurs went extinct and there weren’t any more pterosaurs and other things trying to eat it, they then took over the world. They took over the world because that space was available for them to do so. And so that thing, 85 million years ago really stayed that thing or the ducks –

Ramsey Russell: Did it fly?

Phil Lavretsky: We think it looks like it could. It probably glided. Probably glided, hard to say, but fully feathered. Because they have really nice, kind of like Alectrosaurus. You can see all of the feathers in the casts when they got fossilized and everything. So we know that it’s got – You know what, it actually has a beak billed, kind of like the magpie geese, that’s what it has.

Ramsey Russell: Before we go there, I mean, I jump around. I mean, I understand systematics to this point. Animalia, Anseriformes, Anas. Okay, but as I’m digging through something the other day, just happened to read that all birds are in a clade which falls about midway in the whole systematic thing of dinosaur.

Phil Lavretsky: Correct.

Ramsey Russell: People believe that birds are the closest thing we have to dinosaurs. And you were explaining something the other day when we were scanning geese that it was something entirely different. It was a divergence or was it, the birds?

Phil Lavretsky: No, no, birds and dinosaurs.

Ramsey Russell: They came from the dinosaurs.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. Think of again a microraptor, like a little raptor. So the hypothesis is this, feathers only evolve. So feathers come from hair, same gene. So then the hairs essentially started to sprout like a downy. And that was for thermoregulation. Now, at some point, something happened where there were tail feathers that all of a sudden were bigger and that looked like for show, males started to show stuff. And then Archaeopteryx and other birds like that, what they then did, they were fully feathered, but they couldn’t fly. They didn’t have the proper muscles, attachments. They didn’t have full primaries that can create lift, but what they could do is glide. And then essentially, that rolled into – once there was space to space in the air, where all the pterodactyls were. Once they all went extinct, then that thing started to gain flight, essentially. It’s a very gradual movement from something that just keeps you warm, something that girls like to now I fly because that allows me to hunt and catch things and move about the world in an efficient way and do it where mammals are down there and we’re up here.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Where in the whole scheme of things do magpie geese fall in relation to ducks, geese and swans?

Phil Lavretsky: They are one of the out groups, which means they’re the oldest lineage, leading to –

Ramsey Russell: Like a precursor.

Phil Lavretsky: A precursor. You can almost think of galeranzerae which is like chickens and turkeys and quails –

Ramsey Russell: Screamers.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. Screamers are also a middle point between ducks and chicken. So they are a middle area between the 2 points imagine this, imagine you’ve got these ancestors with mixed trait of chicken and duck, something that was trying to kind of move towards a more water based life from a land based life. So they started to have partial webbing. They had aspects that allowed them to survive and work in water areas where chickens don’t work well. And so you don’t have to compete with chickens that are really good on the land. And so, imagine there were probably lots of different types of what we consider what we see today, which are only screamers and magpies, right? Screamers in South America, magpies here in Australia and there’s probably lots of those types, but they all went extinct because they weren’t as good as a chicken and eventually they weren’t as good as a duck. So they’re kind of in this in between area. Now, today, we still have screamers and magpies. They carved out a life. They continue to be able to survive, reproduce and compete in their environments, but they are a relic. They are kind of this intermediate piece, a living fossil, essentially, is how we consider them of how the evolution progressed from chicken to waterfowl.

Ramsey Russell: I really didn’t know that coming over here, there were 3 species I wanted to shoot on my bucket list, and they’re all up here in northern territories, which brought me here. And as far as I’m concerned, a magpie goose was probably the ugliest duck on earth just from seeing the pictures and from glint, but, man. One in hand, it’s still ugly.

Phil Lavretsky: But it’s pretty cool.

Ramsey Russell: But, oh, my God. It’s like the tip of the beak hooked. That looks a whole lot like a dinosaur to me. That funny bump, I have no idea. Somebody told me the other day they. That what they use it is to, they bump through seed beds to get into seed. I said, have you ever seen them do this? No, but that’s what I heard they do. Why else would you have that big bump?

Phil Lavretsky: It’s got to be a sexual trait. Either they –

Ramsey Russell: But they both got it.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, but the males are bigger, they always are. Think of Caribbean, females have little antlers, but males have those large antlers, right? The females still need for it to, like, dig. It’s a secondary sexual trait. I think it’s a trait, but there it is. Who’s studying them? Why hasn’t that been said?

Ramsey Russell: The bill itself. Okay, so it’s got the hook and on the other end is that big old hump. And that hump gets bigger. Whereas most waterfowl have a notch.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: At the base of their bill, it starts to pull it up and it inverts.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Juvenile does not. But it just pulls that thing up. And the bill is not smooth like every other duck goose and swan around, and it’s not scaly. It ain’t scales, but it sure feels like it and looks like it’s very rough, like cement, unfinished cement. But the nostrils is what tripped me. Those nostrils look much like a dinosaur, is anything – They’re on top and they’re armored and just big and thick and point straight down like every other duck and goose world. You can almost look right through and see daylight on the other side. It’s a perfect little hole, goose. That’s why they put the little saddles on it. Ain’t that weird? That’s just the head.

Phil Lavretsky: Look, we were, Andy and I, hopefully you’ll talk to him about that, we were looking at that. We think that hook is actually the bill. And the rest of it is not like the true bill of a duck is that hook elongated, is what we think. And that the rest of it is like, if you look at the top part of a duck, that little tiny piece that’s up there is that. It’s like your fingers have been, like, the tips have been short, like, shortened and the one part in, like, elongated, that’s what we think it is. The hook itself is probably the precursor to the bill. Like, that’s the bill material. But we don’t know there’s only one way to find out.

Ramsey Russell: They’ve got real long legs.

Phil Lavretsky: They do.

Ramsey Russell: And Paul was telling me, because he’s obviously the camp chef, he was telling they obviously spend a whole lot more of their lives walking.

Phil Lavretsky: Walking in water, though.

Ramsey Russell: Than flying.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Because they got very tender meat in their breast and very sinewy legs. Not quite as bad as wild turkey, but very sinewy.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And they’re doty flyers, they’re slow.

Phil Lavretsky: They’re slow. Yeah. No, I mean, look at it. It’s got that partial webbing. Just enough if they have to go, they kind of, like, suck at swimming. But they can do it, also when they get on those big mats of veg where they lay their eggs, they can walk on that. So that way they don’t sink because it gives them more surface area. And so, I mean, there’s a lot just looking at them, being here, experiencing, being out there, watching them fly, watching them work the water and how they move about. I’ve got a ton of questions I’d love to ask, there’s tons of research that potentially can give us more insight into exactly how waterfowl came to be more generally.

Ramsey Russell: How long did it take for a feature on a bird or an animal to evolve?

Phil Lavretsky: Typically, millions of years.

Ramsey Russell: Longer than what these birds have existed.

Phil Lavretsky: Longer than, well –

Ramsey Russell: Because you’re, and I’m Just sitting there thinking, I mean, why hadn’t their foot evolved into something more webbed?

Phil Lavretsky: Well, no. So that’s the thing, if they evolved and changed, they would be something different. They would be a duck. So they would have gone extinct. If they had truly, completely shifted, then they themselves would have been out competed by whatever it is that they became and that’s evolution. It’s this progression and change to the ecology itself. Again, birds didn’t fly until all those dinosaurs died from the sky. You can’t fly when everybody’s trying to eat you and you’re not that good at flying. But once they’re down, these things, no matter how funky they might fly, there’s nothing up there. Free reign and so they’re a relic. They’re sort of a dinosaur because they still coexist with other waterfowl. Now, if there were true, maybe sandhill cranes, maybe something else that’s kind of better at life than they are in the same kind, going after the same type of food or nesting in the same area, then they probably wouldn’t exist.

Ramsey Russell: How’d you enjoy hunting them?

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, man, it was fun.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve watched enough CSI episodes to know that you spent a lot of your life wearing a lab coat and goggles, looking in a microscope.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, but this is what it gets, that this is what keeps me going.

Ramsey Russell: What would it like being out there in that swamp and that habitat?

Phil Lavretsky: I mean, first of all, I couldn’t. When I was there and I was watching the sunset, especially yesterday and today, when we had a bit of water in front of us, I, like, told myself, just, like, just look at the sunset and watch the birds. Never thought I’d be in Australia. So I got to thank you and I got to thank all our Australian hosts for making this happen. The hunters that donated the birds. I mean, I just, SCI, thank you on Ramsey’s behalf. And, in fact, the only reason I’m here is the National Science foundation small grant that I was able to get to increase international collaborations, which is what we’re doing here.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir. That’s right.

In the Australian Outback: A Duck Blind in a Goose Camp

Phil Lavretsky: Made this happen and not in my wildest dreams that I think that I’d be in a duck blind in a goose camp. Never been in a goose camp. This isn’t even a real goose, but it’s a –

Ramsey Russell: In the Australian Outback.

Phil Lavretsky: Outback. Never in my wildest dreams. Man, this is like, this is what keeps me going. What was it like? It was awesome. Watching them work, how they move. Just seeing a bird that I’ve never been around and watch them over water. Oh, it’s fantastic. Like I said, gave me a whole bunch of new questions.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ever seen a more spectacular sunrise than this part of a Shrek? I’ve never have.

Phil Lavretsky: No, yes.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen some good ones.

Phil Lavretsky: When we were out in the same swamp, that was beautiful when it was coming up. And like I said, I took a second, didn’t really try not to pay attention to the geese that were coming in and just trying to take that in. Watch the whistlers work, watch the teal and green pygmy geese and everybody, and the raja shelduck that we can’t touch, watch them work. It was great. It’s what hunting’s about for me, that was what it was about.

Ramsey Russell: Yesterday morning, you all were down the bank up in the lily pads. Glenn and I were down a bank in the grass. Both had just amazing hunts and it was pretty nice seeing all those radjah shelducks lie around. It’s the only shell duck and I know they’re not the same genus anymore that I’ve not shot. And then all those little green, gazillions of little green pygmy geese out there. And it was a consolation not being able to hunt them, because they’re not, because they’re protected with just being in their environment and seeing them. Because for every goose I shot, I saw thousands that I didn’t. And there’s something nice about seeing that.

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Watching them stream by the rain. You see that pronounced bump on their heads, back lit by that freaking blazing hot sunrise. It’s just amazing to see this and think, my gosh, I’m here.

Phil Lavretsky: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Do you know anything at all about the radjah shelduck, about why they moved them out of the, because they’re obviously a shell duck.

Best Waterfowl to Eat

 I mean, that was, the food was a pleasant bonus, especially here at goose camp.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, genetics. Yeah, so a few folks did kind of like the tree of life of waterfowl and they were distinct enough that some ornithological communities decided to put them into their own family or genus. Yeah, that’s as much as I know like I said, just like my students, I never thought I put boots on the ground here in Australia. So now that I’ve seen them, now that I’ve interacted with them, heck, I want to understand more.

Ramsey Russell: What do you think about the way those magpie geese eat? I mean, that was, the food was a pleasant bonus, especially here at goose camp.

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, I thought you meant, like, how they ate. Like, out in the field, like, how they ate. Oh, how they ate in my stomach, phenomenal.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Phil Lavretsky: I mean, I think other folks you talk to here said the same thing. I mean, the first second I took a bite, I think I was the first person that said I was like, this is sandhill crane.

Ramsey Russell: I think, I mean, when you said it, I’m like, it tastes a lot more like sandhill crane than it does any other goose I’ve eaten.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It was amazing.

Phil Lavretsky: No, it was spot on. I just didn’t think, I didn’t know what to think it was going to taste like, it was real mild, I mean, real soft, pleasant to eat. I mean, maybe it was the cook, but I can’t say anything negative about it. Heck, you just made a chicken fried steak with them and I was a little hesitant. I was like, oh, this is going to make it super gamey. I thought it was going to for sure be, like, super ducky or livery, but, man, that was good stuff.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, how can you beat chicken fries? It’s a food group, back in Mississippi, I went to my roots.

Phil Lavretsky: I was a little scared.

Ramsey Russell: I went to my roots. It was a grind, those hunts were. I mean, these guys are some of the most dedicated hunters I know. Just this morning, what was that, a quarter mile, maybe. Boy, I tell you what, you come out, walk through those buffalo wallows or step into one and pull your boot off or those pig wallows. And that’s one thing, in the dark, it’s coming back with all those geese and ducks. There’s something else entirely different.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. When that sun’s high up, I was, today was –

Ramsey Russell: You were sopping wet when you get back, I sweat like I’m cutting grass on the 4 July in Mississippi.

Phil Lavretsky: No, today was something else. I was standing there and I couldn’t stop sweating. And you saw it, I came back and I was just, and to be fair, just give myself a bonus. I was done by 06:23 I brought my geese back. I was like, all right, I know it’s going to get hot. I was going to, I went back for some ducks and help out the guys, bring back some stuff and I was just standing there and sweating.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, today was hot.

Ramsey Russell: Even though it’s 100 cooler in the shade, it’s still hot. I could not believe it. I would say that Australian Outback and Pakistan were the hottest places I’ve ever hunted ducks.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, it was hot, it was humid. That’s what, I think it got a little bit better. But this, when you’re duck hunting and that sun just peaks out and you could feel the cold? I felt the hot.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Phil Lavretsky: It, like, got hotter. When that sun just peaked, instead of just getting that little bit of cooler and feel that little coldness, it was just hotter.

Ramsey Russell: It’s like, it’s dark and it’s 750 to 800 and the pitch black dark. And I can tolerate that, I’m happy.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But the minute the sky even lights up and turns pink, but when the sun’s still behind the horizon, it’s like sitting in front of a hotbed of cold.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I’m like, man, this fixes me a scorcher. I forgot about this.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. No 2 days ago, it was all right. It wasn’t bad.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, it was nice in Victoria.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. Oh, Victoria was great, it’s wild. We’re 5 hours away. I feel like if I flew, flying flight 5 hours, if I flew 5 hours in the states, I don’t think I’d get that kind of, like, dramatic change in weather, maybe, but I doubt, like, in the same season, you know what I mean? Like, if you just flew from one end to the other in December, it’s going to be cool no matter where you went. But here, we had long sleeve, long pant weather. And in Victoria, kind of nice fall, especially in the mornings and come up here and it’s just, might as well be Florida in July or something.

Ramsey Russell: The bird life in general was astounding.

Phil Lavretsky: It was.

Ramsey Russell: All those parakeets and short bear corrals and good gosh, I’ve never seen anything like it.

Phil Lavretsky: No, I wouldn’t.

Ramsey Russell: Shore birds.

Phil Lavretsky: So many.

Ramsey Russell: There was one that was real prevalent yesterday morning. It’s a lapwing, I’ve learned.

Phil Lavretsky: Lapwing.

The Epicenter of Evolution

But Australia is an epicenter for bird diversity, so evolutionarily, it seems that many of our bird diversity, especially passerines, evolved here. 

Ramsey Russell: Got the little yellow wattles on his face, and it’s just millions of them, like I’ve never seen before. How important is Australia to the evolution of animals? Here’s what I’m asking. You got the magpie goose, that’s kind of a fossil, a living fossil. But then you got weird stuff like the duck billed platypus.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. No, you should talk to Andy about this because he taught me a little bit. But Australia is an epicenter for bird diversity, so evolutionarily, it seems that many of our bird diversity, especially passerines, evolved here. And then it’s kind of an epicenter.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. You should talk to him.

Ramsey Russell: Well, he’s coming up next. I’ll talk to him.

Phil Lavretsky: He’ll be able to talk to you about the A disease of bird evolution and the importance of Australia. Australia was like you talked about lorikeets, parakeets all of these guys, didn’t know this, I thought it was in South America, but this is the epicenter for all those guys. This is where they started to evolve.

Ramsey Russell: Right here.

Phil Lavretsky: Kind of like the magpie goose. The evolutionary history of birds, a part of that origin is here.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What next? Where next?

Phil Lavretsky: Where next? What’s the next question?

Ramsey Russell: All right, this right here, did you gain a sense because we were hosted by a lot of fielding game Australia members, which is not, it’s an NGO.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Fighting tooth and nail, like, all this property we hunted is government property that they took over to manage before. I just cannot, I mean, I can’t imagine the budget to manage all that public land.

Phil Lavretsky: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Not just that property, but lots of them throughout the country. And they’re like an SCI version. They’re like a hybrid between SCI and Ducks Unlimited.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

Ramsey Russell: Is what they are. But did you gain a sense and about anti hunting over here and what was your takeaway on that?

Phil Lavretsky: Well, through the stories there, first of all, my first sense is these guys are dedicated. These guys are incredibly dedicated to the foundation and the future of waterfowl here in Australia. And unfortunately, I also got the dreary sense of that fight is probably 100 times harder than whatever we’re doing in the US.

Ramsey Russell: For the last 5 years, to your point, since 2017. They’ve not known, that I’ve known these 3 men especially and talked to them throughout the year. They’ve never known that there’s going to be a next duck season until weeks before it’s actually a duck season.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. So they’re fighting tooth and nail and folks that want to shut down waterfowl are fighting tooth and nail. And the fact that even if they did have a duck season and you set up the duck decoys and you’re hoping for that really nice sunrise. You got birds working in, you got somebody in the middle of your decoys yelling at you. Oh, man, I don’t know how you go about that.

Ramsey Russell: But did you notice they don’t have that movement up here in northern territory.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, northern territory is like wild west.

Ramsey Russell: And I think, prove me wrong, there’s one of 2 reasons or 2 reasons you don’t see those anti hunters here disturbing hunt. One, crocodiles.

Phil Lavretsky: Sure.

Ramsey Russell: And two, getting back to magpie geese. They’re not particularly attractive, warm and fuzzy, beautiful animal.

Phil Lavretsky: I mean, you might have a point there. I mean, we, you had talked to some folks and they gave you, oh, it’s okay to shoot this, but not okay to shoot that.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. No, no. Duck hunting should be banned tomorrow, according to this older couple I met in a park. But shoot all the rabbits you want because they’re eating their flowers in their yard.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah. I mean, that’s just going with your feelings that stuff is incredibly frustrating, but, that kind of sentiment can have a powerful and, in our opinion, negative outcome. And so making sure that information, now, the other stories that they were able to tell me about if we did, if we even yelled at one, we might lose our guns and our hunting privilege. I mean, to have restraint when somebody’s yelling in your face in the middle of –

Ramsey Russell: Not just yelling, calling you and your children profanities.

Phil Lavretsky: That’s right. And all you wanted to do was sit there in a blind and watch the sunrise and see some ducks move and work the decoys. I don’t know an American that has that kind of restraint that says something about them and their willingness to put up with this kind of antics and to be able to go after their way of life and make sure that it’s there, I think that’s important and that speaks volumes.

Ramsey Russell: Now I’m going to loop back around.

Phil Lavretsky: Back to dinosaurs.

Ramsey Russell: No. Back to this, how important? It just, when I saw that magpie goose and I realized he’s lived for, I guess, millions of years how do I know that during this age of genetic rediscovery and this brave new world that guys like you are forging ahead for wildlife conservation and applied sciences? How do I know that one of these ducks, the hardhead, the radjah shelduck, how do you know, he could hold some secret that we’ll never know because of some ideology that says, no, that’s not what you shooting. Go shoot rabbits instead, they eat my flowers.

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah, it’s –

Ramsey Russell: And what, and here’s the question is, what predicament, as the world gets smaller like that field, do you find yourself in as a researcher that’s trying to make a body of science.

Phil Lavretsky: Difficulties. That’s where I head, where I and Andy and others that are trying to ensure that there’s good representation of all of these species and places where they could be stored for eons and making sure that species is represented in catalogs and for the future of their own conservation it’s difficult. The more, the less hunting there is things that the seasons are closed on, whether it’s due to facts or not that just decreases our chances of finding that kind of golden nugget, I guess you could say you don’t know until you know that’s how I see it. We wouldn’t have known the things, I, as a scientist, we’re told the same things you were about Mexican ducks and black ducks and mallards and other things. And then I said, you know what? Let’s see if that’s true. And so by being able to work with other hunters and outfitters, private individuals, state, federal agencies, collecting and sourcing this kind of data, we were able to rediscover and re answer those questions more accurately than ever before. And that’s what we’re trying to do here.

Instincts: Saved DNA

They didn’t know what DNA was. No, they had no idea, but they saved it. For future generations.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, when they put those Smithsonian skins back in the 1700s or whatever.

Phil Lavretsky: They didn’t know what DNA was.

Ramsey Russell: No, they had no idea, but they saved it. For future generations.

Phil Lavretsky: Forsake. In the future, I’m doing genetics, but maybe in 70 years, on my deathbed or something, some kid’s going to come to me, like, you were wrong, look at this cool thing that I’m doing or something. But he would, they would thank me because they would not be able to do that research if it wasn’t, if those birds weren’t there. And I have to conclude with this, I work at the University of Texas, El Paso. A lot of those kids will probably never step on Australian soil. And for, until now, when I teach waterfowl ecology, it’s always pictures. I don’t have specimens from Australia, until now. But now all of these students are going to be able to touch, feel and look directly at the biodiversity that is Australia. And potentially they’ll get inspired and come work here or come work for the betterment of wildlife conservation here and elsewhere in the world, more generally, expanding their understanding and expanding their horizons by having these specimens there.

Ramsey Russell: Phil, that’s a lot of value for a duck hunter. How may it take to – I had a great time hunting and going through the technique and going through the process and experiencing the habitats and shooting the birds and eating the birds. But now to think that it contributes to a body of knowledge for future generations. Man, that really brings home, hunter conservationist, doesn’t it?

Hunting and Conservation: A Unified Effort

This week we were all hunter scientists. We were here collecting, a piece of meat went into a vial, another steak went on the grill. Everybody got fed, the future got fed, and we got fed. It’s beautiful.

Phil Lavretsky: This week, we were all hunter scientists. We were here, we were collecting piece of meat went into a vial, another steak went on the grill. Everybody got fed. The future got fed and we got fed. It’s beautiful. I can’t deny the fact that we work with tasty, a tasty group of animals.

Ramsey Russell: How many birds are you taking home, do you think? How many, you all skinned –

Phil Lavretsky: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Daylight. How many birds you taking home?

Phil Lavretsky: We’re about 80, 84, 85, something like that.

Ramsey Russell: Is that a pretty good.

Phil Lavretsky: That’s really good. Especially for the fact that we jumped around. It wasn’t just one location where we’re sitting, we get the birds, we have time. We cranked him out there and got up here, did the whole hunt, work, hunt, work. I got to thank again, Andy Inglis and University of California, Davis, for coming out here and being a partner and making sure we get the work done and couldn’t have done it without them, without him. And heck, yeah, we did what we had to do.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Phil.

Phil Lavretsky: No, thank you, man.

Ramsey Russell: Thanks to Safari Club International and to our host, Glenn Falla, Trent Leen, Paul Sharp, everybody. And I mean, it’s 20 people plus volunteer hunters that came in from Australia. And wait, we had a guy drive for 3 hours, come up here to donate these birds and to make this science happen. And thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. See you next time.