EP 431. Building a World Waterfowl Collection

 

All About Australian Waterfowl Specimens

And so I developed an interest in a group of songbirds that live up and down this mountain and they compete with each other, and I was looking at how they were competing with each other and that was the research. 

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. A lot of these guys, in fact, every client I’ve got collects some clients. In fact, many clients collect species, waterfowl species from around the world. All of them collect experiences themselves. Some guys are really big into the species. Down here in Australia today, been here for a week and I’ve met today’s guest, he was down here on a little collecting safari we did in Australia. I’d like to introduce you all to Andy Inglis, UC Davis. Is that right? That’s where are you from?

Andy Inglis: That’s exactly right. I’m from the University of California, Davis in California, Northern California. Born and raised in that region, too.

Ramsey Russell: What do you do Andy?

Andy Inglis: So I’m the curator of the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology at the university, which means that I oversee the research and care of the museum. I bring in grants to do research and to also care for the museum. And then we work with students to train them how to become good field biologists, good lab biologists and also museum scientists. So that’s our primary mission.

Ramsey Russell: When you say museum, this isn’t like a museum up on the National Mall in Washington, DC, that the public comes in and out, walks through. Is it or is it like something else?

Andy Inglis: No, it’s not. It’s a museum that is set asides, specimens to support teaching, research and outreach. And so the collections are in closed rooms, but they’re heavily used by students and by the public. We have a really open policy for use, it makes our museum a little bit different from some of the higher institution museums that you got to have a credential to go into those collections. And here you can just be a bird carver and I want to come in and look at the bill of a ruddy duck and we can take them into the collection and they can measure the bill and they can learn the specifics if they want to carve better. So we take all types of people to come in.

Ramsey Russell: What brings you to Australia? And let me add this we all came from the United States. You came from a whole different, you were somewhere else at the time when we all met here. You’d already been off on a safari. So what brings you to Australia?

Andy Inglis: Yeah. Well, it was kind of interesting. I’m here because of you, Ramsey. It was an invitation to come and join a group of people that would allow us to try to secure specimens of waterfowl from Australia for our collection. And I had, in the 1980s, I was working in my graduate work and working in Australia, New Guinea back in those years, we got some waterfowl back then, so we got some species that even today they can’t be hunted, but somehow we got them freckled duck and musk duck and species like that. Yeah. So this was an opportunity to come and get the more common species and that’s really what I’m after. And so really, my roots to Australia date back to 1984, the first time I was here and then I was a museum scientist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and I was in graduate school at the University of Hawaii at the time and I worked in New Guinea. In the 90s, I came back as a biologist for Ducks Unlimited. So I was a Ducks Unlimited biologist in the western United States for about 11 years before I even came to Davis. So I kind of took this real circuitous path from graduate school to conservation, nonprofit, conservation on the ground, get the work done type of mentality and then on to university.

Ramsey Russell: What were you working on in grad school that took you to Papua New Guinea and Australia?

Andy Inglis: Well, it’s kind of funny. There were 2 reasons why I was going. One is I’m a good field biologist and so they recognized that right away because when I first got there in 84, they just threw me in the rainforest and said, okay, survive for 6 months and that’s kind of what I did.

Ramsey Russell: You’re kidding.

Andy Inglis: No, I’m not kidding. That’s what I did. And so I developed an interest in a group of songbirds that live up and down this mountain and they compete with each other, and I was looking at how they were competing with each other and that was the research. But then I was able to come to New Guinea on multiple expeditions to really remote areas. I mean, some of the areas we went to, we were the only maybe the second scientist oriented expedition into those areas and these are real world expeditions. I mean, you got to think back to Tarzan movies and the guys going in with guns and then guys carrying their gear and big packs and that’s what it was like. And we got into the rainforest in these remote areas, and we set up camp and we were there for –

Ramsey Russell: Like a tent camp.

Andy Inglis: No, it was like a big, we built it out of the trees that we use the local workers then they stayed with our camp and they knew how to work with native woods and so forth they built like an a frame and then we put Visqueen plastic over the top so it was open. And that’s where we slept and worked for anywhere from 6 weeks to 2 or 3 months. So you’re in the rainforest for that long. You’re kind of on a survival mode at that point. There’s no grocery store, there’s nothing. You’re there and you’ve got to survive off of what you capture. So we’re capturing birds and we’re capturing mammals for the museum. Those were dinner, that was dinner. How many birds did we get today? Well, we got –

Ramsey Russell: Skin them out. No matter what they for the dinner.

Andy Inglis: Skin them out, the bodies went into the stew that kind of thing. So we ate what we caught and that’s how we survived that long in the forest, because you don’t get provisioned at all. So once you’re in there, you’re days away from any airstrip and then the airstrip, you have to fly out. So safety was another thing, too. I mean, if you got hurt, you were in a world of pain, if you got hurt in those rainforest areas in New Guinea, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: I think that’s the part of the world that they bowled heads and stuff. I mean, is that, was there that kind of stuff? I mean, isn’t that part of the world today –

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That had cannibalism and bowled heads.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, there definitely was cannibalism. In fact, one of the –

Ramsey Russell: Well, if I didn’t have nothing but a bunch of songbirds, a grad student be looking pretty good because if it’s that’s while –

Andy Inglis: Yeah, well they have –

Ramsey Russell: Did you worry about that?

Andy Inglis: I never worried about being out in the villages or being out in the bush, I never worried about that. Where I worried about it was in town where you tried, where there was conflicts between western civilization and tribal civilization and tribal customs. And we ran into some sticky situations. We had one situation where myself and one of my workers got captured by some of the locals and held at spearpoint. And fortunately –

Ramsey Russell: What did they look like? Like, what were they dressed in? What were their clothing?

Andy Inglis: Most of the people in that area had already been influenced by Christian missionaries and so they had kind of western clothes on, but when they went to –

Ramsey Russell: They wearing the blue jeans. But the hell –

Andy Inglis: Well, when they had, they would have their war regalian paint on. So they’re aboriginal looking people and Melanesians and so they’re dark skinned and they would have their war paint on and they would carry spears and bows and arrows, and they’re a lot like birds. I mean, what’s cool about if I had been there the first year and this had happened, I might have been more scared than when I was there the 3rd year, because when you think about 2 pheasants, ringneck pheasants, 2 males coming together, they’re going to bluff and they’re going to fight a little bit and bluff and bluff, and it’s all about intimidation and bluffing. And that’s kind of the people of New Guinea have this sort of – the tribal areas have these similar mentalities that it’s bluff and bluff and they’re aggressive, but they’re aggressive to a point. And so I kind of knew that and I was able to talk my way out of that situation. But I can still feel the dent in my forehead where the one spear, after 40 years, I can still feel that dent right there where the spear was head pushed into my skull. So, yeah but that’s just some of the things, you have to do it.

Ramsey Russell: All that for graduate students stipend.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. Well, I was clever. So I learned that when I went to New Guinea, I wrote helped work on some of the grants. So I learned how to write some of my grants back in those days and I wrote my salary in to those grants at a higher rate –

Ramsey Russell: I heard that.

Andy Inglis: Than what I would get paid at university. So I was. I was already on the upswing there. I was ready for Du when I went to Ducks Unlimited, because getting money was a big part of what we try to do to get that money into the ground.

Ramsey Russell: What was Ducks Unlimited like in the western US when you started?

Andy Inglis: I always call it the wild west. When I started with Ducks Unlimited, it was August of 1989 and they had just opened up the western regional office. And so it was a brand new office in Sacramento. I was in Hawaii at the time when I met one of their biologists and they called me up out of the blue and said, hey, you want to come work for us? I didn’t think I’d ever have a career working for a group like DU and it just sounded really exciting. I liked the fact that I would be doing stuff on the ground and not just talking about doing it, but actually doing it. And so when I got in, we started out working on DUs programs, back then, they had a program called Marsh. It was matching aid for state habitats. And so whatever money was raised in a state, there was a percent that was matched by Ducks Unlimited and then that money then would go to the state projects and they would match it and you would be able to get, like, twice the amount of money to do projects. But I was there and as the program started to build, the North American Wetlands Conservation act was passed and the NACA grants were starting to come. And so I was one of the biologists on the ground floor of implementing some of the earliest NACA projects in the western United States, in California, in Oregon, Washington. I spent a lot of my career with DU up in Pacific Northwest, building the program up there. So when I started at DU, I was there for 11 years, I worked in Sacramento, but by the time I left, we had already launched the new office in Vancouver, Washington, for DU. And that was a lot of the work that myself and my colleagues did getting that program going up there. And so what’s really exciting, to go back to those refuges now, when I left DU was 99, so it’s been 24 years. I can go back to those refuges and I can take people and say, see this wetland right here?

Ramsey Russell: I built it.

Andy Inglis: This was a cornfield and I helped design this wetland or I helped raise the money for it or I was a biologist on this project.

Hunter and Birder Alike

Were you a hunter or a birder first?

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Andy Inglis: And that’s pretty exciting. That’s gratifying. And it’s for me, it’s for the birds. I mean that’s what it’s all about, I’m a bird watcher and I’m also a bird hunter and I mean, I probably have hunted a lot more birds and some people, I mean, because I’ve gotten everything from hummingbirds to cranes and waterfowl and so forth.

Ramsey Russell: Were you a hunter or a birder first?

Andy Inglis: I started out a bird watcher. I started bird watching when I was 11 years old.

Ramsey Russell: How did an 11 year old kid get interested in birdwatching?

Andy Inglis: Well, there was a program at our school, elementary school and if you passed a certain test, you got to choose an activity that was different. And they had rock tree and they had all these different things and one of them was bird watching and just in treatment, I’d like to be out in the fields. I just was always out in the fields when I was a kid –

Ramsey Russell: To get out of the classroom, don’t you?

Andy Inglis: Yeah. And so my 6th grade teacher taught me how to bird watch and how to use field guides and so forth, and so I just took from there. And I got the passion when I was, I think by the time I was 18 years old, I was going all over the place. And so I started as an undergraduate at UC Davis, actually. And I worked in the very museum as an undergraduate that I am now the director of. And so I was an 18 year old kid coming into this museum and I saw all those specimens and I was like, oh my God, this is a bird in my hand, I can look at the features. I can see everything I want to see about that bird and I got to get into this. And so I talked to the curator there at the time, Ron Cole and he got me into how to work in the field, how to be a scientist, how to collect birds. And that’s kind of when I started hunting it was around that time. So I was probably maybe 20 years old when I started hunting. And then I had a hiatus, when you’re in Hawaii, you can’t really do a lot of hunting there. So I did some upland bird hunting there, though, Frankolin’s and things like that. But I really became a hunter when I started working for DU. And it was not really because I felt like, I needed to, I wanted to. I mean, I just want any experience I can get to get into the field. If I’m sitting in a marsh and I’m getting bit by mosquitoes, that’s the happiest place for me to be, I got birds flying all around me. Even if I don’t shoot a bird, I’m happy. And I don’t know, I was out with you this week and I don’t know if you noticed, but when I’m out there, I’m looking at everything. I’m not just looking at the ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I was just thinking, as you were telling that story, we had just landed, picked you up, driven, I don’t know, an hour and a half to the wetland center, killing the game Australia wetland center.

Andy Inglis: Right.

Ramsey Russell: And 5 minutes after we stopped, we all had binoculars, were walking around looking at birds and man, you were left and right. But what I noticed first is that you knew all those birds. That’s what I noticed. I said, this guy knows all these birds and then, as the week progressed, we landed in Darwin and you were looking at birds. We stopped the truck somewhere one day and I walked up to you, I wonder why you walked over there about 20ft and you were playing a recording and oh, boy, I wish I had the ears because you were playing a bird recording and there was a bird talking back to you that I couldn’t hear. But you said, oh, he’s just right here. He’s right here in this bush right there.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You’re trying to lure him out to get a look at him.

Andy Inglis: To get a look at him, yeah. So when I got back, I love this country. I mean, it’s a fabulous country. The people are fabulous and it’s been working with all of these local folks that have been helping us collect birds, the hunters that are here, it’s just been really rewarding. They’re just genuine people, they care about the resource and they have a conservation ethic that matches my conservation ethic. But when I got here and I started hearing the birds that from – last time I was here, it’s 1998, so it’s been 25 years since I’ve been here. It was like getting reacquainted with old friends for me.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Andy Inglis: And so when I was walking around the first morning in the marsh, I was, I know that bird, I know it. But, like, my brain, the card was – I couldn’t find the place to put it. So I would listen to recordings and that would help me, oh, yeah, that’s right. That wouldn’t birdie or up here turned out to be a brush cuckoo. And it was a bird that I knew it, I’ve heard it, I knew it was a cuckoo, but I didn’t know which one and I just kind of kept going through and finding, bam, I found it and I was able to play it back.

Cataloguing 4000 Species of Birds

Ramsey Russell: How many birds have you, like, checked on your life list like birds do?

Andy Inglis: My life list is probably around, it’s over 4000 species now.

Ramsey Russell: No wonder you couldn’t find the car.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, no kidding. So, yeah, so before I came to Australia, I was in India prior to this and I was there on work related, there I’ve been trying to work with the university there to try to set up a program similar to the one that we have at UC Davis. And so I was there and then we flew to eastern India, to the state of Assam and I attended the Wildlife Trust of India meetings. It’s a group of individuals that have influence and wealth in the country that really want to do good things for conservation. And I was invited to give a talk, a seminar at their meetings. And then we were able to go out and spend some time bird watching and looking at rhinos. And it was really great because there were just huge flocks of pintails coming in and gadwalls that were coming in from Siberia and they winter in these big marshes, it was really fabulous. So coming from there to here, it was a little bit easier transition because I was at least in the same day when you came out, you had to change days. But it made it a little bit easier for me to transition here in Australia. But it’s all about the people for me, I mean, the people that I work with.

The Precurser to Waterfowl: Duckbill Platypus Fossils

But waterfowl were really, I mean, Australia has, I think, one of the most interesting waterfowl assemblages of any place in the world.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about Australia for a little bit and here’s what I’m getting at, is the magpie goose, which was one of the key target species for you all’s collection, legal waterfowl. And I keep wanting to call them a dinosaur, they’re a fossil. They’re this transitionary species that is a precursor to ducks, geese and swans as we know them.

Andy Inglis: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Man, what an interesting bird they are. That’s not the only weird or transformational type species on this continent. Duckbill platypus.

Andy Inglis: Right.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, there’s all kinds of stuff, it’s almost like life evolved here or something. And the bird life out in the marsh in the mornings where we hunt, it was one of the most spectacular – It’s almost like a Disney portrayal of, what was that? Lion king.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. The bird life in the morning. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, it’s –

Ramsey Russell: I like the parrots because I can hear them.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. You hear that screeching they’re coming overhead. Yeah, I mean, that morning flight, we had probably 3000 or 4000 parrot, cockatoos or corellas going overhead. It was just constant for half an hour, it was just constant birds going over. Yeah, I mean, Australia, from a bird’s standpoint, it’s a paradise for ornithologists. It’s from the parrots that evolved here. Australia kind of got isolated from everything else and drifted with the continental plates and it evolved its own sort of bird life and mammal life. I mean, there weren’t placental mammals here, so you didn’t have or large placental mammals like wolves and things like that. So the marsupials filled those niches. But waterfowl were really, I mean, Australia has, I think, one of the most interesting waterfowl assemblages of any place in the world.

Ramsey Russell: How so?

Andy Inglis: The birds here –

Ramsey Russell: They don’t have near the diversity we’ve got in the states?

Andy Inglis: No, no, they don’t. They don’t have the diversity, but they have – the birds that are here, almost all unique to this continent. You can’t find them pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Ramsey Russell: True.

Andy Inglis: There’s an overall feeling that there were, because waterfowl are fairly ancient lineage of birds, that there were waterfowl that got stranded on Australia when it drifted away and they evolved away from northern hemisphere migratory waterfowl. And so they evolved different patterns and different behaviors and they adapted to the systems that are here so for example in North America, we have the northern shoveler and they’re a filter feeder and they have big, flat bill and there was a bird –

Ramsey Russell: My listeners know what spoonbills are.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, spoonie. Yeah, it’s a spoonie. But they have a bird here they call a pinky, which is the pink eared duck. The pink eared duck is this really ancient, another ancient lineage of ducks?

Ramsey Russell: I did not know that.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, that it’s an Australian lineage. And they evolved a similar bill pattern, bill shape and foraging strategy that you see in shovelers. And then I think what happened was that some of these whole arctic birds, these birds in the north, northern shovelers, arrived in Australia later and they evolved then into what we call the southern shoveler or the Australian shoveler. So now you have the northern influenced birds from an evolutionary standpoint here and then you have the Australian bird that’s that pinky that is here. And they both are filter feeders, but ecologically they’re a little bit different from one another one.

Ramsey Russell: The thing that pink ears do have that spatulate build, but then they’ve got those flaps like labia. I mean, it’s just that –

Andy Inglis: It’s crazy –

Ramsey Russell: How specialized that must be.

Andy Inglis: And they have 2 different – how they have those combs that come out, the filter ducks will have that they call it a lamella and shovelers have that you can run your finger on and it sounds like a comb –

Ramsey Russell: Like a comb.

Andy Inglis: And these guys had the same thing, but they had three rows of combs, one on the upper bill, lower bill and one on the tongue. And so they’re filtering differently.

Ramsey Russell: Super fine.

Andy Inglis: So I suspect that they’re eating something a little bit different than what the shovelers eat, because shovelers will dabble and they’ll go down and get seeds and things like that. But that’s just one of the many, really, I call them enigmatic species here in Australia, the magpie goose, the pygmy geese. There’s 2 species of pygmy geese. I mean, I don’t even know why they call them pygmy geese, because they’re the size of a – I don’t know, they’re smaller than a green winged teal.

Ramsey Russell: Yes. About the size of a hen green wing about that size.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. I mean, they’re really tiny and they’ve got short, little goose like beaks. But down here, I think they call them cotton teals. But I think other groups, other people are calling them pygmy geese.

Differences Between Geese & Ducks in Australia

Well, that’s a good question. I think of a duck – I think of geese as larger bodied grazers, so their ecology is more geared towards foraging in upland areas. 

Ramsey Russell: I got a question for you, what’s the difference in a duck and a goose?

Andy Inglis: Well, that’s a good question. I think of a duck – I think of geese as larger bodied grazers, so their ecology is more geared towards foraging in upland areas. And so they do a lot of mowing and feeding on upland areas and they’ll come back and roost. It doesn’t mean they won’t go into rice fields –

Ramsey Russell: I read somewhere a number of vertebrates, but I don’t know.

Andy Inglis: I think their vertebrates are pretty similar.

Ramsey Russell: I think there’s a lot of idiom type names in the waterfowl world, especially when using common names and we talked about, we had a great conversation about common names versus scientific names earlier this week. Like for the Egyptian goose, I think if Phil were to go start doing genetic samples, he proved my hypothesis of just looking at a lot of them, that they’re somehow very closely related to shell ducks.

Andy Inglis: They are, yeah. Well, there’s also those upland geese in South America too. The kelp goose and the Andean goose. And those are kind of, I think that southern hemisphere has that type of, those type of geese because they don’t have northern hemisphere. They don’t have Branta and Anser and Chen. They don’t have those geese, the snow geese, the white fronts, the Canadas they don’t, just think about it. Where do you see those species in the southern hemisphere? They’re not there. So other birds evolved to fill that grazing niche in South America or Africa or in Australia.

Life Happens

I mean, getting people on the ground and understanding the system, understanding the ecology of the birds, understanding whatever it is they’re understanding, they got to learn by doing and that’s the philosophy that, that’s what drew me to Davis is I can do that at Davis with young students.

Ramsey Russell: How did you go from Ducks Unlimited to director of the UC Davis Museum?

Andy Inglis: So at the time, it’s kind of a funny thing. I’d been working with DU for about 10 or 11 years and the curator was going to retire from Davis and he contacted me and told me, he says, I’m going to retire in a couple of years. Would you be interested in maybe applying for the position? And because I didn’t, I have, again a kind of a secluded route, I didn’t ever finish my PhD.

Ramsey Russell: Did you start one?

Andy Inglis: I started one.

Ramsey Russell: What was it?

Andy Inglis: It was in zoology at University of Hawaii. But I just never finished it. And I never, personal reasons why that happened. Life took turns for me and I needed –

Ramsey Russell: That happens, life happened.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. And you know what? I actually don’t feel bad about it. I mean, I’m a well published scientist, but the opportunity to work in academia and influence young people with what I feel I learned from Ducks Unlimited in most part. I mean, getting people on the ground and understanding the system, understanding the ecology of the birds, understanding whatever it is they’re understanding, they got to learn by doing and that’s the philosophy that, that’s what drew me to Davis is I can do that at Davis with young students. And the Wildlife and Conservation Biology program at UC Davis is one of the top programs in the world. And so being affiliated with that was a great place to be. But the first thing I did when I got there was really start to think about how can we better engage undergraduates in the field. They get the theoretical aspects in lectures, they have labs and so they get to handle specimens that’s one of the nice things about our museum is we teach with our specimens. So the TAS are teaching bird identification and ecology. The students can handle the specimens. Well, now we want to get those students out into the field and get them to experience that they need to be a good field biologist. And that’s what I built the platform of the museum. So I was thinking when I started, how do I make this museum relevant in 21st century? Because we were, we had just changed into the 21st century when I started in 2000. So I’ve been at Davis now for almost 24 years and how can I make the museum relevant? It’s not just a collection of specimens, but it kind of was when I started. And I wanted to make it a program, I wanted to make it diverse. We were doing different things, doing new things, whether it’s biodiversity surveys and inventories around the world. We’ve worked in South America and Indonesia and Cambodia and we have projects now in West Africa and so forth. But we also have really good projects in California and the United States. So for me, that was the, I had to make it relevant because the deans and the people that are scrutinizing programs, they look for well, what is this program doing for the university? How are we, how is it being effective for teaching, but also how is it effective for forwarding the mission of the university? And so that’s kind of what I did and that, bringing DUs what I learned with DU, how to work with people, how to raise funds through grants. And I just brought that right into Davis and the third thing, too, is getting the job done. With DU you better, when you start something, you better finish it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, and sometimes in universities, those finishing things kind of drag out a little bit. But I don’t work that way. I try to get things done on a timely fashion and I try to impart that on my staff and my students.

UC Davis Museum: The Story It Tells

So the museum that I curate is birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians. 

Ramsey Russell: I love to visit museums Andy. I love them and unless I’m with my wife, because she wants to read every single sign. And I just, I like to walk through, I like to stop and look at what I like to look at, and I like to think museums are repositories of stories. That’s what I think of them as. I mean it may be something as arcane is going to some middle of nowhere town on Prairie, Canada and all towns got an agricultural museum, which is really a repository of all old farm equipment that nobody wants to store and have to run around. But it’s interesting. It’s interesting just seeing that stuff, to me it is or going to any museum. What story is UC Davis telling? What is your museum telling?

Andy Inglis: So our museum is a, first of all, we’re a vertebrate museum. So the museum that I curate is birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians. So all of the vertebrates, we have about 65,000 specimens in the collection, which is –

Ramsey Russell: How many years did it take to collect that?

Andy Inglis: Well, we actually just celebrated our 50th year in 2022. So 1972 the museum started, but we also had collections at Davis that dated back to the 20s. So when they merged, they then merged those 2 collections into our collection. We have specimens that some of them date back to the late 1800s now. But we’re kind of a medium sized museum. We’re not a really big like the Smithsonian or the Field Museum in Chicago, where they’ve got millions of specimens. But those museums are, the collections themselves and behind the scenes, when you go in and see things exhibits, those collections are closed to anybody, most people, except those who have credentials to be in there. And one of the things that I felt we needed to do was to connect with our users and our constituents, the people that hire our students and the people that we work with. And so our specimens go out to the students to train them, our specimens go to workshops and so that people can learn how to identify birds. Maybe they’re amateur field ornithologists or maybe they’re going to train fish biologists on identification of California fish and our specimens are used for that. And so I really, I think what makes our museum different from a lot of museums is we seek engagement with the public, we seek engagement with faculty for research, we seek engagement with students and I think it makes us unique. I’m really proud of that way that we operate.

Ramsey Russell: Bringing you back to the question, what brings you to Australia? What’s going to become of these birds and of what value to the listener, to future humanity, of what value, okay, so I’ve got these skins and your students going to get to go through and slide a drawer back out and look at a pink ear duck. So what is real value of this?

Andy Inglis: Yeah, that’s a good question there. I believe specimens have an intrinsic value. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been watching when I’m working on these specimens, I’m like, I’m really trying to understand this bird and the reason I’m doing that is because I’m going to be the one teaching the students back there. So when we opened up those magpie geese and we saw those elongated tracheas.

Ramsey Russell:  What an amazing –

Andy Inglis: I mean, that’s just, I’ve never seen anything like that. And you have to see it to believe it, because no one would ever believe that there’s, I measured several of them and they were almost a meter long when they were just coiled up on –

Ramsey Russell: 3.5 feet.

The Secrets of Bird Behavior as Told Through Specimen Study

But what it really does is, I look at each specimen, no matter whether it’s a house sparrow, the most common, some of the most common things to some of the rarest things. Each one is like a time capsule and it represents that bird at that time.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. Right on top of the breast, they’re coiled up right on the breast. And I read and they’re not 100% sure all of the ways that functions. And so I’m going to make it my job to figure that out. That’s kind of what I’m learning here is preparing myself for how we would use the specimens when we bring them back. So we’re going to bring these birds back. They’re not fully prepared as museum specimens yet. All we did is remove the body so that we would reduce the weight and then we’re going to export those specimens under permits and then they’ll come to Davis and that’s when the teaching starts. The teaching starts right there with my students in my lab, because they’re going to be the ones preparing these specimens and I’ll be teaching them that whole process. And then those specimens will go into the museum and the collections manager, my wife, actually, Irene Inglis, she will train the students on how to curate and install them into the collections. Okay, so now they’re ready to be used and they’ll be used for teaching and they could be used by researchers in the future. But what it really does is, I look at each specimen, no matter whether it’s a house sparrow, the most common, some of the most common things to some of the rarest things. Each one is like a time capsule and it represents that bird at that time. So let’s say a pink ear duck or mountain duck, whatever we’re working on down here. Those birds were collected by hunters, they’re donated to us and that bird now represents a timestamp for that exact period from that place in Australia and everything. Paying that specimen forward to future scientists is what might, I feel like that’s my responsibility versus, like a photograph. Oh, there used to be these ducks that lived here. Here’s some pictures –

Ramsey Russell: Laboratory ducks.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, here’s some pictures of it. Well, that’s not tangible and you can’t do anything with it. But a scientist 50 years from now, I can’t even imagine what they will be able to do with a specimen. When I first started collecting birds, it was 1981 when I collected my first bird. I can remember I had a 22 rifle with crimped shot, like snake shot, rat shot and I can remember looking down the barrel at the gun, I was a birdwatcher and I’m looking down the barrel of the gun and it was a little flycatcher sitting there, western flycatcher, very first bird. I said in the name of science and I pulled a trigger.

Ramsey Russell: Whatever became of that?

Andy Inglis: I pulled the trigger. It’s in our museum. Yeah. So the point being that when I was there doing that, nobody was doing research on DNA. It was like they were just beginning to figure out how to even look at DNA and they were looking at mitochondrial DNA. It was nothing like what, like Dr. Phil Lavretsky is doing, he’s with me, with us here. He’s doing the kinds of research now that’s only possible when you have these kinds of specimens and access to these specimens. I had no idea that when I started collecting in parts of the world, like in New Guinea, that specimens that I was collecting in the 80s are now being used by scientists to look at evolutionary traits.

Ramsey Russell: They’re still using the skins collected in the 1700s.

Andy Inglis: There’s actually a renaissance in that because they can now extract DNA from feathers or toe pads of old specimens, like you said, from the 1800s, they can go back and reconstruct the genome of those older animals and so they’re really repositories of genetic diversity. I didn’t know, for example, that when I was collecting a bird that they could actually now pull feathers from the chest and they can look at the carbon in that feather and they can trace the carbon to what that bird ate. So they can look at food webs and there are scientists that are out there reconstructing ancient food webs, food webs that are over 100 years old before, like, the anchovy industry off the California coast, it collapsed wiped out. And they can go back and see how birds change their diets related to that. So it’s a lot of conservation and applied type aspects to that type of work. And those specimens are the time capsules that will let future scientists work.

Amassing a Complete Collection of World Waterfowl Specimens

Ramsey Russell: Phil told me that you have the ambition at UC Davis of amassing a complete collection of world waterfowl species. Is that born from you as a duck hunter, you as a birder, you as a former Ducks Unlimited biologist?

Andy Inglis: It was actually, the mandate was, well called a mandate was set by Dennis Raveling. Dennis Raveling, Dr. Dennis Raveling was the first waterfowl biologist at UC Davis. He came on and he was there, the founding of our department and he told he wanted to start with North American birds. I want every duck of North America in our collection so we can teach and so that was the mission that the previous curator had. And then Dr. John Eadie, who is the waterfowl professor right now, he and I are colleagues and he and I are like, let’s not stop there, let’s go to the world. And so I’ve been trying to get specimens from all around the world. Our biggest deficiencies are in the southern hemisphere and in Europe. Actually, our biggest deficiencies, European waterfowl, we actually had material from Australia and New Zealand, just not a complete. Now we’re going to have a more complete collection from down here. We have some from South America, but it’s very few and we have very few from Africa. So my goal would be to try to get birds from those 3 regions, say Africa and hopefully, we’ll be kind of filling –

Ramsey Russell: Africa I can help you with definitely. The problem with South America is back in 2010 or 2011, one of their presidents prohibited the export of all indigenous wildlife. And we’ve since learned it was a ploy to devalue hunting, to marginalized hunting value. That was exactly what it was.

Andy Inglis: That was in Argentina or –

Ramsey Russell: Argentina.

Andy Inglis: Argentina.

Ramsey Russell: In Argentina. If I said anything else, I meant Argentina. But now in Australia, same thing.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. The recreational hunters, such as myself, have been unable since forever to export sport harvested wildlife back home. Do you not think it’s possible to do anything in Argentina the same way that you, I mean, you approach through a scientific, educational network to get these permits to come out here? Do you see any chance at all that you might be able to do the same thing? Because, I mean, I feel like this research that you’re doing, especially in town with guys like Lavretsky, is of the utmost importance for world waterfowl conservation, let alone their own backyards.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, I mean, imagine when you establish a collection of, say, world waterfowl where we’re not only just archiving the specimen, we’re archiving the tissues. And so we have a cryo collection that, where we house the tissues of all of our specimens that we have and there are not very many of these species from the southern hemisphere where they’re in collections and they have, there’s like a bank of their tissues. And so that’s one of the reasons why we want to try and build this and make it to where we have these tissues. But it’s really, I don’t, Argentina is going to be a – the short answer is, I don’t think so, because we’ve tried. Through an academic perspective, we’ve tried or rationale, we’ve tried to do that and that’s been shut down and we did do some, a little bit of collecting in Chile, but now that’s been shut down, too. So the reason this is happening, one of the reasons this is happening is because of intellectual rights. So when we worked in Indonesia, we couldn’t, we had to be really careful what we could collect and the country retains any intellectual rights on any findings from those things. Now, for a duck, it seems pretty esoteric, but what if there was a compound found in that duck’s tissue that turned out to be something that was valuable for therapeutic human? I mean, it happens sometimes, it does. And now all of a sudden, this country is out of the loop. And so that’s what’s happening, is these countries are realizing that their natural resources are –

Ramsey Russell: Seems like it’d be as simple as just making a contract or having a license on that.

Andy Inglis: We do, for Indonesia, which is a very difficult country, we did get specimens out of Indonesia and it was because we had an international agreement between our university and the Indonesian government, but it took lawyers and it was a real long legal process to get it pulled together. So there are countries like Australia, there are permits available and we’ve got those permits, but it took time to get them and we still have to get our export permits. But I feel confident that we’re going to get those. So there’s still a process here in Australia to be able to work with specimens and I’ll be meeting with some of my colleagues at the Australian Museum. It’s in Sydney next week and we’re going to be talking about specimen exchanges and ways that we can help each other out. So there are ways, there’s ways to do that. And you just got to be proactive, you’ve got to be understanding of what’s going on in the country. The hunter issue here is it definitely, it’s come into a boil and it’s unfortunate, I think I having worked with hunters all around the world and they’re people and they’re committed to the resource. And conservation means wise use of the resources.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Andy Inglis: It’s not and so –

Ramsey Russell: Not preservation.

Andy Inglis: Not preservation. And you think about, I don’t know if Phil talked about this, but when they looked at the state of birds in North America, every single group of birds is going down, is dropping and the populations are dropping except for one group of birds in north, all of North America and that’s waterfowl. Waterfowl numbers are increasing and that is a direct, that’s indirectly related to understanding the biology of the birds, the way they move, the habitat protection, the new restoring wetlands, understanding their biology and it’s through groups like Ducks Unlimited, local state groups like California waterfowl or whatever, these groups –

Ramsey Russell: Universities, federal governments that’s all underpinned by a hunter willing to spend his time and money to make sure that.

Andy Inglis: And why did that happen? Because of the hunting traditions of this, of America were recognized as an important, they learned to pay for the resource back in the 1950s. When you start buying federal stamps and you start paying for licenses, hunters are conditioned in the United States to pay for that resource and they do and they pay beyond what they have. That’s happening in Australia, too, but it’s not raised to percolated to the surface. That’s a thing that and it’s a long tradition here. It’s not like it’s, they’ve been hunting here for 50 years.

Ramsey Russell: No, I met a hunter yesterday, actually I met him on the flight up. But we saw each other last night at dinner and he’s 5th generation.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: His son is 6th generation duck hunter right here in Australia. And the reason I, which is all going to the heart of why I mentioned Argentina bringing birds out is you’ve been to a lot of countries and it seems to me that where you, in the absence of a hunting culture, waterfowl hunting culture Argentina, prime example, management or conservation or any afterthought whatsoever for their natural resources like a duck, it’s just non existent. It’s just completely, it’s absent completely. What other countries have you seen that in?

Andy Inglis: From a waterfowl perspective, I’m probably not as well traveled as you, so I probably can’t answer that question very well. Yeah, most of the lot of the traveling I’ve been doing in my career has been looking at overall biodiversity and not specifically waterfowl. So we’ve done work in New Zealand. They have a definite strong hunting ethic there and they, it seems to be well supported. And we worked there with Phil, we were there with Phil Lavretsky in 2016. My wife went and collected with him and did the very same thing we’re doing here in Australia, we did in New Zealand back then. So I think that some countries, like, my perception of some countries is the resources there to bring in people to spend money to do the hunting or whatever and I’ve seen maybe a little bit in Mexico, some of that in Mexico, on the west coast of Mexico. Now that rings in mind. I worked in Mexico in the 90s as well and I think that’s the thing, that’s what they want to do. And beyond that, I can’t imagine. You got hunters that are donating birds and they’ve shot the birds and they’re willing to donate their birds to you for either research or for teaching or whatever, we’re going to use the specimens.

Ramsey Russell: It was hard felt to me Andy, it really struck a chord the other day down in Victoria province, when the gentleman and his 2 little boys, ages 2 and 7, he drove a long way, 3 or 4 hours round trip, to gift you birds of his that he had in the freezer that he had saved from self pachydermia. They were beautiful birds.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, they were beautiful.

Ramsey Russell: It meant a lot to me that he did that.

Kindred Spirits in Hunting

And you all brought back almost 90 birds or have 90 birds ready to roll.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, that’s right. And then you right away you talk to them and you realize you’re all kind of kindred spirits almost. You understand the mentality, the ethic and the reason why they’re doing that and that’s how it’s been since I’ve been here in Australia on this trip. And it was like that years ago, too. But I mean, these, the hunters that I’ve worked with so far in this country, they’re doing everything that they can to help us achieve what we want to try to achieve and that’s really gratifying and it’s great to see that anywhere you go in the world.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s talk about the birds you all collected a little bit. You told me at lunch, you had a goal of about 90 birds for the week. And I’m assuming that budget was kind of planned on how much can we two possibly process? And you process a bird quicker than anybody I’ve ever seen. I’ve skinned those birds like that, there’s some countries you can’t bring home whole frozen birds. You’ve got to be able to skin them right and trust you me, those countries, like Mongolia, ain’t going to be able to skin them for you. You got to skin them yourself and it takes me a while, takes me a long while to do it. And you all brought back almost 90 birds or have 90 birds ready to roll.

Andy Inglis: So what we did is we were working in 2 areas, one state in Victoria where birds were going to be there, we didn’t hunt down there. It was just birds that local hunters were donating to our cause and so I just looked at what the birds legally could be hunted and we usually want about 10 specimens. That gives us enough variability where we can see male, female immature birds. So it gives us what we want for our collection. And so you get 10, 10, 10, maybe 5 species. There’s 50 birds there, come up to Northern Territory and in this case, the Australians and yourself, you hunted some birds up here and those were birds that we got right away and we were able to process right away. And again, our permits allow us to have 10, 10. So I just kind of set that number 10 for each species. And doggone and all, if we didn’t get to our limit on all of, in both areas just through donations in the south and donations up here, but it was to stand around and work with you guys. And I had to sit back, it would have been nice to have hunted up here, but I couldn’t because –

Ramsey Russell: Now you sat back.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Held the shop down.

Andy Inglis: My permit said –

Ramsey Russell: Get the workflow going.

Andy Inglis: I had to just work with the special –

Ramsey Russell: Is it uncommon for you to be in a country that a permit says you can’t hunt?

Andy Inglis: No, that’s not happened to me before. I think that it was the best way to get the permits because we’re going to be using them for educational purposes.

Ramsey Russell: They knew you were truly in it for the educational angle.

Achieving Conservation Goals Through Regulations

So but that’s the reality of politics from state to state and I’m sure it’s the same here in Australia and it’s just, you got to figure out ways to work with that system to achieve what you want to try and achieve.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. And so I talked and I met with the biologists up here over the phone and over the Internet and we just discussed how we’re going to be doing things and they said, this is the best way for you to work. And I love that kind of, I mean, if I could get that kind of support from an agency that’s given me a permit, whether it’s in the United States or abroad, that’s worth its weight in gold. I mean, I can remember getting our first permits in Texas and working with the state tech, the permitting group there for birds and they were like, what can we do to help you? And it’s like in my state, California, it’s like, what can we do to stop you from doing it? So I’m like Jesus, I’m trying to figure out how to do that. So but that’s the reality of politics from state to state and I’m sure it’s the same here in Australia and it’s just, you got to figure out ways to work with that system to achieve what you want to try and achieve.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about a little bit of the species. Did you have a favorite species that you touched, which begs the question, do you have a favorite species or are they all equal because they’re unique?

Andy Inglis: No, I came here wanting 3 species, really wanting 3 species. I’ll throw in 2 extra ones, too. But the pink ear duck was definitely one that we wanted to go for. The Australian wood duck or maned duck, we don’t have that in our collection and it’s a really common bird down south, you see, just –

Ramsey Russell: oh, my gosh, they were everywhere.

Andy Inglis: Parks and pastures, and then the mountain duck or the Australian shelduck those 3 were the ones that I really wanted to get because they’re common birds we didn’t have in our collection. And then coming up north, I really wanted to get the 2 whistling ducks. So the plumed and the wandering whistling ducks we have, with those 2 species, I think we now have all of the world’s whistling ducks in our collection, except the West Indies, we don’t have that one. Cause that’s, I think that’s a –

Ramsey Russell: I was going to ask you how those whistling ducks, I don’t have near about the, not all the world’s whistling ducks can be hunted or exist in a place that you can’t hunt.

Andy Inglis: Right.

Ramsey Russell: But of the whistling ducks I have, how do those 2 whistling ducks differ from the ones you might see in Africa or South America or somewhere else?

Andy Inglis: What I’ve noticed with whistling ducks, where there are 2 species, there’s always seems to be a smaller one and a bigger one. So I’m not sure how they’re partitioning resources, but there’s probably a reason for that.

Ramsey Russell: I think I might have an idea. My radar heard, like it’s funny how scientific name, everybody that knows scientific names knows exactly what species. You start getting into common names, well, then you got colloquial names. And so here you’ve got the red whistler. That’s what all the duck hunters are calling them and the grass whistler.

Andy Inglis: Right.

Ramsey Russell: And my observations on this plumed whistler, the grass whistler, they come in late hunting them. You don’t see many of them at daylight. They’re all feeding, they’re off in the grass and I have seen them, I could not believe this. With both the magpie geese and that plumed whistler, they’re not landing a little short stuff they can see over. They’re landing and stuff that’s chest high on me thick that you got to look for something to fail. And they’re landing in that and their crawls are full of little sedge rhizomes or something that they’re feeding on down in cover, thick cover.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Whereas the red whistler or the wandering whistler rarely leaves the wetland.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I think that’s how they’re diverted. They’re both around the water because they’re waterfowl. But I think their feeding preferences are one’s a little more upland and terrestrial and one’s a little more aquatic.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. Now, down in southern US, I mean, we have 2 species, the black bellied and the fulvous. And they’re different birds. I mean, one is a cavity nester and one nests on the ground and one is more marsh oriented. I think the fullest whistling duck is a more marshy sort of duck.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy. When I see, when I think of fulvous whistling ducks, I’ve seen some in South Louisiana, South Texas, but they’re gone before hunting season. And I don’t, where I’ve seen a lot of the fulvous whistling duck is in wild, remote marshes that are so full of submerged aquatic. The bird can almost walk on it like a rail, but it can’t quite. That’s his habitat.

Andy Inglis: I think that’s right. And think about black bellies. I mean, there you can see them in wooded areas and in parks and they’re much more.

Ramsey Russell: Like those maned ducks.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, like the maned ducks. So, I mean, you see those 2, there’s a third species in Australia, too. We don’t encountered it here. It’s only found on the Cape York Peninsula. It’s called the spotted whistling duck. Every once in a while they’ll come down the –

Ramsey Russell: Where the heck is that? This peninsula you talking about.

Andy Inglis: The York Peninsula is in far eastern Australia. It’s a little point that goes up towards New Guinea.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Andy Inglis: And so Cairns and Brisbane are along the coast there and then it goes up and that tip up there is where the spotted whistling duck occurs. Every once in a while, one will show up, I think, in these areas here. But it’s a bird that’s found more in New Guinea and Australia and then that just barely gets in Australia or New Guinea and Indonesia and it barely gets in Australia. So there are 3 species here in Australia.

Hunting Waterfowl Legally Worldwide

Never in a million years did I think I would become so enamored with that almost goofy looking, ugly magpie goose like I have.

Ramsey Russell: Of legally hunted species, I don’t collect anymore, I don’t need more taxidermy, don’t want more taxidermy. But I do like to hunt legally hunted birds worldwide. And again, and this hunt exactly proves it Andy is where the birds take you, how the birds are hunted. This is truly. I thought I had, I’ve been to Australia twice. Thought I’d seen it, I ain’t seen Australia. I came to the Australian Outback. Boy, did I see Australia this time. And I wanted the magpie and the 2 whistlers. Never in a million years did I think I would become so enamored with that almost goofy looking, ugly magpie goose like I have. The first one I put on my hand, it’s like, what is this? The feet, the beak, the head, the bump on the head, the bill. And thank goodness somebody had warned me. I kind of wish they had. I’d like to have cracked one open. We were skinning them and seen that long coil of the male’s trachea is about 4 wraps that runs from, like, out his little whatever that little –

Andy Inglis: Furcula, yeah it’s –

Ramsey Russell: The wishbone is out and down like a snake under his skin, the whole length of his body. And Glenn told me he thinks, several locals said they think it’s a thermoregulatory process. And I’m thinking, well, but it’s not always this hot. We’re here in a hot time of year. There are cool and pleasant times of year and when I picked one up, of course sometimes you got to bring a neck. He was making the most unworldly, maybe some people say it sounds like an alien. Maybe somebody said it sounded like a dinosaur, a rattle, coming out of that windpipe. And what I noticed, as poor as my hearing can be, hearing those high pitched birds the other day, 50 to 100 yards away, there were some lily pads and there were crawls, they were eating. They liked that lily pad. I saw them land in lily pads over their head. Again, I just would think a bird would want to be able to look around for predators. And as they were spinning and working, they were all making that sound. And I don’t know if they were consciously vocalizing or if the wing beats were vocalizing, but it was.

Andy Inglis: You could hear that sound.

Ramsey Russell: It was weird. It was like aliens. Listen to all them birds, circulate like aliens.

Andy Inglis: When you look at a structure like that, I mean, it’s hard to explain, but it’s between the skin and the breast muscle. So it’s laying right on top of the breast muscle. And if you want to breast it out, you got to remove that to get to the breast and something bothers me about an apparatus only occurring in one sex male. And to that elaborate, it’s so elaborate a structure, that it can’t just be for vocal, I just can’t believe that it’s just for vocalization.

Ramsey Russell: Unless vocalizations have something to do with the mating process.

Andy Inglis: So that –

Ramsey Russell: Attracting males.

Andy Inglis: I think it may have something to do also for their social structure. And I was reading a little bit about them and that one of there are several hypotheses for why people think that they have this, I just, because doing homework last night in my spotty Internet.

Ramsey Russell: Inquiring minds want to know.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. And so what I learned was that these birds have really bizarre social structure.

Ramsey Russell: They take 2 females every year.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. Male to 2 females. But I think there’s also this social structure within the flock. Excuse me, and so I think that there may be something going on that we don’t, maybe we can’t even perceive some vocalization or sounds that they’re making. That is something that only, the only magpie goose, it means something to magpie goose. So I’m going to dive into that and see if we can learn a little bit more.

Ramsey Russell: Find out and let me know. I’m dying to know.

Andy Inglis: I’ll do my best. But it looks to me like there’s people have postulated several ideas, but it seems to be geared towards a social structure and vocalization of the males.

Ramsey Russell: Like the louder the roar, the more –

Andy Inglis: But I mean –

Ramsey Russell: Far up the food chain.

Andy Inglis: You heard them out there, they’re not. They don’t sound that much louder than a Canada goose.

Ramsey Russell: If they conquer their vocalizations when they’re flying and they’re quite vocal, I mean, they cluck and they’re flying, it sounds a lot like the precursor of a Canada geese.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Just a single little click. That’s just, they’re making that sound.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And they all kind of sound like to me, talk about you were, I’ve skinned the birds like I’ve seen you skin. You make that incision down the little bare spot, peel them out, get the meat off the weight, leave all the legs where they go on the body and stuff like that. What’s the difference in how you’re skinning a bird? Like, describe your study. Skins versus taxidermy. That’s what I’m getting at.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, there’s different, I mean, you can – Modern taxidermists do things so differently than when I first learned, but they basically create a hide. They’ll take the skin off the head. Most North American birds, there’s plastic heads that you can get to put in.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Foam bodies, foam neck, foam everything.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. Just a second, let me get a drink here. Excuse me. I’ll start over again here real quick. Sorry about that.

Ramsey Russell: All right.

Taxidermy Vs. Live Post

We tend to leave more bones in our birds. We leave the skulls in, we leave the wings and legs in.

Andy Inglis: So the question about what’s the difference between a taxidermy bird, say, a live post. We call it live post taxidermy versus a museum study skin. They’re both taxidermy and the goal is to get the body in a position that’s efficient for collections, which is a little torpedo –

Ramsey Russell: Or a little popsicle stick.

Andy Inglis: We tend to leave more bones in our birds. We leave the skulls in, we leave the wings and legs in. And right now, all we’re doing is just removing the trunk. And so we’re just removing the trunk to reduce the weight so when we ship the bird out, we can finish the bird up in the lab. So, yeah, so for taxidermy birds you can, there are differences in the way we prepare our specimens. So for museum specimen we use a, we’ll actually use a cotton body or we’ll actually make one out of wood excelsior.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah.

Andy Inglis: So we spend some twine around it and make, wire up the neck or a wooden stick up the neck. And then you just basically put the bird back together and sew it up. With a taxidermy bird, you’ve got wire into the wings, wire into the legs, wire in the neck, so you can bend and pose the bird. And it’s just not practical to have, if I had 65,000 specimens of birds and live poses, we would have a museum the size of the Smithsonian at least. And as it is, I’ve got my collection is in like a 2000 square foot room. So it’s pretty amazing how much you can get into these cases. And I’m proud to say that we, about half of our bird collection is all waterfowl. So if you ever want to see a complete waterfowl collection of every species and males and females and babies and, you just come on by and take a look.

Ramsey Russell: What will you do with the skeletons?

Andy Inglis: The skeletons are, again, I would say they’re more for comparative studies. And one of the, when we look at how our museum is used by people, the skins are used mostly for teaching and maybe studies on plumage and molt, looking at species differences. The tissues are used for molecular research or whatever other kind of research can be done. The skeletons are used by comparative anatomists. We have paleontologists. They’ll come, they’re going to love the magpie geese.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Andy Inglis: I mean you’re talking about a really primitive bird. I don’t even know yet what the skeletal structure is going to be like, but I think it’s going to be elements of, like, the Galliformes, the pheasants and that kind of group of birds and waterfowl. So it’s going to have some, there’s going to be something. You saw the leg, I mean, the leg –

Ramsey Russell: So if I had a mounted chicken and a mountain goose and I could put this bird in the middle and say, okay, this has got chicken like features. This has got –

Andy Inglis: We used to have a specimen where hopefully your listeners will like this story. It was a mallard head and feet put onto a pheasant and the mallard has got a green head and a white neck. And so they just, some student just put this thing and then the legs are duck feet. And you can imagine there was a colorful limerick written there once was an amorous duck that met a pheasant and the result was a pH and so and I’m thinking, well that’s not too far off what we’re seeing on this bird here so.

Ramsey Russell: No, it’s crazy.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. The bill on the thing about the magpie goose has been blown my mind has been the bill tip. It’s just, it looks like a voltage.

Ramsey Russell: What do you think it’s for?

Andy Inglis: It’s for grabbing those little –

Ramsey Russell: But now screamers have a similar build to it.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. I don’t know how they feed, but these guys.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I tell you, who else has a hook raptor looking, for lack of a better word, a reptile is a capercaillie. And what I know, the capercaillie, people think, well, it looks like a hawker and they don’t know what he’s doing, is going and clipping young shoes just like pruning shears.

Andy Inglis: Right.

Ramsey Russell: And that’s what he feeds on and I’m wondering if this guy’s not out in them lily pads hitting little shoots.

Andy Inglis: I think they may, but what I’ve read about them is that they use their bill to snap off the underground root balls of aquatic plants. So like the sedge nuts and things like that that are under the mud.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what their crop is full of.

Andy Inglis: Their crops are full of that, yeah. And so I read that that’s one of their adaptations and they don’t feed like a –

Ramsey Russell: What do you think that large head protuberance is for? Now, one of the locals told me the other day he knew exactly what it was for. It was for, they used it to, like a hammer to break open the soil. And I’m like, I don’t know. Did you ever seen them do that?

Andy Inglis: I’ve not watched them before. It seems like an old wives tale to me. But yeah, I heard another story where the males have got big knots in their heads because they have 2 females and they’re always beating them on the head. That’s the other thing I heard, too. But that’s a good Aussie outback story, I think, right there.

The Things You See in Duck Camp

How long is a Australian duck penis? Well, that’s not something I’ve ever seen before Andy.

Ramsey Russell: Here’s a good question I got for you. The things you see in duck camp, especially when you bring a couple of scientists with you. How long, you were saying the trachea is about 3 and a half, 4ft. How long is a Australian duck penis? Well, that’s not something I’ve ever seen before Andy.

Andy Inglis: That’s definitely –

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never seen anybody whoop out of duck pecker measure.

Andy Inglis: Well, I’ve been measuring them, yeah. Because there’s not much data on Australian duck penises.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder why.

Andy Inglis: When you’re out with a bunch of hunters and scientists, we’re all scientists, just in our own way. I’ve learned a lot about these birds from the guys that actually know the birds. But yeah, it’s – I have to say that I have a colleague that is studying the length and size of duck penises and it’s never been published that well. So I’ve been giving him measurements of duck penises in North America and I thought maybe he’d like some Australian ones.

Ramsey Russell: What duck has the longest penis in the world? I know the answer.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. There’s a black headed duck down in South America.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a little poacher about the size of a blue winged teal. How long is its penis?

Andy Inglis: Longer than the bird.

Ramsey Russell: Longer than the bird?

Andy Inglis: Yeah. Now it drags out in the water and looks like a snake in the water.

Ramsey Russell: So how do they –

Andy Inglis: Look it up.

Ramsey Russell: How do they copulate?

Andy Inglis: Well, the female has a special receptive receptacle as well.

Ramsey Russell: You better be special to take something like that.

Andy Inglis: So the waterfowl have a, what’s called a hemi penis. It’s not a true penis then it’s copulatory organ that allows them to basically put the sperm packet. So the sperm is like in a ball or a packet that then goes into the female and the female then can mobilize the sperm as she needs it to fertilize her eggs.

Ramsey Russell: She can sit on it. So it doesn’t just swim up there and hit an ovulating egg. It just sits until you want to utilize it. Wow. I know that cows do the same thing.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. So you’ll see that with a lot of ducks and that’s why there’s a lot of competition between males over females, because they want to try and get her, get his packet into her. But they do have an apparatus that allows them to copulate.

Ramsey Russell: So if a mountain hen, for example, was sitting on a nest of 11 eggs, it could be multiple drakes represented.

Andy Inglis: It could be. I don’t know too much about that aspect of their biology, but there’s a possibility that there could be more than one.

Ramsey Russell: So it was a black headed duck with something longer than himself. Is he just kind of sneaking up under the water on her?

Andy Inglis: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the, they kind of court and it kind of just moves over towards her. It’s kind of like a –

Ramsey Russell: Where you lay things –

Andy Inglis: Kind of wonder if it grabs you or something. I have no idea. But the interesting thing is that one of our professors studied that bird and that meat mating system. That was John Eadie in our department has written papers and has students working on that reproductive system.

Ramsey Russell: Raise mic, just a little. Yeah, there you go.

Andy Inglis: So that’s, if you want to know, just look it up.

Ramsey Russell: Very interesting. And I asked you the question. We had this conversation when I saw you whooping out a ruler and measuring. There are some birds that don’t have girl and boy parts. How do they copulate?

Andy Inglis: So all birds have, they have only one outlet. They have a cloaca.

Ramsey Russell: Cloaca.

Andy Inglis: Cloaca, if I remember my Latin properly, it means like sewer or something where everything goes into it. So in the case of a bird, you have the reproductive the egg if it’s a female or sperm if it’s a male, the poop and the urine, it’s concentrated in the cloaca and so forth. So that’s the chamber. So the way that birds, a lot of birds, they don’t have copulatory organs. Their reproductive organs are inside their bodies and that’s for the birds are basically have got all their organs.

Ramsey Russell: What would be an example of a bird like that?

Andy Inglis: Any bird, I mean, even the ducks we’re looking at, their reproductive organs are way inside.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Waterfowl’s Seasonal Breeding Patterns

They probably can turn themselves on to breed when the rain comes because it’s all about rainfall up here and a lot of tropical birds are that way. They’ll breed when the conditions are right.

Andy Inglis: And so when they become reproductively active, the gonads grow really big, like a small bird, like say a sparrow. When you open up a bird that’s highly reproductive, the testes of a male could be almost as pushing the intestines out of the way, they’re so big. And then birds, as an adaptation to weight for reduce weight, they reabsorb their gonads during the non-breeding season. So they become really small. It’s a process called recrudescence, where the testes is big and it gets small and all birds go through that process, unless they’re tropical and they’re ready to breed any time of the year. So probably a lot of the birds up here in the northern part of Australia, they probably can turn themselves on to breed when the rain comes because it’s all about rainfall up here and a lot of tropical birds are that way. They’ll breed when the conditions are right, whereas in temperate areas, like in, say, in the United States, there’s a breeding season. So the male then gets a swollen, their cloaca will swell and it’ll hold the sperm packet in that cloaca and they’ll just basically touch their cloaca to the cloaca of a female and pass that sperm packet into the female.

Ramsey Russell: Like swap and spit.

Andy Inglis: Yeah. And then she’s got it. And most birds, they form pair bonds. You’ll see some ducks, you’ll see issues with some ducks, like you’ll see mallards that were, if you’re at a park or something, you’ll see several males trying to copulate with a female. And that’s really an artifact of, in the wild, the mallards form pair bonds. There’s not all this stuff going on they’ll jockey to try, see who’s going to beat the dominant male. But there’s a pair bond. But when they’re in parks where there’s plenty of food, people. Yeah, it’s artificial. People are feeding them. You’ll get this kind of gang –

Ramsey Russell: That’s interesting. One of the most interesting things I’ve heard, longest line recently was biologists up in Washington state talking about harlequins form lifelong bonds and they both fly way up river, leave Puget Sound and go way up into Alberta. She makes a nest, boom, see you, babe. He’s gone back out to Puget Sound to molt and do his thing. And golly, when she comes back down with the kids, they find each other. That’s crazy. There’s so much going on in the bird world we’re unaware of.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, that’s one of the things about waterfowl, that they’re so different from other birds. And when you think about robins, American robin, for example, when do they start singing? They start singing in the spring maybe April, where it depends on where you are in the United States, but April, May, they’re going to be on nests and they’re going to be done and they’ll form a pair bond. They’ll raise the young together and then they leave. Waterfowl are completely different. They form their pair bonds in the wintering grounds. So they’re all coming down into the wintering areas in North America whether it’s the Mississippi Flyway or Central Valley of California where I live. And you’ll start seeing these nuptial flights as early as November, like right now in North America, you’ll start seeing nuptial flights where one female is being attended by maybe 4 or 5 males. They’re chasing her around and she’s testing the fitness of those males. And the one that can stick with her the best is probably the bird that she’s going to pick. And then they form that pair bond on the wintering grounds. So that’s really different. So mallards or ducks in North America have to be really pretty. They’re really their most striking in the winter time.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Andy Inglis: And then when it comes to breeding, then they, the male will then, the male does things. So as you progress towards being, getting ready to migrate back up to the prairies or wherever they’re going to migrate to, the female has to really get a lot of energy, gets to fatten up she’s producing eggs already. She’s already getting ready to start laying. The male’s attentive and he’ll kind of sacrifice himself a little bit for her. He’ll be attentive, watching for predators to let her feed. And then they both. They migrate together back to the to their breeding pond. And usually she’s taking them to where she was reared.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right, yeah.

Andy Inglis: And then there’s all of the things they do there. And then she gets on the nest. The male buggers off and joins other males. They, again, leave, just like the harlequin. They leave and they molt somewhere and then they come back to the wintering ground separately. They’ll migrate earlier and they

Ramsey Russell: Find each other.

Andy Inglis: They find each other.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just crazy.

Andy Inglis: But they don’t necessarily breed with the same female every time. But the females, when you think about that, the females are kind of driving the dispersal of the duck. So how is that different here in Australia? So this is the thing that you come to a country.

Ramsey Russell: Where you don’t have a continental migration.

Andy Inglis: You don’t have a continental migration. And so what are these birds responding to? And they’re responding to, we’ve heard it everywhere we go, it’s rainfall. When the water this is a really dry continent and when it rains, it can fill up these wetlands and recharge whole systems in one year. And the ducks will disperse and find that. Now how they find the bird, they’ll wander around the continent looking for the conditions that they want to breed. And I think that’s, again, another unique aspect to Australia. The birds here just have a different way of surviving.

The Value of Hunting in Conservation

Ramsey Russell: When you think about the contributions to education, the contributions to conservation that your museum and really Andy, I guess your life passion right now is building up. The world’s getting smaller. A lot of these countries are shutting down, Argentina, Australia, I mean, for example, we came down here and if we’re coming for a few birds, we can hunt. Why not collect more species through hunter donations if we’re going to come all this way? Because if they shut the season, we can’t collect them. We can’t collect the raha because it’s protected. We can’t collect the pima goose because it’s protected. We can’t collect the hard headed because it’s protected. We can’t collect freckleduck because it’s protected. And with the conversations you’ve heard this past couple of weeks, it seems like a couple of weeks past couple of days, it seems imminent that these boys are fighting tooth and they’ll, they won’t know until 2 weeks to a month before they’re sitting in a duck blind whether or not they got a duck season. That’s how close to the bare wire they are. How did that make you feel about the value of hunting in conservation?

Andy Inglis: Well, I mean, I’ve seen the value of the hunter in conservation in the United States and I know that what we do there is not probably comparable to Australia from the standpoint of how, I mean, when you think about how hunters support the resource in America, you see the duck stamp and you see all that. But there’s all this other stuff going on behind the scenes, too, that Pittman Robertson taxes on ammunition and guns and so forth. There’s a tax that then comes back to the states so they can manage resources and there’s a whole way to sustain the conservation of these birds and sustain the tradition of hunting in the United States or Canada. And I don’t know if all those types of things are in place here in Australia.

Ramsey Russell: They’re not, they used to put, there’s about, I’d say there’s 30,000 waterfowl hunters in Australia and that license sales used to be allocated to conservation. This government that is anti hunting predominantly has, I don’t know, just a few years ago decided to throw all the license sales into general budget. General budgets, as far as I know, were for keeping the lights on, paying the light bill every month, not conservation. So that’s what’s worrisome to me.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, I mean, that’s, you see that happening in a lot of the states. I think what’s, that’s one of the real great stories of the migratory bird treaty, migratory bird stamp. It’s one of the best programs in the United States, I think, in terms of you pay your $25 and everybody pays her $25 and it’s going into the purchasing wetlands or purchasing habitat to protect and have general use. And so that’s something that I would encourage to try to get that type of a mentality going. But it’s a really touchy situation. And it’s one that I could try to understand the fight, but it’s hard for me to understand because I come from a country where I know the value of hunters, what they contribute to the protection of the wetlands or managing the resource or understanding the resource. And I’m not sure that the hunters here have the same, are viewed as having the same values. And they have them. Those values are there.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my God. Yeah.

Andy Inglis: I mean, we’re talking to them. All they’re talking about is protecting wetlands and managing wetlands and doing this and doing that –

Ramsey Russell: And nest boxes, everything.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, nest boxes and productivity and I mean, the ethic is the same here, it’s just that I don’t see the same – Maybe the same understanding of that ethic.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t have a model for one, the North American model is we start talking Pittman Robertson act and the whole system of university states, federal governments, it’s all built around the North American model, which is absent everywhere else.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And short of a society building that model, having the societal support to build a model like that, I don’t see a future for hunting, but I don’t see a future for wildlife, because if you remove these 30,000 duck hunters from the landscape, who’s going to know or care that a subdivision is going in? What was the bulletin board the other day the subdivision? Golly, I kinda won’t be able to find my picture. But it was so absurd.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Communing with nature.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, communing with nature. And there’s just a sea of houses and there was a little puddle. That was –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. That wetland down –

Andy Inglis: All brown, that was sitting there and that was the last part of that marsh that was there. That’s true, I saw that in New Zealand a little bit. Excuse me. In the 1990s when I was there, that when they were talking about, I went up there to. I was there looking at the kind of – I was actually, as an auditor, to look at recovery plans for water birds in New Zealand and one of the species was brown teal and it’s a species of decline and it’s protected in New Zealand. And I was up on the North Island and I was looking at habitats and they said, well, this used to be a wetland that had brown teal and they then went to another one, this wetland used to have brown teal. And I went to another one, this wetland and I started noticing every one of them had a ditch in them and I’m like, well, they’ve drained the wetlands, so they’re still draining wet – At least back then, they were still draining wetlands. So they weren’t even at the core problem for that bird, which was you got to protect the wetlands that the bird lives in. And I think that’s all been, I mean, I remember I got interviewed by the newspaper and I said, look, that’s what I’m seeing. I’m sorry, but you can’t conserve a species if you’re taking away its habitat and that’s what was in where their habitat was good, the birds were there. And that’s kind of how it is here. I think that the advantage the birds have here a little bit is that the population is still pretty small in Australia, but it’s concentrated on the coasts. And so those coastal populations may be getting impact, could get impacted. And so, but, I mean, these big Billabongs that we see up here, they’re just phenomenal. The life that’s up here is phenomenal.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you Andy. I’ve enjoyed this week. I really have. I’ve learned so much and enjoyed this week and I feel productive. My human nature is to collect birds. I mean, I put my hands on that plumed whistler, oh, boy, I want to mount him. I want a stuff mystic and I don’t want him. I just find this, gosh, this sense of satisfaction, I’ve got my pictures, I got to touch him, I got to hunt him on his home turf. I got to learn about that species through my filter. And I get a sense of fulfillment, knowing he’s going to be sitting in a museum contributing to the future. You see what I’m saying it’s something bigger than sitting in my house for me to look at, to be putting it and contributing it to a body of knowledge.

Andy Inglis: And we’re talking about stories and every specimens have stories and you’re right. I mean, I can open up a case if I’m shown, like, if you came into my museum and you wanted to see harlequin duck or something like that, I could open up the case and some bird in there, I have a connection to it. I can tell you the whole history of that bird on how it was obtained. We have a little owl that we got this real quick story, the tiny little owl and it’s a rare owl in California and it was found by a lady in a city, Sacramento and she was dead. It hit her window and died and she buried it in the backyard, put it a little grave and buried it. And somehow she knew somebody that she contacted that was a bird watcher. And the birdwatcher contacted one of my employees who’s a biologist working for the museum who’s also and he said, this lady found this flaming owl in her backyard and she buried it in the backyard. My employee called that lady up and said, ma’am, this is one of the rarest birds in the Central Valley and it’s died. And would you mind going back out in your garden and digging that bird up and taking it out of the ground and I’ll come by and pick it up.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Andy Inglis: So he went and got that bird and they consumed this bird and we preserved it. And it’s now a specimen that’s going to be part of a larger study. I mean, it’s a really significant specimen that’s going to be part of a larger study than I’m doing in the Sacramento Valley, California. And it’s just little stories, every specimen has little stories like that and you can relate to them in so many ways. When you handle a bird, whether you’ve hunted it in your hand and you’re looking at those plumes on that, that plumed whistling duck, whatever, you’re connecting with it in ways that you don’t really realize. And when a student is handling a specimen to learn from or in our collection, they’re learning in ways that they don’t even, they’re not even perceiving.

Ramsey Russell: Raising kids, I had long since really not fished very much. I had quit fishing until I had little boys, and taking them out and seeing them connect with nature with a piece of my filament string. It was almost like going through it again myself, only better. And one thing I learned is children only love what they know and they only know what they touch. And I don’t think it’s limited to just children, I think it’s all humans.

Andy Inglis: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You know what I’m saying? I think you’ve got to really touch it and admire it and hunt it and know a little bit about it to truly appreciate it and value it.

Andy Inglis: Yeah, I agree. I mean, look at the diversity of people that are up here at this, at our camp. I mean, there’s people from all walks of lives and they’re all connecting under this one this one passion to for hunting and then seeing now that the birds that are coming in or can be used for so many different things, things they really didn’t think about the museum side of things and bringing birds into science those are things that they kind of tangibly maybe knew about it, but now they’re part of that.

Ramsey Russell: Now they’re a part of it.

Andy Inglis: They’re a part of it. So that’s a connection that’s going to stay with them and for me, too.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you Andy.

Andy Inglis: You’re welcome. Thank you much. Thanks for having me on.

Ramsey Russell: Thanks to Safari Club International for supporting this project. Thanks to Field & Game Australia. Thanks especially to our host, Glenn Falla, Trent Leen, Paul Sharp and to every one of you all that I got to shake your hand, you came up, you donated birds, you hunted with me, you took me to your hunting hole, you signed my decoy, you shared your stories. And thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, we’ll see you next time.