Chief of Migratory Birds

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today we’re going to fall down the rabbit hole of estimating harvest and a whole lot more. Joining me, Mr. Brad Bortner, former US Fish & Wildlife Service chief of migratory birds. He’s moved on to a very important career since then, we’ll get into that last part of this episode. Brad, how the heck are you, man?

Brad Bortner: I’m doing great. Ramsey, how are you doing?

Ramsey Russell: I’m doing fine. Now, look, first note, where’d you grow up? Tell me about your hunting origins and I’m sitting there, you’re backdrop by a photo of, a pretty photo of a lot of greater scaup and I know you live out on the west coast now, but that ain’t where you grew up. You grew up somewhere else, I think.

Brad Bortner: No. My father was a career navy, so I was born in Massachusetts, moved to Florida, moved to Guam, moved to California, but I grew up, my high school years were in Annapolis, Maryland at the naval academy there on the Chesapeake. And so I grew up hunting on the Chesapeake, my hunting origins were that I had an uncle who was a big Canada goose hunter over on the eastern shore and a best friend in high school who had a bay front farm and we hunted mourning doves and black ducks and Canada geese and a few divers. So my first duck was shot with my best friend from high school, it was a Drake Scott, lesser Scott that came in, but I shot an awful lot of Canada geese and mourning doves out there on the farm and with my family and friends. My dad wasn’t a hunter, but I certainly had early influences with my uncle and my best friend from high school.

Ramsey Russell: Were you all hunting from shore or layout boat?

Brad Bortner: We were hunting from shore. I didn’t get into layout boats until later, that’s the problem now I had to sell my layout boat. I couldn’t get anybody who was willing to get out in the big water in a layout boat here.

Ramsey Russell: Man, it’s a lot of work, layout boat hunting is a lot of work and a lot of that big water duck hunting can be a lot of work with big spreads. I know when you get, speaking of Chesapeake Bay, when you get into body booting, man, the gear needs are substantial and it’s just changing times, I was hunting or visiting with some decoy makers up there one time and they grew up body booting and hunting that big water on Chesapeake Bay. And they talked about how the old timers, it was part of the tradition, the old timers carried the young bucks because the young bucks had strong backs and he looked at me and goes, we don’t have them young guys following behind us like at Ramsey. So it is a lot of work.

Brad Bortner: That is, the problem is getting guys that are in their 60s or 70s to crawl out of a boat and crawl into a layout boat when you’re in 10 or 15ft of water a mile offshore, it doesn’t excite too many people unless they’ve done it before.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Do you think your first duck on that big water shooting that scaup? Are you an equal opportunity duck hunter or do you have a thing for divers? Because I made of all the pictures a man out, like Washington state post up. I mean, you got blue bills hanging up.

Brad Bortner: Well, I can put up the mallard picture if you want. I like to hunt divers, they’re a lot of fun, but I’ll hunt dabblers too. I think I sent you a photo of me with 21 Drake mallards wrapped around my neck from a 3 day hunt in the eastern part of the state this year. So I’ve been known to shoot a few dabbling ducks in my life.

Ramsey Russell: I bet you have. You live in one of the greatest mallard and wigeon hunting areas I’ve ever been to. Now, how long have you been out west?

A Path to Migratory Bird Chief Out West

So, yeah, I did that and then my graduate work was looking at the bioenergetics, what were they feeding on? What were they doing? 

Brad Bortner: I moved out of here in 1992. I was stationed at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and get an opportunity to come out to Oregon to be the regional migratory bird chief in 1992 and at that point in time, I dealt with migratory bird issues from California to Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and the Pacific Islands, all the way out to Hawaii. So been out here for, I guess, 32 years now and loved it, didn’t want to go back east when I retired, I wanted to stay right here, where we have 107 day duck season.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. How did you go, I love to hear these stories, Brad, how did you go from a high school duck hunter, shot a blue bill on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay to regional migratory bird chief with US Fish & Wildlife Service? What did that path look like?

Brad Bortner: Well, when I graduated from high school, I knew I wanted to go into natural resources. I had grown up on the grounds of the naval academy and quite often I had discussions with my father and my mother about going to the naval academy and being a navy officer but my passions were being outdoors, both from hunting and I had a grandfather that was a big fly fisherman and loved being outdoors and decided to go to a wildlife school and study natural resources. And like you, I, along the way, picked up a degree in forestry and I also got a degree in wildlife. And in 1980 –

Ramsey Russell: Was it the same degree, was it the same program or did it require like a double major?

Brad Bortner: 2 different bachelor’s degrees.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Brad Bortner: Yeah, I did it in 5 years. So I took all my electives, all my wildlife electives in forestry. I figured if nothing else, I could probably get a job in forestry if I couldn’t get a job in wildlife and as you remember back in that point in time getting a job in wildlife was pretty competitive.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy.

Brad Bortner: So in 1980, I went to Delta Waterfowl Research Station and just, my professors had known that I was a diehard waterfowl hunter, bird hunter and suggested I go up there, I went up and worked on the Marsh Ecology research project. And just being around all the students up there, many of them that you know or you’ve interviewed, my roommate was real – Jeff Nelson was there, he went on to be the CEO of Ducks Unlimited, Canada, Mike Anderson, Frank Rohwer, Al Afton, all sorts of the folks that you’ve interviewed or that you know. And I really had the fire lit in my heart to go on to do other things, so I went on to graduate school, I started off at Johns Hopkins University, which is kind of a, not a place you would expect someone to go to waterfowl school, especially in Downtown Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins med school campus. But there was a professor of ecology there who was studying tundra swans and I grew up looking at tundra swans on the Chesapeake and was fascinated with them and started off there, couldn’t really put a project together. But I ended up going to the University of Maryland, College Park as a little bit cheaper and more focused program and more in my lines and ended up getting funding for a study on Tundra swan bioenergetics in North Carolina, so I chased swans around North Carolina, Mattamuskeet for –

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Brad Bortner: For a couple years.

Ramsey Russell: You weren’t one of the guys putting all those collars back in the day on those swans, were you?

Brad Bortner: I grew up doing that in high school and that professor at Johns Hopkins was the one who started all that.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Brad Bortner: And so in, I think it was 10th grade, I probably hung my first collar on a Canada goose and a tundra swan and that was volunteer work. But it kind of made me aware that there was that as a profession. So, yeah, I did that and then my graduate work was looking at the bioenergetics, what were they feeding on? What were they doing? This is prior to this, having the hunting season down in North Carolina. So they used a lot of my research to initiate that hunting season down there on tundra swans.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fascinating.

Brad Bortner: Then I ended up getting accepted into a PhD program at Iowa State to work on snow geese and 2 weeks away from leaving for Iowa, I got a permanent full time offer from the federal government and I did a lot of soul searching and talking to my wife and decided that I was much more interested or much my skills, I wasn’t much more interested, my skills lay more in administration than in doing hardcore research, teaching students, that sort of thing. So I decided to not go on to get a PhD, but to take a federal government job and I worked as an ecologist for an agency that most people haven’t ever heard about. That’s the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the Office of Hydropower Licensing and they’re the people who issue licenses for hydropower dams. And at least in some of those hydropower dams, there was some waterfowl component, whether it was getting some of the power developers to seed millet or do something for waterfowl in some of those reservoirs or one project out in Idaho was dealing with the effects of the hydropower regime on trumpeter swan. So I got a chance to practice a little bit of wildlife stuff along with some of my other things. And after a couple years of that, I had the opportunity to transfer over to the Fish & Wildlife Service and did that. So I’m going to pause so you can ask me another question, but I’ll, if you want me to go in to discuss my Fish & Wildlife service career, I can do that.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the question I’ve got is now your title of Fish & Wildlife Service was migratory bird chief. What does a migratory bird chief do? Because I know from talking to you and talking to a whole lot of mutual friends that you’re still very highly involved at a lot of meetings level, even though you’re retired from US Fish & Wildlife Service, but I just want to know, what does a migratory bird chief with US Fish & Wildlife Service do? What does your day to day look like?

Brad Bortner: As my undergraduate advisor said to me when I told him that I got in that job, he says, you’re going to go to a lot of meetings.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Brad Bortner: The migratory bird chief. Now, I’ve been out of it for 6 years and it’s changed a little bit since then, but the migratory bird chief, I was the senior manager of career manager, not in an executive position in the Fish & Wildlife Service, looking at migratory policies towards migratory bird management everything from setting the hunting regulations, which is what your listeners probably most interested in, all the way to representing the Fish & Wildlife Service in the interests of the American people in treaty discussions with our treaty partners in Canada, Mexico, Russia and Japan. So of interest to you, I’ve seen those pintails as North American pintails that are recovered with a Japanese band in Tokyo.

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?

Brad Bortner: Yeah. I have seen red breasted geese flying in Central Russia and I know they’re one of the prettiest birds. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a chance to see them in Hungary or Central Russia, but I was able to represent the United States there, way back when and Russia and looking at red breasted geese, but also discussing the North American model of Wildlife Management and also our survey programs and to interested folks in Europe and Asia, to celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Migratory Bird Treaty, with the Canadian and Mexican government in Ottawa, so all sorts of different things, I was responsible for making sure that the surveys were flown, that we set good policy for take of migratory birds through, whether it’s by a permitting process or whether it’s through hunting or coming up with conservation strategies for songbirds or seabirds or some other variety. I don’t feel like that’s a very focused answer, Ramsey, but –

Ramsey Russell: Well, it’s leading me down the trail, so it’s perfect, you talk about a lot of what you work was working with partners worldwide, not just as a part of the treaty. A lot of people don’t realize that Japan and Russia are a part of that treaty. We all know Canada and Mexico, but we do, I mean, they’re a very integral part, you talk about the band. I can remember, it’s been a while, but every once in a blue moon, you see a pintail band spurred up in the south somewhere, it’s got Japanese writing on it. One was killed up in rural Mississippi about 20 years ago, that I remember. I was working for US Department of Agriculture, why they call that office, I have no idea, but that’s the only number they knew to call and that boy had rung that bird by his neck and slung him clear off for he realized it had a Japanese band on it. I guess that’s because so many pintail will breed in Alaska and I guess that’s just kind of a terminus that they all kind of meet at –

Brad Bortner: Well, you should probably know, pintails, if they encounter drought on the prairies, will overfly and head up into the boreal, head up into Alaska. I think if you look at the telemetry studies, you’ll see that a significant portion of them end up in Siberia to breed and some of those end up going down into Japan, pick up a band and then the next thing you know, they’re here in North America. I’ve seen them recovered everywhere from Oregon and Washington to Louisiana before.

Ramsey Russell: Do you know how far east, excuse me, west, those birds from Siberia will go in my lane. Will they end up in the UK? Would they end up that far away?

Brad Bortner: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a banding record going that far of. I have seen some of the telemetry data that shows them and I won’t get into, I’ll mess up the Russian geography, but far enough west that they’ll end up flying down into Japan or Mongolia, but I’ve not seen them fly to New England.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Brad Bortner: I mean, to England.

Ramsey Russell: Because I’ve killed pintail in Mongolia and mallards, I’ve shot them in other European countries. Mallards and gadwalls and pintails are a common species over there and I’ve wondered, I said, well, there must be some arctic breeding ground over on this side of the world, too. You know what I’m saying? It’s not just Prairie Canada and our side of the world up north, it’s the other side of the world, too, that European Flyway or Asian Flyway.

Brad Bortner: Well, they’ll breed on the tundra and obviously there’s tundra that goes all the way across the Russian Arctic over to Finland.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. It’s just very – and along those lines, I wake up the other morning, things that duck hunter wakes up thinking about and because I’ve been invited to go hunt in Europe this year very excited about. I’ll tell you about it after we get done, about some of the opportunities, just experiences we’re going to get into over there and I just got to wondering, where their birds came from and then I got to wondering if somehow another fell down a rabbit hole. Now I’m in a meeting with somebody that has actually dealt with these issues. But the rabbit hole I fell down was reading a paper that didn’t appear to be written by hook and bullet biologists like yourself. It had some, maybe some other interest and they do have a model of conservation over there, migratory bird management, but it is not an adaptive harvest management, it’s adaptive management and it’s almost like the undertones of some of the stuff I read and I’m thinking about another continent that’s vying to get this model put in place, they also opted out of the harvest quotient. Could you tell me at all, just at a cursory level, of how Europe and Asia and other parts of the world that do have some form of an adaptive management versus an adaptive harvest management? Could you just, I’m just trying to lead up because I know we’re going to get into adaptive harvest management. Some of our reporting models later, Brad, in the conversation. But I’m just trying to draw contrast to how we manage as composed to how they manage. I was really surprised to know they had any management at all, I’ll just be honest with you.

Brad Bortner: Well, let me start with describing what happens in North America is we’re blessed with the North American model of Wildlife Management, where it is seen as a common resource and we have a system where we are all vested in the common outcome of those species that’s developed into licensing systems, both involvement at the state level, provincial level, the federal government levels and in Canada and US and Mexico. And we tend to manage things on a flyway basis and we sit down, we have some coordination, we have shared costs, hunters are very much involved in the process in –

Ramsey Russell: Excuse me, it’s the original. It’s how my buddy Heath Hagy described as crowdfunding, that’s the North American model. We’re a crowdfunded model and I love that concept, but go ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

U.S. Waterfowl Management vs. European Practices

And I was describing our system of management and much to their chagrin they just don’t have anything like that. And our survey and monitoring efforts are the envy of the rest of the world.

Brad Bortner: Yeah, well, I mean, the US Fish & Wildlife Service pays for the aerial portion of the May breeding waterfowl survey, for example, where the Canadians conduct the ground transects. We also partner on some of the plot surveys and that sort of thing that are done. But we also have a lot of involvement by states, the Upper Midwest and some of the Pacific Flyway states are paying for and conducting surveys in the Atlantic Flyway, there’s also surveys done by the states that contribute to population estimates. So there’s a lot of involvement and a lot of money that goes into it, they don’t have that in Europe. The meeting that I was telling you about, that I was in Kalmykia, which is a republic in the middle of Central Russia, was a joint meeting of the European and Asian of basically duck and goose biologists. And I was describing our system of management and much to their chagrin they just don’t have anything like that. And our survey and monitoring efforts are the envy of the rest of the world.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Brad Bortner: And the level of coordination and communication that we have and the structure for setting seasons for collaborating, like I said, we have the flyway system here. They don’t have a similar structure, they have lots of different countries involved and not necessarily, they don’t necessarily feel obligated to manage the same as the country next door to them, where we have a lot more collaboration, communication. Some of it’s based on treaties, some of it’s based on just long term common understanding of the resource. So you can have, you can set regulations in a country X over there and country Y may say, yeah, we’ll go along or we won’t go along. And they try to, at a technical level, they try to communicate and express what their conservation concerns are, but in some cases, the federal governments are setting things up independent of those technical concerns.

Ramsey Russell: Let me go and let me dig a layer deeper because I want to run this, best science in the world. What goes into setting seasons for adaptive harvest management? What specifically in North America goes into the setting of the seasons, adaptive harvest management versus over there?

Brad Bortner: You’re asking about data or are you talking about the process?

Ramsey Russell: Both, I guess. I mean, because we’re getting into that.

Brad Bortner: Okay, well, the process in North America is that we have flyway councils that are groups of state agencies, the 4 flyways that we have in North America, in Atlantic, Mississippi, Central and Pacific and they meet on a regular basis and discuss management based upon their common birds and so Atlantic Flyway mallard are managed differently from the mid continent versus the West coast. Anyway, those states get together, they regularly meet, they have discussions, they seek out common grounds for the common objectives for the management based within that flyway and then those recommendations come to the federal government and the federal government sets what we call frameworks, which are the outside dates, bag limits, species that a flyway can have. And within that flyway, the states are free to select seasons that are crap that they want to craft for their state pick the opening day, the closing date that sort of thing, but they can be more restrictive than the federal government’s frameworks, but they can’t be more liberal. They can’t say, hey, we want to shoot 12 ducks when the federal government has said, you can shoot 6. They can’t sit there and say, we want to shoot 65 days when the federal government says, you can shoot 60. Now, to go to the science part of it, the best place to start, I guess, is that since 1995, we’ve had something in place called the adaptive harvest management and that is a set of rules that we’ve all collectively federal and state, have agreed upon. So we go out and we survey, count the number of ducks, we look at harvest information, we look at band information and based upon that data that is collected, the rules for the hunting season that year are selected. So prior to 1995, things happened a little bit more through debate and discussion and in some cases, almost fisticuffs.

Ramsey Russell: I was just fixing to ask you.

Brad Bortner: And it was a much more contentious time and we developed adaptive harvest management, it has the ability to test competing theories. I’m sure you understand and you’ve heard, I think, Mike Schumer, when you interviewed him, talked about compensatory and additive mortality, probably, Todd Arnold, he’s got some of –

Ramsey Russell: Yes.

Brad Bortner: So, embedded it within the process of adaptive harvest management is a way to test which of those theories is working best and it shifts weight onto the winners and shifts weight away from the losers. And through the almost 30 years of application now, we have a much better understanding of the role of harvest in duck populations dynamics.

Ramsey Russell: As compared to – go ahead.

Brad Bortner: Yeah. So once we kind of crank the numbers, go through the process, the service proposes regulations, it goes out for public comment, the flyways say, yeah, we agree or we don’t agree. You get other people that are opposed to hunting or think things should be closed in the X, Y or Z state. The service responds to those and then ultimately publishes the final regulations and then the states make their selections and publish those so they can legally be authorized to have a hunting season.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that’s a lot to that right there. Tell me this, were you involved? What were you doing in 1995 when all this was being developed and hitting the ground?

Brad Bortner: Well, I was in Portland as the regional migratory bird chief. I had kind of, between 1987 and 1992, I had a couple different jobs within the Fish & Wildlife Service at Patuxent and one of those jobs is I was the head of what was at that time called the population assessment section and it was through that section where we started the discussions that that ended up, in 95, becoming adaptive hard risk management. I wasn’t as involved as many people was, but I was kind of on the sidelines, participating in the development of that more as a regional folks, as opposed to being in the headshed.

Management of Duck Populations

So when we developed AHM, you have a restricted package that provided some opportunity for hunting, but it was constrained purposely to help those duck populations retain the ability to recover when habitat gets better.

Ramsey Russell: You know a lot more about it than I do for those reasons and I was asked by a longtime listener to see if someone could elaborate on the 3 thresholds and I know it’s adapted, maybe since 1995, but it was Mississippi Flyway. I had 60 days, 6 ducks, 4 mallards or 45 days, 4 ducks, maybe 3 mallards, 30 days, 3 ducks, 2 mallards. How did those 3 thresholds come about and what were the criteria for going from one to the next to the other?

Brad Bortner: Well, the criteria, like I said, based upon the estimated number of ducks in the breeding population and the estimated number of pawns, you can move from liberal to moderate to restrictive or from restrictive to moderate to liberal based upon what was observed in the system and the way that came about is that when we were developing it, we realized that you need to have regulations, packages that achieve different results. There needs to be a, I’m trying to describe this in terms that your listeners will understand. A liberal package is, hey, if you go back to the johnny, are you familiar with the Johnny Lynch Paper, mediocre. Okay, Johnny Lynch was a famous pilot biologist for Fish & Wildlife Service back in the 50s and 60s and 70s and he published a paper one time that said there are yellow, where there’s red, yellow and green lights on the prairies. Green is boys, there’s water everywhere, there’s ducks everywhere, go get your case of shells and get out there and get after them. Yellow is probably most years they’re somewhere in between great and poor and go out, have a good time but we’re not going to just be ripping the doors off your picking shed, and then on red years, it’s like, hey boys, let’s back off a little bit. And duck habitat, ducks aren’t doing real well, but don’t worry, they’ll be back at some other point. So when we developed AHM, you have a restricted package that provided some opportunity for hunting, but it was constrained purposely to help those duck populations retain the ability to recover when habitat gets better. Moderate is that kind of center zone and then liberal was to achieve a higher harvest rate and more structured, as you and I discussed in the past, for the biggest pile of dead ducks for the longest term, which is –

Ramsey Russell: Maximum sustained yield.

Brad Bortner: Yeah, maximum sustained yield. So that’s what the liberal, moderate and restrictive packages are about. Then there was also recognition going way back into the 60s and 70s that there are differences between flyways. You have fewer ducks, but more hunters in the Atlantic Flyway than you do in the Pacific and so there was a kind of this historic differences in the realized harvest rate, if you will, in the Pacific Flyway versus the Central versus the Mississippi versus the Atlantic. This is getting real weedy, I hope I’m not getting too far down in the –

Ramsey Russell: No, it’s all very good. I was a little rusty on that topic anyway and again, as compared to Europe, Asia, other place and there’s other places, believe it or not, we’ve got adaptive harvest management, they have adaptive management which is really not a system at all compared to Iowa’s and other parts of the world don’t have anything. Nothing.

Brad Bortner: Ours is much more structured, formally structured to be adaptive. Now, I mean, if you truly wanted really adaptive, you’d shut down the duck season one year, have no duck hunting, see what happens to the population or you’d double the bag limits or something like that. Now we happen to be in that a little bit more risk adverse than that, realize that learning for learning’s sake only goes so far, doing something as drastic as shutting down the duck season just to see what the population response really would be not in all of our best interests.

The Role of Harvesting in North American Waterfowl Management

You mentioned on the one hand, there are people that are very dubious of the existing harvest, we’re killing too many, on the other hand.

Ramsey Russell: It would sure put crowdfunding in a bind. That’s a fact, it would dampen that. You mentioned on the one hand, there are people that are very dubious of the existing harvest, we’re killing too many, on the other hand and Todd and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, we have shut down in the past, we have closed tundra season, we have closed greater snow geese, we have closed canvasback, 5-year moratorium on canvasbacks James Bay population. We put moratoriums on shooting those Canada geese you grew up hunting with come from the James Bay and it worked. But on the other hand, harvest doesn’t matter, okay, so regulated harvest doesn’t matter. But on the other hand, it has been proven that if we shut it down, so we go back and forth with this thing about the influence of harvest in North American waterfowl populations and it’s a very daunting and a very challenging topic. And somebody told me one time, much smarter than myself, I said, well, if harvest doesn’t matter, then why do we have limits? Why do we have these bag limits? Why do we have 3 and 30, 4 and 45, 6 and 60? He goes, because in the grand scheme of things, Russell, he said, that’s the only thing we can manage, the rest of it is beyond our control. So when we start getting back, coming back around to adaptive harvest management, coming back around to the model under which our continental populations of waterfowl are managed, how important is harvest and how does it play a role in this management?

Brad Bortner: Well, I mean, I’ll start that with what you just said, harvest, not every duck species is the same, not every goose species is the same. They all have different abilities to reproduce, to survive and to sustain a harvest. You can’t harvest geese at the level that you harvest, say, blue winged teal. The same applies to canvasbacks versus blue winged teal. I think you recognize that they just have the different abilities and also different habitats. So ultimately, that’s why we got rid of market hunting is because hunting, at some level, absolutely, definitely controls populations, but what we’re trying to do is manage in the sweet spot where harvest is not controlling the duck species, what you’re seeing and I think that’s what you’re seeing with a lot of the last 30 years in adaptive harvest management is that we’re managing that level of harvest where we are sustaining the populations at recreationally important levels, but we’re not having a large scale negative impact on them. I mean, they could probably actually withstand higher harvest, but achieving that and achieving it uniformly is going to be difficult and then you’re running into an ever decreasing loss of habitat and so maintaining harvest in the face of that dwindling habitat base and also a place to go hunting, which I think is what a lot of people are concerned about. I know I’m concerned about it is you can produce the ducks, but if you don’t have a place to go and hunt them, you’re going to see increasing competition and increasing hunter density and dissatisfaction and that’s another whole rabbit trail.

Ramsey Russell: How accurate as a former migratory bird chief, how accurate are our harvest estimates and our population estimates? Now, wait a minute, Todd and I had, my description not his, I can tell you, my piggy bank theory, I mean, I’m a simple man, Brad, if I want to how many coins or how much money I’ve got in my big old piggy bank, I just go dump it out and count them. Now, like yourself, I got a degree in forestry and wildlife, I got a wildlife degree, I’m a wildlife biologist. But at Mississippi State back in the day, come out of the forestry program, no shame in that, because Aldo Leopold, the godfather of wildlife management, was himself a forester. And at a time in American history when they said, oh, we’re going to manage. We’re going to manage wildlife resources like a piggy bank. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Aldo Leopold stepped in and said, why don’t we take the civil cultural practices and manage it for maximum sustained yield? It’s a renewable resource, boom, the birth of wildlife management. But in the same way, trees aren’t. I mean, I guess I could kind of sort of go out there and count every single tree. I have laid out a few harvests in my day, but really and truly, it’s impractical. Now we start going into ducks, my goodness, we got a sample them, we’ve got a survey and we’ve got to fly. We’ve got to do this thing called statistics and it’s like one of my old professors said, there’s lies, damn lies in statistics. No true words have ever been said, so how accurate are these estimates we’re predicating everything on?

Brad Bortner: Well, the May breeding waterfowl survey is a strip transect survey. So you’re flying airplanes at 100ft, 100 knots and no one will tell you that you count every duck. So on a subsample of those transects, a ground crew goes in right after the airplane has gone over and counts every single duck and they come up with a correction factor. Now, they’re flying 44,000 miles of transect every year. They don’t have, they can’t do ground truthing on every single one of those transects, but they come up with correction factors and from all statistical standpoints, it is an accurate estimate of the number of ducks in that area. Now, I said 44,000 miles of transect, that doesn’t cover all of North America, it doesn’t cover every place that there is a duck. And so you have to look at the May breeding waterfowl survey as giving you an accurate estimate of the ducks in there, but hoping that that provides an index to the continental populations. It’s like counting trees, they don’t move, but you don’t count every tree in the forest before you go out and then you expand that to a larger landscape, that’s the same thing for the May waterfowl survey. Now, to go to the harvest survey, which I hope we go into much greater detail about.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely.

Recent Adaptive Harvest Management Plans: All About Mallards

And so mallards have kind of been the species that was picked to be the sideboards and everything above and beyond, all the other species are managed in relation to what the mallard season length is going to be. 

Brad Bortner: It starts off with getting names and addresses from each of the migratory bird hunters in all the states, then the Fish & Wildlife Service conducts a survey of those hunters and asks the hunters to respond. And then from there, estimates the number of birds that are taken by the species and how many hunters are out there, we’ll get into more detail later, but the measures of precision that we have is that they are a continental scale or at a flyway scale, they’re pretty good, they’re pretty accurate or they’re pretty precise and hopefully they’re accurate, we’re hoping to always be able to improve that and I’ll talk a little bit later about my concerns about how to do that and what some of my more recent efforts have been to do that.

Ramsey Russell: Why are mallards so integral to adaptive harvest management?

Brad Bortner: Well, mallards are always been king, they’re the most abundant duck out there for the most part. They’re relatively easy to count, they’re desired by everybody. We’ve always used those as kind of the indicator if the status of mallards kind of drives the whole system, from a management standpoint, I’m sure you would agree that if you had a mallard limit or season length that was different from your blue winged teal, different from your canvasback and if you had different regulations for every species of ducks, you’d go crazy out in the duck blind. You would not, is it, can I shoot that today or how many of those can I shoot today? It would be a nightmare. And so mallards have kind of been the species that was picked to be the sideboards and everything above and beyond, all the other species are managed in relation to what the mallard season length is going to be. That’s why you have smaller bag limits for some species and you have no restrictions on other species within that bag. But it’s all based upon the mallard, the status of mallards.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a 2 year time lag now, not always. There’s a 2 year time lag on a lot of this input data and the duck season. For example, we all know that the prairies are as dry pending no bill of the ark flood, they are as dry at the time of this recording as they’ve been in the last 20 years. Nonetheless, the Mississippi Flyway’s already set to season 60 days, 6 ducks next year, 4 mallards, boom, we all know that, why is there a 2 year time lag? I know there’s a good answer.

Brad Bortner: As an ex-fed, I will tell you, it’s administrative process. It was just impossible, getting harder and harder for us to clear all of the administrative procedures necessary to set the duck seasons. When I first started July 25th, we always had a status meeting in Denver, Colorado. We prepare all the reports, we’d all meet in Denver on July 25th, go from there out to the flyways. The flyways would take the information, send in recommendations, then later we would get together at what called the service regulations committee. The service regulations committee would make decisions basically in early September and then hopefully, we would get all the administration, all the paperwork done in time before the duck season started around the 1st of October. Well, over the years, the layers of administrative red tape have built up to the point where we were having a harder and harder time to do that. And so we recognize that with all the years of scientific, good scientific data and everything else, we could make a pretty educated guess on what the duck population was going to be next summer by looking at the conditions up until December. So in 2013, when I was migratory bird chief, we implemented the change in the regulations process to be able to sit there and say, okay, we think we have a pretty good idea of what the duck populations can withstand next year. We’re going to propose this and we’ll go through the process and buy ourselves more time to fulfill all the red tape.

Ramsey Russell: Because there have been, Brad, there have been seasons, somebody told me there have been seasons in the past that before we got congressional authorization, the season had opened somewhere and that opens up a whole can of worms in terms of liability, doesn’t it?

Brad Bortner: It’s not congressional authorization. It is, it’s an administrative rulemaking process. And the simple answer to your question is there’s been really close a couple of times.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Too close for comfort because you alluded to earlier, there are – and if somebody digging into federal agency, you probably had to deal with, like you mentioned previously in this recording, had to deal with people that don’t want any duck season at all. I mean, they’re just looking for a reason to hang us out.

Brad Bortner: Oh, yeah. And actually, that has been one of the best things about adaptive harvest management is that we have been able to demonstrate over the years that we have a very good understanding of the role of hunting in the population dynamics and we have not been tested. No one has taken us to court over all the years with adaptive harvest management, where earlier in my career, I saw us go to court over black ducks or other species and I’ve been in the position of having to answer some questions about some of the seasons where we didn’t have as good of information as I would have liked to have. But the hunting community should be proud and also stand behind the science that we utilize to set seasons because it has kept those seasons going.

Ramsey Russell: Good deal. We are managing our ducks similar to a lot of other natural resources, timber, tomatoes on a maximum sustained yield model. You feel comfortable. The system seems to accommodate this, having this 2 year time lag. What potential problems could there be? And what are your thoughts on an increasingly shrinking budget? I mean, right now we’re doing it kind of to comply with the administrative constraints and it’s okay. But we may be going to, I’ve heard a little birdy tone, we may be going to it on a full scale. It may be just a matter of fact that we’re going to do our B-POP counts every other year, I’ve heard because of an increasingly shrinking budget in Fish & Wildlife.

Challenges Faced by the Migratory Bird Program

When I took over as migratory bird chief in 2011, it was clear to me that there wasn’t sufficient budget to continue doing. And I had to make a bunch of cuts, Midwinter Waterfowl inventory in a number of states.

Brad Bortner: Well, yeah. One of my greatest frustrations is in, when I took over as migratory bird chief in 2011, it was clear to me that there wasn’t sufficient budget to continue doing. And I had to make a bunch of cuts, Midwinter Waterfowl inventory in a number of states. I had to cut back on a variety of different things. And as far as I’m aware, since 2011, the migratory bird budget has basically been static, it has not seen an increase. There have been increased responsibilities thrown at it, increased operating costs. I’m sure you’ve encountered inflation. And in that time, it’s just the buying power of the dollars that the service has had for migratory bird management has gone down and in some cases have been redirected to other priority issues. I know that the folks that are in there now are having to make very difficult decisions about the future. They’ve gotten some relief, there have been efforts by NGO’s and others that can lobby to try to increase the budget, but without getting political, just have not been able to get an increased package put together that’ll help out on some of the issues. I know when I was in there, I was always looking, how do I save a buck here so I can invest it in something in the future? And those flexibilities that I had have diminished since then and the folks that are in there now are struggling mightily and I’m glad I’m not in their position, but they’re having to –

Ramsey Russell: They’re doing the best they can with what they’ve got to work with and it just seems like with all the issues of the world that increasingly on Capitol Hill, the part of the world I’m most interested in, migratory birds surveys, populations just fall further down for the, just becomes increasingly less priority. That’s US State, there’s 900,000 duck hunters, while we’re talking about this kind of stuff, pie in the sky, why not, Brad, I’ll ask you, there’s 900,000 us duck hunters. How many would have to call their congressman and demand of him that he go back to Capitol Hill and put more funding into this budget?

Brad Bortner: Put a couple more zeros behind that. That 900,000 –

Ramsey Russell: It would tell you. No, I’m saying how many of the 900,000 duck hunters in America would it take 9000, 90,000? How many of us would need to call our congressman and demand that he green light just a little bit more money for this very important topic?

Brad Bortner: Well, what I was saying, Ramsey, was if you put another zero behind it, it would become 9 million or another zero behind that would be 90 million, you get 9 million phone calls. I’m not sure that 900,000 phone calls would be the most effective way about doing that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I see what you are saying.

Brad Bortner: And it isn’t just all, I mean, there’s 3 branches of the government, right? There’s executive branch and then there’s the congressional branch and then the judicial branch. The executive branch has to ask for the money and then Congress has to appropriate the money. And so it takes all those parts of the government working together to make sure that it happens. And so if the president asks for an increase, they still have to have Congress pass the bill that includes an increase and without being super political, that isn’t happening very often in our government. How many times have we had close to government shutdown in the last year? And so there may be proposals to increase the budget. I don’t think that we can build a future program based upon one congressman delivering one time fix on the budget. I think it needs to be much more involved than just having some particular congressman appropriate a little bit more money and say we’re going to spend more and more money because if you don’t have that support, continue on, it’ll just disappear after a year.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. My point being, we just need, what can I do? What can us duck hunters listening, doing to prioritize this? That’s the point, we need just like everybody needs more money. This division, this topic, to me, needs a lot more money than what it may be getting. I just, I’m a simple guy, Brad. I mean, I can’t go write checks without knowing what’s in the checking account. You know what I’m saying? Well, I mean, it reminds me of my favorite Jeff Foxworthy punchline when he said a check, I thought you wanted money. But seriously I don’t live like that. We, it concerns me, it just concerns me that we’ve got a 2 year time lag that it may be, we may be just counting every other year if the budgets keep shrinking and what can I do besides sit here and talk about it, to make a needle move?

Brad Bortner: To answer that question, what I think and I guess what I was trying to get around to is that not only all the people that are hunting migratory birds, but all the people that are interested in natural resources need to speak up. Especially hunters in every state need to make sure that their voices are heard, but also the bird watchers and everything else in migratory bird division, you asked me earlier, what did migratory bird chief do? There is over a 1000 species of migratory birds that are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and I spent a fair amount of time on duck regulations, but I’ve probably spent a lot more time on being concerned about a lot of other different species, too. It’s not just something that the duck hunters have to deliver, but everybody needs to deliver and say, this is important and we need money for doing surveys, we need money for restoring habitat, we need money for all those other different activities that are associated with migratory bird conservation. I don’t want duck hunters that feel like they have to shoulder the entire burden and I’m sure they don’t want to do that, too. It needs to be a broader coalition expressing the concerns about where the budgets are going.

Ramsey Russell: When you’re not in a duck blind these days and you’re retired as migratory bird chief. What do you do? Now what do you do? What is your second career?

Brad Bortner: Well, what do I do for passion or what do I do for – I live on a farm.

Harvest Information Program

But it’s probably the one that’s least understood is the Harvest Information Program is, well, harvest surveys is a partnership between the states and the Fish & Wildlife Service. 

Ramsey Russell: It’s how we met here, here’s where I’m going, Brad, you and I met in a meeting. You and I met in a meeting and that’s what you do. You are now an advocate and working in HIP.

Brad Bortner: Yeah, I work for the Wildlife Management Institute part time, on mainly what is a passion of mine and that is working with the states and working with hunters to let them know and understand how the harvest surveys are done and particularly the front end of it is called the Harvest Information Program. As you probably know, since about 2000, 1999, all migratory bird hunters, whether you’re hunting ducks, geese, cranes, coots, rail, woodcock, doves, all of those hunters need to register for HIP when they buy their state hunting licenses and one of the reasons I’m passionate about it is, it’s one of the 3 data streams that comes into setting migratory bird hunting seasons. And it’s the one that, besides banding, that includes the most citizen science, the most involvement from hunters. But it’s probably the one that’s least understood is the Harvest Information Program is, well, harvest surveys is a partnership between the states and the Fish & Wildlife Service. HIP is the registration of the hunter, saying, I’m a migratory bird hunter, when they buy that license. And that means in 49 different states, if you are hunting migratory birds, you need to say, I want to hunt migratory birds and then you give the agent or however you’re buying your license, you put down your name and address and then you’re probably asked 5 or 6 basic questions. And those basic questions are really, you said, the lottery bucket. I say they’re basically screening questions. How many ducks did you shoot last year in that state? And are you going to hunt it this year? Same with geese, same with rails, woodcock and everything else. And basically, what happens is that information is turned over to the Fish & Wildlife Service. And the Fish & Wildlife Service says, okay, here’s our universe of rail hunters and so they’ve already, you’ve already been identified as a rail hunter. You can imagine how difficult it would be to survey rail hunters if they weren’t self identifying, saying, I’m a rail hunter. Do you know any rail hunters?

Ramsey Russell: I’ve haunted them, I wouldn’t identify as a rail hunter.

Brad Bortner: Yeah. And so if you were in New Jersey or maybe South Carolina, maybe you have a long history of rail hunting and so you’ve already identified yourself that, yes, I’m a rail hunter and I shot 30 or more rails last year. Well, that makes it much more efficient to sample and figure out and estimate how many rail hunters are out there and how many rails are being taken. So what I’ve been trying to do is work with states to identify what are some of the constraints in their licensing systems from getting hunters to answer those questions. In Louisiana and Arkansas, I worked with them to change their licensing system, where hunters need to register for HIP online or go visit one of their offices. The reason was, is when I was migratory bird chief, I used to get letters every year from hunters just irate, saying, why is the federal government asking me how many ducks I shot last year when I’ve never shot a duck in my life? And they were concerned that it was some sort of federal inquisition and what was happening in both of those states, you’ll get a kick out of this, Ramsey, in both of those states, they were registering over 100,000 deer hunters as migratory bird hunters because when they were asking, when they, hunter was asking the question, either asked the question by the sales clerk at the sporting goods store or for some other reason, they were clicking and saying that they needed a HIP registration and you can imagine when you start from a customer service standpoint or from a survey efficiency standpoint, you start asking 100,000 deer hunters in a state how many ducks are caught and they didn’t shoot any. It blows up the survey.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Brad Bortner: And it also makes a lot of people unhappy.

Ramsey Russell: It’s got to be good data. I’m leading up to how we can improve the system, improve the harvest, I said something, 2 of all people, my wife, about HIP, about going to meet with you and go talk about this HIP and everything else. And she shrugged and said, what’s the point? And that was her take on it, as somebody that completes HIP, she knows what I shoot and where I hunt and completes the HIP. She didn’t understand, she had a misunderstanding, is what I should say. She had a misunderstanding of how HIP falls into this very important harvest estimate. And so it, could you walk me from just so that I understand that any listener will understand. We all got to fill it out, go to Walmart. Yep, yep, nope, nope. Now, can you walk me from Walmart to how it fits into this important equation of harvest.

Buying a Hunting License

All that information comes in and the service has to go through and sort out and try to contact all of the hunters. 

Brad Bortner: Yeah. So how many states did you buy hunting licenses last year, if you can tell me?

Ramsey Russell: A dozen.

Brad Bortner: Yeah. And so in all dozen of those states, you should have been asked, did you hunt migratory birds?

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir.

Brad Bortner: Last year. Did you hunt ducks? Do you intend to hunt ducks this year? Well, your response to that question should have been specific to that state. So if you were hunting in Mississippi, you would said, well, I shot more than 30 ducks in Mississippi last year. But if you were hunting in Washington, which I knew you hunted in Washington last year and you didn’t hunt the year before, your answer would have been, yes, I hunted, but no, I didn’t shoot any ducks last year. So that information is sent by the state to the Fish & Wildlife Service. Like I said, there’s 49 different states that have migratory bird hunting seasons, Hawaii does, you can’t hunt migratory birds. All that information comes in and the service has to go through and sort out and try to contact all of the hunters. Well, contact a sample of those hunters within Mississippi for migratory bird hunters. Here’s somebody who harvested over 30 ducks, okay, we’re going to, you get drawn in the survey and then you’ll get an email or a letter in the mail asking you to keep track of how many ducks you shot in the state last year or this next season. At the end of the season, the service takes all that information from all the hunters who participated in the survey and estimates how many active hunters were in Mississippi or all the other states and then how many ducks they reported into shooting and then you’re probably familiar with the parts collection survey.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Brad Bortner: Hunter Sundance, wings of species of ducks and geese and brand that they harvested. Then they take that sample information and expand that to the responses they got from what’s called the mail questionnaire survey and come up with estimates for harvest within that state. They rolled all that up at a flyway basis and they roll it up at a continental basis. So the harvest survey is one of the most critical data streams that we have and it’s becoming more and more important, especially as you alluded to, we’re losing money. We may not be able to fly the breeding waterfowl survey every year. If you talked to Todd Arnold, he probably talked about Lincoln Peterson estimates.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Brad Bortner: And Lincoln Peterson estimates are the ratio of, is a way of taking the ratio of harvested to unharvested birds. And I won’t get into the math to estimate the size of the population. And so having accurate and reasonably precise estimates of harvest is important for migratory, for setting the right hunting regulations. And digging into this, you find out that there’s a lot of hunters who misunderstand HIP. Either they’re registering when they don’t need to register or they think that the survey itself is those 5 questions. So they don’t believe the science. I’ve had people sit there and say, I’ll answer zero because I know that if I tell you how many ducks I really shot, you’re not going to believe me or you’re going to close the season down because too many ducks are harvested. There’s a whole variety of reasons that those answers might be skewed. We’re trying to understand those more, we’re trying to make sure that all the dove hunters and all the woodcock hunters and all the duck hunters out there in the world know that they need to register for Hip and why it’s important and how they benefit from answering those questions accurately and truthfully.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So when I do complete my HIP plus 32, whatever, it’s a, my words, not yours, it puts me in, it puts me in a lottery bucket and lets the state know, all right, this guy needs to be surveyed if he comes up random and those survey, like I’ve gotten quite a few letters, every year I get letters from US Fish & Wildlife Service, from Washington, from Oregon, from different states querying me more specifically, date, county, place, number, species that I’ve harvested. That is getting to the meat of the real harvest, is it not? Not the hill. That letter I’m getting from Fish & Wildlife, they draw my name out of the lottery bucket and say, oh, this guy gets a letter and I’ll tell you this, Brad, they’re relentless. It’s not something you can just ignore, they are relentless about getting, what is the – is there a reporting error on those letters they send.

Brad Bortner: Yes, there is. And that’s why they’re relentless, is there, they are trying to make sure that they have accurate information and some of the ways you do that is to try to elicit responses if they don’t get that first response the first time. And there’s a couple of other things that happen. There’s people that overestimate the number of ducks they shot or underestimate the number they shot or they frankly just don’t remember. We got 100s of them.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a tough one, preceding. I use this. Man, I’m going to tell you what, what a great world we live in, Brad, I’ve got this dead gum hunt proof app now and this year when I got those letters, I could go back through there and find the date and found the species and find the harvest. But I will admit I was spitballing there for a while on some of these reporting. Heck, I don’t know what I ate for breakfast 3 days ago, let alone what I may or may not have shot back in November and a certain geography.

Brad Bortner: Yeah, I’ve heard you mentioned that app and there’s a few other ones that are out there and I think those are great and while I’ve never been one for being a record keeper, I don’t do a life list, I accumulate the experiences. I don’t really necessarily need to have 373 species written down somewhere, but I want 373 experiences and I don’t need to write it down on a piece of paper. But in this survey, it’s important that you indicate how many birds you harvested and try to fill in the other information and to that line, the service has actually come up with a new web page when they ask you to participate in that survey where you can just get online and record that so you can come home at the end of the day. You can do it from your phone, you can do it on your computer, however and just mark in. I shot 5 ducks today and what the date was and the location and move on. And at the end of the season, all you do is hit complete record in it and it sends that information into the Fish & Wildlife Service and they can utilize it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a pretty good idea. It’s a wonder they don’t, I bet there’s been some talks about coming up with an app, just an app.

Brad Bortner: Oh, there has been, let me just say when I was cheap, we were mailing all of this out. Printing, mailing, sending out those and so if you only have a response rate of, say, 20%, 80% of that effort was a waste. We weren’t getting anything for that investment. And it was creating things like this website and everything else that it takes money to develop it, but once you develop it, you save money and so my point is, yeah, there has been some discussion of developing an app and everything else for the Fish & Wildlife Service to do this, maybe even to take pictures of the wings or the birds and send that in instead of sending a wing through the mail. But it takes money to develop that, do the research and development of that. And as we just already discussed the budget situation, things are tight now. They’re trying to decide whether they can buy another tank of gas for the airplanes and redirecting enough money to sit there and invest in the future was always a challenge. That’s one of the things that when you asked about being migratory bird chief, you didn’t realize that I ran a small air force, did you?

Ramsey Russell: No, I did not.

Brad Bortner: Oh, yeah. When I was, when as migratory bird chief, we had about a dozen airplanes and pilot biologists for flying all those surveys. So I needed to make sure all of them were current and qualified to fly their aircraft and that they had proper training. The planes are air worthy and everything else. So that was another one of those duties. That was a class I missed in college. How about you, did you take one on running an airline?

Ramsey Russell: No, I did not. That’s a good point. Look, I go and complete this HIP form. What are some of the problems you all have had with that HIP form? Just the execution, I mean, because I have had to coach the lady behind the counter along.

Brad Bortner: Well, we expect a –

Ramsey Russell: Here’s what I’m getting at. I bought a license this year, can’t remember where, somewhere up north and, tick it, tick it boom, handed me my license. Well, you didn’t ask me about the HIP. I need to, well, it’s on there, I got it. I just answered it for you. I go, yeah, you see what I’m saying?

Brad Bortner: Yeah, when I was migratory bird chief, I actually had this happen at my hometown high school, hometown sporting goods store is. I went in to get my license and get my HIP registration and they did the exact same thing you just said and they said, boom, here’s your license and everything else, I said, you didn’t ask me the question and they said, we don’t do that here. And I said, you need to ask me those questions. And they said, no. And I said, can I talk to the manager? And so I talked to the manager and I explained who I was and what my title was and they said, we don’t do that here. I said, I guess I’m not going to buy my license here. And I moved on. But I tried to explain to them the importance of this and how it kept I mean, they were in the business of making sure that they were, have good hunting seasons. This is a sporting goods store that was greatly impacted when there were restrictions on the number of Canada geese in the Atlantic Flyway. And you would think that they would see the vested interest in good wildlife management, but they viewed it as just being this is not necessary. It is a waste of our clerk’s time to sit there and ask these questions and they would automatically say, didn’t hunt. So my message to your listeners and everything else is, if you encounter this, try to get them to ask you the questions, make sure that you give them a response. Give them an accurate, truthful response for each of the questions and if they don’t, try to encourage them to make sure that they do not just click the button that says didn’t hunt and move on. One of the things we found in doing some of our work is that 30% of the hunters who sent us wings in the next year, when they get their HIP registration, it’ll sit there and say they didn’t hunt the previous year. And we suspect that that’s the sales clerks at stores either not knowing or not wanting to answer or some other glitch in the system where they’re putting down I didn’t hunt and we know that they’re successful hunters.

Ramsey Russell: Even to your point junk in, junk out, even old kid Rock says one of my favorite lines, kid Rock you get what you put in, people get what they deserve. So we could all, because it is citizen science. We can all do a much better job. Because this is – Even though I’ve got lunch to eat, phone calls to make, got to get back to work and a million different things to do, this is important. It takes a few minutes, but HIP is not just something, it’s important. And on top of that, my name goes in a bucket, I get drawn, I get a survey from a letter, how do those harvest letters I get in the mail from various states and banding and wing bees, how does that all tie in together? Because right now, Brad, I’m asking you this because there’s a misconception that this HIP has something to do with number of birds, we’re killing, this bullshit. Oh, I’ve even heard people say, well the Canadian harvest is BS because they don’t count all the ducks on that 3177 declaration form, which hadn’t got nothing to do whatsoever with population estimates. It’s got to do with how many birds you bring in on US soil from a foreign country. So how does everything go together to come up with these harvests?

Brad Bortner: You keep on asking me these questions that are –

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah, that’s what I do.

The Impact of Hunter Participation on Harvest Data Accuracy

Banding is used in conjunction with that to understand how many, what rate, what the harvest rate is. So what proportion of the ducks out there are being shot, so currently, adult mallards in the Central Flyway, I think, are being harvested around 12% to 14%.

Brad Bortner: Very, very broad. And so, like I said, HIP is the front end of the harvest surveys. So those 5 questions you’re asked are not the harvest survey, they are purely screening questions and then the service follows that up with either an email or a letter and that’s how they estimate harvest. Banding is used in conjunction with that to understand how many, what rate, what the harvest rate is. So what proportion of the ducks out there are being shot, so currently, adult mallards in the Central Flyway, I think, are being harvested around 12% to 14%. So that means a whole bunch of them don’t get shot and go back and breed the next year, the Canadian harvest survey is conducted almost exactly the same as the Fish & Wildlife Service survey is. I’m sure if you bought a license up there, you get a form from the Canadian Wildlife Service that says, how many geese did you shoot? How many ducks did you shoot? In which direction, from which town, which game management area?

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Brad Bortner: I’ve gotten that the last 3 or 4 years from coming back from Alberta. I’m sure you’ve gotten it in the past also. So the form, the declaration form, has nothing to do with harvest estimation. That’s purely a form for customs and border patrol and also the Fish & Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement for importation.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Brad Bortner: Again, I think the importance really here is the citizen science aspect, is that all the hunters, it’s in their best interest, they all have skin in the game, is to make sure that they’re participating, they’re reporting their bands, they’re participating in the surveys, making sure that they’re getting registered for HIP. It helps with management, helps make sure that those hunting seasons are appropriate. You asked me earlier, are we shooting too many ducks? Well, I mean, what do you think one of the streams of information we use to figure out that the answer to that question, I can’t encourage you enough to reach out to your readers, we’re trying to educate them. We’re trying to inform them make sure that hunters know that they’re helping protect the game. And I mean that by not only wildlife, but also hunting in the bigger picture, by making sure that they’re participating in these management efforts.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Brad, that’s why I wanted you on today to talk about these topics. It can be a dry topic, it can be a daunting topic, but to me, just an average duck hunter sitting out here, I don’t understand the system, I don’t know where these numbers are coming from, I don’t know how these harvest estimates are coming up. I see these reports, I see these charts. I don’t know, but I know what I see in my neck of the woods, which may not all reconcile with the big outer space picture looking down, right? And so I just feel like the more I know, the more informed decisions I can make, the better citizen scientist I can make. Last topic, important, cause you’ve mentioned it several times, I’ve mentioned it several times. The reason that harvest, I believe, is becoming such a contentious topic. Number one, we don’t know. Number two, thanks to some bureaucrat named Fauci, we don’t trust the science. So how can I trust something I don’t understand? I believe and you know what? My buddy, my buddy Kevin out in Utah said it best the other day. He just, very matter of fact, he said, well, it’s right or wrong, however good the science is or is nothing. And I’m adlibbing. He said it’s the best science in the world. We spent quite a bit of time talking about that in the front end. But I want to get to another topic because you’ve mentioned it. The reason harvest is so important, are we killing too many ducks is because we all want a big old handle of old charter. I’ve been drinking some 15, ain’t going to stop. But you know what? All the bourbon in the world doesn’t matter, if I’ve just got a shot glass to pour it in. I’m going back to habitat. It’s scary to a duck hunter that loves mallard ducks especially. It’s scary that in the last 7 or 8 years, half the continental population has truncated to boom, we’ve got half of what we had 7 or 8 years ago, let me put it this way, in mallards, but it’s all going back to me, to habitat, not to harvest. If I’ve got, if we had the North American goal today, if we sent 10 million ducks, boom, back to the north today, what good is it? That’s like trying to pour that half gallon of old charter into a shot glass. We’re in a drought. We’ve lost a lot of habitat. We’ve also lost 20 million acres of CRP grasslands. We’re continuing to drain our wetlands. My question to you, just not in your formal capacity, but just wondering if somebody that spent your career as heavily involved in migratory bird management as you did, how has continental habitat changed in the last 20 years?

Brad Bortner: Well, a couple of things, let me unpack a couple of the things you said there. I couldn’t agree with you more that ducks or duck populations are resilient. We have drought, we’ve experienced drought in the past. With habitat ducks will come back and so I agree with you that harvest is not what’s driving populations now. It’s habitat. It’s having moisture on the prairies. It’s having habitat for them to breed, habitat for them to come back and spend migration and wintering time and I think we have lost a lot of breeding habitat. We continue to lose a lot of breeding habitat. We don’t have CRP. We saw huge increases with ducks, pheasants, a lot of grassland birds when we had CRP on the landscape. If we can get some of those programs back, I think we can, we’ll see populations respond quickly, I think we’re also struggling. And you continue to struggle with providing habitat on your end of the flyway is as having a place for the birds to go and also places for hunters to go get them. I mean, harder and harder to find a place to hunt, it’s harder and harder for birds to find the little holes where they can get into. So I think all of us as hunters need to keep an eye on what’s going on with habitat and what we can do to try to protect the habitat, excuse me, that’s out there and make sure that there are places to go, good policies in place that protect them. There’s a whole variety of things I’m not sure how far down into the weeds you want to get in, what a hunter can do, but, I mean, being members of the conservation organizations, making sure that good policies are in place are all important at a local scale and all the way up to a national scale.

Ramsey Russell: Final question, when does harvest matter? I’ve got to be this devil’s advocate, because if we’re losing habitat, trying to put that handle of bourbon into shot glass, because of the drought, because of this, because of that, at what point might we be killing too many ducks with this 2 year time lag?

Guided by Waterfowl Supporters

We’ve got to be guided by something intelligently.

Brad Bortner: Well, I mean, that is the purpose of the moderate and restrictive packages. If the population drops and the pond level drop far enough, we will trigger a restrictive or a moderate. Potentially, you could even get to the point where it would be closed, but I can’t imagine environmental conditions where we would get to where the recommended regulatory option would be closed season, because there’s always some value of where there’s allowable number of birds that can be taken. This is where I’m hoping people can find some comfort in the whole adaptive harvest management process is that, it does respond to conditions and if harvest is getting to the point where it is going to be adverse to the population, to, adverse to that maximum sustained yield, it will trigger regulatory restrictions. It doesn’t necessarily, need a whole wholesale revision of AHM, you don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The models have been improved over time, the regulatory space has been improved. They are trying mightily to make sure that they perpetuate the population and also provide hunting opportunity.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. It’s the best science we’ve got and I’m going to stick with it. In the ab, if I don’t trust the harvest, if I don’t trust the science, what do I trust? Am I going to just go back to those fisticuffs years where, I mean cause guess what, folks? If we don’t trust the science, we don’t trust this and that, California fish starts shooting seven pintails a day just because that’s where we’re going and I’m going to start shooting 50 mallards a day just because my opinion matters. I’m just saying, you know what I’m saying? We’ve got to be guided by something intelligently.

Brad Bortner: I saw the regulatory process in 1988 and there were people calling for a closure of the hunting season. And I won’t mention names and everything else, but some of them were mainstream environmental organizations that we would think of as being waterfowl supporters. I think we’ve learned a lot since then, I think that we can have much more comfort in the management of birds. I’m struggling with how to defend science, I mean, I’m a scientist by nature and I’m also a hardcore duck hunter and I want you to, I want your listeners to understand that the last thing any of us want to see is shoot too many ducks where we’re dealing long term damage to the population. And I got to tell you and I’ve already have said it, is that we’re the envy of the world with the management program that we have, the surveys and monitoring, it’s under constant attacks. I would hope that hunters would get behind that science as opposed to undermine that science.

Ramsey Russell: To which I’ll add, we hunters, citizen scientists can do a lot better job and control what we can control. Taking care of the HIP, filling out the reports, doing the very best we can to be accurate.

Brad Bortner: Thank you very much. Thanks for making my point.

Ramsey Russell: Brad, I appreciate you. Thank you very much, it’s a daunting subject. I mean, we just covered years worth of meetings and topics in about an hour and a half. I know it wasn’t easy, sorry to bombard you, but thank you for unloading these questions and clearing the waters a little bit. It’s murky waters, but I appreciate you clearing it out a little bit for me.

Brad Bortner: I had a great time and I feel like there’s a whole lot more to the conversation that you and I could have.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we’ll get you back on another time, I promise you. Next time I think we meet, we’re going to be sitting in your neck of the woods. I want to shoot some of those greater scaup.

Brad Bortner: You’re more than welcome, come out. There’s always room in the boat. As I tell people, I’m always looking for duck hands. When you put out 10 dozen decoys, you need someone else to another set of hands, so come out.

Ramsey Russell: So got 2 hands, We’ll travel. Thank you very much for coming on. Folks, thank you all for listening this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Well, that’ll help you feel out there at Walmart a little more important than you thought, isn’t it? We got to do a better job. We’ve got to make sure that Walmart clerk is taking care of us and man, when I get those letters in the mail, Fish & Wildlife Service, I need to do a better job at making sure it’s accurate so that it will reflect in the harvest, so that we aren’t, so that we know with certainty that we aren’t shooting too many ducks. Like old kid Rock said, you get what you put in and people get what they deserve. See you next time.