EP 483. Waterfowl Habitat Management: Rethinking “Seed Mentality” (Part 1)

Tips From an Expert in Waterfowl Habitat Management

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today I’m coming from Warren County, Mississippi, on a rainy day with a guest, a lot of you longtime listeners and avid land managers are going to recognize Mr. Kevin Nelms who works for NRCs in the Mississippi Delta and is among the foremost experts in waterfowl habitat management. Kevin, how the heck are you, man?

Kevin Nelms: I’m doing great, Ramsey, glad to see you.

Ramsey Russell: Good to see you again, good to meet you. I think we missed last year.

Kevin Nelms: I think so.

Ramsey Russell: With road travel and everything else. Tell me how your duck season went because you are a duck hunter and I learned you got a pretty important milestone approaching very quickly this year.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. So I realized, well we were in an epic drought. Matter of fact, a lot of people asked me, I’ve been around for a long time and they said, do you remember a drought like this one? And I said 1999 was the last drought and it wasn’t like this one because it broke on like December 6 or somewhere along in there. We got a rain and broke it, but we held that drought all the way through season and the places I have to hunt, I just don’t have the ability to pump water, I don’t have that kind of budget, don’t have wells and can’t put down a well and probably couldn’t afford the gas if I had it. But anyway so –

Ramsey Russell: There may not have been enough groundwater to pump all the place that needed pumping in the Mississippi Delta this year, it was so dry.

Kevin Nelms: You’re right. I thought, well, one manager that they sell hunts that I deal with, they ran their well from October 1st till 2 weeks before the end of duck season. So end of June.

Ramsey Russell: Constantly.

Kevin Nelms: Constantly ground was sucking it up and they were still trying to pump, run 6 whales that long. But anyway, we were in an epic drought and I didn’t have water and there wasn’t a place to hunt and so I wasn’t hunting. And so I realized at some point, I got to thinking about it and this was my 49th duck season.

Ramsey Russell: 49th duck season.

Kevin Nelms: Next year would be my 50th. And so I realized I can’t break that streak, so I called a buddy –

Ramsey Russell: 49 years, if you hadn’t gone duck hunting, you’d had to start all over again, Kevin.

Kevin Nelms: I won’t last for another 49, Ramsey. So I called a buddy of mine with a week left in season and I said, hey, I know you don’t have much water, but I know your break that you’ve got over there, your lake, whatever you want to call it, has some water. I said, is there any wood ducks over there? And he said, that’s all that’s there is a few wood ducks. He said, we hadn’t even been hunting it I said, well, if I don’t find a good hunt between now and the end of season, I said, I’m going to go over and kill wood ducks and he said, are you that hard up? And so I told him what was going on and he said, yeah, you better go kill some wood ducks. But anyway, place I normally hunt is a buddy’s farm of mine and they do have a big lake on it and it had held a little bit of water all year and we were getting the rain of inch or 2 inch every now and then and right there, the last week of season, we got some rain and got enough water. And he called me probably a few days after I made that call and said, Kevin, we’ve got some ducks, we’re going to hunt. And so I hunted the last 2 days of season, absolutely, last Tuesday and Thursday, the 30th and 31st and that was my first 2 duck hunts of the year. And it wasn’t because I wasn’t looking or trying. It was just because there wasn’t any – That’s how bad our duck season was, in Mississippi, if you didn’t pump water, you didn’t have water and the people didn’t hunt water too late. They didn’t have ducks anyway because they didn’t catch early ducks and the ducks weren’t here and you know how all that goes.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I know how it goes, man.

Kevin Nelms: So an epic bad season. But it was about drought, it was about nothing else.

Ramsey Russell: There were spots on our property, which I’m going to use a lot throughout today’s conversation is just a platform for talking about a lot of these concepts we’re going to cover today from a different angle. We’ve talked exhaustively pregame about this, but I saw wetlands dry that I have never seen dry and since you all came in and built some impoundments and I will say this, man, you got to give credit where credit’s due, man, I’m going to tell you what, the boys, the men that pumped and got things going on us for what water we had, they worked their butts off and it showed, it was one of the best year in terms of water, but the water we had was not by accident. It took a lot of hard work and commitment on behalf of some folks, put that stuff up, Kevin, you’ve been on, I think this is going to be episode number 9 over the past several years. And we’ve talked a lot about all the different various aspects of habitat, man, we’ve talked about moist soil management, we’ve talked about wetland complexes. I want to get back in and review some of that stuff. But I’m going to tell you, Kevin, you and I work together, we’ve known each other for 20 something years, I’m going to guess, we started to work together, met and knew each other, when I started federal government employment up in the delta and then working for the same agency later, we got to know each other better, worked on a lot of projects, I know that before I even knew about the property we’re meeting at today, you’d already been out here and done a lot of survey and worked your magic on it and set some stuff in motion. But I’ll be honest with you, even though you literally wrote the handbook on wetland. What’s the name of that handbook? It’s a waterfowl habit, wetlands habitat management for waterfowl. You literally wrote the Bible that belongs on everybody’s shelf, at least if you’re in this part of the world, in the deep south, you wrote the Bible and preached the merits of moist soil management. And I’m going to dig back a little bit and talk about coming onto this property, 22 years ago, me and Mr. Ian, my buddy, Mr. Ian we got in at the same time, we had the same forever vision of where we wanted to be and how we wanted to raise our kids and what we wanted to do and he and I both did a lot of growing up on this property, because when we walked up onto it, it was in wetland reserve program. Trees had been planted. They had crowned out over all this aster that was on the property at the time and the wetlands were in disarray. They had just, I guess, put boards in and forgot about it or pulled the water out and put the water back on with no rhyme or reason to it and you and I had a lot of conversations back then, you were talking moist soil management, moist soil management and I agreed with you a little bit.

Kevin Nelms: In principle.

The Evolution of Waterfowl Habitat Management 

We had to replace that heavy cover crop with something different, something more. And we did what we knew to do what, what the surrounding delta showed us and we just made us believe we needed to do, we died down, went to the seed bags, went to the equipment, you and I weren’t farmers.

Ramsey Russell: I agreed with you a little bit and in the past 22 years, from where I was then to where I think now about this property and other wetland type properties and waterfowl habitat management has swung an 1800 pendulum swing because we showed up and this property needed some disturbance, it needed some reset, it needed some attention. We had to replace that heavy cover crop with something different, something more. And we did what we knew to do what, what the surrounding delta showed us and we just made us believe we needed to do, we died down, went to the seed bags, went to the equipment, you and I weren’t farmers. The guys running that equipment weren’t farmers. We didn’t know nothing about no coffee, weed or anything else. We just went and socked it to it and it’s funny how over a 22 year course, we went from not killing very many ducks to killing, I think our top year was well over a 1000, close to 1500 – 1400, 1500 ducks one year. And in a sense, declined because of a different management strategy. But at the height of that was a moist soil management impoundment, so I’m telling you, we went from killing virtually nothing to having a great duck camp and it was us shifting to some form of management and realizing you got to go with the flow and work with what the sight and what nature will give you. You can’t put a round peg in a square hole, you got to go with it and starting to cultivate and love on this thing a little bit. And like a lot of camps, maybe management ideas and strategies changed a little bit, but sooner or later, everybody comes around the same page, I think. But I was telling you before the show and that’s where this meeting originated from, in the last 22 years, I have hunted worldwide, far and near and just all places in between and a lot of different species, a lot of different environments, a lot of different times of year and it’s amazing how little agriculture I hunt, which is to say none in foreign countries, it’s like, gosh, some of the best places, Mexico, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Australia, New Zealand, we’re not hunting flooded agriculture, we’re hunting natural wetlands. And when I start driving through a lot of these properties, not just this one, but beyond this one and I look at how these properties being managed, it’s still this poured out of a bag mentality, convert this wetland habitat to the same roundup ready, sterile agricultural landscape that surrounds us. And if it were up to me, I would never let it go back to what it was when we acquired this property 22 years ago, which, say, asters and goldenrod type community, but I wouldn’t – I would put the boards in and walk away from it and then go back and look at what I’ve got and just take a look at it, but me and Mr. Ian learned the hard way, it was trial and error and I’ve just become real heartfelt about wetlands, not flooded Ag, wetlands, some form of wetland function. What do you think about that?

What is the Best Habitat for Ducks?

We all saw them today, there’s 2 things, what are the ducks doing when they’re here for the winter? 

Kevin Nelms: Well, we have to think about the species we’re managing for the waterfowl, the ducks, what habitats are they using? And you mentioned wetland complex and we’ve talked about wetland complex. We all saw them today, there’s 2 things, what are the ducks doing when they’re here for the winter? What’s their wintering ecology and what habitats do they need to meet those wintering ecology habits that they’re living in? What habitat do they need? What habitats are they using? And before we were ever here and made this an Ag dominated landscape, those ducks were here and they were using the wetlands here and so when you talk about moist soil management, when you talk about natural wetlands, we moved into an unnatural community, this property that you’re talking about and we started restoring wetlands. Well, we didn’t really restore the wetlands because the damage was so grand from the agricultural scale that we had to build levees and put water control structures in and do things to put water back on the landscape that had been taken off the landscape, plug some of the ditches, whatever. Everything that had been done for drainage, we couldn’t really – You got a levee, the Yazoo River Levee, we couldn’t take that levee down so we had to work within the system that’s here. But what we’re really doing these days when we talk about wetland management is we’re trying to emulate nature and the natural process that was happening on the landscape to manage wetland succession is what we’re really getting down to. And so the different wetland types that we’re talking about are wetland succession and the different successional stages of wetlands and you’re talking about, you put the boards in and walk away. Well, what would start happening would be wetland succession and you’d move through a different series of habitat types, a series of natural wetlands, until you got to the climax wetland community and depending on how deep the water was, that climax wetland community here where we are would either be bottomland hardwood, that’s seasonally flooded or it would be cypress tupelo breaks deeper open water, those kind of things. So, I mean, you’re talking about hunting natural wetlands worldwide, native wetlands, whatever you want to call them, that’s exactly what we tried to restore and we’re trying to manage here, whether it be moist soil or whether it be shrub scrub, cypress, tupelo, all of those things are used by ducks at different parts of the year.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s very important, you brought up a very interesting topic that really stuck with me, one of the first episodes we did a few years ago and it’s not, okay, I’ve got this property, everybody listening has got this property, here’s where we hunt. But it’s not just that property, those wetlands or that pond, that it’s where that property fits in the grander scheme of things, say a 12 mile radius of there, because the duck’s got wings, they’ll fly lickety split, just because if a neighbor’s got something planted don’t mean that you need to be emulated. It don’t need to be a monocots, you can fit a different niche in what he’s got, and you bring up a great point, too, ducks have existed for, let’s say, millions of years in North America and certainly 1000s of years. But agriculture is a relatively new 125, 150 year phenomena and I mean, who listening has not killed ducks in soybeans, in rice and flooded corn and harvested grains? I mean, yeah, it’s there and it’s got its point and I have shot a lot of birds, ducks and geese in agriculture, but at the same time is it because that’s what ducks prefer or is it because that’s what’s now available in this landscape to ducks? And even if they can get some energy or get some habitat value out of that flooded Ag, is it better or worse than the habitat they had down here in the deep south? I mean, Kevin, this entire landscape in the delta was at one time hardwoods, all flooded hardwoods, sloughs, breaks, mud flats, just seasonal ebb and flow. There wasn’t any agriculture here at one time.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: And they persisted and they grew and they came, this was their wintering grounds.

Kevin Nelms: All of those different habitats existed here and they could meet all their life needs here and that’s why they came here was for that wetland complex that you’re talking about. And you mentioned that 12 mile radius, which is absolutely what we’ve always said was a little bit interesting since we did that first podcast, I don’t know, 4 years ago now maybe, Ramsey, we’ve got more data and now we’re saying 12 to 16 miles radius.

Bringing Ducks to the Mississippi Landscape

Yeah and if your neighbors got agriculture or your neighbors got a bunch of shrub scrub habitat or something, you don’t necessarily need it, you need to be providing what is not on your neighbor’s property.

Ramsey Russell: 12 to 16 miles.

Kevin Nelms: That first 12 mile came, Mississippi started, I don’t know, maybe the early 90s of doing aerial surveys and Aaron Pierce was a student of Kaminski’s and he took that the survey data where do they see ducks in that aerial survey? And they compared it to the landscape and they came up with that wetland complex, within 12 miles was where ducks were on the Mississippi landscape from that area.

Ramsey Russell: If I’m doing the math right, we’re talking approximately 35 to 40,000 acres. That’s about right –

Kevin Nelms: I keep checking math.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I know there’s people that can, but if I’m doing the math right, I mean, that’s a big piece of chunk of property.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, that’s right. But anyway, yeah, it’s a large area and you’ve got to think about your property within that area and what’s missing in those wetland habitat types and we’ll get into some of those habitat types because we need to. So where we’ve refined that and now we’re saying 12 to 16 miles radius is, what are we doing? What are all these studies doing now? We’re putting on radio, putting radios on ducks.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Kevin Nelms: And we’re actually seeing what the ducks are doing, not using survey data. So we’ve refined that number with actually ducks with radios on them and what the ducks are doing. So now we’re saying 12 to 16, but still you’re thinking about your property and all those wetland types within that radius. Yeah and if your neighbors got agriculture or your neighbors got a bunch of shrub scrub habitat or something, you don’t necessarily need it, you need to be providing what is not on your neighbor’s property.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s walk it down like this and just run through the 4 habitat types real quick and what life cycle requirements they satisfy for a duck.

Kevin Nelms: So again, we’re talking about wetland succession. Like you said, if I put the boards in and just walked away from that unit, really what happens? So during the summer evaporation and all that kind of stuff, we quit getting rains. So stuff starts drying out when we’re talking about shallow seasonal wetlands, so at some point you’re going to get a mud flat. That’s what we’re doing when we pull boards is we’re emulating that mud flat, we’re emulating that pool of water below the mud flat, so that water’s wicking up the mud flat. Same thing that’s happened in the tidal areas, tides go out and you get a mudflat every day. Now, it’s much more short lived on a tidal marsh, but it’s the same idea. So you got a mud flat, mudflat’s a short lived community, but there’s invertebrates and crustaceans there, that’s what the birds can feed on, on a mudflat, that’s the benefit of a mudflat. Then quickly, mudflat is turning to germinated plants, what we call moist soil, so that’s the next succession stage, you got bare dirt, just like if you walked away from a dish field, it’s going to start growing up in herbaceous stuff. You walk away from a mud flat or you dry out a mud flat in a wetland, it’s going to turn into a moist soil habitat, that’s annual seeds, annual plants, plants that have to come back from seed every year, create a lot of seed. So a moist soil habitat, if we’re managing it and keeping it in that habitat that we’ve talked about a lot on these podcasts it’s got annual seeds, it’s got invertebrates, some crustaceans. Crustaceans take a little bit longer in the water column than some other invertebrates. So they’re using it for feeding, but they’re also using it for loafing, safety and number ideas, big open space, a lot of them can get out there, hawk flies over, he’s going to pick somebody else off, hopefully not me, if I’m a duck and then also that open courtship space our breeding chronologies going on down here, they’re starting to court, they’re starting pear bonding, all that kind of stuff. So that big, open, moist soil habitat is great courtship space. Same Ag cropland that we’re flooding is that exact same idea as a moist soil habitat, basically, except it’s now a managed monoculture, but it’s a seasonally flooded wetland habitat if we’re putting water on it. So again, it’s got seeds, they use it for loafing and they use those big areas for courtship as well. And people don’t think about Ag land as courtship, as loafing, but some of the radio data now that we’ve got shows that because ducks are using these areas, then they go in and quantify why ducks are using those areas? What’s the habitat type? When they go sample some of these cropped, flooded cropland that these ducks are using, they go sample them, there’s no food value there, it’s zero. So why are the ducks there? They’re loafing, they’re getting away from pressure. They’re just using it, we as managers, we get caught in this thing of what are the ducks eating while they’re there? Ducks don’t eat 24 hours a day. We lose that sight. Why are the ducks there? They got to be feeding on something, that’s not true.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Kevin Nelms: They’re roosting, they’re loafing, they’re doing all these things. So, that Ag grounds used for loafing some and we don’t think about that. We see them out there and oh, they got to be eating those soybeans. No, there’s no soybeans left, they’re just out there because a hunter can’t get to them out there. So anyway, mud flats, moist soil, seasonal wetland, then you move to emergent marsh, which is really what you’re thinking about when saying, I’m going to put the boards in and walk away.

Ramsey Russell: Walk away.

Kevin Nelms: I’m going to let the emergent plants come through the water and grow, which is where the name emergent marsh comes from, that’s honestly the best crustacean invertebrate habitat. It can go through those life cycles of those aquatic insects and they can develop. It’s also, there’s plants out there, tubers, some of these perennial plants that feed ducks, a lot of tubers out there in that community. There’s seed, there’s some annual seed, there’s some perennial seed that’s used, so there’s food out there from that standpoint, but it’s also huge for loafing and roosting habitat. It’s in the south where we are wood duck rearing, black belly habitat, we’ve got black bellies that have moved here in recent years, then our next successional stage, we’ve moved into emergent marsh. Next thing is the woody vegetation starts coming in, if we’re not doing anything.

Ramsey Russell: Shrub scrub.

Feed to Draw in Ducks

Kevin Nelms: Shrub scrub. So when we get to shrub scrub habitat again, crustaceans are really good. Some invertebrates as well, they’ll loaf in those habitats in parts of the year, they really roost in those habitats a lot. Thermal cover, we’ve talked about thermal covering it before, holding heat in overnight. Pair bond isolation, that’s the habitat, I’ve used the term getting the girl out of the bar before, that’s the habitat that shines for, is a shrub scrub. Then if we keep letting succession happen, we don’t do any disturbance and we’re moving down the successional chronology, you get the bottomland hardwoods on those seasonally flooded wetlands. So, you’re going to have your, from a food standpoint in there, acorns, pecans, that ducks can eat, a little bit of annual seed, some invertebrates, doesn’t shine like the other habitats do, but they’re definitely using it for roosting, especially secure roosting a lot of cover around, loafing going there in the middle of the day and loaf, weather protection, wind, that kind of thing. They’re going in there, getting out of the wind, pair bond isolation again, in your bottomland hardwoods and then a wetland habitat that we tend to overlook some is what we typically refer to as deep open water, stuff that’s 3ft deep and deeper, not the seasonally flooded stuff, which is shallower water, but the deeper water. And in our landscape, our landscape was dotted with that kind of stuff, when you think about lakes and rivers and cypress tupelo sloughs that are deeper than the bottomland hardwoods, excellent habitat with submerged aquatic vegetation, different vegetation type that maybe we’ve mentioned before, some inverts and crustaceans, but they’re definitely using those habitats for loafing and roosting. Security like we’re talking about numbers and getting away from pressure. Now, the one reason we don’t talk about that a lot, especially in our landscape, is it’s not a limited habitat type, there’s plenty of it out there. But you go out west or in the plains and lots of times, that’s a limiting habitat type, they’re having to find a reservoir or something to use for that deep, open habitat and that roosting or loafing. So when we talk about habitat types, wetland habitat types, that’s really what we’re talking about, I started saying a nutshell, but that was more than a nutshell, that was a pretty big clamshell maybe.

Ramsey Russell: We covered all those topics a lot more in depth in past episodes that I’m going to post in related links down below for anybody that wants to hear that. But you open up, when you run through the life cycle requirements and the different habitat types and the way you just broke it down, you open up any given property managed for duck hunting or for waterfowl utilization, you open – The sky’s the limit on what this property can be and where that life cycle requirement is going to – You open up, the sky’s the limit on what you can do with your property for the benefit to attract ducks. And I wonder and I’ve always, I guess, I’m as guilty as anybody else, but I wonder where this seed feed mentality came from, I mean, was it from all of us grew up watching mama feed the birds in a bird feeder? Is it a holdover from the bad old days? Did duck hunters baited their ducks? Where does that mentality come from, I wonder? Because and I’m on loop back around real quick and say I guess ducks got to eat, that’s how I’m going to attract them. But there’s more to it, as you just explained, there’s way more to what a duck needs in a 40,000 acre geography than just feed. At some point in time, he’s got all the feed in the world, he needs other things that may be limited.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right.

Understanding Ducks’ Behavior in Different Habitats

Getting back to that emergent marsh for example, you just covered a lot of habitat types and life cycle requirements and it all makes perfect sense throughout a lot of regions in America, right here in the Mississippi Delta, you talk about flooded timber, you talk about shrub scrub, you talk about emergent marsh, you talk about open water.

Ramsey Russell: I can tell you a lot of properties I hunt, the ducks ain’t coming in from feed. My buddy, Mr. Ian and my hunting buddy for 30 years would wait those ducks out till 11:00 or 12:00. He packed a thermos and he packed food and you better – If you’re going to hang with him, you better do likewise, because what he realized is a lot of places we hunted, even on this property, the ducks weren’t coming in at daylight because they were all feeding somewhere, they were coming in for something else later in the morning, that’s when the mallard showed up and the mallards are the cat daddy their body’s after, right? I love a mallard duck and that’s the game we go with. Getting back to that emergent marsh for example, you just covered a lot of habitat types and life cycle requirements and it all makes perfect sense throughout a lot of regions in America, right here in the Mississippi Delta, you talk about flooded timber, you talk about shrub scrub, you talk about emergent marsh, you talk about open water. We got all that stuff going on, right here within 12, 13 miles of us. But then break, let’s go to the Bear River Valley in Utah, where you’ve got 100s of old clubs, 100s of clubs ranging from 4000 to 20,000 acres covering gazillions of acres on, all around the great Salt lakes. And they ain’t planting nothing, they’re purely managing marsh and the variability where you get into, all the dabblers, all the divers, all the geese and swans, whether we’re talking till or pintail or canvasback or mallards or gadwalls or wigeons and that’s all in a marsh area and it’s got to do with time and the water came in, time and the water went off, water depth, whatever’s going on around that has nothing to do with agriculture whatsoever. The birds breed there, the birds winter there, they live there year round, coming in and out with the flow of it. And it’s pure, natural, God given marsh and I’m like, wow, wait a minute. So there are parts of the world, many parts of the world, that you don’t have to have agriculture into the equation at all, that you can shoot lots of ducks and lots of diversity of ducks. And that really makes me think a little bit about this, it makes me question this pure seed mentality. And another way that that seed mentality perverts itself is this. I don’t know where I read it or heard it or came across it, but let’s just take smartweed, for example. I’ve got perennial and annual smartweed, perennial white flower, annual pink flower, boom, I mean, I’ve got these 2 smartweeds and somewhere along the way, like everybody else I know, we learned that annual smartweed has not near the seed production. Perennial smartweed doesn’t have near the seed production of annual smartweed, therefore it must be bad, but it’s not, boy, you show me a standard of perennial smartweed, hypercoides, I think the species name is and I’ll show you freaking, you’re going to stick a 4 wheeler underneath any given day, because that stuff grows in saturated soils and where it doesn’t have the seed value, the seed production value, smartweed doesn’t have the seed production value of a lot of desirable moist soil crops or agricultural crops, but they’re both very beneficial and very desirable for waterfowl. I mean, I would love to have 10 acres of perennial smartweed sitting somewhere I go throw water on at the end of the year, I know I’m going to kill a lot of ducks and it ain’t got nothing to do with seed value.

Kevin Nelms: To me, what you’re describing is invertebrate habitat, that when we equate it to food because you’re talking emergent marsh, that’s where the food value is. But again, I’m thinking food value, ducks might just be coming in there loafing or because they’re doing other things they’re not always eating and you’re saying the ducks are going to be there, yet they’re using emergent marsh to find food, mainly in vertebrates, but also they’re using it for loafing in the middle of the day. So what are they doing? And maybe we back up a little bit and we talked about the habitat types, but what are the ducks doing when they’re here over the winter? Ramsey? What’s the life history? What’s each day make up for a duck? Of course, as they head south, migrations happening. So they’re finding places to stop, when they’re stopping, what are they doing before they hit their southern terminus? Well, they’re feeding up, they’re building nutrient reserves, recovering from that event they just took or just undertook. Some of those stops we know, are longer, some of them are shorter, sometimes they don’t go any farther south. It depends on weather and we know now that there’s these different populations of ducks and how they migrate and when they migrate and if they migrate so what’s the wintering ecology of a duck besides migration and recovery from migration? So I mentioned courtship, they’re on the southern crowns, where, however south that is going through winter. So courtships happening, pair bonding is happening during that time. They’re building nutrient reserves to get them through the winter, they’re building nutrient reserves to recover from migration, they’re building nutrient reserves for nesting when they migrate back, they’re building nutrient reserves for that migration. One of the big things that they’re doing every day that we don’t think about is they’re escaping predation, whether that be animal predation or whether that be hunting predation, so a lot of the things that they’re going through on a daily basis is escaping predation and disturbance they’re going through and I think we’ve talked about this before, they’re going through molts. All the females are molting on the winter and grounds, wherever that may be and some of the males are molting, highly energetic taxing time of the year when they’re having to form new feathers and those feathers are 85% protein and they’re getting that protein from insects. So lots of things going on, on the wintering grounds and then they’re also, during that day, they’re loafing and roosting they’re not feeding all the time, so lots of different things going on, another thing I think we do, Ramsey, is and I’m as bad about this as anybody, maybe worse, is we lump waterfowl, we lump ducks, we hey, when we’re managing for ducks, what we really need to think about on your individual property is what ducks are you managing for, what habitats do you have and what ducks are going to use those habitats? Because when we stop and think about it, ducks aren’t created equal. A mallard is not a blue winged teal and they use different habitats and they use different foods. If you go back and think about, I don’t know, probably 7th grade biology, remember niche, Ramsey?

Ramsey Russell: Niche, yeah.

Kevin Nelms: Every bird’s got a niche. And you learn niche and science about the songbirds and their different bill shapes and their different bill links and what they’re eating, a woodpecker’s bill is different than a cardinal’s bill and a cardinal’s bill is different than a junco’s bill and their bill is an adaptation. And for where they’re eating and what they’re eating and their habitat that they’re using, ducks are the same way. Ducks have a niche that they live in and they’re not all the same. They’re not all, a shoveler’s bill is different than a mallard’s bill for a reason.

Ramsey Russell: That’s how they exploit. An environment without all compete for the same exact resource, so they may be in be – let’s just take, for example, they may be in 2 and a half foot of water in any given habitat. You may have your shovelers, your mallards, you teal, but they really ain’t, they’re hitting something different within there. Generally, they’re not all targeting the same exact thing.

What Do Mallards Like to Eat?

When we talk about a mallard from the standpoint of its feeding chronology or it’s, yeah, let’s just say feeding chronology, mallard is really the most generalist out there.

Kevin Nelms: That’s exactly right. And when you say all the time, the mallards, the rock star, the mallards want all the research is done on everybody wants to kill the mallards. When we talk about a mallard from the standpoint of its feeding chronology or it’s, yeah, let’s just say feeding chronology, mallard is really the most generalist out there. It’s the white-tailed deer of the duck world, it can really live anywhere, just about and eat anything.

Ramsey Russell: They’ll make a living anywhere.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. I mean, well, let’s back up. Every duck is an omnivore, meaning they eat plants and animals. Well, what animals are they’re eating? They’re eating insects, now you got talk about mergansers, they’re eating fish. But a mallard will actually eat fish, too.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah, they will.

Kevin Nelms: Mallards, they’re as much of a generalist as anything. But also, mallards are some of your biggest, well, I guess they are the biggest puddle duck, when we’re talking about puddle ducks they feed in basically anything from 0 to 20 inches deep.

Ramsey Russell: They’ll dry field feed.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: They’ll fly into timber to fly into open habitat, to fly into, any of those habitats you just named, you can find a mallard duck.

Kevin Nelms: Right. So when we talk about that generalist or maybe opportunistic omnivore the other duck species, that are the other puddle duck species that’s closest to a mallard is probably a green winged teal on just about eating anything.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy, isn’t it?

Kevin Nelms: It is. But what’s the big difference there? Size of the duck, right.

Ramsey Russell: Length of the neck.

Kevin Nelms: Length of the neck. So now we’re really getting down to feeding chronology, their niche, a green winged teal’s niche is like zero to 5 inches and their preference is like in that 2 inch range. So are they using the same habitat? Yeah, at times, but just like you said, mallards might be feeding in 12 inches of water, 8 inches of water. Green winged teal can even feed in that water, so now we’re figuring out what niche is. The other probably broadest omnivore in the puddle duck world is a wood duck. But think about a green winged teal’s bill or a mallard’s bill and a wood ducks bill, there’s a big difference in that bill. Wood duck has got a shorter bill and it’s made to pick up acorns, pick up seeds, a wood duck will eat a lot of different things, but it prefers seed, acorns and native plant seeds, that’s why it’s bill is made the way it is. And I said it’s probably one of the broadest omnivores because it will eat a lot of different things. Its preference and its feeding depth only goes to like 4 inches because it’s always, you think about mallards, they’re always – I mean, think about wood ducks, they’re always feeding around the edge, they’re picking up those acorns or whatever and you were talking about a mallard to go out and dry field feed. Wood ducks will go out and feed acorns on the flats or whatever. So and of course, we all know that wood ducks feed in a different habitat type, for the main part, the mallards and green winged teal.

Ramsey Russell: See, by relation to what you’re talking about, these different feeding strategies, foraging strategies of different cadres of ducks. The whole time you’re saying, I’m thinking South Louisiana down in that marsh. Again, no agriculture for miles, but all those species you’re naming exist and even though you see them flying across your decoy, they’re all going to some different little place in the marsh to satisfy that foraging behavior and their life cycle requirements.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right. And the most specific grain of ore, and when I say grain of ore, eating seeds only, not grain. When you say grain of ore, you’re talking seeds, not just because if I say grain, everybody’s thinking corn. But the most specific seed eater in the whole puddle duck world is a pintail.

Ramsey Russell: I can believe that, yeah.

Kevin Nelms: They’re going to use some insects to balance a diet.

Ramsey Russell: Well, they have to.

Kevin Nelms: But seed is the preference and a pintail has a long neck, it can feed up to really 14 inches, 15 inches, somewhere in that range. But it’s preference is 4 to 6 inches, it don’t want to use its neck. So we’re talking about depths, but we’re also talking about what they prefer to eat, we talked about the habitat types and what’s in those habitat types. So now you start thinking about what habitat type for what species, we talked about the green winged teal, when you think about a blue winged teal, big time insect eater, that’s what it’s dabbling for. That’s what it’s filtering for, it’s going to use some seed, but it’s a big insectivore 0 to 4 inch. It can go, it actually can go a little bit deeper, but definitely preferring that shallow zone, 0 to 2 is its preference really in the mud, dabbling the mud. And you talk about it, it’s cousin we, me and you went to school, Ramsey, when all these species were basically genus, anus they’ve changed blue winged teal and shovelers –

Ramsey Russell: Shovelers, cinnamon teal.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. Put them in their own –

Ramsey Russell: Spatula.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, spatula. So shoveler is the grown up blue winged teal, the cousin, the brother, whatever you want to call it again, insectivore, shifting with that big bill or filtering with that big bill. They do shift the vegetation in the winter as some of the invertebrates move out of the water column, but they go up to 18 inches plus, actually prefer to feed in an open water column, not feeding 3 foot deep, but we’re actually filtering that 3 foot deep, I tell people all the time, when you got shovelers, it means you got too much water.

Food for Every Duck

 And I think a lot of people don’t realize gadwall and wigeon are what we would classify as vegetarians.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kevin Nelms: Because that’s their preference.

Ramsey Russell: You are exactly right.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. When you start having a lot of shovelers in the unit, you got it flooded too deep for everything else.

Ramsey Russell: That reminds me of one of the best duck seasons I ever had a lease up in Tallahatchie County with a buddy of mine and there was a creek on the south end, Bear Creek and it jumped every other day, it seemed like, and on the days it was high, shovelers, when that water went back down a few days later, mallards and pintails. And it was that way all season long, to your point. Same duck, same area, same field, sitting in the same anchored down, we were using layout boats back in the day, same place in the field, but that bag would vary based on another foot water preferred.

Kevin Nelms: Preferred the habitat type than feeding depth or whatever. So in the puddle duck community mentioned 2 species now, gadwall and wigeon. And I think a lot of people don’t realize gadwall and wigeon are what we would classify as vegetarians.

Ramsey Russell: They’re grazers, man, they’re salad eaters.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right. Green vegetation cutting, you think about, gadwall’s a little less specific than a wigeon, maybe, when you think about the bill, that wigeon bill is made to cut vegetation, to break vegetation off but the gadwall is eating, it’s pulling up submerged aquatic vegetation, eating green vegetation.

Ramsey Russell: And it’ll also dry field feed and wheat fields. I mean, that wigeon is a grazer, too.

Kevin Nelms: Oh, yeah, that’s exactly right. Filter water up on a wheat field, there’s going to be some wigeon there. But wigeon, shorter bill than a gadwall. Wigeon actually prefers zero to 8 inches of water, pulling that vegetation off, cutting that vegetation off, whereas gadwall really will, they’re preferring deeper water, actually feeding up to about 25.

Ramsey Russell: What is a gadwall’s favorite food? Why they go to cypress breaks?

Kevin Nelms: I can tell Coontail moss.

Ramsey Russell: Coontail moss found down here. You showed me a duck hole full of coontail moss and I’m going to show you a gadwall killing something –

Kevin Nelms: Coontail, southern naiad, any of those submerged aquatics, pondweed, whatever, another thing I said 25 inches on them. Well, they’re not really diving down and feeding in 25 inches, what they’re doing is pulling vegetation up from 25 inches that submerged aquatic grows that long, that high in the water column. The other thing about gadwall, really interesting that a lot of people don’t understand is they’re into kleptoparasitism. You remember what that means?

Ramsey Russell: No, I don’t.

Kevin Nelms: That’s stealing food from other ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, that’s right. Say that word again.

Kevin Nelms: Kleptoparasitism. Meaning stealing and stealing is a parasite.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I have seen gadwalls hanging out around the coots.

Kevin Nelms: So that’s exactly why, that’s their big –

Ramsey Russell: They sit there and shrink, the coots are diving under and rooting for something and vegetation floating to the top and the gadwalls are swimming around, gobbling it up, for the coots can pop back up and eat it.

Kevin Nelms: You steal it out of the coot’s mouth, the coop will come up and the gadwall will be sitting there and pulled out of their mouth. So we talked about this a long time ago. I grew up on the Tennessee River, hunting on the Tennessee River. We did not kill gadwall on the Tennessee River, the reason we didn’t kill them is because they tasted like filamentous algae. And you go, ooh, you’ve never tasted filamentous algae, but you’ve smelled it.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve smelled it.

Kevin Nelms: And that’s what gadwall tastes like.

Ramsey Russell: Smells like a polecat.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. Gadwall was a species we didn’t eat and that’s because they fed with those, their feeding strategy on the Tennessee River was sitting with those coot rafts and stealing filamentous algae from – eating filamentous algae off the top. Stealing filament, filamentous algae will sink as weather gets cold, the coots go down and get it and the gadwall would kill it. Gadwall was not a species that we killed until I moved to Missouri and then Mississippi and it’s a bread and butter species, but a little bit deeper water, definitely, we think of and vegetation during the winter. So as we’ve talked about all these ducks, I hope people were thinking about emergent marsh and the invertebrates and the deep open water and submerged aquatics and so what species is your property and your duck hole that you have going to attract?

Ramsey Russell: Let me answer a question with a question. How many people in the deep south do you now hear say gadwall is the new mallard? Because they become so abundant past 20 years. I mean and see where I’m getting at, part of what’s making me rethink my seed mentality and I’m going to ask you a couple of questions here in a minute, but first, I’m going to share some very recent, within the last 2 or 3 years, published scientific papers, some research projects that Heath Hagy was on recently, helping us work through, talking about this, surprise, southern hunter’s been saying it forever, this shift in migration, this change of migration and this shift in distribution in the mid continent flyways. And wouldn’t I want to be managing for species most likely, to your point, to be on my property? And mallards are still coming, I mean, there’s no doubt we’re going to see mallards in the deep south, but let’s face it, folks, we ain’t seeing mallards in the numbers that we used to see this far south. If you’re a deep south, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, you ain’t seeing mallards like you used to.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right.

Shifting Migration Patterns: Mallards Migrating Later and Staying North

And so based on 60 years going back to the 1960s, going back to the time before you even duck hunted, on the 50th anniversary this year, Kevin, going back to those days in harvest data, some pretty smart people started, well, maybe. Is there any truth to what these guys in the deep south are saying about migration?

Ramsey Russell: And so based on 60 years going back to the 1960s, going back to the time before you even duck hunted, on the 50th anniversary this year, Kevin, going back to those days in harvest data, some pretty smart people started, well, maybe. Is there any truth to what these guys in the deep south are saying about migration? Well, they have proved it empirically and the 2 takeaway points on that particular research project that really struck home with me and began to make me start rethinking my seed mentality was the fact that not all mallards are short stopping, but the bulk of mid-continent flyway mallards are short stopping and by short stopping, I mean they’re flying, they’re migrating later and staying further north to the tune of about 500 miles from there from where 60 years ago, they were migrating. That puts them up above St. Louis from right where I’m standing right now, but ironically and it makes sense because of the changing landscape, but the flip side of that is you’re what the biologists like yourself describe as wetland obligate foragers, not ducks that dry feed ducks that don’t dry feed, ducks that got to have these habitats, you’re talking about that you just named, those ducks, they’re flying earlier, going further south. We’re talking blue winged teals, we’re talking gadwalls, we’re talking shovelers, we’re talking practically everything and we’re talking diving ducks that you ain’t even got into yet, we’re talking the ring necks and the canvasbacks and the redheads that don’t, a mallard duck will sit on a lake or a pond or a reservoir and roost as long as he’s got harvested agricultural crops within flying distance to go feed on. And if he doesn’t, then he’ll probably fly south. Gadwalls, shovelers, green wings, blue wings, canvasbacks, redheads, practically everything else, they got to come south. They got to come – at the same time that a lot of wetlands have been drained and replaced with, I say, natural wetland habitats have been displaced by drainage, been drained to make row crop agriculture further up the flyway, boom. They’re coming south looking for what, not looking for dry field feed and flooded agriculture, they’re looking for some of these wetland obligate habitats, coontail moss, naiad, whatever else is out here. And it just made me really start rethinking, why don’t I lay the table for those birds? Because what’s going to happen in another 20 years, another 30 years, I need to set the table for what most likely is going to come and like Eden and I walked through, when I look at how we started and where we ended up in terms of our approach to habitat management, we had to reconcile with what we wanted versus what we got, what we wish for versus reality.

Kevin Nelms: Live in your reality and manage your reality.

Ramsey Russell: Now, I’m going to follow this up with a question and I’m just still arguing my point of wetlands and I am not bad mouthing agriculture, because I promise you I’m going to continue to hunt agriculture. It’s just maybe that ain’t all there is on the landscape for me to hunt. I’m going to ask you the question. You’ve worked for US Department of Agriculture in the Mississippi Delta, which is a sample of the United States, a sample of the Mississippi Flyway, but you’ve worked here for 20 years, 25 years, a long time, Kevin, I know you got – a busy man, got important stuff to do working on private land with landowners and governmental type work, I know you ain’t just studying numbers all day like about to ask you, but I’m just asking you your opinion, maybe, of those habitat types you named, what might be among the most limiting habitats on the landscape in the Mississippi Delta, for example, what might be one of the most limited? Because I’m going to guess that it’s not flooded agriculture.

Kevin Nelms: No, it’s not flooded agriculture. So it’s a good question you ask Ramsey and it goes back to, you introduced me every time I’m on here, hey, you’re the moist soil person.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you are.

Kevin Nelms: Well, here’s how that happened, is I started working for NRCs in the Missouri and then came here and I’ve told the story about meeting Leif Ericson and Mickey Hetmyer and all those managers in Missouri and really tapping into them. But WRP, WRE is a program which I’ve dealt with a lot and even CRP wetland and all those things. That program was supposed to be meeting needs of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. North American Waterfowl Management Plan, holistic plan, has got step down plans per region, each region is going to do these things and provide these habitats. The most limiting habitat in the Lower Mississippi Valley, which is the Bootheel, Missouri Inn, where we are right now, was moist soil habitat. And so, as a NRCS manager, the program and myself were promoting moist soil. That’s kind of how that came about and we probably never discussed that before. So I became the moist soil person because the program and the North American Waterfowl Management plan pushed me that way. So moist soil is limiting less so now than it was 25 years ago when I started my career. I would tell you right now, the most limiting habitat in the Lower Mississippi Valley, that 7 states is emergent marsh.

Ramsey Russell: Emergent Marsh, natural emergent marsh wetlands. That may be, I would say, in the Mississippi Flyway anyway, it’s got to be one of the most limited resources for ducks. And no, getting back to that seed mentality, if feed is a limited resource and I got to feed, I got the ducks, but when you start walking through all these life cycle requirements and all these different habitat types of all the different types of waterfowl, wouldn’t I want to focus on a limited habitat? To attract them? I mean, wouldn’t that attract them? If I’ve got a limited resource, wouldn’t I be bringing them in bringing in the customers.

Kevin Nelms: And that’s the exact thing we say about a wetland complex, is look at what your 12 or 16 miles radius has and you need to be focusing on providing what’s not there already. So if that’s the limiting factor in your 12 or 16 miles radius and we just said it probably is in our part of the world, then yes, that’s what you need to be providing. The other thing is we just went through all of these feeding ecologies of the puddle ducks and like you said, we didn’t mention the diving ducks, but let’s cover that, just a second is when you think about a diving duck and these wetland habitat types that I just listed, which ones are a diving duck using?

Ramsey Russell: They’re using that marsh, those bigger waters.

Kevin Nelms: Marsh and deep open water.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kevin Nelms: That’s the only 2 in there they’re really using. So if we won’t –

Ramsey Russell: I mean you’ll kill a canvasback in a foot rice field. But he’s just passing through and he’s a canvasback, so he’s going to decoy but they’re, that’s not where they’re going, that’s not their habitat.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right. And all of these ducks, we said all the puddle ducks are an opportunistic omnivore or an omnivore, I said that they’re eating insects, animal material. What did I say when I was talking about those different wetland types? What’s the one that’s got the best insect and crustacean habitat? Emergent Marsh.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Ducks Want Energy

We’re talking about lipids, fat, carbohydrates, we’re talking about protein, we’re talking about vitamins and we’re talking about minerals, that’s kind of the 4 categories of food.

Kevin Nelms: So if all of them got to go there and eat at some point, why don’t we manage for it?

Ramsey Russell: Why don’t we? That’s how I began to rethink based on just, look, I try to be the dumbest man in the room and I really don’t even have to try. It’s just by a long time of personal observations and experiences, shooting a lot of different waterfowl species removed from agriculture and then coming to my homeland, like, it’s not just that the landscape has changed relative to agriculture, it’s that agriculture within the landscape has changed drastically due to improved technologies in the last 20 years. I mean, we’re really looking at now on a lot of these sites, we’re looking at a technology that is truly a sterile landscape except for that agriculture, cultural crop, nothing else. And then we’re looking at, man, just the harvesting efficiency that has come through there. So I look at myself on a wetlands underscore reserve program piece of property. Why do I want to convert this to that? What benefit – I mean, how am I going to attract those hard to get customers, those ducks, by having the same thing everybody else has got? Why don’t I offer them something different? See, now there’s people thinking, here comes a big argument, I know you’re up to task here, Kevin, on rethinking my seed mentality, my agriculture and duck habitat mentality. Start looking at the kilo calories of a corn kernel. I mean, energy galore versus what? I mean, God dang, I mean, if you just look at the sheer calories, a cup of sugar versus an apple, ducks want energy, don’t they?

Kevin Nelms: So when we think about food for a duck, we’re thinking about 4 things. We can just lump everything into 4 categories. We’re talking about lipids, fat, carbohydrates, we’re talking about protein, we’re talking about vitamins and we’re talking about minerals, that’s kind of the 4 categories of food. So if we’re talking about an agricultural crop, it’s making one of those, it’s making the lipids, so a little bit of protein, very little vitamins and minerals. So if we’ve got to balance our diet, if we’re a waterfowl, so we’ve got to go find those natural seeds that have all 4 of those things, we’ve got to go find those invertebrates. The invertebrates is where the protein and minerals and vitamins are, not lipids, so we’ve got to use all those things to balance our diet. So talking about kilocalories, like you said, certainly there’s kilocalories in grains, but we’ve got to balance the diet. So that’s the first thing, second thing is when we talk about kilocalories, an insect has kilocalories, a tuber in emergent marsh has kilocalories. Green vegetation of submerged aquatics have kilocalories, everything’s got kilocalories. What do we need to meet those kilocalorie needs? What habitat has the most kilocalorie needs? It’s not just about lipids, it’s about everything else and all of those foods having kilocalories.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s a quality kilocalorie, you got fat, you got protein, you got carb, I don’t eat a lot of bread, I really don’t. But, buddy, I pick my battles, when I get down to Mexico, I eat the – When I get down anywhere south of border in Central America, I eat a whole bunch of them corn tortillas, they turn them little old ladies turn out every single morning fresh off the griddle. But I don’t want just the corn tortilla, I want the good stuff in the middle, I want the meat and the avocado and all that good stuff right in the middle, I don’t want just a corn tortilla, I want to wrap it around a good bite of protein and fat. That’s kind of the same thing, wouldn’t you say?

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, that’s exactly right, you can live on corn for a while, but at some point, you got to go find a juicy leach or a water shrimp or something.

Ramsey Russell: What do you think about the energy value, the kilocalorie, the energy value of crops versus moist soil?

Kevin Nelms: So that’s an excellent question. And I think about my friend Mickey Hetmyer. One of the things that Mickey’s always making his PhD professor and those guys think on a lot higher level and always thinking about research and Heath Hagy is one of your good friends and Heath is always on a much higher level than I can ever think. But one thing that Mickey always did was Mickey would get into the research and combine everything and boil it down to this nice, pretty table that I could understand and a practical table and not all PhDs are practical.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Kevin Nelms: But Mickey put this table together years ago and I’ve used it for a long time and it’s the wetland habitat types crop, moist soil, emergent marsh, shrub scrub, all those things. And then it’s columns of the different kinds of food, annual seeds, green vegetation, tubers, inverts, whatever else. Anyway, and based on all the different research and all these different kilocalorie research numbers, he filled this table with kilocalories for each of those wetland types, there’s this much inverts in this habitat and there’s this much green vegetation and this much annual seeds in this habitat that when you look at kilocalories across all of those food types, moist soil had the most kilocalories of any habitat type.

Ramsey Russell: Come on, now.

Kevin Nelms: Cropland had the second most. Now, I think if you go back and look at that, might be harvested cropland. But I remember and I can’t tell you because Mickey might have changed, I know it’s kilocalories, but I don’t know if it’s kilocalories by acre or hectare or whatever. So the number I’m giving you is not going to be, can’t tell you whether it’s acres or hectare or whatever. But when you look at the numbers, because this does give you an idea, moist soil was over 1000 kilocalories per whatever land unit –

Ramsey Russell: That’ll feed a lot of ducks.

Kevin Nelms: But that was across a bunch of different food types. Then when you go to cropland, you got one food type, it’s an annual seed and it was like 800 because it didn’t have those other things mixed in. And like I said, that might be harvested. It might be a standing food plot type, I can’t remember. You want to know what was third?

Ramsey Russell: Let me hear it.

Kevin Nelms: Emergent marsh.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I can believe that.

Kevin Nelms: Because it’s got all of those food, it’s got tubers, it’s got annual seeds, it’s got green vegetation, it’s got environment vertebrates, it had some of everything. And then when you got behind that, I can’t remember, I’d have to go look at it. But I suspect shrub scrub was in it, when you go all the way down and deep open water was at the bottom, but there’s still kilocalories in deep open water.

The Ongoing Struggle to Preserve Natural Duck Habitats

Kevin, you were telling me about them finding yonka pin seeds, water lotus, water lilies, finding yonka seeds in thousands of years old Egyptian tombs, planting them in the son of a gun sprouted.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a real good point. I mean and that’s a real good point. Let’s say, I lost my train of thought trying to think about something real quick. I’m going to jump back to emergent marsh and limited resources and stirring what you got what I want versus what I got, what I wish for versus reality. And let’s take a deep south habitat like this one right here, this property right here, just for concept, we’ve got a hole we fought tooth and nail for forever. And I’m going to describe this 15 acres of yonka pins, that’s just what it is. And I never forget one of the – It’s funny the things you remember over all the years we were talking about, in one of the past podcast episodes, Kevin, you were telling me about them finding yonka pin seeds, water lotus, water lilies, finding yonka seeds in thousands of years old Egyptian tombs, planting them in the son of a gun sprouted.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: You ain’t never going to get rid of them, ever.

Kevin Nelms: And I think my example was the seed bank is there.

Ramsey Russell: We disked and we mowed and we planted and we did this and we did that and we just had lily pads there. That’s all it boiled down to, but boy, I’m going to tell you what, Ian was my partner in crime hunting blue winged teal. That’s something we did together for almost like 29 of those 30 years, was blue winged teal hunt and that particular pond, as few ducks as we might shoot during big duck season, boy, was always good for blue wings. And it is ideal, perfect wood duck brood habitat.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So what if I began, if I’m adjusting and rethinking my seed mentality, what if I began to look at some of these habitats that for whatever reason, may not attract or hold big ducks later in the year that may or may not migrate south? And in this particular duck holes instance I’m using for example, it’s also on a main road to gets a just daily lots of traffic, I don’t believe I could pour 2 pallets of shell corn off in that duck hole and kill limited ducks during deer season because all the traffic disturbance coming through there. But man, what if I were to ring it and saturate it with wood duck nest boxes? I mean, the whole idea is to shoot ducks during duck season. Well, if I could produce X number of, 100 wood ducks, I know that my juvenile males are going to disperse, my hatcher females are going to stick around, mom and daddy going to stick around. So I got a whole, I got 75 more ducks right here. And I know you talking about a time that hard to go shoot a wood duck. Man, I was thinking when you said that I’ve only been hunting 32 years, not once nor ever will I ever give a wood duck a pass, that’s just what I grew up shooting, I’m going to shoot them, I want to shoot wood duck. I want to shoot mallards too, but I want to shoot wood ducks. And so it’s almost like there’s other values besides just feeding a duck, besides just wintering a duck and it’s going to lead me into a transition I want to get to, in the same way that a lot of us duck hunters think have a seed mentality, got to have seed, got to have feed, I think we also fall off into this Mississippi Flyway past 20 something years, duck season, 60 days long, 60 days of water and throughout the whole duck hunting universe, in the deep south, people are scrambling a week or 2 before the season to flood. I think Mr. Ian had it dialed in, man, he figured out before I did, he figured out flood early, start getting water on the landscape early because our legally abided duck season may be 60 days, but ducks are coming if they’re coming. The blue winged teal, the gadwalls, the pintails, the shovelers, these birds are coming and the mallards that still penetrate the deep south, a lot of them are running more on a calendar than on a temperature gradient. That’s those Halloween ducks coming to the deep south and I mean and talking about a limited resource would be water on the landscape in August, September, October, when a lot of these are first arrivals, I mean and the whole game is to attract and hold waterfowl and nothing’s going to pull more ducks into your area than ducks already on your area so there’s a lot of advantage to having early water. And now I’m getting to my question is, we talk about having water, we talk about the habitat values, we talk about the timing and the life cycle requirements of ducks. But whereas the duck season may be 60 days, Kevin, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, 7 months. If I’m going to put water on my landscape early and hold water late to be of benefit to waterfowl that are coming and going and wintering and to also help them birds imprint on my property 7 months of water, not 60 days, 7 months water.

Kevin Nelms: I’d say 9 months.

Ramsey Russell: 9 months. Can you elaborate on early and late water on the landscape?

Kevin Nelms: So let’s talk about early water and residual water, we’re talking about emergent marsh, we’re talking about leaving the boards in having water early for teal and those kind of things and your best teal hole was your yonka pin hole. That’s because it had water year round, it was residual water, you couldn’t get it drained. The reason that hole is what it is because you couldn’t get it drained. And that way, we’ll leave that now, but get me back to, don’t screw it up. But anyway, I get asked all the time when do I put water on? And I tell people, well you put water on in August if you want to teal hunt, you put especially and you mentioned the Halloween mallards and I’m of the opinion and I don’t know what that’s worth, but our early mallards migration, that happens, I say by November 10, it tends to go to South Delta more than they stay in the North Delta. That population of mallards, if you’re a South Delta property, you need to have water on by that October 31st to November 10th date to catch that migration.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Kevin Nelms: So –

Creating Winter Ecosystems for Ducks

Early water is really and when we’re talking early water, we’re not talking about every duck hole, you can hold some stuff till later in the year, you don’t have to start flooding everything then, but certainly have some early water on the landscape…

Ramsey Russell: What about the habitat benefits of kickstarting that ecosystem that winter and ecosystem by early water.

Kevin Nelms: That’s residual water and that’s why I said 9 months. So when we’re talking about invertebrates and we’re talking about crustaceans and we’re talking about all these ducks have to have that food, you’re talking about a wetland community that’s either held water all year long or it’s only been dry for a short period and 3 months is kind of the maximum. So holding water 11 months is even better. But absolutely, research and everything we know about inverts shows that if you’ve got residual water, whether it just be a small puddle in the bottom of the unit or a borrow or whatever and you put water, you start putting water on that unit, start flooding it up whenever you do it, that invertebrate community, it utilizes that new space and it colonizes that new space and invertebrates have a tremendous ability to colonize that new habitat, tremendous young, they come out of there, their strategy to survive the drought or whatever and boom, a huge invertebrate bloom. So early water and residual water is important from that standpoint, you’re kickstarting, you’re creating that invertebrate community earlier. You’re increasing it from the get go. Early water is really and when we’re talking early water, we’re not talking about every duck hole, you can hold some stuff till later in the year, you don’t have to start flooding everything then, but certainly have some early water on the landscape, especially if you’re farther south and you mentioned earlier some of these ducks are coming south, your gadwall and some of those ducks are some of your early migrants, pintails are early migrants when they get this far south, so you’ve got to have that habitat on the ground. So water, especially when you’re in the deep south and it’s evaporating in a lot of years has to be put out there, seemed like that question was 2 part and I only hit one part.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we were talking about early seasonal and then mostly late, we talked about attracting ducks, we talked about why it’s ecologically beneficial during the season to have early water.

Kevin Nelms: Right.

Ramsey Russell: And talk about late and we’re talking about sites that you can do this on, but obviously, well, take the Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana Deltas, man. I mean, some of those agricultural settings that did hold water during duck season, that pump water soon as they got the crops off and where they could start pumping water, hell, they got to pull water off to freaking get the crops in.

Kevin Nelms: Right.

Ramsey Russell: That’s understood. But what are – The ducks are coming through till mid March.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. So we’re really talking about flood timing and holding water. So flood timing, I mentioned migration and timing to migration, well, migrations happening. We talked about the early birds, but then you’ve got the birds are moving on weather and though so time your weather events, I said, you don’t have to flood everything at once. Some of that especially if you got food plots or other habitats or moist, you got a bunch of moist soil or you got multiple units you can hold stuff to later and time your migration. You get in the rain in December, let’s bring this unit online. So you timing the migration, timing when you hunt, timing where you are in the landscape, you got a national listener audience here, Illinois is flooding earlier than we are, so you’re timing, your migration, your timing, where you hunt and the other thing is and this is one I run into all the time, Ramsey, is it’s beginning of duck season, let’s go out there and put all of our boards in. No, stop it. Incremental, we’re mimicking nature, I said that earlier. The whole reason we make these units where they’ve got boards in them is so not only can you draw them down incrementally, but you can flood them up incrementally. And one thing we don’t do as managers is we don’t listen to our ducks. Our ducks are telling us something every day that they’re here and one thing they’re going to tell you is when to put another board in, we create these units, impoundments, whatever you want to call them, closest to the levee is the deepest water, as you move away from the levee, the water gets shallow and shallow.

Ramsey Russell: They like new water. They like fresh food.

Kevin Nelms: They like new water. We just said that every one of these ducks feeds 0 to something and most of them are pretty shallow, that’s why they’re puddle ducks. So we put a board or 2 in at the beginning of the season, they’re going to eat that. And then, what I’m telling you that, when I say they’re talking to you, they’re using the unit and then they’re not there. That means it’s time to put another board in because they motivate that unit out where they found something else that they liked better. So then you put another board in it, flood some new stuff incrementally, we’re mimicking nature, how nature floods a wetland in the fall, during the winter. And so we’re moving the ducks through the food as they tell us they need the food. We put all of our boards in at one time and we get a big rain. I mean, some of that stuff in the bottom is going to never be fed on because it’s too deep to feed now, because we just talked about zero to 20 inches, basically, as being the deepest anything can feed. So, we’re moving incrementally. And then you were talking about how long do you keep water on, to me and I just said, 9, 11 months, there is no such thing as keeping water on too long. Your water drawdown depends on your management type and your ducks are going to talk to you again, when the ducks are no longer here, we hold ducks here till April, get farther north, they’re going to hold ducks longer, when the ducks are no longer there, it’s time to start drawing down. And I think we’ve talked about this before, we used to not really talk about philopatry or site fidelity on the breeding grounds because we didn’t know whether that was the case. Well, now we’ve got data that says that’s the case, they will come back to the same place. Well, I think common sense tells us that the place that dries up on January 31st or February 1st is not a place they remember as much as the place that they left on March 15th or April 1st or whatever. So I’m of the opinion, hold water as late as possible for your objectives and your habitat type that you’re managing. I told you I hunted last day of season, I hunted the last 2 days of season, probably about 11:00 on the last day, explosion, dynamite went off. My son looked at me and said, what the hell was that? I said, just dynamite. He said, huh? I said, somebody blowing a beaver dam or blowing something, draining a duck hole and wasn’t 30 minutes later, another explosion went off, last day of duck season, damn it, it’s time to start draining. And unless you’re planting a crop, unless you go on a drought really slow and you’re planting that crop to corn, which is your earliest one you’re going to plant, there was no reason in hell to be blowing that beaver dam, it’s counterintuitive to duck management, it’s counterintuitive to, you said, imprinting your ducks, it’s counterintuitive to us as habitat managers, we spend all this time and energy to have ducks during the duck season. Why are we going to run them off on February 1st?

Ramsey Russell: Especially when they get out without hunting pressure and begin to feed and imprint on my property. Kevin, I get what you’re saying about stepping it up, some of the arguments I’ve heard from embarrassing sundry people around the country is, well, if I put my boards in too quick, if I pump up my duck hole too soon, the ducks are going to eat me out, when the big ducks show up, there ain’t going to be no food and I’m like, that don’t make sense, nature don’t work that way and also, let’s like, I’ve got to your point about stepping it up, I think that some impoundments and some wetlands lend themselves to that more than others. My friend Terry Denmon down in Louisiana, Darren, what he calls his funny farm man, he can hold 100s of acres with 2 or 3 boards, it’s flat as a pan, parts of Missouri where you’re from, same thing. We’ve got some impoundments down here with a 4 or 5 foot rise that’ll hold 10, 11 acres and it’s been our experience that not stepping the boards up from opening day through the season, but stepping the boards up from September. Got some teal, got some stuff going on and stepping it up and then we go into season and all the boards are in the water, may or may not be towards the top, but it’s like the more water on that landscape, the more it’s going to attract, it’s a balancing act.

Kevin Nelms: So definitely, you’re right. I mean, we’ve said before, this wetland management is an art, not a science, that’s the balancing act and I’ll totally agree with you that more water on the landscape is a beacon. But one thing I’ll tell you, you said people around the country have argued with you about stepping water up, ducks are going to eat me out or whatever we started this whole conversation with ducks are using wetlands for other things besides just food. And we get caught in that mentality and we talked about roof roosting and loafing and courtship and invertebrates and all these kind of things and these wetlands are all that habitat. So ducks are going to use these habitats for other things besides food and we’ve got to remember that and we’ve got to think about that when we’re managing and we got to think about what kind of habitat type it is and what duck wants to be there and what duck wants to use it for what reason.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Kevin Nelms: For what life cycle needs.

Ramsey Russell: It changes around the country in different locations. Last little thought, but we talk about distribution in the Mississippi Delta for the past 20 years, big years in terms of midwinter waterfowl count or low years in terms of mid winter waterfowl count. State of Mississippi does a great job at posting up their findings in a graphical map of the delta. And 20 years in count, the waterfowl distribution in the Mississippi Delta, it’s trending and has been for a long time. You got 3 spots lit up like a Christmas tree. It ain’t flooded corn, it ain’t flooded agriculture, it ain’t standing crops. You got bell zoning up around Leflore County, kind of up in Tallahatchie County. And the 3 things those areas with the big red Christmas lights have got in common is wetlands.

Kevin Nelms: That’s complex.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of water on the landscape that likely ain’t in standing hot crop.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s like to listen to what the ducks are telling you, Kevin, I’ve appreciated as always, you always shed a lot of light on these topics and I will say that in the past 22 years for a lot of different reasons, you and your gospel have helped me rethink my seed mentality. I’m increasingly where I can, when I can and can think of just endless examples of why I need to have water earlier and later and maybe begin to look at the water sitting on that property as a limited resource. What can I offer ducks that is not abundant around me? How can I capture and deal with what this site is instead of what I want it to be? And that makes putting a round peg and a round hole is a lot easier than doing that, you just kind of work with the system.

Kevin Nelms: Work with what you got.

Ramsey Russell: I really appreciate you, Kevin as usual. Folks, you all been listening to my buddy Kevin Nelms. Thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where we have been rethinking our seed mentality with regard to waterfowl management. See you next time.