Wood Ducks

Ramsey Russell: I’m your host Ramsey Russell, join me here to listen to those conversations. Welcome back to another great episode of Duck Season Somewhere, I am at the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Park, Headquarter with a biologist that I’ve known of for a long time and have known for quite a while. And you know what I want to talk about today, because mostly because Mississippi but mostly because I think it’s something that everybody listening can relate to. Now, if I said duck hunting, tell me an iconic species of duck. What’s the first thing comes to mind? I bet it’s a mallard, that big old green head, everybody’s nodding their head. Yeah, but if you think about it, wood ducks. I mean wood ducks. I was 18 years old hunting in Pointe woods, Mississippi deer hunting one evening. And as the sun started setting I shot a buck, he run off in a brush pile and I’m waiting on him to finish up, waiting on it to get dark. I ain’t going to go in the reason why I had to wait for it to get dark for I jumped across that barbed wire fence and grabbed him up. But I was sitting in that tree, there was just tons of ducks flying, eyeball level going to this little swamp behind me. And that was my first duck hunt and I shot a pair of mallards not wood ducks, but I went back later and morning and evening and had some good wood duck shoots, and much later as I was in college at Mississippi State I’d hunt what they call the yak and Oconee river bottom. And you go deer hunting in the morning, maybe go chase some ducks in the evening or vice versa. But it was wood ducks and since and the 30 some odd years, 40 some odd here, since then, I’ve shot wood ducks and all four flyaway, I’ve shot them in several Canadian provinces, I’ve shot them from Canada clear down to the gulf coast. And a lot of my neighbors here in Mississippi, and I think probably nationwide, they may not be duck hunters. Like a lot of us are duck hunters but they duck hunt. If they duck hunt, they go back to paw pal’s be rebound or they go to back forty, they go somewhere local and they shoot wood ducks because they’re very ubiquitous species. Not to mention the fact they’re very beautiful. Today’s guest, I’m going to let him introduce himself but I know, he does a lot of wood duck banding activities which is very vital to management here in the state of Mississippi and can speak to their habits. You all hang on, you all are going to enjoy my guest today, Mr. Houston Havens. How are you sir?

Houston Havens: Doing well. How about yourself?

Ramsey Russell: I’m doing good. Introduce yourself to the crowd. Because they don’t know you, like I do.

Houston Havens: Sure. Houston Havens, Waterfowl program coordinator for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks. Started this job after I finished my Master’s degree at Mississippi State University back in 2007 and been enjoying it ever since. I get to do a lot of really good things, some of which we’ll talk about today and just have a blast doing it every day.

Ramsey Russell: Now, where did you grow up in the state of Mississippi?

Houston Havens: Born and raised in Mississippi. Carroll County around Vaiden. Have since, my wife and I have since about three years ago moved back to the farm that I grew up on. So a lot of nostalgia there with a place where I grew up, learning how to hunt. Just like we’ll talk about today, learning how to pattern those wood ducks, and doing a lot of initial hunting on wood ducks.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of duck hunters in the state of Mississippi and nearly all of them, not all of them, but nearly all of them commute to the delta. The alluvial plane, that’s where most of the good duck hunting is. And I actually killed my first white tail deer in Carroll county. And a lot of those Delta folks go to the hills to hunt deer. Did you grow up duck hunting or pursuing a deer hunter, turkey hunter?

Houston Havens: Right. So I initially started out squirrel hunting some earliest memories, just starting with that small game, just because probably because of my attention span, having to go after something I could do a little activity and dove hunting also some of my earliest memories, but then transition and then sitting on a deer stand and probably didn’t start duck hunting until I was early teenager years or so.

Ramsey Russell: Right. And did you hunt there in Carroll County?

Houston Havens: I did, yeah, I did most of our hunting just like you described, Big Black River bottom, looking for use in places like that where birds were using and trying to figure things out that way and we get the occasional gadwall, mallards as well. But those were kind of extra bonus birds. We were pretty well going after wood ducks in most of our hunts there. And as I got older, started branching out hunting public land, going to the Mississippi Delta and things like that, kind of branching out.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a natural progression. Well here in the world, it’s a mighty big world and it just gets way bigger than the Mississippi Delta if you let it. So I get a lot of in boxes and a lot of emails and text messages, things that nature asking about, from young people from junior high even, but a lot of high schoolers or college age kids wondering kind of how to get into the field, something like I do, something like you do. What led you into wildlife management?

Houston Havens: Just a growing up on a farm having that just kind of natural innate tie to the outdoors, everything I did, but because that was what there was to do living in a rural area. Always had that desire to hunt and fish, but not only that just to kind of learn about those natural processes. Why things were the way they were. And so that was always a curiosity with me, which just kind of felt like a natural transition when I started trying to decide what I wanted to be. When I was getting up into college age and so went to junior college and then progressed over to Mississippi State and I did my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree there. Excellent school. There’s a lot of good natural resource universities across the United States, but Mississippi was home to me and so I was fortunate enough to be able to find a place there and be able to stay local.

Ramsey Russell: And we were talking before the show, of course got a degree undergraduate in Wildlife and then got a master’s degree under Rick Kaminski, one of my humble opinion, one of the foremost waterfowl ecologist in the country.

Houston Havens: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And what was the nature of your Master degree?

Houston Havens: So we were looking at rice fields in Arkansas, looking at post-harvest management practices. So trying to figure out what was the best practice to use after that rice was harvested if the intention was to the in flooded and use it for duck hunting. So we looked at not only seed availability, but primarily duck use, bird use in general, focused on waterfowl use of those fields. And so we went in and did multiple treatments or we had the farmer do multiple treatments on these fields after they were harvested they would go in and burn some they rolled some, some were discs and some were moved, just to see and some were left standing of course, so we could we could evaluate that. So just kind of quick and dirty results there. What we found was of course, not doing anything to those fields had the most seed availability. But the bird use wasn’t what it could have been because of the open water. So we had to have a treatment to go in and break up some of that stubble and have the little more showy water in there. And so burning is what we found was primarily the kind of the middle ground there for maintaining seed availability. You don’t want to disc it under and have it unavailable for birds that are using the field. But having that patchy burn kind of what Rick Kaminski would call hemi-marsh. Having that distribution of vegetation and water and having that seed maintained on top of the ground there was, what attracted the most birds.

Ramsey Russell: Ok, so you left grad school and then where’d you go? How did you end up at NBWFP and where did you go through to get to where you are now?

Houston Havens: So this this actually was my first job that I moved into straight out of grad school. Started as a biologist in the in the waterfowl program and have since moved into the coordinator role here. I started out working in this job, working statewide, getting around on a lot of our wildlife management areas and learning about the day to day activities that go on those areas for managing for public waterfowl hunting. And then also working with private landowners, helping them to develop management plans for managing wetland habitat and trying to meet their goals for attracting waterfowl for hunting opportunities.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Let’s jump into wood ducks. I keep up with you all on social media. I know, you’ve been very busy this time of year doing wood duck banding. What’s up with all that?

Houston Havens: Yeah, Mississippi is one of many states that are involved in cooperative banding effort, of course, as you know, even though we have, each state has their own population of resident birds, they’re still going to migrate from time to time. We’re going to so to speak be trading birds back and forth. So it’s a shared resource that we’re all kind of in this together on the management of and so we do have a target each year to band at least 200 wood ducks, which is not a not a large number, it’s usually pretty easy to meet. But we’re banding in the months of July, August and going in a little bit into September on our resident would duck population. And overall goal is just to catch and band a representative sample. And what I mean by that is we’re not just trying to catch all adults or all juveniles, we want a good mixture of juvenile male and females and adult male and females just so we can have a marked population after we release these birds out there that are available for harvest.

Ramsey Russell: Well, so what good, why? That’s what I’m saying is what do you do with this data? Because I mean, most of us grew up thinking or think that these wood ducks are, especially down here in the Deep South. I mean every slew, every wood holes has got, every beaver ponds, got wood ducks on it. What good is the data?

Houston Havens: Yeah, so a lot of hunters, think that the primary goal of banding is just to have a trophy, for hunter to harvest. And that’s definitely part of. We love that is a kind of a driver, it’s a motivator for people to look for bands and the harvesting birds, and you don’t get excited about those. But one of the main things, especially for wood ducks is that they’re almost impossible to survey. So you think about the habitat that wood duck uses, it’s going to be that really thick scrub shrub habitat or forest to, well, in habitat that’s going to have a lot of overhead cover, they’re fairly secretive as far as the ducks go and the habitats that they use in the behaviors that they have. So when we’re doing things like our winter waterfowl surveys, for example, in Mississippi Delta. Yes, we do see wood ducks on those surveys and we count those birds. But by and large there’s a large proportion of those birds that are never being seen with those types survey methods just because of the nature of, the wood duck and the habitat that they use. So banding is extremely important. So we can mark a known subset of the population. We know, that these birds are banded in what we call the preseason period during the summertime. The assumption is made that most or all of those birds are going to be available going into the hunting season to be harvested. And then from that we can get some estimates on what the harvest rates are, future years what the survival rates are on these birds. It’s really the best monitoring tool that we have for wood ducks.

Ramsey Russell: It’s pretty interesting to me. I shot three wood duck bands that I’m aware in the state of Mississippi. Shot one on the state WMA, shot one on one national Wildlife refuge in the Delta and shot another one on National Wildlife Refuge in East Mississippi. And before I reported them I’d have just assumed all of those birds were banded locally, but that wasn’t the case with any of them. I think it was Minnesota, Parish, Tennessee. And I can’t remember third one was Indiana or Wisconsin was somewhere up there. That kind of blew my mind because I think of wood ducks, I mean that’s our state waterfowl. I think of them as being hours. I think of them as just living and growing here and available to state. But that’s not the way, that’s not what it how it is, is it?

Houston Havens: That’s a great point because a lot of people have that thought, and it really even comes down to sometimes people, aren’t even worried about reporting a band because they just make that assumption. No, it’s a wood duck banded, it’s probably banded right down the road and a lot of times maybe that is the case. But I tell people that, a banded bird an encounter with a banded bird, especially if it’s harvested, that’s a story, and if you’re not reporting that band, you’re not getting the end of the story. It could be, we’ve got examples of birds, being harvested both ways, from far reaches of the United States coming here and being harvested by Mississippi hunters. And then on the other side of Mississippi birds that have that have traveled all over as well, and harvested by other people. When we get that information, it never gets old to me to get a band returned, a list of banded birds that were marked in Mississippi and where they went, it’s always going to be something surprising, it seems like every year.

Ramsey Russell: Where do now, you all are banding in our summertime, we’ll get into how you all are banding. And then in the fall there’s a transition. The wood ducks that were producing some of them begin to disperse and then we have an influx of others coming to utilize our habitats as winter habitat. Where do our birds go? Is there and which ones go?

Houston Havens: Yeah. So most of the band returns as you might imagine, of Mississippi mark birds are harvested in Mississippi and then if you kind of zoom out, so to speak from there, it’s kind of like a shotgun pattern, they dispersed in all directions, so the surrounding states Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, get a large portion of those birds as well as they are being distributed. But the surprising things are, we get band returns from Mississippi Mark birds that are on the East Coast, all the way up the eastern seaboard.

Ramsey Russell: Like, which one sticks out to you?

Houston Havens: North Carolina for some reason, has a decent representation.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of our birds go to North Carolina.

Houston Havens: In the grand scheme of things, probably wouldn’t say a lot, but of those birds that are going that direction, North Carolina seems to be a kind of a local spot where there’s,

Ramsey Russell: What are some other states?

Houston Havens: South Carolina, Georgia all the way up, into the northeast probably, New York. I knew, we’ve had some birds that are there made it up that far. And in particular one of the furthest ones just north of Montreal, Quebec. Not only that, it wasn’t the following season, it wasn’t what we call a direct recovery. But it was marked in late August and then, not the following September but the following year. So a bird that made it pretty extreme traveling to their winter and destination in the following year.

Ramsey Russell: Which birds of ours, age and sex are staying and which ones are dispersing?

Houston Havens: By and large, those long range dispersal are going to be the juvenile males. And so the hypothesis there is that, they’re looking for a mate during the winter here. So when they are pairing up with a migrant female is what we think is going on there then, in the spring when birds are starting their spring migration headed back north, headed back wherever that bird likely came from, then that juvenile male, they form that pair bond and he’s going to follow her back. And so that’s what we think is going on. But when we get those really long range band returns, you can pretty well bet that it’s going to be a juvenile male when it was banded.

Ramsey Russell: Do many of our wood ducks go further west than Louisiana or Texas?

Houston Havens: East Texas. I also looked at that this morning and I also looked at Louisiana and those were about the same way, about the eastern third of the state probably is about as far west as those birds are going.

Ramsey Russell: When you start putting it together, like you all are out there banding. Do you ever, so migratory female comes in pair bonds with a hatch year male in the state of Mississippi, he follows her because she’s going back to her originating nesting grounds. What they call it, Philopatry? Do any males show up from out of state and stick, do you think? Any breeding age males find a girlfriend down here and say, oh, she’s nice, she’s southern girl, I’m going to stick around.

Houston Havens: We assume that that probably happens as well, that it’s basically, once that pair bond is formed, then the he pretty much determines, wherever she’s headed to, that’s pretty much where he’s going to end up as well.

Ramsey Russell: When you all are catching birds on these areas, do you all ever recover band from elsewhere? Or bands that a male that for whatever reason didn’t follow somebody off? I mean, you know what I’m saying? To do the band recovery, show you anything.

Houston Havens: We do from time to time. Recaptures what we call that, we’re catching a bird that already has a band on it. Of course, if your band, and if you’re doing multiple shoots over, rocking head on one side, then you’re likely to recapture birds that you just banded a few weeks ago. But you always check that information because you never know just like what you’re talking about. If you’re going to get a bird that has come from, way off somewhere and it turns up and that’s valuable information as well, getting that without the bird even having to be harvested, you’re still collecting data off of that bird. And so that kind of goes back to what I say about every banded bird being a story, and that’s just writing another chapter of that story, when it turns up in a net and is able to be identified and released again with that band on it. But yeah we get some pretty neat recaptures. One of the stories that I had noted here to share with you was, a few years ago, there were two Mississippi banded wood ducks that were captured and banded about a week apart in Mississippi. I think this was around the grenade area. It was not a bird that I caught it before I got really involved with it. But the following summer, so again not caught together banded at the same site but about a week apart. The following summer, those two birds were captured in the same net in Wisconsin on a wildlife management area there. So probably some kind of philopatry event that was going on there to take both of those birds that weren’t even necessarily caught together in Mississippi to show up at the same place at the same time. However many miles that is to Wisconsin. It was pretty neat.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be done. Well let’s get it. We may come back to this, but tell me how do you band wood ducks?

Houston Havens: It’s a lot of prep work that goes into it. Of course the no brainer there is you’ve got to find good summer wood duck habitat. So we’ve got to have got to have good habitat that also has a good catch area. And what I’m talking about catch area is you think about a place where you’re going to get into hunting wood ducks during the wintertime. It’s pretty nasty, tripping over logs, underwater, things like that. So that’s not what we’re looking for when we’re trying to catch these birds. Ideally we want to get them onto clean area. A lot of times we do have to shoot the net over shallow water but we prefer to even get them on the dry ground. And so cleaning out the edge of the water area, at the edge of the wetland, and putting some bait along that shoreline first, to get the birds used to come into that bait is the first step there. And so we’ll put a camera before we put much effort into it. We’ll put a camera and be sure that we have good bird numbers using that bait site.

Ramsey Russell: What are good bird numbers?

Houston Havens: We like to see 40-50 birds here in Mississippi is a decent number, but the more the better, of course, as many as will fit into that is what we like to catch. But that’s typically, what we would, put out the effort for setting up in that and try to catch.

Ramsey Russell: And we’re talking rocket net.

Houston Havens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: So, you put seed out and get them coming in.

Houston Havens: If we have space and we have a good setup to do it. We’ll start backing that bait up on the dry ground. And so once they’re, just like anything, once they’re used to a free food source, it’s really easy to get too easy to find consistently there every day. They’re not running out of bait, showing up in the mornings and afternoons they eat. Then you can start moving it back. We learn really quickly you can get them into a dry ground shoot is much better than slopping around through the mud. And you got muddy birds that you’re later going to try to pull out of the box and identify. It’s just so much better when you can do that.

Ramsey Russell: Probably a lot less stressful on the bird too.

Houston Havens: Absolutely sure is. It’s a hot time of year. You want those birds to be in good condition when you’re releasing them to be able to fly and not have to go out there and print to get the mud and mud out of their feathers and also, it’s definitely the situation that we’re looking for. Not always doable, but that’s what we’re shooting for. So when we get them, where we want them and get them consistently using a good number of birds using the bait site, then we’ll set up the net. And Adam Butler, our turkey biologists. He tells stories of how much work it goes into was trying to hide a net from turkey, wood ducks, not really like that. Once they’re on that bait, it’s pretty easy, you could set up the net and the next day you’re ready to shoot pretty much has been our experience. But so we’re stressing out a long net, right next to a bait line driving stakes behind that net, anchor the back of the net down. And then, like you said, it’s a rocket net, so they’re, it’s three points down the length of that net. It’s going to be attached to a rocket that we have these explosive charges inside of running electrical wire to.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just shoots a balanced out like a cannon.

Houston Havens: That’s right. It’s pretty impressive for us. You definitely have to have those steaks down pretty good and definitely have to have that net anchored really well. But it’s pretty instantaneous. You don’t miss a lot of birds if they’re in front of the net, we’re always going to have some that are a little bit wary. Probably your adult, more of your adult birds that are kind of hanging back a little bit and maybe a little more difficult to catch but works very well.

Ramsey Russell: That’s awesome man. So the cannon goes off, you got 40-50 maybe a whole lot more birds flopping under a net than what?

Houston Havens: Then we’re immediately getting out of that blind, we’ve usually got a couple of trucks on back up. So it’s usually a couple of us sitting in the blind, deciding when to when to set that net off. As soon as they hear that blast, the trucks are coming with crates, poultry crates basically trying to get those birds out safely and as quickly as we can into a cool area because again this is Mississippi in the summer time, it’s pretty hot. We’ve actually been blessed this year to have some decent weather cool mornings and evenings to do it in. But yeah just the safety of the bird at that point. Just trying to minimize the handling, get it into a crate, get all the birds out of the net and then we can move into the shade or somewhere where it’s a little more conducive to handling the birds and we’re working them up.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic. Have you learned anything from a lot of these band studies in this activity, I mean because you’re hunting those ducks but you’re not hunting with a shotgun, you’re getting them to an area. Have you learn anything about wood duck? Does that made you a better wood duck hunter when you’re not trapping ducks?

Houston Havens: Some of the things that I guess, I never would have picked up on if I hadn’t been sitting so close to them and just watching them in that blind or the vocalizations, the family groups, the units that, you’ve got adults and juveniles from a bunch of different brews mixed in together. And then one other thing that I’ve noticed, our colleagues in Louisiana been dealing with this for a while, but if you’ve got a site where black bellied whistling ducks are, they can really wreak havoc on your attempts of catching wood duck. They’re very aggressive, very territorial.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, whistling ducks are very aggressive.

Houston Havens: That’s right. So they’re are bigger bird anyway, just easier for them to bully around those wood ducks. And they really like their bait as well. And so they’ll get up on that wheat and they’ll try to run off the wood ducks. So it just kind of throws another environmental factor in there, you never know what’s going to come up. You’ll have, other things, hogs, typically they’re coming at night, but a lot of times you’ll get there, ready to catch birds in the morning and hogs have rooted your net up, entangled it up. Things like nutria will come up, and a raccoon, you got birds that are just getting on bait and then here comes, something that’s just going to throw a kink in your plan, so to speak.

Ramsey Russell: Do you all band? The Black Bellied Whistling Duck?

Houston Havens: We don’t hear Mississippi. We, probably will eventually start doing that because we’re seeing more and more of them. Louisiana has been doing some and there’s been some other states that have done some marking.

Ramsey Russell: That’s where I’m getting with this, is big water and I  we’re talking a few weeks ago, of course I met with Paul link a couple of months ago and they’re growing and after hurricanes, especially Rita, which come right after Katrina. Over here in Warren County, a lot of our wood duck nest boxes started being utilized increasingly by black bellied whistling ducks. We’ve never seen them. In a decade or so we’ve been hunting out there. And now I haven’t been out there enough to look around, but usually about this time of year, if you’re driving around some shallow water and some little areas, you’ll see a little family cohort of black bellied whistling ducks, and so big water and I got to talking about this on the podcast recently and put the question out. I wonder how far these black bellied whistling ducks are being seen now, if it is here. I got inundated with boxes from Tennessee throughout Mississippi of course, Louisiana, North Louisiana, Arkansas as far, I got, I still got two or three inquiry replies from people in Indiana that are seeing black bellied whistling ducks.

Houston Havens: I actually talked to a colleague in Delaware, this year, nesting pair in Delaware.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, to me it’s kind of good news that a nice the duck decoy. Well, they work good, they’re delicious to eat. That there’s something, kind of expanding into something. I wonder if it’s got to be something more to it than just a hurricane dispersing them. Something made them pass a barrier and begin to expand in north America.

Houston Havens:  Yeah. When I started this job in 2007 it was even, just then it was fairly rare to come across them. I wouldn’t say rare to come across them but you didn’t say large numbers of them across the Mississippi delta from too much. But now they’re, we get more and more people every year, they’re like, hey what is this bird? It showed up, in the pond, behind my house and people are noticing them. They’re definitely expanding even in Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, and I have seen some flocks. I can think of one kind of camp house setting. A lot of manicured lawn around a pond, way out in the country here in Holmes County Tchula Mississippi and there must have been 150 black bellied whistling ducks sitting around like pets. That was amazing. I’ve never, I mean I had not seen anything like that have come from Mississippi, I’ve not seen anything like that at all. And, speaking of being aggressive, they will take over a nest box and push wood ducks out. And there are some people, this is not scientifically based or me saying this is just me saying what I heard, some people saying, they’re worried that as a black bellied whistling ducks were to expand or increased density in a certain area that they’re going to push out wood ducks out of those cavity because they’re both cavity nesters.

Houston Havens: Sure, right. And that’s the conflict. You know, it’s always something to keep an eye on when you have a bird that’s moving into an area that maybe they haven’t, been so prevalent in before. What we’ve seen is typically, your wood ducks are going to be nesting earlier than black bellies for the most part, but there’s definitely going to be that overlap. You’re late nesting wood ducks, your early nesting black bellies are definitely going to be competing for some of those cavities. There’s even been some instances where, if we look at a wood duck nest box that is properly sized, if you’re making that hole for a wood duck, then, there’s been some cases where black bellies have been able to get in and not be able to get out. And so you’ll have some mortality that way, definitely hate to see don’t want to have a habitat or a nesting area that was made to be a good quality area for a bird and then have some mortality is like that. But it may be something, that we could eventually adjust our nest boxes to have a larger opening, intentionally for those black bellies and kind of kind of keep them a little bit out of that competition area.

Ramsey Russell: Houston back on wood ducks. How would you characterize wood ducks habitat user transitions to different areas during the course of the calendar year? I’m assuming they’re using different areas.

Houston Havens: They are. It really, when we’re banding trapping and banding wood ducks, you think about, you’ve got to have wetland habitat that’s there in the summertime in Mississippi a lot of summers. We’ve been fortunate as far as habitat goes, we’ve been fortunate with adequate rainfall the last couple of summers, but some years, I guess what I would call an average year for Mississippi. Summer wetland habitat, shallow water wetland habitat, good foraging habitat for wood ducks maybe pretty limited. And so in those years they may be tied more to riverine systems, you know, up and down, small creek drainages. Because those areas are still going to have that bottomland hardwood habitat associated with them on the edges. So, scripture up habitat, forest the wetland habitat are going to be the types of areas that they’re going to be using pretty much regardless of time of year.

Ramsey Russell: [**00:33:07] that they love them.

Houston Havens: That’s right. Yeah, that emergent marsh habitat, that’s something that I didn’t mention, that’s actually one of our better sites in the last few years have been in that type of habitat still close to a lake bottom with a lot of bottomland hardwood around it. And that’s where we see the birds coming from when they’re kind of staging before they come up on the bait on the trap site. But yeah, that emergent marsh kind of semi-permanent wetland habitat is something very valuable. You think about, late spring, early summer when they’re having broods, they need really dense cover for that brood habitat, just because of predators. Here people said for a long time, basically everything eats a baby wood duck in Mississippi, so it’s a pretty hard life that we’ve got to have adequate cover in the areas before they’re able to take flight.

Ramsey Russell: That’s interesting. You say everything eats a baby wood duck because as you were talking previously about some of the habitat they like cover, they like getting up in stuff. They may come into an opening in timber, but it’s usually adjacent to something, swim right up into a thicket, in the winter time or the summertime, and I was in school, I love Mississippi state. Same time Brian Davis was working on his masters. And he had put a lot of little geo locators on these chicks, these little bitty by the side of a chicken egg, baby ducks. And it was amazing. How big a sample size he started with, how small it got because of predation. But it was really incredible. What I was eating a baby wood duck. I mean you think of a hawk or now, but you don’t think about a large mouth bass or a snapping turtle or an alligator or a blue heron. And he told the story one time about he finally found this chick again and he’s following it out. There is his machine is clicking to him and said and he gets there’s no baby duck, and right up in the top of that snag with blue heron and that’s where his beacon was, inside that blue herons. That’s crazy.

Houston Havens: Yeah. So when we’re working with people, they’re interested in, a lot of people are typically interested in, just viewing wildlife and wood ducks is a good example of that. So they are often interested in putting up nest boxes. And that’s usually one of the first things we ask them is, what’s the wetland habitat that you’re putting it on? And a lot of times they’ll say, well, we were trying to grow trophy largemouth bass and we say, well that’s not real conducive for the first place of that little duck’s going to go into that wetland nearby and it’s not going to end well for them. So yeah, just considering all that that habitat you want, that real dense, typically scrub shrub habitat nearby for those wood duck boxes and predator regards as you mentioned, there’s all kinds of things even before they hatch.

Ramsey Russell: The snakes going to eat them. They’re going to eat the eggs and eat the baby.

Houston Havens: That’s right. Even before they’re hatches, things are after them. So they’ve got to have the right set up to be successful.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of nest boxes and stuff like that, if you ain’t got but one red wasp nest from your entire property, it’s somewhere associated with wood duck nest box. But they seem to coexist, it doesn’t bother the ducks a bit. We were over in one of you all’s WMAs when I was with NRCS, doing just a field day with a, I don’t know, must be 40 or 50 elementary school teachers. Jeffrey Lee and I we were working for NRCS at the time and driving and we got this great. All those nest boxes had wood ducks in them. And we come with the idea, well let’s just go catch one, show it to the teachers, turn it loose. I put my head up over that hole, he was going to reach in and grab it right. That time it looked like I got, I felt like I got hit with a bolt of lightning five times. It was in wasp. We didn’t we didn’t think to look for them wasp up on that predator. My lips swelled up so big, my dip fell out. Trying to be a rock star with them wood duck, and that didn’t work out too good. Do you see a transition from those type habitats that you’re using, when you’re out there trapping them this time of year, do you see them transitioning into something else during the hunting season? Food source maybe?

Houston Havens: Right, food sources will change a little bit and then just habitat availability, hopefully we’re going to start getting, we’re headed toward fall and early winter now and so hopefully we’ll start getting more of habitat, both on the natural wetland side of things. And the role of the private landowner, Mississippi’s mostly privately owned, we’ve got a lot of great landowners, land managers, who were doing lots of great things for waterfowl habitat. And so that expansion of a forest, that well in habitat, that the birds will immediately respond to whether it’s wood ducks and mallards, I’m sure you’ve seen that plenty of times, it doesn’t take long for ducks to find new habitat. So that’s what they’re pretty well constantly looking for is those newly flooded resources of wood ducks are the same way. And then as the winter goes on later in the year, they’ll start kind of going from gathering up in those large groups to breaking off into those pairs, they’re trying to stretch for those pair bonds. So they’ll kind of bounce back to that kind of solitary type of habitat where it’s going to be really dense cover and headed on in the spring and starting the whole thing over again.

Ramsey Russell: One important thing about band data is estimating harvest. Do you all, how important or do you have an idea how important is the wood duck to a Mississippi duck hunters bag?

Houston Havens: It is. Most years going to be top three at least. So you’ve got mallards, wood ducks and gadwall those are, mallards typically going to be number one in the harvest data. And then gadwall and wood ducks are typically going to trade back and forth for the 2nd and 3rd spot. So you and I talked a little bit earlier about, outside of the delta, we still got still got plenty of duck hunters in Mississippi that they’re not always hunting in the delta. Hunting these places like the Big Black River drainage places like that. So several years ago, around 2010 or so, we were able to add a third wood duck to the bag limits. So we’ve been at two birds in the bag for wood ducks for a long time.

Ramsey Russell: It was that stemming from you all’s banding data?

Houston Havens: Absolutely. But because like we talked about, we don’t have good survey data to know what our wood duck population is. And so that banding data was very important, not just in Mississippi, but all the states cooperatively working on that to have a good dataset to know, what’s our estimated harvest rate with wood ducks, we call it a kill rate, instead of a harvest rate because it factors in a crippling loss, so to speak. Because it goes back to that habitat thing again, thinking about shooting wood ducks even if you’re a really good marksman, shooting the best ammo, might even have the best dog. It’s really tough to recover a 100% of the wood ducks. You’re going to shoot.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. Duck hunting is we just have to own that as hunters. It’s an imperfect sport. It’s like baseball, you’re going to hit, you’re going to chip the top or the bottom and sometimes you’re just not going to get a solid hit. And boy, those wood ducks are in 3ft of water of dense dog hair, thick button willows good luck with a dog catching. He’s good, but he ain’t God that wood duck know, it’s in his territory, he knows how to dive and get away.

Houston Havens: So with that banding data, we have a pretty good idea of our estimates of the percentage of those kill rates from year to year. And just like you said, that was how we were able to say, okay, with an additional bird in the bag limit, this is what we would expect that kill rate to get to, is it within our acceptable levels. And it was and it has been for several years now. So that banding data is important to continue to do so we can continue to justify why we have limits the way that we have them.

Ramsey Russell: I was asked by somebody to ask you, what about shooting wood ducks during the early blue winged teal season? Is that ever going to be a possibility? Some states do it? Some states don’t.

Houston Havens: That’s right. So Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee are the three that I know of that have that opportunity right now and basically what it came down to was a tradeoff. It wasn’t because they did anything special. They did have to do some evaluations before they could get it approved but basically what they said was, okay we’d be willing to give up this amount of our teal season in order to have some wood ducks in the bag.

Ramsey Russell: They swapped days for ducks.

Houston Havens: That’s right. So Mississippi has a 16 day September teal season. Those states, so Tennessee and Kentucky and the Mississippi flyway I know the most about their situations. And they have, I believe it’s a nine day total teal and wood duck season. So they have I believe it’s five days where it’s a combination of teal and wood ducks and then four of those days are just teal you know, teal only day. So reduced opportunity overall. But they said, whether it was through hunter surveys or biological data that they had, that was where they needed to be for that trade off. They get fewer days, but it was worth it for them to have that early season opportunity on some wood duck harvest.

Ramsey Russell: Well using banding data, because I’m, do you feel confident in your survey numbers of population density or can you see trends in populations growing and contracting through banding data or through banding sites?

Houston Havens: You can, it’s all about sample size. You’re trying to get as many as you can, of course, the more the better. So you can look at that information. One of the things that’s rarely apparent each year is just the ratio of juvenile birds’ that you’re catching. You want to see a lot of juvenile birds that gives you a good measure of what the local production has been. If you’re catching a lot of adults or not catching very many birds at all from year to year on the same side that kind of will give you a little bit of indication. But as habitat distribution may change from one area to the other. It’s kind of hard to know what your population is. Like we talked about, there’s no way that you can actually get a really good accurate survey so that banding data is just so important to be able to kind of keep tabs on what you’ve got going on.

Ramsey Russell: I guess some years you’ve got a lot of hatch your bird in some years you don’t. Does that correspond to how wet our growing season is here? I mean, because everybody knows you want more ducks and the prairies add water. It’s the same trend down here. Same thing.

Houston Havens: It could be the same, on extreme years too much water could potentially be a detriment. If you had, just at the wrong time of year. If you had, extreme floods. But we’ve had a lot of questions recently in the last couple of years about, the backwater flooding the Mississippi delta. The timing of those water levels coming up, we’re before a lot of the wood duck nesting began. And so they were fortunate that it was early enough, a landowner down in that part of the world definitely wouldn’t say that. And it wouldn’t make light of that situation whatsoever. But as far as wood duck habitat, it was a decent setup because they, for the most part had not begun their nesting attempts before that water came up. Because as you’ve seen in the south dealt a lot of places, that water got really deep for a really long time.

Ramsey Russell: For you all aren’t aware what he’s referring to is a about a half million acres that went underwater in January and stayed until August or September in places 2019. It was catastrophic. Backwater flooding, it was a densely populated area in terms of humanity, but there was a lot of farms, a lot of homes, just a lot of businesses, there’s a lot of stuff devastated by this, not the least of which were wildlife populations. That’s very interesting. I didn’t think about that. I wondered if, I did wonder, but had no idea if during that flood, maybe 12ft of water, but it probably flooded a lot of areas, mature hardwoods that had cavities. I would have thought the ducks, the wood ducks utilized that area.

Houston Havens: Yeah, and so habitat wise, if it was, as long as it didn’t fled to high and get some cavities that were already starting with nest attempts, then we theorized that wood ducks probably fair pretty well in that situation. But as we talked about earlier, relating trying to catch ducks to hunting, as you probably well aware a lot of times, you can get what hunters will call too much water. You might have decent bird numbers, but if they’re too spread out they can be hard to hunt. With wood ducks, trying to trap wood ducks that we kind of found out that it was a little bit of a similar situation if we had high water years around the sites we were trying to catch. They have plenty of habitat, the world was open to them, a little bit more hesitant to stay on those bait sites. And so that was something that we didn’t really expect to happen. We thought this site is going to be good, year after year after year, but those local conditions can kind of throw a wrench in things.

Ramsey Russell: Most of us hunters get out and hunt. We hunt, when we’re out in the field, we’re out in the field during hunting season. We’re hunting and maybe we go out scouting, but maybe this time of year, maybe in the fall or maybe in the spring we’re doing something else, we’re fishing or I don’t play golf if somebody does. We’re doing something else, and you mentioned earlier about some of the interesting social behaviors of those ducks around the bait site. And I can remember, I don’t know, five or six years ago I decided I wanted to learn to take pictures of flying ducks, which way harder than it sounds. And I went out to our camp. There’s still a lot of spring birds coming through in April and May and I baited it. I pour the corn to it. This has been, you know, late spring, but there’s still a lot of blue wings, some green wings. They probably in his late April and May. I stayed up late, but I probably got kicked off around February, March. And I’m going to tell you what, they didn’t want anything to do with that corn. They were eating the seeds, they were eating the vegetation, they were getting rooting down and getting those invertebrates, but it was so much different. And it’s so notably different sitting in the cover, not deep back in the cover because I had to take pictures without obstruction. You can shoot through something better than you can take a picture through something. And just watching those ducks on the water and through a lens, not over the top of the shotgun barrel was totally different. Their behavior was different. I mean there was no way they could not see a six inch wide piece of glass glaring at him, and they knew it was there, but they just sensed it was harmless. There was fire coming at the end of it and nobody’s dying. But even on the water, their social behavior the way they would interact with each other over food or just squabble like kids at the dinner table. It was fascinating. Can you think of any situations you’ve seen, with just wood duck behavior because a whole lot different sitting in a blind without a gun and just watching something and hunting it.

Houston Havens: So one of the things that really stands out is, we talked about that moving the bait back on the dry ground because that’s just where we prefer to catch me if we had that type of setup. Sometimes they’ll hang up for people listening who are turkey hunters, it’s kind of similar, that guy just something’s not quite right, and he’s not going to make that last marsh that he that you need to get him into to get him into gun range. Well, net range is what we’re dealing with trying to catch wood ducks. And so a lot of times they’ll come up to that edge of the water and they’ll sit there and they’ll just kind of what we call hang up. Sit there looking at the bait, but they’re not really sure about it. And then invariably what will happen is it’s going to be, that there’s a few juvenile birds that are just, they just can’t stand anymore. They’ve been on that bait before and they’re not as patient as the adults. And so they’re typically going to be the ones that are going to ease up there and start hitting that bait first. And then behavior wise, once we see that, that’s when the jealousy kicks in. It must be safe, there up there, nothing’s happened and they’re up there eating.

Ramsey Russell: So here come mom and dad.

Houston Havens: That’s right. That’s when the rest of them will kind of fall in line there so that’s just one of one of several things that I can think of with just the social interactions there.

Ramsey Russell:  That’s just amazing to me. Can you speak much to the migration? Blue winged tail season fixing to kickoff, we’re recording this a few weeks early and we’ve got fronts moving. Those birds are photo migraters, they’re coming down with a little soft front, but they’re coming down. I mean right now, as of today I have seen astounding reports, through video and social media and personal contacts of just thousands of blue wings down on the gulf coast. And yet I’ve got a biologist but from Mississippi State, also a student of Rick Kaminski, that shot a limited blue wings up in Manitoba last weekend. And a lot of adult males still intersect tells me the pipeline is full buddy, they’re just going to be a great teal season I believe. When do wood duck, what are their triggers for migrating? When do those birds start to move in?

Houston Havens: It would really take some looking at the out of state band returns. I can’t say that, I’ve really drilled down on that when our more northern banded birds are showing up here. The numbers that are thrown around as far as, how much a lot of people ask, how many, what proportion of our birds do we have here versus what we’re going to have in the wintertime, coming from other sources. The numbers that get thrown around are in the Eastern United States or anywhere from 30% to 70%. They’re going to be your resident birds. I would imagine just kind of anecdotally from what we see. Numbers building during the winter time. I would say we’re probably on that lower end so we’re probably less than half of the population of wood ducks will have in the winter, I would say are probably resident ducks that’s kind of a guess at this point. But Yeah, I mean they’re, it basically depends on where they’re coming from. How long it’s going to take them to get down here. And food habitat related, it’s probably one of the one of the more significant drop.

Ramsey Russell: Do you see a lot of in state resident transitions? Like I’m just wondering myself if ducks that bred or nested in Warren County central Mississippi Delta migrate down to Pascagoula swamp.

Houston Havens: Sure. Absolutely, sure, do. It’s not an automatic, not a given, some of them are just going to stay right there, and that’s where they’re going to winter. And others just like you said, are going to continue to go South Mississippi and the South Louisiana will get a lot of, kind of central or North Mississippi banded wood ducks that are going to turn up down there. Those are going to be direct, what we call direct recoveries where, that’s really good information, we’re looking for a bird that was banded preseason and then harvested that following season, that’s really good information because that gives us the best information on harvest rates and it’s, you have the least amount of uncertainty there because you know where the bird was, you know at this point and it most likely, you know, traveled to where it was harvested, not a whole lot of leeway in between. Whereas if we get band returns from, a six or seven year old wood duck, that just keeps going back to, that bird is a story. We don’t know all the story, we don’t know how many trips it made up and down the Mississippi River or maybe it hung around, fairly locally all those years. It’s just one of the things that is really interesting to me, kind of mind blowing just to think about, where all that bird may have gone.

Ramsey Russell: Do you all have any future plans or ambitions to put some of these geo locators this real time geo locators on some of these wood ducks?

Houston Havens: Not currently. Not anything in the works currently, but is that technology it’s advancing by leaps and bounds, it is. Those units getting smaller, more reliable. So it’s the world is definitely going to open more and more and I would say to being able to track and fine tune these moves of the birds.

Ramsey Russell: Collars are coming down, but it’s still not as cheap as an aluminum band.

Houston Havens: That’s right. It’s almost prohibitively expensive, to market a decent sample size. You get great information off of those birds, but it’s just a much lower number than, like you said, there’s aluminum bands, we’re putting lots of those out there and getting good data off of those as well.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic information right there. Every now and then, somebody stumbles across something on the worldwide internet of social media and there are two species of Aix and I guess that’s how you say the genius of wood duck. Very beautiful birds, and the other one is over in Asia and it’s a mandarin duck. And I get asked about, I’d say half dozen of 10 times a year, somebody shooting in box. Like where can I hunt things? I’m like, well, there’s no hunting down in China and Japan that I’m aware of, that’s been a tough nut for me to crack is trying to get down into Asia. There’s just a lot of limitations and barriers to hunt in that part of the world. But I’ll tell you the story. I knew a guy up north that had a big aviary and he had a really nice adult male dying. He called me and said, would you like that to mount? I said, heck yeah, I want, so I’ve got it above refrigerator, people ask all the time man, what kind of wood duck, where’d you get that thing? I don’t know. I shot back here in the swamp. I don’t know why. It looks so funny. It looks very similar, but it’s got those big sales on the back in a different crown. Well when he brought me that bird, he also brought me a live one. That was an old bird in his aviary and he said, look dude, this thing is old as Methuselah. It’s blind in one eye and I’m just getting rid of it, I figured you might want it. I said, yeah, I put them in a Croker sack, brought him home. We got to buy a three acre pond, a three acre pond in the neighborhood. And I turned him loose and he’d been pin head. So when he tried to fly, he looked like a little Woodstock there on, snoopy buddy, that it just loopy loop. When he tried to fly, and I think a house cat finally got him. Because he liked to sleep with his good eye looking at the water and he was so old and seeing how I could just about walk up to him and pick him up. I’m not an Indian, nobody could just about get hands on him when you wake up, loopy loop off into water. But the craziest thing I remember is when he handed me that bird, that live bird, it looked like a summer molt Mississippi wood duck. It did not, sure this is a mandarin? He said, oh its mandarin, I promise you. And he said, you’ll see. But when I took him out, my kids go what it looks like wood duck. I said, I think it is a wood duck be honest with you. And we talked him on the pond and he dove under like wood duck will do to evade. And he swam, you can see the swell coming up and he popped up on the top. I to understand the lake and he shook off and it’s just like watching it. I mean the most spectacular mandarin duck you’ve ever seen, it was just it was amazing, like just a real time transition from an ugly duckling to the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. I just thought I’d share that story because it’s only, there are very unique genus is what I’m trying to say. And what just astounds me, is how different parts of the world. Obviously the mandarin duck, it looks a lot like would do a lot of similar features but he is a lot more ornate, but nonetheless they’re wood ducks. They use the same exact habitat, I’ve heard of reports people I have probably shot aviary bird that got out of something, but they shoot them in wood duck habitat. It’s just genetic, they are wood ducks that it just evolved differently over in Asia than right here in Mississippi.

Houston Havens: Yeah, that’s funny. You mentioned that we get every duck season we get pictures sent in or calls about these unique birds that if they have been harvested. To be honest with you, I mean as a waterfowl biologist, a lot of times it’s hard to pin exactly what’s going on with that bird a lot of times there’s. So many aberrations of plumage, you’ve got crosses that are happening between species. They’re just really interesting. Never fails. Every season we’re going to get something that I’ve probably never seen before.

Ramsey Russell: So I get a lot. And some of them turn out to be hybrids at a glance. Oh yeah, that’s a hybrid. Most of them aren’t. I mean they’re really are. There are a lot of young duck hunters out there and they don’t have a biologist daddy or somebody’s been hunting for 50 years to kind of coach along. So when they pick up a hatch your hand gadwall. They don’t know, I mean it can be daunting for a beginner. And I tell people all the time, man just ask, somebody ask me. I really bought one of the downsides of the internet is and I hate this about social media is when somebody posts doesn’t know what this particular duck is and post it up. Well it’s a duck, its legal shoot it and they posted up and say what is this? Is it hybrid, something going on they don’t know. They haven’t been hunting 30-40 years and I always just assumed there could be a 14 year old kid being raised by single mama and it’s my chance to help them out and educate them and coach them along into the sport of ours. And I just, I hate when people, push them folks around all the way you shouldn’t shot, you shouldn’t have done this, I can’t stand that attitude.

Houston Havens: Especially with waterfowl hunting probably maybe more so than most other types of hunting is that social aspect is so important. Even if it’s not somebody you’re hunting with just the camaraderie of talking with other waterfowl hunters is just.

Ramsey Russell: We’re a waterfowl community. And we were out there on the public land duck hole, I understand that I’m in a different boat than you. So we’re on two different teams, but the boat ramp, we’re all friends. Again, we’re all in the same life raft. What now are you done with your trapping? You wood duck trapping?

Houston Havens: We are just about to wrap up, might do one or two more shoots but things are things are getting pretty close. That’s another thing to mention is we were into starting of early migratory birds seasons. You got dove hunting going on teal season coming around the corner, Canada goose season. And so once that starts happening in September we are able to still trap wood ducks. But we’ve got to be cognizant of where we’re doing the baiting. We can’t be influencing birds that are going to be they’re going to be potentially harvested by somebody. So it really pairs down, the spots that we’re able to work in and so most of our banding effort is done in July and August.

Ramsey Russell: I can see that you got to get that bait out there, not tempt somebody to shoot some blue wings or something like that. I understand. Houston, I really appreciate you coming on board. I learned a lot today. I really did. I learned a lot about wood ducks and I learned a lot about what’s going on with wood ducks. Do you have any other topic or anything else you want to discuss?

Houston Havens: I can’t think of much. We’re headed toward duck season. Landowners are kind of putting the finishing touches on habitat management. So our phones are still ringing in that regard, one of the things that we’re working with a lot of landowners now is what’s that habitat going to look at when you put the water on because a lot of times that’s not thought of, people are just going to start flooding up by a certain date. But we try to encourage a little bit of forethought before that happens. How slowly you’re going to put your water on where you’re going to put it. At different times of year just to try to, be mindful, have a strategy going forward. A lot of things that people are still able to do right now is to get into those units if they’re morsel units, not a planet crop or anything, but, do a little bit of opening. If you got really rank vegetation going, that’s right doing a little fall disk and set you up for next year or just moving an open hole that you’ll be able to have some showing water in as soon as that wetland is flooded is, can make a lot of difference.

Ramsey Russell: Have you got an opinion of how habitat conditions look statewide or in the south as compared to years past?

Houston Havens: I would say really good again for the most part, it largely tied to rainfall and when we got the rain, which most places got it throughout the summer, so it kept things going. A lot of areas, whether they meant to or not, just by default, we’re late drawdowns for morsel management. So they weren’t able to make that mistake of pulling the water off too early and getting things too dry. So I’ve seen a lot of good late producing morsel habitat. Probably a little bit of a tough here if you were trying to grow corn in a duck hole this year, but there’s definitely some places that have pulled off some good looking, agricultural crops as well.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen some good ad crops and I’ve seen some good morsel whether manager accidental, I’ve seen some good habitat conditions last year was heartbreaking when that water finally came off in August and September, you’re looking at a half million acres of nothing but mud flat, nothing for a duck, no cover, no food, no nothing. And I felt like our last season reflected that I really did. And this year I’m optimistic if we get some ducks down, I think it’s going to be a good season down south.

Houston Havens: Yeah, Well, we do what we can do here and that’s at the table. We hope the birds show up and hang around to use it. But I think we’re in good shape so far for this year.

Ramsey Russell: Folks. I appreciate you all listening. I hope you all learned a little bit about wood ducks. Hit me up in social media if you got any questions or follow up or I’ll get him back on because he’s a very knowledgeable person. Thank you all for listening. See you next week, Duck Season Somewhere.