EP 576. Chicken Little: Debunking Waterfowl Management Myths (Part 2)

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where we’re going to continue into part 2, our conversation with Dr. Mike Schumer, also the host he is of FowlWeather Podcast. Go subscribe, go listen to it. He talks about smart stuff all the time. We’re digging deep into an episode he did back this fall on the Burn It All Down about misinformation rhetoric regarding waterfowl hunting. And we covered a lot of topics last week talking about misinformation, talking about ways you can verify the credibility of information for regular folks like us. We got a little bit into evaluating waterfowl population models and now we’re going to continue with part 2 and we’re really going to dig a little bit deeper into some of this stuff. Thank you all for joining us today. Mike, thank you for joining us today.

Mike Schumer: Thank you for having me back. And you said regular folks like us. I want people to understand I’m just a redneck kid from the hills.

Ramsey Russell: You are.

“I did coon hunting and then decided to do ducks for a career and was lucky enough to train under some of the best of the best.”

Mike Schumer: I did coon hunting and then decided to do ducks for a career and was lucky enough to train under some of the best of the best. Dave Ankney, Scott Petrie, Guy Baldessari, Rick Kaminski, it’s been great and a lot of wonderful flyway biologists that I learned from as well. So I like to think –

Ramsey Russell: We talked about that last week about how all these guys are regular guys that started as duck hunters, but what you do on a day to day basis is disseminate information. The guys like me don’t. I’m relying on guys like you all to explain it, you know what I’m saying? To explain it to guys like me. And I just see so much well intended but otherwise misinformed information and these info wars call social media, and that’s why guys like myself and Listeners lean increasingly on guys like yourself to come on and explain it to us. Talk about what you do. You’ve got the podcast and I’ve known you since forever from Mississippi State University. But what is your real job?

Mike Schumer: My real job is Associate Professor of Wildlife Science at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, right next to Syracuse University, but state institution, been around since 1911, Forestry School, Wildlife pulp and paper science. Like everything about the university has something to do with the environment. We have the Roosevelt Wildlife Station there, which is like one of the only things that Teddy Roosevelt actually agreed to have his name put on, was a staunch conservationist that, the whole family was from Oyster Bay, New York, kind of downstate. And I grew up just so people are aware, not on pavement, nowhere near it, 6 square miles of open timberland all around my house. So I just want folks to always understand that, New York’s a pretty diverse place and we’re not all from the city or agree with the politics that go on with the city either. So I always feel like I got to plug that one.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you got to, but, as somebody that has passed through and hunted and done some stuff and I’m going to come up there and hunt with you one day, Mike. But you got the New York City and then you got the rest of New York, which is a pretty amazing place.

Mike Schumer: Hey, even we do a lot of work out on eastern Long Island, it’s surprising. You get like halfway out there, it’s like, farm country and pine barrens and an amazing waterfowl hunting history on eastern Long island as well. So, it doesn’t take long to get out of the city, to get back to, real folks that you and I relate to.

Ramsey Russell: How did your duck season go this year?

Mike Schumer: It was spotty. We went out to North Dakota for 10 days with my wife and the dogs and a couple friends. So we lost a little bit of the front end of our season. We did shoot the opener shot, shot 3 limits at a national wildlife refuge, that’s a draw system for the opening day. And then it was kind of, really spotty. Our early ducks moved out and I did get into, I think like out a 7 day period, I had 5 hunts. Somebody asked me the other day, that’s from down your neck of the woods, I was talking to on the phone. He’s like, man, you must really get into the black ducks up there. And so I had 5 hunts, one of them, I only killed one black duck and went home because there were guys highballing next to me and I can’t stand it when calls are screaming. But what pissed me off more is it was working and they were killing ducks. So I went home. But the other 4 days I killed, and this was in 2 different places that I had. I was hunting kind of the middle of the day. Shot 4 limits in those 4 hunts. And I had 2 of them that were 4 greenheads and 2 drake black ducks, that in New York is a perfect limit, right? And I’m talking like coming in about 10:30 and back at the home office by 01:30, done. I don’t like to complain when I get a fair share of those in. I feel like, a lot of folks now just go every day, go every day, I kind of pick my days, that’s what the FowlWeather podcast is about is, I use the algorithm that kind of picks out the days when birds are migrating in and try to hit those days. And I’d say I go half the time, I used to go, maybe 3 quarters of the time I used to go. But my success is probably twice as good as what it used to. I just don’t have the time away from the home office to do that, Ramsey. Like, I got another job, I just can’t duck hunt. I know it’s what you do.

“Boy, I tell you what, 4 greenheads and 2 black ducks is the perfect strap.”

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I tell you what, 4 greenheads and 2 black ducks is the perfect strap. And I was hunting over in Atlantic Canada where the limit was 6 black ducks, and we were shooting mallards and black ducks. And one day we had gone by, we had scouted this old slough, we’d seen it, it was nothing but hardy black ducks. And the weather got right, the wind direction was right, it was spitting snow and it was a day that I was going to hunt and start driving south. But I committed myself, I don’t care how long it takes, we’re going to get our limit. We knew we were just a matter of how long we were going to sit out there. I’m shooting all black ducks, that’s it, baby. I ain’t never shot a legal 6 black duck limit. And wouldn’t you know it, 4 black ducks on the strap, duck number 5 comes in and it’s a big, beautiful greenhead mallard. And I couldn’t help myself, Mike. So I went home with 5 black ducks and a mallard, I just couldn’t help myself. And my buddy, when it hit the water and I said, Char, he goes, wait a minute, I thought, you’re going to shoot 6 black ducks. I said, yeah, maybe next time, I couldn’t help myself.

Mike Schumer: Well, you’re probably doing those black ducks a favor by getting rid of a mallard competition for then there out east anyways.

Ramsey Russell: It’s real interesting when you start talking to those old timers that far north up there that can remember shooting all black ducks the whole lives and can remember the novelty of a mallard duck. Some of them have been hunt for 20 or 30 years when they saw the first mallard, got the crack of the first mallard, it was such a prize. And now, all these years later, they’ve got a lot more mallards on the landscape, but they choose to chase black ducks, and I don’t blame them.

Mike Schumer: Yeah, I would, too. I mean, folks don’t realize it, but most of southern Ontario, New York, there were no mallards here, there was all black ducks. I grew up on the Allegheny river in western New York, and I probably, I remember year after year after year in the spring, into early summer, seeing a pair of black ducks on the same sandbar every single year and then one year they were gone. And that was probably the last, breeding black ducks in my hometown. And they’ve moved. They’ve moved east. There’s still a good core of them, we hope to keep them with us and keep the mallards at bay, to the further west, for sure.

“I mean, I would say that there are parts of the deep south that duck hunting is woven into their cultural fabric, and that’s why this is very serious and it’s very difficult.”

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Mike, let’s continue with our conversation. This conversation all stems from your famous Burn It All Down episode. Misinformation rhetoric about waterfowl management must end. And boy, was it an impassioned monologue bringing a lot of information. And I invite you to come on the links down below, if folks that hadn’t heard it need to hear it. You all need to be plugged into FowlWeather podcast anyway, it’s a lot of great technical information. And Mike, I want to kick off this conversation today, reflecting on waterfowl hunting culture. And it’s very difficult for a lot of us duck hunters that don’t work in the field to stay abreast of everything. But first and foremost, no matter what, a lot of the information in my world is coming, and a lot of the topics we’re talking about revolve around duck hunters. And duck hunters are a very passionate and very committed, whether they’re in the field of wildlife management or not. They are a very impassioned culture that encompasses traditions and ethics and practices and community values. I mean, I would say that there are parts of the deep south that duck hunting is woven into their cultural fabric, and that’s why this is very serious and it’s very difficult. Like you coined the word info wars in the previous episode, just how there’s so much information hitting us out there today with these social medias and podcasts and everything else. But a lot of it may not be actual. But today, the link to episode one is down below in the caption. But today, let’s talk just a little bit more about waterfowl hunting in the context of waterfowl management, so to speak. And I’ll lead off of this question. How do you see historical hunting practices having contributed positively to current conservation efforts and policies?

“Now it seems we have fewer hunters, but in an age where you can work from home, more time off, maybe more leisure time for some people, and there seems to be a cultural shift towards, I got to go every day.”

Mike Schumer: Yeah, I think that’s a great lead into this. And I want a caveat that I have been hunting, I would say, 35 years. So that’s probably right around where I’m at, maybe getting plus, I’m older than what I think now. But I came into this after that kind of 1986 low. I was born in 1974, started duck hunting when I was about 16, maybe a few years earlier than that with my dad. And so I’ve never seen the full bottom of it. And so I think I was spoiled on the front end. And I think a lot of the waterfowling culture out there, the old timers, if they’ll let me call them that, that it was much different, it was much more relaxed. I think there were a lot more duck hunters, but people probably didn’t go as much. Now it seems we have fewer hunters, but in an age where you can work from home, more time off, maybe more leisure time for some people, and there seems to be a cultural shift towards, I got to go every day. And that has really changed the duck hunting culture. And this is just from talking with folks that have been with it a long time, and even in my 35 years, it feels the same to me that it has changed, right, Ramsey? And maybe my math isn’t right. If somebody’s adding this up 1974, started 16, 30, whatever. 30 years. Been duck hunting a while. And I also just talked to a lot of old timers and traveled right up and down flyways, east and west and tried to really get a, just because it’s the constituency I work with, get a grasp on how stuff has changed. Much slower paced, much less competitive. We didn’t have boom boxes on our boats, we didn’t have surface drive stuff. I’m still hunting out of kayak. I go with guys in boats on big water, but I’m a more like a pirogue type guy. I mean, my kayak is, I got a what we call punt paddle 17ft and I pull my way through the marsh, these big cattail marshes. I go by myself a lot or just with my wife, I don’t hunt in giant groups. I feel like the old tradition of duck hunting exists still in some places, lots of times on private clubs. But the public hunting has changed. So I think culturally we’re in a different spot. We are really interested in giant piles of ducks. And Ramsey, I’m the first one that’ll say, like all these surveys out there say duck hunters don’t have to shoot ducks to be happy. And I’m like, yeah, but when there’s a whole pile of dead ducks, at the end of the day, you’re not sad. It didn’t make your hunt worse, but it shouldn’t be your goal, right? The camaraderie, being there with the ducks, working ducks properly into range, not treetop shooting them. Having a well behaved dog, respecting your fellow hunter, those things matter. The first thing I do when I get to a boat ramp and there’s other people there and I don’t hunt very clogged up boat ramps, we just don’t have that here. But I get to know people, I’m like, hey, where are you going? Like, if they got there before me, they got there before me. And I’m not going to even run ahead of them to launch before they do. I’m like, you guys go ahead, where are you going? I’ll go someplace else. That seems to be lost a little bit. I’ll leave it there. I feel like we got to slow our roll a little bit, slow our pace a little bit. Be okay with the pursuit of shooting a bag limit, I think that that’s the goal. We don’t go there to not shoot ducks, but then, be okay that we don’t, maybe not show it off as much on social media. It’s not a, can I say a blank measuring? It’s not a blank measuring contest, we’ll leave it at that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s not a big stick measuring contest.

Mike Schumer: There you go. But I’ll leave it there. That’s culturally kind of where I’m at.

Ramsey Russell: But since you open that can of worms, as somebody that does post a lot on social media and keep up with a lot of people that post on social media, I know there’s a thought train going out into social web right now to call for a complete and utter cessation of posting any hunting and fishing online, saying that it’s almost contributing to a decline in hunting quality. And I say, okay, I can see that side, except for the fact how the heck else are you going to communicate and share with your friends? Text a thousand people? I mean, it’s what we do. I mean somebody has carved freaking buffalo drawn on the side of a cave, we’ve shared this imagery with people, and can some of the way or some of the things people are posting be modified to reflect a better, more conservation value for hunting? Yeah. Mike, you were talking about hunting and how hunters and stuff have changed. And it reminds me of an online social media type survey that somebody put out recently. And I listened to some of the results and I was shocked to hear, I mean it was a great survey, a lot of people from around the country participated, it was shared and whatnot in social media and folks logged in and participated in that survey. And the number that stuck out of my mind was that the average number of days that participants that replied to this survey hunted was 40. 40 days. 60 day season in most places. 40 days. I think back that greater generation, the world’s greatest generation, our granddad’s era, there ain’t no way my grandfather hunted that many days. He probably hunted 5 or 10 days maximum to include Christmas break in the 50s and 60s and 70s, no way he hunted 40. But okay, so let’s say that. And I told this to somebody I was talking to on the phone the other day and he called bullshit right off the bat, that ain’t average. That ain’t the average duck hunter, American duck hunter, let’s say, a million duck hunters in America, that’s not the average. And he asked me the question. He said, well, how many? And I don’t know what year this was, but let’s say it’s in the past 2 or 3 seasons. He said, what would the average harvest?

Mike Schumer: I said, 9.

Ramsey Russell: 9. There was 9. And I borrowed that number from 2021, 2022 season, I believe. The estimated North American duck harvest was 8.1 million ducks, and there were about 900,000 hunters. I said, 9? That’s pretty easy math, even for a redneck like me. And he said, when I know it was 11, there probably ain’t nobody hunted 40 days to kill 11 ducks, could have been a few. So let’s just say as a subset that the social media hunters who are probably the savvy, most enthusiastic, maybe that’s an enthusiastic segment of the people that we’re all networked with on Instagram and whatnot, but still, that’s a shocking number just a subset. There’s a subset of enthusiastic hunters that are hunting 40 days per season, which is 2/3^rd a season in the state of Mississippi. I mean, wow, that’s a lot of days hunted and as compared to maybe yesteryear’s generation, that if you weren’t a guide, a professional guide or outfitter or something back in the day, or a punter working on one of them old clubs that you hunted up, spent that many days in a duck blind.

Mike Schumer: Yeah, those boys that were doing the disturbance survey stuff in Tennessee, they’re flying over Real Foot lake is, they can tell if somebody’s in the blind is like, is the spinner on or not type thing, right? And they’re like, man, they just blinds that get hunted every single day. Every day. Every day there’s somebody in it. Those ducks showing up there, hear guns every single day. That surprised me.

Ramsey Russell: And wonder why you ain’t got ducks flocking in like the good old days. Bradley Cohen was on here, you mentioned him last episode. Bradley was on here, he’s done a lot of hunting pressure research. One of our top episodes actually was his conversation around hunting pressure and boy it’s been a while, so don’t quote me on these numbers, but I do remember that, let’s just say within about a mile and a half diameter as a circle with a mile and a half diameter, he estimated 42 blinds active blind in that area. That is a lot of hunting pressure in an area that’s a lot of folks going out. And he said, an overwhelming amount of those during their survey were active, because he could see the spinning wing decoys or something going on out there that indicated that those blinds were active a lot of days.

Mike Schumer: And what surprises me is culturally people are okay with that because in all honesty, one of the reasons I hunt middle of the day is to avoid being next to somebody. And then one of the reasons I hunt, some of the draw hunt stuff we have is because they restrict the number of people that are in there. And the experience that the harvest at one hunting party per 50 acres and one hunting party per 100 acres, the harvest is about the same. Because they’ve changed that through time. It’s about the same.

Ramsey Russell: Repeat that again.

Mike Schumer: Yeah. The harvest, the daily harvest ducks shot per hunter at 1 party per 50 acres compared to 1 party per 100 acres is about the same.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Schumer: And I’ve hunted that, there is one marsh specifically nearby the house that went from 1 party per 100 to 1 per 50, they up the numbers of parties in there. And there’s two things that happen is that it takes longer, so you can’t get this in the data. It takes longer at one party per 50 because there’s guns going off around you. And so you’re working a bird, bunch of birds, and there’s closer guns and there’s a shot and they bugger off. So it takes you longer to get up to get a limited ducks. The other thing that was happening at one party per 100 is, I mean, the experience is just that much better, you feel alone out there in the marsh. I’d work a big, let’s say a big group of ducks, 100, 200 birds that don’t come in, they go land somewhere in between parties in the middle of the marsh. Later on, pair of mallards come in, pick out the green head, shoot at, watch those ducks don’t leave that marsh at 1 party per 100 acres. The experience at that density for the hunter and for the ducks is better. And so those places where you’re saying there’s 42 blinds in this small area. What I don’t understand, I wouldn’t want to hunt it, right? I don’t want to kill a duck that bad to have to deal with all that traffic, all those blaring calls and all that stuff, that’s me. And this is where culturally, folks are different. I’m not going to vilify anybody. I got guys that I’m good friends with in the same marsh that hunt right till noon, because you’re allowed to hunt till noon. And I’m like, man, if I ain’t shot my ducks by 9 o’ clock, I’m going home because I got other stuff to do. But the one dude, good friend of mine, listened to the FowlWeather podcast all the time, sells fertilizer, does farm equipment sales and stuff like that. And it’s his downtime and he’s got like two months freewheeling to do whatever he likes. So he’s like, what am I going to do? Go home and sit in front of the TV or, whatever else? He’s like, I’m going to sit here till noon and it takes me that long to scratch my ducks out? Fine, go for it. I’m not going to judge, it’s not what I find enjoyable, I got other stuff to do.

“I mean that’s undeniable that hunting pressure is having an effect in bag harvest and undeniable that it is having an effect.”

Ramsey Russell: It’s a real delicate balancing act because we spent a lot of time last episode talking about population models. A lot of frustration in the duck hunting world today that is converting into misinformation or let’s just call it dangerous rhetoric out there is, stemming from a decrease in bag harvest. And it’s not as simple to me as what the population is doing necessarily or what the be pops are necessarily, we’re going to talk about that in a minute as just the freaking fact that there’s a lot of diehard hunters on the landscape hunting 2/3^rd of the season and creating this hunting pressure. I wonder and I’m thinking of my buddy Ryan showing me an old market hunters way back in the 1800s or early 1900s, showing me the diary of a hunter that on one particular day, even back then literally his daily entry was didn’t see shit. That’s literally what the old man wrote down in his journal, and I’ll never forget that. But now in the modern era, fewer hunters and that’s fewer duck hunters and that is a statistical fact, competing more aggressively than any form of humanity in the past and on a shrinking landscape. And I mean that’s undeniable that hunting pressure is having an effect in bag harvest and undeniable that it is having an effect. And one of the most disappointing and confusing things to me about this dangerous rhetoric, Mike, and I’m building up to a point, I promise I am, is how it’s become manifest. There are groups and person plural, one more little cliché out there, there are people all over the United States and I was shocked to see this as someone that went through the wildlife programs and has worked for federal government agencies and an ardent supporter of NGOs out there on the landscape and have raised my own children as best I could to be enthusiastic and ethical hunters and to contribute to it. I am seeing from a lot of different sources a call to end the 3 R’s recruit, retain, I mean, just to get rid of, quit inducing more people to hunt. And that’s coming from all over right now. There’s not enough places. And I’m seeing this thing that the only reason that we’re stuck in a 6 and 6, forget the model you explained last week, it’s all about industry trying to sell us gadgets. We don’t need more hunters. And I’m like, God, that’s wrong. I mean, our mutual friend Heath, first expressed hunting as crowd sourced funded conservation. And I mean buddy, that described it, we need more people, we need more people on the landscape, because a lot of this, practically all of the science and the conservation practices on the continent right now are coming from hunters, first and foremost. Hunters. We’re the ones putting our money where our mouths are. And it’s still not enough. We’re still losing habitat. We’ve continued to lose habitat with this ongoing drought. You can’t really go and tile these fields and do what you need to drain wetlands until it’s dry and by God you can get in there and drain them then to where they don’t ever hold wetlands and grass again. So I’m beating all around the bush but I’m just trying to talk about the importance of hunting and hunters in conservation in perpetuity.

Mike Schumer: Yeah, paramount. Probably our most important, in my opinion, most important conservation concern, conservation need right now is to keep passionate people out there in some shape, manner or form. Our biggest enemy, some people ask me what’s the biggest enemy of grasslands and wetlands? Apathy.

Ramsey Russell: Yes.

Mike Schumer: Not being involved. Not writing your representatives and saying, hey, wetlands matter, right? Like, find a way to keep wetlands with us. There’s multiple reasons that wetlands are important, right? It’s not just ducks, for us, it’s ducks, but it’s other things that humanity, depends on. Grasslands are the most imperiled ecosystem on the planet. And we are wholesale, for the most part, turning them into, row crop corn, soybean, wheat or parking lots, lots of things. I mean, I don’t hide behind the fact that marginal farming practices are the single thing that has probably reduced wetlands and grasslands out there on the prairies for ducks. Like, we can’t hide behind that. I’m not vilifying farmers, I come from a farming background and vegetable farmers, but farming background in western New York. Heck, my grandfather was the manager of the buffalo farmer’s market for 30 years. So don’t think that I’m like anti farmer, it’s just the reality of what’s happened out there. And folks in Delta and DU can’t be like, oh, farmers are the problem. I mean they got to work with them. And there is a lot of ranching and cattle grazing and things like that, that really help Ramsey. Like it’s not all detrimental, but grassland loss and wetland loss is real. And we should acknowledge that as a people, as a passionate group of duck hunters, we can’t hide behind that, that it’s not, we can’t pretend like it’s not a problem.

Ramsey Russell: Farming is not vilified. It all goes back to one of them 1960s hippie words called progress and progress is inevitable because we got more people and more demands on the resource for more people. But to your point, about grasslands and the value of hunting and the need for more hunters and recruiting hunters and retaining hunters and re-engaging hunters, those 3 R’s we talk about and this crowdsource funded conservation model, to your point, first seen by my eyeballs on Ducks Unlimited social media feed and then later distributed in report form on a listserv that I follow was the state of migratory birds. Did you see that graph? And that graph was just like eye popping because ducks and geese are kind of hanging in there, man. Believe it or not, this guy ain’t really falling, they’re hanging in there comparable to 1970 levels. But Buddy, everything else is plummeting. And when you get into those grassland bird species, man, I mean, we’re looking at some -30%, -40% in the last 50, 60 years of how some of these migratory bird populations are just absolutely plummeting. And it’s not just in North America, it’s worldwide. And again, I mean, when you look at that, I sent that to one of my sons. I said, what do you think about this? And he said, wow, if that doesn’t speak volumes about how hunting is conservation and hunting dollars are conservation, I don’t know what does, and it just speaks for itself. Mike, I’m going to ask you this question. In terms of modern conservation science, are there any traditional duck hunting practices that need to be revaluated? You know what the first thing that comes to mind for me is hens. Because I hear a call, a rally to the troops to scale back on shooting hen mallards, which is the only migratory waterfowl species that we differentiate on hens versus drakes. And I get it, but it’s the same time, because dead hens don’t lay eggs, we’ve covered that topic in a previous episode. But at the same time, I do not – as somebody that has shot hen mallards because it happens. And as somebody that has shot hen blue wings and hen Canada geese and hen snow geese and female everything else, I do not leave the house to target hen duck. And I don’t know a hunter that does. I don’t know a single hunter to go down and said, I’m all shoot the f-bomb out of hen ducks today. Nobody does man. A flock of green wings comes in, we’re all grabbing those purdies. Blue wings, same way, fall winter, blue wings, I should say, nobody goes out and targets the hens. I saw some data one time a spreadsheet that Luke Naylor sent me and it was just eye popping, I mean, I guess a guy could spend the rest of his life pouring over harvest data and but down the deep south there were states that are shooting 3.9 drakes per 4 duck limit, which tells me there ain’t nobody, and even up north where it’s hard to differentiate September up in Minnesota, Wisconsin, very hard to differentiate between hens and drakes when they’re all in their basic moat. Nonetheless, they’re shooting almost 3 drake per hen. Man, that’s some sharp eyeballs out there. But can you think of any other traditional practices? I had an old timer on here recently, grew up hunting, been hunting for, he’s 78, started hunting when he was 5 or 6 years old with his daddy out in South Carolina. And the stuff he talked about, shared were really some very interesting stuff. But he kind of talked about missing the days that, back in his day the best duck hunters had a 5 horse outboard, and things were relatively quiet on the landscape. There were some things he missed. But I’m just curious as somebody like yourself, can you think of any traditional practice we should re-evaluate in light of modern conservation?

Mike Schumer: That’s a good one. I mean, the technology is obviously advanced and where you start to think about, in a traditional sense, I say no. I mean, I think we’re in a good spot, Ramsey. Like from the traditional kind of approach to waterfowl hunting, I’m not going all the way back to punt guns and live decoys or anything like that, but post market hunting days, the conservation ethic has kind of been there. Do we have some technology now that gives us opportunities to lure birds in better and get to places that we couldn’t before, you know? Sure, we do. But is that something that so greatly impacts the population that we need to regulate it? Probably not in most cases. If this pressure thing is real to some extent removing whatever disturbance there is beyond guns, I think is a great idea. There are clubs on Lake St. Clair in Ontario that are so small that they don’t allow anything other than an over under or side by side 20 gauge. And they actually let fragmites grow on their berms, which is an invasive plant, but it deadens the sound so that they can reduce the pressure on units that they’re not hunting on those days. And it is frowned upon to overshoot and not hit birds that you’re shooting at. The large loud motors running all through the woods, and this is on Great Lakes wetlands too. There is a disturbance factor there. A lot of these types of systems push birds to just feed at night. There’s a lot of night feeding that goes on when that disturbance happens. My least favorite thing that I experience on almost an annual basis is somebody with a 10 gauge and BBs banging away at wood ducks at 60 yards. like, who needs a cannon that big? I mean, traditionally, I feel like folks worked very hard at their skill at shooting. And now sometimes it’s like, how many shells can I shoot? Is the metric of did I have a good day hunting? Ramsay, oh my goodness, the last hunt we had this year, we had a great spot, this little small hole in wetland, got the dog in there, got the decoy set, it was a tight spot for ducks to get into a 20 mile an hour wind. She shot 10 times, she’s much more reserved than me, killed one duck. I shot 20 times and killed 3 birds, it was gross. We tried to go back the next day, but that was our last day, the marsh froze out, we basically had coffee and breakfast on the drive in and drive out and the dog got a little run on the berm, but we never ended up being able to hunt. And we went because my wife’s like, we got to make up for yesterday, that was disgusting. And that’s happened to all of us, it was one of those days where the angles were weird. As soon as we missed our first two flocks, I should have been like, hey, let’s reset up over here, but the birds just kept coming, we kept banging and that shouldn’t be the norm. Maybe I’m getting off topic from you, but I mean, as far as old traditions go, I don’t know, that’s where I go with the slow your roll thing. And maybe think about, you don’t have to get to every part of the woods and maybe there are spots that ducks should be able to exist without people getting to them. Because we didn’t run a boat up there in 2 inches of water to get to them. It’s kind of like a give the ducks a break thing a little bit sometimes, especially this is mostly public land stuff. I think the private guys do a very good job of providing that.

Ramsey Russell: I think they do. In fact, we’ve got an episode coming up that tips for mitigating hunting pressure. And it’s going to be from coast to coast. I’ve reached out to clubs and private landowners and managers that I know that do a really good job. Some of them are shooting small bores, some of them have real strenuous hours, but all of them consistently kill waterfowl. And all of them have a live or die rule for managing hunting pressure.

Mike Schumer: Let me jump into something because we did an episode that I got crucified about, and it was why every state needs a draw hunt. And one of the points was there is no private hunt club that’s just got like 20 members, it’s just like, go whatever you want. And if there are and go wherever you want, then if there are, they’re basically underutilizing the property and the potential to shoot.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Mike Schumer: So then why do we not have – I mean, why are people so offended by that, by a draw hunt? Here’s what people say when you survey them. They don’t want to have to drive more than an hour, they don’t want interference from other hunters, and they want to have opportunities to see and shoot ducks. You know how you do that? Yes, somehow manage pressure. And you put a lot of areas so nobody has to drive more than an hour and somehow you manage pressure. Because here’s the thing, no one meters themselves, Ramsay. Heck, this place I was telling you about, where I shot, well, I probably could have let it build up to more birds. Yes, it was good. But there’s places where I’ll go, if I see a hundred birds in there, I’ll go shoot it on public because if I don’t, somebody else is going to. So we’re all guilty of it. It’s the tragedy of the comments. No individual person is ruining, but together we definitely are ruining it for each other.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Mike, how do you think that the hunting community as a whole can bridge generational gaps to foster mutual respect and understanding, especially as it regards ongoing conservation strategies? You know what I’m saying? And I’m seeing again, coming from social media, I’m seeing generational gaps. How I was raised, how you were raised, how us old “boomers” I’ve been called a boomer twice by little whippersnappers in social media that disagreed with something I said or did. And okay, well I can remember my old granddaddy not liking my long hair. You know what I’m saying? My music and I’m not trying to be that old guy. But we’ve got to admit there has been a cultural shift in generations. And I tell you what I’m thinking of last episode you were talking about, I believe I recall you mentioning the goose season on the Atlantic Flyway. Those guys having safe stops and wanting to go from a 30 to 1 for the upcoming season based on, that may be the James Bay population of Canada geese. And let’s face it, on those same wintering grounds there are a shit pile load of residents. Resident Canada geese.

Mike Schumer: For sure.

Ramsey Russell: And I was like, good gosh. I read a thread the other day and a younger generation than myself, he’s entitled to his opinion, I just vehemently disagree saying he wish that population would just go and just go extinct and not factor in the management because he wanted to go shoot all those Canada geese he saw out there in his backyard. Wow, I can’t relate, man. So I’m that boomer generation.

Mike Schumer: Yeah. Taught to think. I mean I play the long game, right. Like I’ve always been taught, be introspective, blame yourself before you blame others for anything. And do good work and be good to your neighbor. And part of being good to your neighbor is not for today but for tomorrow as well. And this comes back to the flooded timber stuff, Ramsey. Like folks saying I don’t care as long as I get mine before I die.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Schumer: And that is not the mentality of old school waterfowlers. I mean, the folks that dedicated their lives to waterfowl conservation, that started the co-op units through the USGS, got Pittman Robertson running, thought about the duck stamp and what that was going to do in perpetuity. The folks that started Ducks Unlimited and Delta, none of them were like, hey, let’s do this thing so that we can kill the snot out of ducks for the next 20 years before we die. They’re playing the long game and I think that, that culturally is something that, we’ve got to maybe reinstile. It’s not all about you, it’s about us as a community. On our podcast, I talk about, Duck Country USA and the culture of duck hunting across this great country. And I truly believe that it still exists and it will continue to. And hopefully, at least, these young generation, I feel like that person now I’m 51 years, well, 50, I’ll be 51 this summer. But I feel like I’m being overly judgmental. But the intent here is to say maybe re-evaluate and think about it as you as part of a community, well beyond just your small core group of folks and competing with others to go on every day and out shoot everybody else and then jam it up on social media and hey, I’m with you, like I post pictures of dead ducks too, Ramsey. But here’s the thing, you try to put a conservation message with it, I’d use the word vehemently, but that’s usually an anger. But man, eat your ducks and talk about the quality of ducks as food too. One of the premises of the North American model of wildlife conservation is that animals are not just targets. Ducks are not just flying targets, they are not just sport. They are meant to be respected. And that’s part of the culture that we may be losing as well.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the damn sure don’t exist for you to build an alter ego and alter social media ego on top of. I mean, there’s a greater value to that. But I really struggle as I get older and as somebody that raised my own kids, I struggle with it because I really feel like I’m open minded, I feel like I’m far more open minded than my granddad was with regard to long hair and rock and roll. And I do understand having done what I’ve done for the past quarter century, brokering hunts and doing things of that nature. Somebody asked me one time, well, what have you learned about people or what have you learned about duck hunting, the past 25 years? Somebody asked me that at dinner this past December, to which I replied, well, I’ve just learned that duck hunting, especially because that’s my world is a very subjective experience, man. I’ve met guys that are happy to go out and just drink a cup of coffee and watch the sun rise, they’re typically older, but not always versus guys that are absolutely come wheeling into the boat ramp playing heavy metal at full throttle, jump into a loud boat with a loudspeaker and do the same thing, come blaring into it and want to kill every duck on earth. I mean, I’m not saying anybody’s wrong, I’m just saying everybody’s approach is different. And boy, I tell you what to follow back up on what you’re talking about, the Arkansas Green Timber, Mike, I’m thankful that I don’t have to tow that line, and make those hard decisions because it’s really a paradox. On the one hand, what do you tell a 3^rd or 4^th generation hunter that has hunted that property forever for generations now, why it’s going to be dry or we got to go in there and do some management activities. But on the other hand, to balance it out, you are in charge and you are responsible as professional to ensure that the habitat values are there for future generations. And there’s no quick fix. It’s not like deleting a post on social media and posting it back up, we can’t wave a magic wand. We’re talking 30 or 40 year harvest cycle to get red oak regeneration back in there, to get those soils drained and get them back functional for that mid succession species, it’s a very daunting process.

“They were wrong, and they were trying to screw me. These are people who are literally in the marshes, in the woods, in the fields next to you, also hunting, also using the resource, and you’re paying their paycheck.”

Mike Schumer: Well, I’d like to loop this back to the dangerous misinformation out there. And you’ll hear, I’ve seen on social media, it’s like, well, the only reason they’re doing it is because all they care about is deer hunters and they’re harvesting the timber and making money, and that’s why they’re draining these things. And that’s just very far from the truth. And so my father was this way, too. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is not perfect, they do make mistakes. But what he would do is at every possible turn, whatever the decision was, they were the enemy. They were the enemy. They were wrong, and they were trying to screw me. These are people who are literally in the marshes, in the woods, in the fields next to you, also hunting, also using the resource, and you’re paying their paycheck. Why would it make any sense for them to be out to get you? And so, like, Arkansas Game & Fish is taking it on the chin for those management practices and those green trees from that type of comment out there and then it somehow spreads. And I think one of the things I could talk to folks about is like, just maybe tone down the hate a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s not personal.

Mike Schumer: Like, think about it from – it’s not personal. And maybe think about it like, every single time, be like, they’re trying to do the right thing, even if they get it wrong. And it’s very obvious it’s wrong and that does happen. Nobody’s saying that doesn’t happen, I wouldn’t say it’s the case a lot of times, but give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s the same thing that we started last episode with I think, it’s that any misinformation out there that’s spread by people, I’m not really, like, upset at them or anything like that. They’re passionate, they’re trying to find something out there that they can do to save the ducks and to keep ducks around. No one’s going into this, like, intentionally spreading misinformation. So I say, like, try to find the positive. Even though I kind of disagree with how people might approach spreading information around, it doesn’t mean that I’m like, I have hate for that person, it’s not what it is. And so maybe look at what people’s actions are as positive. Maybe don’t start with the hate portion of it I think might get us a long way.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I agree Mike. I can think of ways, you can think of ways, I’m sure and I’m asking you how do you think this misinformation rhetoric is compromising the values of crowdsource funded conservation? The values of hunting to conservation? I mean, it’s manifest. I mean people calling for a cessation of 3 R’s, people say and to hell with managing timber, right? I want to hunt it now. I mean, but can you think of any other examples?

Mike Schumer: Repeat the question again. I kind of got lost in the discussion there, I apologize.

Ramsey Russell: How misinformed rhetoric is compromising the values of hunting to the conservation process or to the conservation model itself?

Mike Schumer: Well, I think lots of times when people come in hot and attack agencies, attack DU, attack Delta, their feds, everybody that’s involved in that conservation process, right? That people put up walls pretty quickly too, from that side of things. It creates an unnecessary divide of an us against them that should not be there. So as simplest terms, we kind of said it in the last episode is like, do your homework, take some time to investigate the information you see on social media and make sure you’re getting, a quality message, maybe dig a little deeper, right? I will tell you this across the conservation community, call it like the 20, 23, 24, 25 kerfuffle that’s going on now that we saw back in, 2005, 2008, when we had low mallard populations and low duck populations in general at that point, at that time. But this new thing, it’s eaten a lot of folks time to just deal with an angry constituency that is asking for answers. Now I will say, like I did on the last episode, the conservation community folks like myself need probably to do a little better job with messaging and such, kind of cut this stuff off at the pass a little bit. I mean, that’s on us too. But it takes homework, it takes hard work on both sides. The hunting community should look for good information, ask good questions, not jump to conclusions, not hate their agencies and non-profits that are working for them. And then also on our side, we should probably do a better job working hard to inform folks. And I tell you, like, and you know this, like across some of the social media, sometimes they just got to turn it. I had to put one page on pause for a month because I was about ready to blow a top stressing me out reading the comments. But I could spend all day just trying to help inform people. But as you know it’s not always worth it, it’s a tough fight. So we do it through the podcast, it was, again, it kind of developed organically to try to really get the good information out there to folks, it wasn’t the intent. I wanted to do like guests and just the migration forecast and keep it short. But we’ve launched into kind of an info campaign a little bit here and I think it’s timely, it’s what was needed anyway, and Ramsey, I think this is a great episode, the last one was, and I hope what we’re doing on the FowlWeather podcast is really helping, arm people with good information.

Ramsey Russell: I want to bring us home now, Mike, because we’ve been yammering for two episodes almost about this topic, the dangerous rhetoric. And here’s the deal, there’s 900,000, let’s round up, say a million. There’s 900,000 duck hunters in the United States of America, there’s 330 million Americans, most of which don’t give a flying flip up out of duck or wetlands or grass or anything else we need. And the utter danger of misinformation is boiling down to unfounded claims, conspiracy theories. They’re just extending the season to sell us shit. Inflammatory statements, and it’s all undermining scientific consensus and most importantly, it is sowing in utter discord. At a time that we by gosh, need to be 900,000 hunters locked arm in arm and drawing a line for conservation, now we’re beginning to fractionalize ourselves, over a lot of misinformation. And I am seeing and picking up on a lot of erosion in the trust of management authorities, and that I believe is going to further hinder conservation efforts. What are some of the-?

Mike Schumer: Can I just give that an amen?

Ramsey Russell: Yes. Yeah. Well, thank you, sir. But Mike, I mean, you really went home on your episode, Burn It All Down episode. And you just, amen, you just blessed my little sermon. But what are your thoughts on this? I mean, what are some of the specific examples where unfounded claims have disrupted conservation or policy implementations or what do you see as the threat? You said in the last episode how Fish & Wildlife haven’t been sued since adaptive harvest management, but that a lot of anti-hunters are clambering to shut down duck hunting no matter what. By God, they’re kind of hard to dispute their science. So, the judges aren’t jumping on board with them. But I mean, how do managers feel about duck hunters themselves criticizing what they’re doing? It ain’t just the anti-hunters now, it’s some duck hunters.

Mike Schumer: It’s frustrating. I think it’s frustrating, right? When you work that hard in your career and you’re putting your best foot forward every day. You get up, get your coffee, you get your biscuits, you kiss your wife goodbye, you send your kids off to school, you go to the office, you go to the field and you pound away and you’re doing it for the duck hunters, and then, you get slapped in the face across the social media waves, right? It’s frustrating. I think a lot in it and it does create a little bit of a dividend. And then I think the biologists and such, they put their guard up, because they feel like they can’t talk to a public and have them listen. It’s like the decision’s already been made that you’re the bad guy. So I think that’s the danger. Getting politics involved in this is just as bad of a slippery slope as what’s been going on out west with the mountain lion stuff and all that, right? None of this stuff’s based on the good information out there. The antis are doing it based on feelings. I really don’t want to equate the duck hunters to, doing it based on feelings, but it is not in the same way. But it is based on perception that might not be reality. What you’re seeing all the time in your small part of your world might not be what’s going on at the larger part of the world, that others work. And so understanding that the information being put forward could lead to political action, which puts us back to the subjective in the worst spot we could be. Because again, just because you’re looking out for duck hunters doesn’t mean that subjectivity doesn’t weasel in there that is something that the antis get their hands on, which is woefully not based in science at all. So I think we need to be careful with it. It’s okay, here’s where I’m at, I don’t want to say don’t question people, that sounds horrible and it is horrible, but it’s like, bring guests on that can explain things, listen to them. And on social media, try to engage with folks that are going to give you kind of pretty objective answers to things. Don’t always just try to hunt up your own narrative. And I think we’ll be in a lot better spot. But a perfect example. And here’s the deal, I’m not making this political, but this is a weird one that happened. Ducks Unlimited didn’t get fully doged, but somebody blew a whistle and said Ducks Unlimited has spent $48 million in the last 10 years and the duck population’s decreased by 4.8 million. And that was the comment trying to say that Ducks Unlimited was just an inefficient machine, I don’t know if you saw that, Ramsey that was floating around social media –

Ramsey Russell: I did not see that. But I can tell you somebody that in a former career, I became an absolute lifetime advocate of Ducks Unlimited in working with them when I was in government employment. What they brought to the table in terms of efficiency and conservation on the ground to day, not to 2 budget cycles from now, made me a lifelong supporter. And I call bullshit on that statistic or that dangerous amount of rhetoric that. See, to me that that’s misinformation, Mike.

Mike Schumer: I was going to get to, like, what do you see is like a dangerous thing. Like, that’s something that is dangerous because that is what is going on is, they’re saving wetland acres with those $48 million or whatever. And so when the water does come back, hopefully we’ve got this habitat to support those birds. The decline in ducks over the last 10 years, we all know, and that’s the cycle of it. It’s not like DU is inefficient, but that’s the way it’s portrayed. Now, not everybody knows this, but those that do are like, well, Dr. Mike’s biased because his wife works for DU, that’s true. She was on the day that Trump gave his congressional speech, she and a whole pile of DU folks were in Washington meeting with folks in the Senate, in the House, to try to keep NAWCA, North American Wetlands Conservation Act and keep NRCS programs, Natural Resources Conservation Service through the USDA in place, like CRP Conservation Reserve Program, WRE, Wetland Reserve Easements, keep all of these things in intact for the ducks. So please understand that, like, DU is literally on Capitol Hill trying to speak for duck hunters and doing it very strongly, and monitoring very well. Every day they’ve got policy people.

Ramsey Russell: Every single day they’re doing it. And I can’t possibly support. I want to wrap up Mike, I want to start wrapping up this episode talking about – I had just gotten back in the United States, I can remember exactly where I was. Me and Char dog were going through TSA, back into the Dallas Fort Worth airport when you sent me a text. And I guess you just spent your weekend fooling around on the computer, like smart people do.

Mike Schumer: I get up at 4 in the morning, drink coffee, and just crunch numbers for fun, believe it or not.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, I kind of got. I mean, it made perfect sense. But the one graph you sent me was one that was popularized and making the rounds in social media about, and boy, did it make sense for a guy like me to look at it. But then you actually factored in some other stuff and sent me a couple of comparative graphs. I want to wrap up about same numbers, you ran the same freaking numbers, but you put a little more intelligent input on it. Kind of explain those graphs verbally, and I may end up sharing them online one day, but I don’t know how. But go ahead.

Mike Schumer: You’re good, man. You’re good. We’ve shared a bunch of these on our fowlweatherco Facebook page so people can go there and look at, dig through the post till you get to the graphs and look for those if you’d like. And so what floats around is, yeah, I mean, total mallard harvest has declined strongly in Arkansas since 1999, which is when the harvest information program stuff started. So we have at least a standardized data set, despite some flaws in it, whatever, you can punch as many holes in it as you want, but it declines pretty steadily through time. But it doesn’t detail, I’m like, yeah, well that’s fine. But like, what’s changed? Maybe hunter number wise or effort wise and things like that, right? So as soon as you put in, as soon as you divide that total harvest of mallards by hunter days, so that comes from the harvest information program too. And you put down in your diary how many days you hunted, so we get numbers of days hunted per hunter, and then you multiply that by the total number of hunters and you get hunter days per year, it’s kind of a measure of effort. And once you divide that total harvest by that, you end up with a line that’s not flat, it’s not a steep slope, it kind of rises and falls. So ducks harvested per hunter day ebbs and flows. And it statistically is related to the mallard breeding population.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Mike Schumer: So if you do a statistical regression saying, does the be pop relate to the hunter, the mallard harvest per hunter day in Arkansas, it is statistically significant those 2 are related. Now, it only explains about, I think, 35% to 40% of the variation in that mallard harvest per hunter day. But there’s other things in there, like weather, as I noted in last episode as well, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and then 2023, 2024 were notoriously warm years. And those are right at the bottom for mallard harvest per hunter day. So there seems to be certainly some influence of weather in there as well, but it paints a completely different picture than, the sky is falling and harvest is just plummeting. So I mean, the total harvest is, but it has to do with effort as well.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I appreciate you explaining that. And again, people can go to your social media pages and see that and draw a more informed opinion. Mike, I’m just going to wrap it up this way by asking you, what strategies can be employed to promote critical thinking and media literacy among the waterfowl community? Or to discern credible information. And I’m going to stick with waterfowl hunting, we could add any topic from nutrition to politics in this topic in the world of the info wars and social media. But let’s stick with waterfowl hunting on this.

Mike Schumer: I’m going to speculate, but if I had that real answer from a social science standpoint, I think we’d be in a lot better spot.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I think we would too.

Mike Schumer: But what happens is when I see something out there that fits my narrative, I don’t just accept it and wave it around, I first of all try to break it. I try to make it say what it’s not saying. That’s what I did with that the decline in mallard harvest, I didn’t know what that was going to turn out as. I had to go get those numbers, put them in a spreadsheet, divide things, move things around and investigate that number. But the first thing you got to do is not, I think almost always nowadays when you see anything out there, heck, there’s videos I show to my wife, we’re sitting on the couch in the evening, just watching BS television, petting the dog, and I show it to her. She goes, you know that’s AI generated. And I look at it again and I’m like, oh, you’re right. And I’m like, man, this is cool, look at this thing. Like all these fish jumping out at these guys on the shoreline, fishing, right? And it was like thousands of fish coming out. And she’s like, there’s no way that’s real. And so I fell prey to that stuff too, right? So the first thing you should do is just understand we’re living in a different world. And you’ve got to question what you’re seeing, do the critical thinking. I don’t know how to get people to be that way other than ask you to, right? Try to ask the good questions, try to look through the available information out there, make an informed decision and be okay. Like, man, when you’re at the coffee shop and everybody’s like, saying something, that’s total BS be like, I’m going to throw the BS flag here, right? Like, be okay to be that person too. Like, it’s easy to just follow the crowd, it’s hard to buck the crowd sometimes, but try to do it diplomatically and be like, nope, that’s BS, right? And I don’t know, that might help, I mean, you might have less friends.

Ramsey Russell: Yes.

Mike Schumer: But I know sometimes I do. Because of just going against the grain on stuff. But I think the key to being a critical thinker is do it. Just do it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Mike, I’m going to finally wrap up with this last little topic, and it’s just going to be, I feel like by necessity, by the laws and obligations, I’ve always felt that wildlife agencies were transparent. For those that have the means and ability and willingness, they can access the data, they can apply critical speaking or reach out to smarter people than themselves to understand otherwise esoteric or complicated topics. But I’d like to commend you because I mean, we’ve had a lot of smart and gifted biologists, and hopefully we’ll continue to do so on our Duck Season Somewhere podcast to explain it, to explain some of these complex topics so that we can better understand it. But what I see is having gone through the wildlife field, having worked in some federal agencies myself, a lot of the smartest and brightest people in conservation, especially when you start getting mathematical and things of that nature, just their personalities are not, they’re not a type A personality. They don’t get up and give a bunch of presentations, they don’t speak a lot, they may talk to a few classrooms, but really and truly, so much their personality is such that they spend a lot of time picking through and sorting through a lot of analytical, complicated topics. And they might have to get up occasionally and present a white paper or present it to a group of colleagues, but otherwise they don’t go. And sometimes those complicated topics will make their way through Delta Waterfowl or Ducks Unlimited publications written at a 4^th grade level that a guy like Ramsay Russell can understand. But unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in anymore, man. It’s just not the world we live in. We live in a very social world of podcast. And we consume our information not even by reading many books or magazines anymore, but by consuming it in memes and short posts in social media and listening to podcasts very passively, you know what I’m saying? And you are one of the exceptions that gets out there and has the FowlWeather podcast and habitually explains his information. But I would love to see a lot more of that think tank began to transition to the public specter, and wade into this information war in social media. But I commend you for having done so already.

Mike Schumer: I appreciate that, Ramsey. And so folks know, I mean, this is a big lift left, right? And the homework to get it right and to get that information to people is a lot. I do want to crush my ego a little bit on this though. One of the ways that I can dumb this stuff down is, and I’m going to put myself down here, I guess is, I am not these folks running these models, right? So I understand them enough to talk about them. Sometimes maybe people would say dangerously, but from what I can tell, I’m not getting hate mail from the powers that be. But I joke with folks like, I grew up a duck hunter and I just happened to be a redneck that wanted to go into this profession. But I also joke that I’m just too damn dumb to make it so high brow that people can’t understand it. And it’s not even talking down to anybody at all. It’s just saying like, hey, there’s a bunch of us out there that are just normal dudes, normal guys and girls, just trying to do it for the ducks and that’s what the podcast is evolved into. And really appreciate the listenership, appreciate you, you having me on, a bunch of times and keeping this great discussion going. But I do agree that we should try to communicate a bit more. I think the Ducks Unlimited podcast also does a very good job of that within the sideboards of understanding that they are among the largest conservation organizations in North America. Nature Conservancy is the only other organization that’s bigger than DU as far as conservation goes on this continent. So I get edgy, we get edgy, you and I get edgy. DU’s got some sideboards they have to work within and everybody should understand that.

Ramsey Russell: Everybody listening knows I’m a huge supporter of Ducks Unlimited and always will be though. Can you imagine where we would be in terms of habitat conservation today? I mean, we’re losing it leaps and bounds. Can you imagine where we’d be if not for Ducks Unlimited?

Mike Schumer: Yeah, it’d be like saying the duck stamp never existed.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly. That’s exactly where we’d be. Thank God for Ducks Unlimited. Mike, thank you very much for coming on board as always, and I’m going to encourage everybody listening go dial into the FowlWeather podcast, add it to your list. Get the downloads. Listen to what Dr. Mike has to say about a lot of these topics. He gets in depth and brings a lot of this stuff. We’ve just glanced the surface, but it was important to me, Mike, to have you on just to address a growing amount of dangerous and divisive rhetoric that I’m seeing everywhere that everybody’s seeing and experiencing. So thank you very much for coming on. And folks, thank you all for listening this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where we’ve gone through 2 episodes just trying to talk and explain and wade through and these info wars that get into all these conspiracy theories and inflammatory statements that undermine scientific consensus and unity and are sowing discord among us few remaining waterfowl hunters at a time that all, every single one of us, from coast to coast, north to south, to include folks into Canada and into Mexico, we all need to be locked arm in arm, drawing a green line and saying, hell no, we want a future in duck hunting. See you next time.

[End of Audio]

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