EP 599: Waterfowl Habitat Moist Soil Mgmt: “Putting It All Together”

Over 70% of all waterfowl habitat in the United States of America, as expressed by kilocalories energy, is on private land

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. In the studio today is Mr. Kevin Nelms up there with, he’s been a biologist, a habitat manager in the Mississippi Delta forever for as long as I can remember. And this episode I was trying to think today, this episode number 9 or 10, he’s been on to talk about moist soil and habitat management for a lot of you guys that are trying to improve your property, here’s a little known fact. Just let this sink in for a minute. Over 70% of all waterfowl habitat in the United States of America, as expressed by kilocalories energy, is on private land. And that’s because a lot of you guys are out there managing duck holes or want to improve your duck holes. You all listen up and Kevin’s going to get us sorted. Kevin, how the heck are you? Good to see you again, man.

Kevin Nelms: I’m doing great. Good to be here, Ramsay.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Have you gotten any response off these podcast episodes?

Kevin Nelms: Every time we do one, it generates a bunch of phone calls, emails. People here in Mississippi call me because they just discovered me by your podcast, want me to come visit their property. So, every one of them generates new interest.

Ramsey Russell: Good. What seemed to be the main topic or points of interest and follow up to the previous podcast.

So, really there’s probably three main areas I get questions in, is more details about moist soil management.

Kevin Nelms: So, really there’s probably three main areas I get questions in, is more details about moist soil management. Hey, I’m doing this, what am I doing wrong? What do I need to do? Also, we’ve talked a lot in the past about invertebrates and so there’s always a lot of questions about invertebrate management. What do I need to do to get more bugs, that kind of thing. And then really the other area is, and some of this really came to a peak last year. We talked a lot last year about managing the habitat you’ve got. And in the past I’ve talked about, don’t fix something that’s not broke. Don’t screw up one wetland type by trying to make another wetland type. But the really managing for the species that are coming tricked a lot of people’s trigger last year and I got a lot of questions about that, which led into your lakes and sloughs and kind of, what we call deep open water habitat. And how do we make that better? How do we manage that? And then a good many instances, hey, I realized I screwed this up. How do I fix it now? So that’s kind of the 3 main areas that I get questions in.

Ramsey Russell: We’re going to do a deep dive in all these topics and we’re going to put it all together is what we’re going to try to do today. Because I know it’s like a complicated gear with a bunch of cogs on it. And I’ve been around it for decades, you’ve been practicing it for forever, but it’s putting it all together to where that chain kind of can hit all them gears and it all worked together. It’s easy to focus on one, on invertebrates or on this or on that or on timing damp, but to put it all together onto your particular property, which is different than your neighbor’s property or a property across the state, can be a little daunting process, I think, for a lot of people. And never mind the curve balls nature and season to season throw you. But before we get started, Kevin, let me just take a break. I want to throw some stuff up on some people’s radar real quick. You all mark your calendars, Delta Waterfowl Expo is blowing into Oklahoma City July 25 through 27 and if you like duck dogs, hunting gear, guns, calling contest and meeting fellow hunters, this is the duck hunters Disneyland. Then the very next weekend, August 1^st through 3^rd, DUX Ducks Unlimited Expo hits Memphis, Tennessee like a freight train full of camo calls and everything outdoors. Best yet, both of these events are in the air conditioning, what the heck else are you going to do that time of year? And you get to see the latest and greatest before the duck season gets here. I will be at both, Char dog will be with me, we’ll be shaking hands, telling lies, and probably talking too much as long as you asking questions, so come say hello, put your hands on all and any and all of the great brand products that you hear about here, and let’s swap a few duck blind stories. Don’t just hear about it this year, be about it. See you all there. Kevin, where do we start? Here’s where I want to start with this thing right here. Let’s talk about the perfect property, a well-managed property. Is there any such thing as the perfect property?

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, I could probably take you to a few perfect properties. And that well managed property idea is a thing I throw around a lot these days when people are asking about where’s the ducks? Why didn’t I have a good duck season? Did anybody have a good duck season? And the answer is yeah, at least in the mid-south, Southeast, the answer is yeah. People with a well-managed property had a good duck season, probably even a great duck season this year. And sadly enough, not everybody asked me, okay, define a well-managed property, and you just threw that out there. So I would tell you that a well-managed property is one where they considered the whole idea of the wetland complex. We’ve talked about that before, we’ve talked about that in detail. But a wetland complex has all the wetland types, when we say within a 12 to 16 mile radius, but the property is big enough, they’re putting that wetland complex all with on their property. If they can’t do it on their property, they’re at least making sure that they’re doing what their neighbors don’t do so that they’re creating that wetland complex. And so those wetland types are moist soil, emergent marsh, shrub scrub, seasonally flooded woods, open water and some crop. So, that’s all the wetland types that make that wetland complex. And then also they have a designated refuge, a place where the ducks can go and not be disturbed. Where they can go and know that they’re safe and stay there, be there and do duck things. And then also on that same property, in addition to a designated refuge, they’re also managing their disturbance. And that’s not only when they hunt and how they hunt, but also how they move around the property. It doesn’t matter that you’re stopping duck hunting at 11 o’ clock in the morning, if you’re going out at 01:00 PM and riding by the duck hole to get on a deer stand or whatever. So, managing disturbance and the designated refuge and then having that complex, that’s a well-managed property, or having the property that’s part of that complex and has a refuge nearby. But you’re always managing disturbance and disturbances is a whole lot of things. You’ve done complete podcasts now about disturbance.

Ramsey Russell: Now, we’re going to keep on doing it. But I want to break apart some of this well managed property you talked about. And the first thing that jumped out was the wetlands complex. We’ve talked about that in depth links below. But again, and this is a critical point, I really think you’ve talked about this many times, but I never get tired of hearing it. And I think when I’m hunting on a particular property, I think when I’m visiting and I think when I’m talking to folks like you do, it’s not just what my property is, it’s what my neighbors ain’t doing. And you defined one time the geographic area. I want to say it’s like a 12.5 or 13 mile radius around my property. If I was able to pull that off and lay it down on a table and look at it like a map, how does my property fit within that wetlands complex, like a piece of puzzle with that surrounding area?

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, so you mentioned the distance and we got about 20 or 25 year old data that was showing a 16 mile radius.

Ramsey Russell: 16 miles.

Kevin Nelms: And now, we’ve got some new data that’s showing 12 miles. So, somewhere in that neighborhood, 12 to 16 miles, just average it at 15 if you want to, because that’s an easier number to remember, all of those wetland types have to be in that area. Now I’m going to tell you that if you’ve got them in a much smaller space than that to where those ducks aren’t having to move as much, you’re even better off. So the properties that have all of it on the property, those are the ones that are winning every day. But definitely, when you’re talking about, I said, do something different. I was on the property last week and the guy had one duck hole and we were looking at the duck hole and he was like, I want to plant rice on this. I said, well, why would you plant rice? Well, that’s fantastic duck food, I don’t know of anything that’s better. I’m like, your neighbor over there has got 200 acres of corn. You’ve got another neighbor down the road, that’s got a bunch of moist soil. And I was telling him, you know who, and he knew who I was talking about, when I told him which neighbor, I was like, this one has the seasonally flooded woodland, the shrubs scrub, you need to do something different. What’s left is the emergent marsh. And honestly, that’s the easiest one to do, it’s just flooded up and keep your hands off of it and let it do its thing for a while. And he had the depth in his water hole where he could do it. And he kind of bucked me for a minute. And then, when I explained everything to him, he’s like, that is the way to go. He’s like, because all I’m doing is trying to get a few hunts a year off this property. I know we’re one duck, always not going to be in every weekend thing. And he said, I think that’s the way to go. And that’s what we have to do. We have to be realistic with what we’ve got. We have to look at what our neighbors have. Don’t try to compete with your neighbor, do what your neighbor’s not doing and win that way.

Ramsey Russell: We talked in the past about the seed mentality, escaping the seed mentality, and everybody – and I get it, man, ducks eat, I mean, really and truly, ducks eating shit, that’s what they do. You sum it up, that’s what they do. And if you’ve ever had ducks in your backyard, you’ll agree, especially when you’re holding off your patio 20 times a day. But is it okay? I should say, I’m asking, not saying. But it’s like everybody, we all want a lot of food on our property. But when you start talking about the wetlands complex, it’s more than that, it’s way more. Satisfying all their little life cycle requirements, besides just eating, because they literally don’t just eat and discreet, they go off and lay up, they’ve got a praying, they need sanctuary, they need a pair of bonds, there’s a lot of little things ducks need to do. And how important would you rank food relative to the rest of it?

Kevin Nelms: Food is definitely number one. But then we got to break it down into types of food and are we meeting their life history requirements? Then we have to realize that in reality, they’re only eating twice a day. So we’ve got to think about what are they doing those in between times and what habitat are they using for that. If we got corn, sure, they’re coming to eat the corn, but then where are they going? And what’s happening to them there and who might be shooting them there and those kind of things. We’d all much rather keep them on our property or nearby where there’s less chance for them to leave or get shot. And we may have even talked about this before, I get caught up in it as much as everything is all we want to think about managing our property is food. And yeah, I just said it’s number one, but a close second is all these other habitat types and what they’re providing for them. And types of types of food, like the invertebrates. And that’s why everybody that’s listening our past podcast have called or emailed me going, hey, let’s talk more about invertebrates, because I’ve realized the importance of that food. But the shrubs scrubs, I was on property last year, and the guy was showing me around and showing me everything he’d done, and he had taken every one of his shrub scrub areas, just recently and had run a mulcher through them because he thought they were too thick and they needed to grow more and moist soil. And I had to hurt his feelings and say, hey, look, you just took one of your habitat components and ruined it. It’s the worst thing you could have done is opened up the shrub scrub habitat. And he’s like, well, I don’t see the ducks in there. I was like, no, you don’t see the ducks in there when you want to see the ducks in there. You see the ducks in there when they want to be there and I explained that to him, he’s like, you’re right, they are there late season, they are there in inclement weather. I just hadn’t made that connection until you just spelled it out for me. So what are they using those habitats for? When do we expect to see them there? They’re not there feeding every minute of the day. They’re also not feeding every minute of the day, which is what we got to get into our mind when we’re looking at our properties.

Ramsey Russell: And when you look at the different habitat types and I’m talking about water depths, size of water body, what species are attracted inherently to that water type. The food needs are going to change a little bit. For example, blue winged teal vs gadwall vs shoveler vs ringnecks vs canvasbacks vs scaup, they’ve all got a little bit different something they’re focusing on. They’re not all coming into a cornfield, that’s for dang sure. They’re not coming to all, I have killed them all in rice field, but they’re not necessarily going to choose to eat rice. I mean, they’re looking for something a little bit different within those habitats.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. And I think that’s why our discussion last year about manage for what we know is migrating, what we know is coming. Hey, the gadwall are coming and people grabbed hold of that and I got a lot of phone calls and a lot of emails last year about, okay, let’s talk about break and slough management for gadwall, those kind of things. So definitely people are starting to think about that more and if they’re not thinking about it, then we’re telling them right now they need to think about it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And when we have these conversations, Kevin, it’s hard for me not to think about my club, the property I hunt the most. And first and foremost, it is not a duck club, it is a hunting club. We got as many deer hunters as duck hunters, which affects that disturbance part of it, you know what I’m saying? And in terms of refuge, it’s been a conversation for, I don’t know, a dozen years about establishing a little refuge on the property. And I’m the guy that was opposed to it. I mean, because we’ve got some state and federal properties nearby within that 12 mile radius that are sanctuaries. So, we might need somewhere to jump into a duck hole for too many people. We might need some spillover. But this past season changed my mind, often wrong, never endowed am I, but it changed my mind. I must be from Missouri because seeing is believing, the show me states. This year, we had about a 10 to 12 acre duck hole and the boys got in there and planted a crop and there was no way to get to the blind in or out by foot. But it was impossible because they didn’t leave an opening. And there was no way to get in there without disturbing those crops. We don’t want to disturb a pre harvested crop or knock it down or do nothing, so we left it be. And it paid in spades. It absolutely paid in spades. And we did not hunt it for the entire season. And it was mostly wood ducks, but some other big ducks got in there too, and they just had it to themselves. We drove completely around it, there wasn’t any disturbance around it and they just had it to themselves. And we feel like it really, we could see the result and having just that little bit of safe area right there amongst us. And I feel like we’re going to continue that based on the spring meeting. And in terms of managing disturbance this year, it was daunting because we took 2 or 3 of our best duck holes, the duck holes that produced the most shooting year in, year out. And we closed them Monday through Friday, closed them completely. And I feel like I didn’t hunt over there but about 4 or 5 times this year. But when I got into those duck holes, I felt like it made a huge difference. Those birds were comfortable in there. If I got there on a Saturday or even a Sunday morning, sometimes the second day, it really worked out. But maybe somebody listening has got a different situation where they don’t have deer hunters coming in and out all the time, or they don’t they, you know what I’m saying? Or they don’t have as many hunters and it could be some other alternatives for managing disturbance. But I know some of those conversations we’ve had in the past few years with people like Heath Hagee and Rick Kaminski and other these researchers, it could be that if you’ve got enough hunting pressure that hunting mornings only is not enough break if you’re hunting it too many times. And so historically, we would hunt it up mornings only, and some of these holes would only be hunted Monday, Tuesday, some would only be hunted Thursday, Friday, all of them were hunted Saturday, Sunday when everybody showed up. And we felt like maybe a couple of days was enough. But a lot of the research is showing that it may take 4 or 5 days for ducks to get comfortable without being shot again. And we’ve evolved, not Ramsey, but we as a club have began to evolve, kind of just trading off quantity hunts for quality events and it seems to be working. But so it goes to your point about having designated refuges and managing disturbance, it’s very important as a part of a well-managed property, whether it’s on you or within that 12 mile radius is essential.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right. And like you say, there’s so many different ways to do it and different ways to think about it. And the whole disturbance thing, sometimes it’s not the most convenient thing, but it’s also not that hard to do to change the way we’re moving around our property to deer hunting or something like that, and sometimes when you think about it till it gets pointed out to us. So, if we’re just look at what we’re doing, it’s pretty easy to change sometimes.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s talk about moist soil management. As a part of a complex, we do have various and sundry crops and other wetland types. But let’s talk about moist soil management because talking to you the other day, you seem to get a lot of questions on moist soil management. What is the importance of moist soil management?

Kevin Nelms: So what I’m seeing, Ramsey, is there’s a tremendous amount of people really based on these podcasts that are contacting me and asking questions and they’re getting pieces, but they’re not putting every component together of moist soil management. So when they’re calling me and asking questions and I asked them questions and we go back and forth a little bit, I’m like, oh, well, you did this, but you didn’t do this. And so, I didn’t get that. And I’m like, well, we talked about it in the podcast, but everybody keys in on something and they don’t always key in on everything. So let’s just simply break moist soil management down into the 4 main components. The 4 things that you’re doing, if you’re really doing moist soil management. So we talk about them in order of importance. Number one is soil disturbance. And we can come back and talk about why each one of these things is so important. But number one’s soil disturbance. Number two is your drawdown, how you’re taking water off, when you’re taking water off, all those things. Number three is how you’re reflooding. And then number four is undesirable plant control. You’re doing those 4 things, you’re doing moist soil management. If you’re missing one of those, you might be doing halfway decent moist soil management. But if you do them all, you’re winning.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, it takes a lot of time to do them all, too. A lot of time, a lot of people on the ground at the right time of year to do it. Not to be discouraged, but it just does.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. Basically you’re there once every two weeks during the growing season. Well, and really, when we talk about reflooding, you’re in the midwinter at that point too. So you’re there every 2 weeks for 10 months out of the year, I guess.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s take them one at a time. The importance in rank order of importance, soil disturbance, drawdown, reflooding or rehydrating and controlling undesirable plant species. But in chronological order, we would start with the drawdown period.

Kevin Nelms: That’s correct. So chronologically, in the spring, you’re going to start doing your drawdown. Now, the important thing to note, Ramsey, about drawdown is we’re really emulating nature at this point. And we talked about it in some of those first podcasts that we talked about wetland management, the history of moist soil management, and the idea of moist soil management, which is kind of what this is getting back to. And you said earlier there’d be some links below, so I’d encourage people to go back and listen to some of those early podcasts. But what we’re really doing with the drawdown is we’re emulating natural evaporation of a well. Or in a riverine system, we’re emulating the natural flood pulse of the flood getting out of the river system sometime over the spring or summer. So that’s what we’re doing with the drawdown. The second thing to note there is really to do this properly, we’ve got to have good water control, which is some type of boardage structure, a flash board riser, a boarded wee or something like that, to where we can take incremental water off. Because at the end of the day, what a drawdown is managing soil moisture. And the important part of that is soil moisture is what gives us moist soil plants, that’s the whole name of the game there. And we’ve talked about this before, but what people have a problem understanding is it’s not really the mud flat we just created when we took one board out. It’s the pool of moisture, the residual pool that’s still there behind the other boards, that’s wicking moisture up onto that mud flat, that’s keeping it moist so that we’re germinating wetland plants instead of germinating upland dry land plants. So that’s the whole managing moisture. We’re managing that pool of moisture that’s down there below the mud flat we just created drawing the board down or taking the board out. So, that’s the important components of the drawdown from the science or theory standpoint. But then the real nut cutting is the timing and length of drawdown. And so let’s just talk about timing, and we’ve talked about this before, is an early drawdown is defined as the first 45 days of the growing season. Mid-season drawdown is the second 45 days of the growing season, and then late drawdown is the remainder of the growing season. Now that really is the southern definition of early, mid and late season drawbacks. If you’re north and let’s just say the line between north and south is basically mid Missouri, mid Illinois, somewhere in there, mid California North, if you’re north of that line, early season is the first 45 days of the growing season. Late season is the last 90 days of the growing season, and mid-season is anything in between. So, there really is a kind of a north south difference in the north south definition there.

Ramsey Russell: All things equal, what would be the reasons you would choose early, mid or late water drawdowns?

Kevin Nelms: So there’s some difference that I can tell you in terms of bird response. But I always say the only reason you’re doing an early season drawdown in the south is because you’ve got some type of maintenance or management or something that you’re trying to get to. And so we’re going to take the water off early. Now, what science tells us about an early season drawdown is that it produces the most seed. So the farther north you are, maybe the more you consider an early drawdown, because mid-season shrinks a lot in there. So the benefits of early season are you get more seed, the negatives or the cons of early season are in, as far south as we are, we’re maturing stuff too early, we’re maturing stuff before the birds get here. Which is the reason I say, we never do early drawdown unless we’re trying to get the maintenance or management. But far enough north, maybe you do an early drawdown for more seed. You get more broad leaves typically out of an early drawdown. Smart weed and those kind of things, which is not a bad thing, it’s just, that’s a fact of science or a fact of plant ecology. Now, mid-season tends to favor more grasses. Mid-season also, research tells us that mid and late season gets more bird response, gets more bird use than an early season. So, I think that’s one reason I tend to favor mid-season drawdowns. Late season drawdowns tend to favor increased invertebrate numbers. You’ve got a shorter dry period, so you’ve got more invertebrate numbers. So that’s the difference from the ecology standpoint of the 3.

Ramsey Russell: I have seen late water drawdown some of our spots that won’t, you can’t get the water off till late. In a hot summer and it evapotranspirates in late July, August it’ll come up a lot of sprangletop and a lot of nutsedge. So if those are the areas that have got a lot of invertebrates, and we’ve also talked to yourself and several others in the past that have said that during a 12 month period, the longer those soils are saturated, the quicker and the greater the invertebrate response is going to be when you rehydrate it. So, there’s got to be some correlation to that.

Kevin Nelms: That’s absolutely right.

Ramsey Russell: Got to be. What about the length of drawdown? You talked about the length.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. So we break drawdown into two links really, a fast drawdown or a slow drawdown. And again, the only reason you’re ever doing a fast drawdown from a moist soil management standpoint is you’re trying to do some kind of maintenance, and maybe you need to do some work on the structure, work on Levy or whatever. So hey, let’s get the water off and do it. But when we think about actual moist soil management, lots of times that early fast drawdown is strictly about doing the reset and we’ll get into reset more in soil disturbance, but that’s kind of the reason you would do one. Every other time, the vast majority of time, more than 90% of the time your drawdown is going to be a slow drawdown, which means you’re going to take one board out every 10 to 14 days, that’s that whole evaporation, emulating evaporation, managing soil moisture thing is, we’re going to expose that mud flat, we’re going to let water wick up that mud flat and we’re going to germinate some plants and then we’re going to do it all again by taking another board out. Now important thing to note here is, and I don’t know that I’ve ever said this before because sometimes I think things are common sense and they’re not really is board size is important here. I was on guy’s place, I guess last year and he’s like, I’m just not getting the response I need, we looked at his stuff and I was like, yeah, you aren’t getting a response, no, I don’t really understand this. And I got standing back looking around and it hit me how much mud flat he was exposing. I was like, what size boards do you have? And he said, about 12 inch and I was like, there’s our problem. If you got a lot of slope then 6 inch boards are okay. If you got flat units like you’ve got on your property, 4 inch boards, 3 inch boards, 2 inch boards might be what you need to think about. So you need to think about how much mud flat you’re exposing and how much moisture can be whipped up that mud flat, that whole manager moisture thing. If half of what we’re pulling out is drying up too fast and we’re not managing soil moisture properly and that’s about board size.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And I know some of the boards, steel boards, it could be if you got an 8 to 10, 12 inch, you just need to not be adjust that 10 to 14 day period.

Kevin Nelms: And it’s real easy to, if you got 12 inch boards, pull a 12 inch board out and stick a 6 inch in.

Ramsey Russell: Good idea. Yeah. Work smarter, not harder.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right. And then the next time you come back, take the 6 inch out, next time you come out, take your 12 out and put the 6 back in. All you need is that one 6 inch board to cut it in half. Same thing with a 3 inch board, if you got 6 inch boards, all you need is one to cut things in half and just swap them out.

Ramsey Russell: When do you stop the drawdown?

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, so the barometer that I use is consistent 70 degree nights. When we get system 70 degree nights, we’re sitting here in July, Ramsey, and we’re right up on it. Generally, in our climate, it’s about mid-July that we start getting consistent 70 degree nights. And what we’re doing there is now we’ve got 90 plus degree days, we’ve got 70 degree nights and we’re getting evaporation 24 hours a day. So basically we’re stopping our drawdown and letting evaporation take over. And then we pull a board behind evaporation, when evaporation clears the board or whatever. And again, that’s all about managing soil moisture. If we pull a board, then we’re getting it dry too fast, so let’s just let Mother Nature take over.

Ramsey Russell: Is there ever a situation where as you get late in the season, you might put a board back in and catch a thundershow or something?

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s one thing I was going to mention is, I have people ask me all the time, well, what if I stop pulling boards and it never dries up? Great. You didn’t lose anything. I mean, we’re managing a wetland and I’ve said before, it’s an art, not a science. And you were just talking about, the shorter the period of dry is, the better invertebrates are. So if we leave a pool of moisture down there, we do a partial drawdown, we’ve got a place that won’t drain or whatever, we’ve concentrated those invertebrates. As soon as we start increasing that wetland area, when we start reflooding, then our invertebrate response is going to be quicker and a lot more because we had that residual pool there of concentrated invertebrates. So, from that standpoint, fantastic. From a teal habitat standpoint, wading birds, all those kind of things that are still around on our wetlands during the summer.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And I’ve had managers tell me, they manage for those early season, those August and September birds that come down for that reason. They said, if I’ve got habitat for those species, I’ve got habitat for the remainder of the year. One of the managers over in Arkansas was telling me that it described it almost like a indicator species was good, healthy, shorebird in the fall response. Now I know I’ve got everything in place I need to do right. That just as an indicator species of sorts. I found it very interesting.

Kevin Nelms: Your vet is one of those people.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, he is.

Kevin Nelms: He’s passionate about shorebirds. And it’s not really, I don’t think that he likes seeing them. I don’t think he can really name them or anything, but he knows when he’s got shorebirds on the unit, he’s going to have ducks on that same unit later in the year, and that’s something that he’s learned through experience. And he’s kind of become a passionate or late season, late summer shorebird manager because of that.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of Bill, he’s actually got a couple of spots. They have fantastic blue wing teal hunting, I mean epic blue wing teal hunt. And here we are 20, 30 miles below, we don’t have the habitat he’s got in terms of water depth, manageability and different management practices. So we sometimes have blue wings, sometimes don’t, he smokes them. But man, his blue wing teal impoundment is he pulls a little water off and gets the grasses and all he can get in there, this time of year, later in the year, but not all of it because the way he describes it is, pull some of the water off and lets Mother Nature do the rest. He said, it’s a massive invertebrate bloom and he’s had some folks you sent over his way with them little bug nets going through the pond and measuring biomass and that taught him this. But he said, as the water column contracts more and more them birds get pressed together. The blue wings show up and just have a field day. He said, you ought to see all the water bugs crawling around through that water. And he said the blue wing teal just can’t stand it. Here they come.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, it’s amazing how alive some of those places can be with movement in the water with all those invertebrates and stuff concentrated. And like you said, the birds are seeing that too when they’re responding to it.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s talk about soil disturbance. I mean, because right now listeners may have some properties that this is the time of year to do it, out here in July. You’ve pulled down some of your good stuff, it may not have got exactly the response you needed, maybe it’s been 2 or 3 years since you disked it up or disturbed it, or maybe you got some problems going on. So let’s talk a little bit about soil disturbance.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. Soil disturbance and undesirable control can be interchangeable here. But like you said, let’s talk about soil disturbance –

Ramsey Russell: One big ass other on my property, but go ahead.

Kevin Nelms: So, the reason we would be doing soil disturbance now or following the early drawdown is because we need to reset the unit. We haven’t been doing disturbance. Disturbance is necessary. The whole idea of disturbance is necessary is because we’re looking for annual plants. Annual plants produce seeds, they produce a lot of seeds. And that’s what we’re feeding our ducks is those annual plant seeds. So we’re trying to keep it in the annual plant community. If we don’t do soil disturbance, it’s going to move to a perennial plant community which is not going to produce a seed. So, every 2 to 3 years we’re going to do some kind of soil disturbance. So, if a listener has never done so disturbance, they’re just now getting into moist soil management or something like you said, we’re sitting here in July, their units dry, they can get in, okay, it’s time to do what we call a hard reset. Push the button and disk the whole thing, disk it hard, disk it up, disk it complete. And because we just destroyed everything in July, you’re probably going to come behind it with crop. You’re going to plant some millet or something and save this year. But then what we’re going to do in subsequent years is we’re going to start doing a rotational disking, a rotational disturbance where we’re going to disk half of it, disk a third of it or whatever in the fall right before we flood. And that’s why I say these next two things are interchangeable depending on how we’ve been treating our unit. So, if we’ve been doing moist soil and we’re in that rotation, then every – and I tell people, the great window to do soil disturbance is August 15^th to September 15^th. That’s when we’re at our dry, that’s when you can always get in there. But honestly, you it up to the day you start reflooding, it’s just, you get later than September, you know where we are, we start flirting with hurricanes, we start flirting with tropical storms, we start flirting with potential rains that are not going to let us get in there. So let’s get in there in the driest period and do it. And when we’re talking about a reset, we’re talking about disking the food out of it, getting it as hard and as deep as we can because it hasn’t been done in a long time and we’re trying to set ourselves up going forward. If we’ve been doing soil disturbance, if we’ve done soil disturbance in the last two years, then all we’re doing is a light disking. And I tell people when you’re doing – and people, this is a hard thing for people to understand is, hey, I’m destroying duck food? No, you’re not really destroying duck food. You’re laying it on the ground. Because when you do a light disking, you’re knocking it down, you’re not disking it under like you’re doing a food plot. You’re knocking it down, you’re helping some get in the top two inches of ground maybe is really, maybe even an inch and a half is all you’re disturbing. And that’s still in the dabbling depth. We can still get to that seed if we’re out there feeding as a duck. The other thing, we’ve talked about this before is that soil vegetation contact that you just created by disking by that light disking helps that invertebrate bloom because we’ve got the detritus on the ground that runs that whole system. You’re making water show by knocking that plant down when you put water on it. So you’re kind of showing decoys, you’re showing open water, you’re making good open water for the ducks to see, for the ducks to land in. So there’s a lot of different things we’re doing with that disturbance. So, it all depends on whether we’re resetting or whether we’re doing part of our rotation on exactly whether we’re doing it now as a hard reset or whether we’re doing it more toward late summer and fall and just doing our rotation. When I say rotation, we’re getting in there every fall and doing this. If we miss a year, we just screwed up some of our moist soil management.

Would there be any advantages or disadvantages in me either doing a reset or a rotation to just a third or a half or a fourth a segment of that unit?

Ramsey Russell: Assuming you’ve got the time, which would be to go out there repeatedly over, instead of once every 2 or 3 years, maybe go out annually. Would there be any advantages or disadvantages in me either doing a reset or a rotation to just a third or a half or a fourth a segment of that unit? Like maybe, I say, well, I’m come out here and disk this 20 acre duck hole every year, but I’m only going to disk a part of it.

Kevin Nelms: So, that’s absolutely what you should be doing. You just set up that rotation. I’m going to disk this every year, but I’m only disking and a half of it, or I’m only disking in a third of it. The complete reset is we’ve never done moist soil management or,  if like your property, where you’ve got a bunch of units and let’s say we just don’t get to everything every year.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kevin Nelms: Or we’ve got a crop on something, we can’t disk it that year, that’s when you go in and you do a complete reset is, hey, we haven’t got to this in two years or for whatever reason it hasn’t been done. We’re going to disk it and we’re going to crop it this year. And that’s completely fine if you want to not disk units every year, but understand that every 3 years is the maximum you’re ever going to go. Is every 3^rd year I’m going to disk that entire unit and put a crop on it that year. That’s the way a lot of refuges, Fish and Wildlife Service refuges manage because it’s easier for them. They disk entire unit every 3 years, put a crop on it, and then they’re managing moist soil on everything else, that’s fine. But if you’ve got just a few units, you need to be in that rotation.

Ramsey Russell: Or in terms of reset, there may be a listener that has got a unit or a new impoundment or something they inherited that just had anything ever done to it. It’s just time to go in and set stage, bam, bomb it, hit the whole thing one time and then put it into a rotation.

I keep saying disking, and if you’re doing a reset, you absolutely need to do a disc or whatever

Kevin Nelms: Right, that’s what we call the reset. You just define the reset. And I keep saying disking, and if you’re doing a reset, you absolutely need to do a disc or whatever. But if we’re doing that rotational soil disturbance every fall, then it doesn’t take a disk every time. We can do a little bit of disturbance. Like I’m talking about light disking. Well, what does light disturbance?  I’ve got guys that use some tined harrows that get enough disturbance out of that that they don’t have to actually disk every year. I’ve got a landowner that has a cleated roller and not everybody probably knows what a cleated roller is, but that’s just a big roller with spikes, bladed spikes on it that you roll, it was really made for rice stubble.

Ramsey Russell: A snake killer.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, snake killers is what they call it around here. But that cleated roller does enough disturbance that. And I know one Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge in the southeast, that’s what they do their disturbance with is a cleated roller and it does a great job. Some people would do a lot of food plots, they got one of these rotovators or a tiller that you pull behind a tractor, hey, that’s fantastic too. It does a little bit more disturbance than your normal disk because it’s preparing a seabed, so to speak. But raise that thing up and let it do a little bit of chewing and it does a good job too. So, there’s other instruments that can be used. But if I had to go buy one piece of equipment, I’d be buying a disk.

Ramsey Russell: What about burning instead of tillage?

Kevin Nelms: That’s a great question. Coast that’s kind of their only disturbance tool. When these marshes that don’t ever get dry, those kind of things. And if you’ve got a unit that doesn’t get dry enough to put a disk in, certainly burn that thing because it is soil disturbing. It’s soil scarification, it’s not really soil disturbance, it’s soil scarification. But what I will tell you is disking the actual turning soil over is better than the soil scarification of burning. And so if you’re in a situation where you don’t get dry enough and burning is the tool you use, or you’re on the coast and burning is the tool you use, the one year out of ever how many that it gets dry enough to put a tractor on it, put the tractor on it and run the disk. Take every chance you can to get in there and actually turn that soil over. One thing you’re doing is you’re just bringing some of that seed to the top. Because when we put water on top of soil, the water pressure is pushing that seed down. So, it’s important that we move some of that seed back up to the top. And we’ve talked in the past at length about how long some of this seed lasts.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, it’s amazing. That’s what I was just thinking. It’s amazing how those seeds will last forever. And my favorite one is you telling me those yonkapins, they found some of the Egyptian tombs thousands of years old and they sprouted. They went to see if they’d sprout and they sprouted. That’s just mind blowing.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. I’ve actually got a chart where, when I teach a moist soil class because everybody’s always asking, okay, where’d I get this seed? Hey, you don’t need it, it’s there in the seed bank. And I’ve got a chart of about 15 plants that have been found like that in different places, that were naturally preserved and how long they lasted. And that’s the longest one, 10,000 years. But there’s another one, I think it’s like 6,000 years, just numerous examples of seed that they could prove that were, a 100 plus years old, and they’re germinating. And so yeah, they’re there, sometimes you just got to pull them to the top. But going back to the burning, yeah, it’s a fantastic tool. But every time you get a disk in there, get a disk in there and I know you’ve been on some of these properties on the Texas coast or east coast or whatever where they’ve got a marsh master, which is a trapped boat almost that, they’re burning a lot. But they’re going to go in there and do some tillage every year with that marsh master because they’ve realized how important it is.

Ramsey Russell: Where necessary soil disturbance and the next topic, undesirable control go hand in hand in my experience is you break the soil, especially this time of year on some of the soils we hunt or anywhere in the delta, anywhere around wetlands in the south, you start breaking those soils and you’re going to get coffee weed, period, end discussion. And I’ve come around to where, first time we ever did it, not knowing what the hell we were doing 20 something years ago, by God, we had 40 acres of the Boone and Crockett freaking form class types bad stuff out there. But then we figured out how to get rid of it chemically and then we went from having too much to not enough. And I’m happy personally, I’m happy with, not necessarily says Bandy or something, but I’m happy with some form of taller coarser plant that may not be food just for cover on 30% to 50% of the wetland. Especially, if it’s just broke up, I think the ducks like having some coffee weed not just a vast landscape. I told Mr. Denmon over at MOJO Outdoors we got to talk about how to control his coffee weed. I told him, what you said, we need to disk. He goes out there and disk it did a hard reset on a big old flat piece of property. I mean flat, held by 12 inches, 18 inches of board for hundreds of acres. And man, he did a hard reset and it came up Boone and Crockett coffee weed. And then I told him, we talked about how to fix it. Hey, man, it wasn’t a blade of coffee weed on the place. Well, you couldn’t hunt the ducks. And so now he too has found a balance, it’s a balancing act, what Kaminski calls hemi Marsh. Just having 50%, some odd diversity out there. And I’ve seen folks go in, Kevin in good and undesirable. But seeing them going into good stands and mow, just mow randomly out through there. I know Iron McCauley up, Missouri is an amazing moist soil manager and him go in and just mow out some landing areas just to create that homogeny, that heterogeneous structure and the ducks respond to it. So anyway, let’s talk about undesirable control.

Kevin Nelms: Well, to the point you were just making, if you’re doing your rotational soil disturbance, where you’re doing a third to a half every year, you’re going to have that diversity of height in that unit, just because the first year stuff is not going to be the same as the second or third year stuff. And so you get a lot of diversity that way. So this is, I said it’s interchangeable. We’re sitting here in mid-July, if we’ve been doing moist soil management, we did our disturbance and so we just finished taking our boards off, or we’re letting Mother Nature take over and we’re drying down naturally now, we need to be in the plant response monitoring stage. We’re out there every 2 weeks looking and seeing what’s there. And this is where a lot of people walk away. They pulled their last board, we’re drying down. I don’t have to worry about it anymore. And then they come back in September or something and that’s when I get a bunch of phone calls about Kevin, what is this plant? Well, September, lots of times that plants already mature, they needed to have controlled it and it’s too late to control it because it’s mature. That’s why plant response and plant monitoring is so important. We need to know what’s out there. Do we need to do something? Do we not need to do something? So every two weeks, we’re monitoring our plant response, we’re identifying our plants, and I have people that send me, pictures all summer long, hey, what is this? Do I need to worry about this? If it’s something they don’t know, they’re immediately asking me. And there’s other biologists that are getting the same pictures all year long. So, is it a good plant? If it’s not a good plant, do I need to control? And that’s what I’m always – and somebody sent me some stuff this weekend, I saw it Monday when I walked in, and I didn’t just identify the plant for them, I told them, okay, this is such and such, don’t worry about it. This is such and such, it’s a good duck food. This is such and such, it’s not really a good duck food, but we’re not going to worry about it because it’s an annual, too, which is your coffee weed example. I’ve told you many times, coffee weed is a personal problem and I don’t worry about it because it is an annual plant. Ducks don’t need it, but it’s an annual plant. We know we did something right out there. And like you said, it does provide some vertical cover.

Ramsey Russell: But they use that habitat, they do use it, because somebody told me one time it could have been you or somebody else told me that on crop analysis of mallards, it was one of the most common seeds found. It wasn’t a predominant seed found, but it was common throughout a lot of different habitat types. Where I see coffee weed a lot, it could be because of a reset disk or something like that, but it also could be because of a late water drawdown and it comes up. And in that instance especially, you start seeing a lot of desirable forage underneath there. The sprangletop, the nutsedges come up under that. And so, the ducks are in there feeding if they’re incidentally picking up coffee weed.

Kevin Nelms: And that’s why I tell you it’s a personal problem, because I’ve told you, hey, there’s very few, and I can think of two instances in my career where I’ve seen just a solid stand of coffee weed. Most of the time, like you said, there’s a lot of other annual stuff in there, so I’m not worried about the coffee weed. And like you said, it could be a soil disturbance. But typically where we are, it’s afternoon thunderstorms. We get a thunderstorm, it gets really wet, it dries up really fast because the sun pops back out and that’s the recipe for coffee weed. Coffee weed germinates over 90 degrees when it’s drying really fast. And I tell landowners that all the time, you’re going to get some coffee weed. There’s going to be some coffee weed out here that germinates. But you’ve got all this other stuff right now, and not every acre is going to be coffee weed. So don’t worry about the coffee, don’t stress about the coffee. The big thing about coffee weed is it’s a big showy plant and everybody can identify, they’re not worried about all that other stuff because they can’t identify it.

Ramsey Russell: Well, to that point, the single most evil, noxious, undesirable plant we have there at willowbreak in the delta is red vine. And disking don’t do nothing but throw gas on that fire. Because it’s unbelievable how deep and broad underground, it’s not coming up like a poison ivy vine or a blackberry vine from a root, it has got a massive root network underneath the ground. And when you disk it up, it just says, oh, heck yeah, now I’m a bunch of individual plants can start growing again. And it takes over the joint. And there’s no redeeming value in as much as I can tell with regards to waterfowl utilization or food or cover or nothing, it just takes over the joint.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. Probably the two worst offending undesirable species that I see are red vine and alligator weed.

Ramsey Russell: Alligator weed.

Kevin Nelms: But really two different scenarios there, one drier than the other. But you said coffee wheat shows up in a lot of crop samples, just not at a high rate, that reminded me of Lee Frederickson. Lee, what’s an undesirable plant? And we’ve talked about that before in the past. And Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a weed is any plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good quote. Yeah.

Kevin Nelms: But Lee Frederickson says that an undesirable plant in the wetland system is any seed that does not show up in crop analysis or does not show up in high rates and crop analysis. And that’s the best response that you can hear, is it? Ducks aren’t eating it and that’s what you just said about coffee weed. So we know it’s undesirable by Lee’s definition. So really, when we get down to control, what do we need to control? Is it good or do we need to control it? Well, control depends on the particular plant. How noxious is it? And I tell people all the time, I looked at a unit last week that had a bunch of red vine on it and I pointed it out and I said, you’ve got about 5% red vine in this unit right now, we’re not going to worry about it until we get to about 15% or 20% and then we’re going to spend the money to do the control. Because it’s one of those, like you talked about, it’s got so much root underground that you got to kill the root, you can’t just top kill the plant.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t remember how we got it under control, Mr. Ian that is got it under control. But it involved spraying an expensive chemical in the fall when it was taking it down in those roots. And it wasn’t just a one time and I’m done. It wasn’t like spraying roundup on your sidewalk, it took some dedication to get rid of it.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, it’s 2 years of dicamba in the fall right before the first frost to take it to the root. But going back to any plant, like I said, it’s the particular plant, how aggressive it is, how undesirable it is and what the percentage or what the coverage of it is. When I see alligator weed in a unit, it doesn’t matter if it’s 5%, I’m telling them, hey, you got to start controlling this plant right here. Because it’s so aggressive and it’s so noxious, we let it go, it’s going to take over a unit. If we say, oh, we’re not going to mess with it till it gets to the 5%. Well, next time we don’t know, it’s going to be 50%.

Ramsey Russell: And is that a chemical treatment also?

Kevin Nelms: Yes, that one’s going to be a glyphosate or a masopyr. And one important thing, because we just defined, okay, it’s about the plant and it’s about the coverage of the plant and need to talk to me or another biologist or whatever because we can’t sit here and talk about everything. But some of them are herbicide control. Some of them, like your coffee weed, we can control it with the disturbance, it’s not a herbicide. There’s good herbicides for it, but we can mow it. And if we cut it off mowing right after it’s bloomed, then it’s used a lot of its energy on bloom. If we let it start setting its seed pod, it’s using energy setting its seed pod, we mow it at that point, it basically is not growing anymore. So we cut it off and that’s where it’s going to stay. So, there’s certain plants we can control with mowing, certain plants we can control with disking. There’s also plants we never want to disk because they got a rhizome when we’re just spreading them. Or like you said, you’re chopping red vine up and making it a bunch of multiple plants now. Same thing with alligator weed, we don’t want to strain it with disking. If you’ve got the ability to put water on a unit, whether that’s letting a structure open and putting some surface water on or pumping something and you’re willing to do it, there’s a lot of these species that we can flood out. We can kill young cocklebur in about 2 days by over topping it with water. We can kill coffee weed in about 8 days by over topping it with water. Our friend Rick Kaminski used to, because Rick wasn’t going out there every 2 weeks and looking at his plants, he’d find coffee weed down the road and it would be tall enough he couldn’t overtop it, he mow it and then over top it with water and control it that way. And by then your other plants, if you got other good wetland plants, they can handle that water. Whereas, coffee weed is not a true upland plant. I mean a true wetland plant is more of a true upland plant. It just likes to grow in our heavy clays. So we can control it with water. So, there’s a lot of different ways besides herbicide, mowing disk and flooding. Sometimes even burning on some species, depending on time of year. But then there’s some species that it’s just absolute musk that we’re going to spray it with something.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Kevin, we’ve talked about seasonal drawdown, soil disturbance, going out there, taking a look, trying to get these undesirables, if any, under control. Let’s move forward. I mean, we’re coming into it now, here in mid-July, maybe we still got some disking to do, between now and mid-August. Maybe we’ve got some control to do between now and first frost. Let’s start talking about the fun part, reflooding.

If you want to teal hunt, if you’re looking for putting that habitat out there, our teal show up and in really early to mid-August

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, the part that gets to the fun part for sure. I get asked all the time about timing of flooding, when do I need to flood? And I typically follow that up with a question I ask whoever’s asking me, well, what do you want to hunt? Are you interested in teal hunting or -? A lot of the farmers in my area, they’re harvesting crops, so they’re never going to be out there during teal season, so they’re not interested in teal. But if you want to teal hunt, if you’re looking for putting that habitat out there, our teal show up and in really early to mid-August.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Kevin Nelms: Generally, I’m seeing teal where we are somewhere around August 10^th. So, we need to have water out there August 1^st and it doesn’t have to be a lot of water for teal. We’re just doing the bottom of the hole because like, you know they don’t want to feed, but in about 2 inches of water and less. And I typically tell people, you know if you’re flooding for teal, go out there and mow and then put a little bit of water on it and make teal soup.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, it is teal soup, I guarantee it is. One of the best hunts I ever had one time was just mowing a problem area, I think it was coffee weed and hydrating, it smelled like a hog lot. Well, there’s some teal out there, son. But I just go back because so many people like yourself, you’ve said it, them boys over in Arkansas have said it, others have said it, some of the folks we talked about today do it is wanting to capture some of those areas early enough to get the teal to get the shorebirds. My folks down in Texas are all about hydrating them soils early enough to catch them because they can jump start that invertebrate process and get this thing going, get this stuff going good. I just really think when I look back at my past 25 years of voluntold work over there at camp, the mentality of well, duck season is in 2 weeks ago, let’s go turn on is short sighted at best.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. If we don’t have that partial drawdown to where we still got some residual water, if we don’t have that part of the unit out there that doesn’t drain or whatever that’s holding some water, then the earlier you can put water on, absolutely the better for the inverts, you’re just going to jump start that invertebrate button. So yeah, teal and invertebrates, but then the one thing I tell all of our people here in Mississippi especially, we talk about what you like to call the Halloween mallards, the early mallard tribe population, whatever we want to call it, that population of mallards here in Mississippi is in Arkansas and Louisiana, it’s going south, it’s going the farthest south. And so if you’re in the south delta, if you’re in Louisiana and you don’t have water on in mid-October to catch that migration, you might have screwed your property up for the whole year quite honestly. It can’t be overstated that whatever the early migrant is in your area, whether it’s pintail or gadwall on your habitat type or mallards on moist soil, you’ve got to have the water out there for that population. So put the water out there to catch that early migrant, whatever that local population migrant is. And then, how you manage your water from then on out is actually how you want to hunt, and when your hunting season is because a little bit of water for teal, a little bit of water for inverts and then have some water out there for those early migrants is not filling your holes completely up, which really gets to the next idea of, how do we flood them? Not just when do we flood them, but how do we flood our units? And we really reflood just like we did our drawdown is we do a slow reflood. We put a couple boards in, we catch that rain, we pump those few boards and we give the birds that food. And then we watch our merge and when they start moving off of that unit going to another unit, that means there’s not food out there anymore, they ate through that food. So then we put another board in or another two boards in and we catch the next rain or we pump some more water and we expose them to some new food. And if we’re really in tune, we’re letting those birds talk to us and tell us when to put the next water on there. If we’re at camp and we know it’s getting ready to rain, there’s nothing wrong with putting another board in or whatever. If we’re not there all the time where we can watch our birds and let them tell us what to do then put them in based on rains, but don’t flooding the unit up at the beginning of the season and I see that all the time, somebody puts the boards to the top of the riser and turns the well on and they go home. That’s the absolute worst thing you can do because we’ve talked about this in other podcasts, the ducks can eat, the depths of different species can eat, and at the end of the day, anything that’s over 18 inches deep is unavailable to our puddle ducks that we’re trying to hunt. So a little bit at a time, move them through the food and don’t make the bottom of the unit of time capsule that we spent all summer managing that area and then the bird never got to eat it because we flooded it to deep.

Ramsey Russell: Boy with diesel prices like they are right now. We ain’t talking just pumping now. I know we can’t afford just pump. But I mean, really and truly, we should be thinking early to mid-August at least putting some boards in and hopefully catching a rain event to fill up the bottoms for those blue wings. And that’ll kick off some of the invertebrates, that’ll kick off some of the, get things going a little bit, it’ll catch some birds and then we can start backing up, put another board in, start backing up as the season progresses. If we put in too many boards, we get too much water early, we can always pull a board, let a little bit off.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, that same tropical storm that was going to keep us from disking in September, we need to capitalize on that by throwing some boards and some structures. And the other thing is, and we should have mentioned this talking about drawdown, but if you’ve got multiple impoundments, you don’t have to flood them all at the same time. You ain’t got to put water in the bottom of every one of them for invertebrates. We can reserve units for later in the season, especially depending on what the food is. We’ve talked before about there’s no reason to even flood your corn early in the season because it’s late season when they’re looking for those high carb foods or whatever. So, same thing with moist soil impoundments, is we ain’t got to flood them all at the same time. We got multiple impoundments, let’s flood them differently. Just like if we got multiple impoundments, we can do different drawdown schedules on, but we’re always going to stop at that 70 degree night time temperature thing. So, reflooding is as important as everything else, and that’s one thing that people have a hard time getting because they finished everything else, now it’s time for hunting season, let’s put our boards in and go. And putting boards into the top is you just screwed up all that hard work that you did all year long.

Ramsey Russell: Before we move on to invertebrates and I want to talk about invertebrates this time because I hear a lot about invertebrates from the conversations you and I have. And I’m a huge invertebrate fan. I mean I get the seed mentality, we’ve talked a lot about moist soil creating seed production, a benefit being invertebrates in some of those systems, but not all ducks eat seed. That’s just a fact. Not all ducks, at least where I hunt, not all ducks eat seed. A lot of those ducks favor invertebrates. And all ducks later in the season begin to shift increasingly towards invertebrates. But before we move into that topic, let’s just sum up moist soil benefits. Just hit me with some bullet points of why we spent so much time, so many episodes, talking about moist soil management.

Kevin Nelms: Well, before I hit that, let’s go back and talk about those 4 components of moist soil management. Just so everybody hears again. Soil disturbance, drawdown, undesirable control and reflood, that’s your four components. That’s the thing that you’ve got to hit all those to be doing good moist soil management. So benefits, moist soil and we probably should have started with this, but we’ve talked about it a lot before. Number one, it’s native food, it’s home cooking for those ducks, it’s what they’re looking for. It’s essential nutrients. They’ve got to go to moist soil at some point to meet all their dietary requirements. So essential to not be stressed too much there. If we’ve done it right, we pull one board at a time, and each one of those boards germinate at a different yield, a different suite of food. So it’s food diversity, it’s that buffet of a bunch of different things, a bunch of different foods out there, including invertebrates. Invertebrates are in moist soil, that’s really the third best invertebrate habitat, and we’ll talk about that more in a minute. Not only is it food, but it’s good cover. You talked about the coffee weed cover, there’s a lot of other things out there that are making cover. Now, sometimes because it’s native or not native, it’s annual plants and those annual plants aren’t as robust sometimes as perennial plants that cover breaks down over the season, but it has really great cover. One of the big things from a landowner standpoint is it’s less expensive. We’re not pouring food out of a bag, we’re not pumping fertilizer, all those kind of things. We’re not putting roundup out there because we’re dealing with the roundup ready crop or whatever. So a lot less input cost to it because we’re looking at that diversity that I was talking about, all the different food types, we’re managing moisture instead of just drying it down and putting the crop out there, we’ve got a decreased chance of failure. That’s a huge one. You know as well as I do, we can have the most beautiful stand of whatever we planted out there. But then the army worms or something’s going to show up. Mother Nature’s always going to win. Mother Nature created moist soil and we’re just helping her through this process. So we’ll a huge decrease in rate of failure on moist soil. And then from a hunting standpoint, the big plus is we can go out there and manipulate it. We can sculpt our habitat, we can do that fall disking and that fall mowing that we can’t do in a crop. So, lots of benefits there on moist soil over other habitat types.

Ramsey Russell: To your point, and you said this earlier, but moist soil is God’s buffet. That’s what sustained North American water world waterfowl populations for millions of years. Row crop agriculture, this agricultural system we live in is really about 150 years old. And when you start talking about, what’s changing the landscape drop drastically right now, we’re talking about a 50 year old system that is start starting to move these ducks and do some stuff. And so I mean, this is what ducks were engineered to explore is these moist soil systems, that’s what sustained them for millions of years.

Kevin Nelms: Moist soil and acorns for some of our species. Yeah, it doesn’t matter, if we’re talking about a wood duck or mallard or whatever, if they got all the acorns in the world, they still got to go to moist soil to find those essential nutrients.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s talk about invertebrates now. I mean, I think it’s one of the most overlooked assets in the moist soil complex or a good healthy invertebrate population.

Kevin Nelms: So I probably have gotten more questions about this over the last 2 years because I think we basically did and like you said, we’ve done 9 or 10 or ever how many of these things, so they all run together now. But I think we did an entire podcast basically on invertebrates and managing for invertebrates and talking about the different kinds of invertebrates. And I got a lot of calls and questions and I still get them about, okay, tell me more about this invertebrate management. People understand they’re important, but let’s talk about the management, is the question that I get. But we just talked about moist soil benefits at the end and I said, we probably should have started with it. Let’s talk about the invertebrate benefits, why they’re important, why ducks or why they’re important for ducks, is it goes back to that essential nutrients thing. They’re a huge source of protein. We’ve talked about that before. But they’re also vitamins and minerals. We’ve talked about how the hens have to store the calcium in their bones to go back north and lay eggs. And that calcium comes from snail shells and fingernail clams and all those different gastropods, so you can’t say the essential enough. But they’re using them for other things just besides that nesting preparation they’re using them for, that protein is important for migration recovery. They get here after migration, they hit those invertebrates hard. Which goes back to you talking about having that early water on the landscape. Because when they get here they’re looking for those invertebrates. So migration recovery. And then in late winter, early spring migration preparation, they’re feeding up on that again, trying to get ready for this taxing migration that they’re going to go through. We’ve talked before, I think pretty extensively about molting and how much protein and how many bugs it takes to form a new set of feathers. So they’re using the invertebrates for molting. And then just daily nutrition, that whole essential nutrients thing. And that’s one thing that we tend to forget is that invertebrates are there in the water column throughout the year. We think, oh well, it gets cold, the advertisements aren’t there. No, they’re there, they’re somewhat in lesser numbers sometimes. But what’s interesting is when the aquatic insects are decreasing some and really they’re not decreasing about water temperature, they’re decreasing about photoperiod is day length. But the thing that’s really interesting is our gastropods, the shelled creatures, our clams and snails, fairy shrimp, crawfish, yeah, crawfish is a great example. They’re increasing over winter. They just hit their low at September, August in our dries period we put water back on, all the aquatics increase but then the true bugs start falling back off when day period goes down all winter long those the gastropods are increasing. So you know that invertebrate food source is there all winter long and they’re using it. And we’ve talked before about how, because of the nesting and the use of the calcium that they’re leeching that hen shift to a mainly invertebrate diet late season. Some of those species using 75% to 90% invertebrate material as their diet in late winter, seeds become a lot less important and invertebrates becoming a lot less more important. Our pairs are already bonded at that time, so if our hens are in that invertebrate community, feeding our drakes are there with them. And understanding that helps us know where to hunt late season. And definitely that invertebrate use determines their habitat use. So, habitat is important because invertebrate use of those habitats or invertebrate chronology in those habitats is important.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. It’s amazing how much they need of invertebrates, it truly is, especially the hens. But it’s like I put it in simple terms, in people terms, bread is my heroin, it’s high carbohydrate, you can’t live on bread alone, you’ve got to have meat and fat, protein and fat and minerals to do well. How do I manage for and get more invertebrates on my property?

Kevin Nelms: Yeah. So, I think that podcast I was referencing before where we talked about invertebrates, the whole podcast, I talked about invertebrate units or bug units or whatever. What we’re really talking about is managing for a different habitat type that is attractive, that is conducive to invertebrate blooms. So the highest number in diversity of inverts is in emerging marsh. So we’re really talking about trying to manage emerging marsh. Then second behind that is shrub scrub in terms of invertebrate numbers. And then third is moist soil. So, if we’re really trying to have invertebrate numbers at the peak, we’re at emergent marsh. If we’re just trying to have other invertebrate or other habitat types, it also have invertebrates. We need to think about our shrubs scrub and our moist soil. But when I’m talking about doing invertebrate, doing a bug hole, doing whatever you want, I’m really talking about emerging marsh management.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Kevin Nelms: And so it’s really fairly simple is, you’re trying to maintain or average 2ft of water throughout the growing season. So that’s either you’ve got a source of water that you can keep that 2ft of water on there, or you’ve got a deeper unit where you know as evaporation occurs over the summer, that you’re going to average that 24 inches, 2ft of water. And there’s some holes that we can’t do it with, you know they’re too shallow and if they’re too shallow don’t try it because you’re going to get some kind of response, you don’t want like cattails, it’s not going to be good. So we’ve got to average that 2ft depth and that helps you decide what hole you’re, you’re going to do it with. And if you don’t have the water nearby then we’re going to start out with that deeper water. And then basically it’s just we’re not pulling boards, we’re just letting it be. And it’s basically a hands off approach but we’re watching to see if any problems come on. Like I said, if it gets too shallow you’re going to have some cattails. Sometimes if the seed source is there or something you might end up with alligator weed, so we’re going to address problem vegetation but that’s the only thing we’re doing. We’re not managing boards or anything, we’re letting it be water and have that invertebrate soup thing going on all summer long.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. What about flooded corn? Like for example, I know that millet attracts a lot of invertebrates as a benefit. In fact, I’ve had guys, we’ve mentioned here tell me that the reason they plant especially Jap millet is to get more invertebrate response in there. I’ve personally never killed a duck with a crop full of Jap millet, but I’ve shot them in Jap millet holes. And I just wonder why are they more attracted to a crop like that than to corn.

Kevin Nelms: So, I can’t really scientifically answer that question, Ramsey. But what I can tell you is the grasses and we’ve talked about this before, the detritus that runs the system, and I think I got into this last time, the coarse particulate matter and the fine particulate matter and which invertebrates eat what. And we’ve talked about long linear is a better detritus than short, thick or whatever. Grass is a good detritus. It’s a thin leaf with a lot of leaf margin and you’ve got insects that just eat on the leaf margin. So when we talk about millet we talk about rice, those are small grasses and they make good detritus. Whereas corn is a big thick leaf, milo is a big thick leaf and that leaf doesn’t break down as easy. And so I think it’s not as good a detritus as the other two. Now, I can’t prove that scientifically, we’ve never looked at that. I’ve actually proposed the study to some university people and it’s not sexy enough to them, I don’t think, so they’ve never done the study. But the other thing is, I’ve always wondered what the BT in the corn is doing to invertebrates. The whole BT corn is about reducing insects in the corn, reducing damage. So what all insects, what aquatic invertebrates is that leaf working on later when it’s flooded?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, we talk about that emergent marsh last time and I’ve got this thing forward. I mean, yeah, we’ve got some spots on shallow that aren’t deep enough to do it. But man, I think that in a lot of these wetland areas that a lot of us are hunting, we should leave water on where we can and just let it do its thing. Instead of trying to emulate the sterile delta and the sterile agricultural systems around us – some of these shallow water areas, 18 inches, 12 inches, managed for moist soil. Some of these deeper areas, I think we’d really help ourselves in terms of invertebrates or having a complete waterfowl complex by just putting water on it and leaving it alone. Kevin, how do we wrap this up? How do we put it all together now? For guys that have been listening, for guys that have hung on with us, and I’m sure we’ll do some more episodes down the road, but how do we tie this all together into an actionable management plan for the listeners?

Kevin Nelms: So, let’s go back and talk about that wetland complex. Look at your place, look at your place in the context of that radius and your neighbors and what habitat type do you have? What habitat types do you need managing for what else is needed in the complex? That’s our first action item. Then if it’s moist soil, we’re going to all 4 of those components, soil disturbance, drawdown, reflooding and undesirable control. And just like you just said, it can’t be stated enough how important invertebrates are. And because of that, people that have multiple holes, clubs that I work with, we’re always doing an invertebrate hole or emergent marsh hole, which is just leaving something flooded for multiple years that’s going to have that 2ft depth over summer average 2ft to create that emergent marsh component. And even if your neighbor’s got that, do it again yourself, it’s just that important. So that’s what I would say. And then we go to the, and we talked about this earlier, if you’ve got a habitat type and it’s producing and there’s some ducks on it, don’t try to make it better. Don’t fix what ain’t broke. Don’t screw up a duck hole trying to make it better. That’s us trying to think we can be better than mother Nature and make a habitat better. And man, I have people call me and I see this all the time, but this used to be a good duck hole, what happened?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Okay, yes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And we get back to that shrub scrub component of like button weed, button willows. And I’ve seen guys going and push it out, but I’ve seen guys, the reason they’re having to fight it is because they keep, say you can have some, but not too much, they keep drawing the water down early and it begins to expand. I’m like, hey, leave the water on a little bit and it’ll control them, it’ll contain them, they won’t just take over the whole joint. So there’s a balancing act. And it may just be as simple. Sometimes I think a lot of mistakes and a lot of guiding force would be just looking at what’s working. Okay, I got ducks in this hole, what have I got? What is the relative percent? Why are the ducks using this? What are they keying into? And try to suspend succession to suit that exact condition.

Kevin Nelms: That’s right. You asked me at the beginning what’s the questions I get, and the one we hadn’t touched on yet, it’s kind of the deeper open water break sloughs or whatever. And the component that’s there, that’s not in these other components is the submerged aquatic vegetation. And really what I get sent a bunch of pictures of, hey, what is this? And it’s a submerged aquatic vegetation, is it good, is it not good? How can I introduce something? Those kind of things. And that’s typically, somebody drained a break, they drained a slough or something because they wanted to plant corn in it. And then they realized down the road, okay, that wasn’t the thing to do. How do I go back and get the submerged aquatics in there? And that’s a tough question because sometimes you screwed it up so bad it’s never going to happen again. But the question of can I make this better? If you got submerged aquatics in it, let it be what it’s going to be, you can’t make it better.

Ramsey Russell: By the same token, if you’ve got that cypress break or that tupelo break that’s consistently holding ducks, don’t try to go in and manage the hydrology either. Apparently God’s managing it just fine. I’ve seen guys try to pull it off all the time and I’ve seen guys try to hold it on all the time and neither one works good. I mean, those systems have got to be wet, but they’ve got to be bone dry sometimes or you’re going to look up, you’re not going to have any crown in your trees.

Kevin Nelms: Yeah, that’s the whole, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it component. Don’t try to think you’re going to do it better. But let’s talk for just a second about that. The drainage or the management reduces or even extirpates the submerged aquatics. But I’ve been asked the question a bunch over the last two years of, how do I reintroduce these things I extricated out of here? Or can I get some coontail and put in mine? Because the only thing that’s in there is naiad or something. And I’ve always told people it could probably be done and I’m not going to tell you not to try it. Go rake some coontail out of another break somewhere and bring it over there. But the one question you’ve got to ask yourself is, and I have people call me going, hey, there’s no submerged aquatics in my slough. How do I get them in there? Well, if there’s none there, then it’s probably not a system that works for submerged aquatics. And so there’s really 3 key scenarios there where the reason they’re not there is, one is turbidity. The water’s too muddy. You get backwater flooding, the river goes through there and keeps it muddy all the time and it’s just not clear enough to have the sunlight for submerged aquatics. Or it gets too deep too fast. Submerged aquatics live in, in about 3ft to 6ft of water, and if you’ve got one of these sloughs or lakes or something that drops off fast, you might have around the edges, how do I get it across the whole thing? You’re not going to have to cross the whole thing because it’s too deep out there. And then the third one is trash fish. Trash fish are doing two things. Some of them are eating that submerged aquatics and then other ones are stirring up the soil because they’re bottom feeders and causing that turbidity. So if you’ve got a place with a lot of trash fish in it, you don’t have a good submerged aquatic place. Now, they’ll game fish and submerged aquatics will mix, but trash fish, not so much. So those are the scenarios where that’s the reason you don’t have submerged aquatics. And you’re probably not going to have, and so that’s when you go hunt the other break because that breaks just never going to be a decent break. But people ask me about reintroduction, something, hey, I drained it. I realized I shouldn’t have, now how do I get it back? Sometimes time is the only answer. Sometimes time is longer than you might have because it can be a long time. And people ask me about buying it. Hey, where can I buy? There is some nurseries that sell, coontail, naiad, musk grass, pond weed, whatever. You can buy it and you can try it, but I’m not going to tell you to go spend a bunch of money.

Ramsey Russell: I bet it cost a bunch of money too.

Kevin Nelms: Well, and I’ve just never tried it, I don’t know the success level. So, I’m not going to tell somebody to do it. But you can buy it. But what I would do is just go collect some somewhere else and bring it over there and see what happens.

Ramsey Russell: If conditions are right. And that’s time. And it’s like, I can think of a small, little deeper water duck hole we had that was engineered not to drain and it sat there, just nothing particular about it, just nothing particularly attractive about it until 10, 15 years. It was a flood event, the water stayed on late when the water came off and it got down to just regular pool, it exploded and it’s never looked back. It’s unbelievable. It’s just unbelievable how it’s just like something kind of incubated and then bam, it triggered.

Kevin Nelms: Answer on, because I get asked all the time, how do I manage this break? How do I manage this slough, my bayou, whatever you want to call it? Is you don’t manage. Just like you said, Mother Nature’s doing it, let Mother Nature do it. She knows better than we do, and we’re going to lose to her every time. The only thing I would tell you is, if you get invasive like, alligator weed or something like that, control your invasive. But otherwise, it’s hands off.

Ramsey Russell: Right. Kevin, I appreciate you, I really do, I always do, it’s a great conversation. Tell everybody how they get in touch with you.

Kevin Nelms: kevin.nouns@usda.gov that’s my email. And that’s the best way to get a hold of me. I’m always checking email.

Appreciate you all being here today, we’ll see you next time

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I appreciate you. And I’m going to post up a bunch of links down below. I appreciate you. Folks, I appreciate you all listening this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ve done extensive body of work in this topic with Kevin over the years, all the links down below, go check them out, I think you’ll enjoy it. Appreciate you all being here today, we’ll see you next time.

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