EP 559. “Splash Limits” versus Hunter Satisfaction

“Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast, where today I’ve got an interesting topic. Whether it’s 6 and 60 or whatever the frameworks are and how many ducks we’re going to kill, what if there were two options? What if you could opt out of that and instead shoot fewer ducks of your choice? There’s an experiment going on right now, a two-tiered option for doing just that.”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast, where today I’ve got an interesting topic. Whether it’s 6 and 60 or whatever the frameworks are and how many ducks we’re going to kill, what if there were two options? What if you could opt out of that and instead shoot fewer ducks of your choice? There’s an experiment going on right now, a two-tiered option for doing just that. And to help me explain and explore this topic as an alternative harvest strategy is Mr. Rocco Marano from South Dakota. Rocco, how the heck are you this Monday morning?

Rocco Marano: I’m doing well, Ramsey. How about yourself?

Ramsey Russell: I’m doing good. I’m doing good. What is your title?

“My title is Senior Waterfowl Biologist for the state of South Dakota, Game, Fish and Parks.”

Rocco Marano: My title is Senior Waterfowl Biologist for the state of South Dakota, Game, Fish and Parks.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir. And how long have you been doing that?

Rocco Marano: Since 2010.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. We talked the other day. Where were you born and raised? You’re from South Dakota?

Rocco Marano: I am. I was born and raised in Huron, South Dakota, which is in the central part of East River. If you’re familiar with South Dakota, it’s divided east to west by the Missouri River. I’m in the central portion of East River, right in the middle of the prairie pothole country.

“Wow. What did you think you wanted to do when you were a little boy out there with a pellet rifle, playing outside and baseball and everything else? What did you think you wanted to do when you gr…”

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What did you think you wanted to do when you were a little boy out there with a pellet rifle, playing outside and baseball and everything else? What did you think you wanted to do when you grew up?

Rocco Marano: I definitely had an interest and aptitude for wildlife and anything outdoors. I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid, hunted pretty much anything that you could hunt back then. I was kind of a latecomer to waterfowl hunting. I hunted upland game and deer from age 12, but I probably didn’t start duck hunting until my mid-teenage years, maybe 14 or 15. I really took to duck hunting. It was something I could just do. There was a lot of public land in the area, a good reasonable chance of success, and you could just go out and get it done. I didn’t have a dog at the time, literally had a gunny sack, a potato sack with 12 decoys, and that’s how I duck hunted back then.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t believe someone born and raised in South Dakota grew up hunting upland birds. You’re in an upland bird paradise.

Rocco Marano: To be perfectly honest, waterfowl was almost more accessible back then because of the public land option. I didn’t have a dog, and I could go throw half a dozen decoys out on a body of water and have a reasonable hunt on public land. That was one of the main reasons that originally drew me to waterfowling. I’ve always had a high interest in migrations, the rhythm of the seasons. Watching the migrations of waterfowl and other birds has always been a high interest of mine. By the time I got into high school, I definitely wanted to have that be my career path. I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees at SDSU and was fortunate to get a graduate project that had to do with waterfowl banding up in Canada. That helped steer my career in that direction. I worked more in the habitat field surrounding grad school. I worked for Pheasants Forever as a habitat biologist, then worked for Game, Fish and Parks in South Dakota with private landowners for a number of years on habitat improvements on their private property. That gave me a well-rounded avenue in migratory bird management, not only harvest management and monitoring, but also habitat and how we’re producing the birds in the landscape.

Ramsey Russell: You strike me like nearly every other biologist or someone working in the field at the state, federal, or NGO levels. You strike me as what I call a “hook and bullet biologist,” Rocco. You grew up blessed with an abundance of natural resources, took to it like a fish to water, and at some point in high school or shortly thereafter, realized: “I so love this resource. I love to hunt it. I love to chase it. I think I’m going to make a career out of it.” That’s where an overwhelming amount of people that are in a position similar to yours in wildlife management in North America started, as what I call a hook and bullet biologist. Their origin started catching and touching, and now you’re at a managerial level. Is that a fair assessment?

Rocco Marano: Yeah, absolutely. I’m certainly a heavy user of the resource myself. I love to hunt and fish and try to steer my kids in that direction as well, to give them an appreciation for the same things I value. It’s a different angle. A lot of people can have impacts on the resource no matter what they choose as a career path, as long as they value it in their life. But to make your career out of it is a unique opportunity, and I feel very fortunate to do it.

Ramsey Russell: I think it’s a misconception among the public, at least some of the naysayers out there, that question or don’t understand. I sense sometimes on social media or other platforms that some people view wildlife managers or agencies as disconnected, like some kind of deep state force that’s far removed and unlike themselves. But I disagree. So many people I’ve talked to are like yourself. You just used the word “vested”, I’m personally vested in this resource. That really describes the wildlife management field. They’re personally vested in this resource. Would you say that’s a fair assessment of the field?

Rocco Marano: That is certainly my experience. I can speak from a state agency level. We work directly for our constituents. We work every day to ensure there’s not only abundant wildlife to pursue, you know things like regulations, access, and habitat and all these components to help ensure that there is a place to hunt and critters to chase and reasonable regulations. That’s literally what we do every day, to go to bat for those issues. There’s always going to be issues between the public and any agency, but from my own experience and background, I can say we go to bat every day for the sportsman. And not only sportsmen, but also the citizens of the United States. There are a host of non-consumptive users that we are certainly trying to ensure have viewing opportunities and things like that.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. That’s a great way of putting it. Real quickly, who introduced you to hunting? Who took little Rocco out to the field the first time and taught him the ethics, the ethos, and the how-to’s of upland bird hunting and later waterfowl hunting?

Rocco Marano: It’s kind of an interesting story. My dad did hunt, and he took me hunting. One of the more interesting parts of my story is that my grandmother actually was a hunter.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rocco Marano: She instilled a lot of the ethics and appreciation for the outdoors and wild things in general. She was really into that. When she was a kid, there were pictures of her out in Wyoming and Montana and the Black Hills, hunting big game back in the 1930s. She was a very big influence on me.

Ramsey Russell: Rocco, I hate to chase a trail, but let me go here. Tell me more about your grandmother. Was she born and raised in the Dakotas herself?

Rocco Marano: Absolutely. She was born and raised near Huron. Her family was one of the first families to homestead in that area. Her dad took the two kids, she had a sister, and he took the daughters hunting from the time they could walk. They went with him duck hunting, big game hunting, whatever he was chasing, they went without fail. It was a very unique situation because that wasn’t real common back then. There were actually all kinds of newspaper articles at the time, about the two Cow sisters out hunting and things like that.

Ramsey Russell: What lessons did she teach you? What are some of the most indelible teaching moments that your grandmother taught you, not only about how to kill something or how to skin something or how to cook something? I bet she was a heck of a cook. But what little life lessons do you still think back on sometimes that your grandmother taught you about hunting and respect for resources?

Rocco Marano: So she was really big on respect for the animal itself. So, things like if you’ve wounded an animal, you do absolutely everything you can to retrieve that animal. That was really big for her. Also, not to be wasteful of that animal. Once you harvested it, you’re going to use it somehow, and you’re going to eat it. That was a really big thing. And I know I’ve certainly brought that into my adult life, just the respect for the outdoors and the intrinsic value of wildness and wild things. She was really big on that, and it certainly stuck with me.

Ramsey Russell: Did she have a recipe or something she cooked, big game bird, that you just, boy, you say, “Man, I wish I could put my feet under her table and sink my teeth into that again?”

Rocco Marano: I definitely try to replicate a lot of her recipes. She’s no longer with us, but it’s never quite the same, right? It’s just never quite the same. But pretty much any of the wild game recipes that I try to replicate, you can try, but you’re never going to get it quite right.

Ramsey Russell: What was her favorite, or what was your favorite thing that she cooked?

Rocco Marano: She used to cook pheasants a lot. She’d make your classic fried, smothered pheasant in a fry pan, something I certainly will never forget, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: That’s great. And tell me a little bit about, because I love this kind of topic, tell me a little bit about your graduate research that involved banding up in Canada.

Rocco Marano: I actually banded near Medicine Hat, Alberta, for three summers. It would have been in the early 2000s, 2002, 2003, 2004 were my three field years. I was working with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Canadian Wildlife Service in their cooperative banding program, trying to increase efficiency in the trapping based on the trap styles or the trap configurations.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocco Marano: I was comparing different trap styles and orientations and ways to set the traps at the banding sites, trying to increase capture rates. We did find some statistically significant ways to increase capture and published that in the Journal of Wildlife Management, ultimately.

Ramsey Russell: What would have been the trap style? I’ve done a little bit. One summer, I got to go up there to Quill Lakes and band as a part of the Western Canada Cooperative. I learned a lot. One of the first things I learned, this makes me sound like a dummy, I was a wildlife biologist by training. I didn’t know ducks had to stay dry. I didn’t know you had to put floats inside those cages or a wet duck would die. I had no idea. They have to get out of the water. And I was just telling somebody something the other day, I had this conversation. What was so crazy, we were catching lots of blue-winged teal, tons of them. Initially, you’d catch a few, band them, turn them loose, and they’d fly off to parts unknown. But by about midway through that session to the end, they were like crack fiends. You’d catch those little teal, and you had to go block off the trap completely. Because if you didn’t, here you are, 20 yards from the trap, you’d band them, do everything you had to do, turn them loose, and they’d go make a spin and swim right back in the trap with you standing there. They were just. they were, by gosh, they were coming back in just crazy.

Rocco Marano: Yeah, they get trap-happy, that’s for sure. They learn that. They get a free meal and kind of get a pat on the back and let go. The traps that worked the best in my research were basically a large oval trap that was off-centered. Then I actually created a lead panel. They would come from the throat of the funnel, because they work, for their listeners that don’t know, they basically work kind of like a minnow trap, where the birds will swim into a funnel and then can’t find the way back out. I had a wire lead panel that would go 20 feet toward the shore that would terminate at the funnel. The birds swimming around would hit that panel and go straight toward the funnel. It was a significant increase in capture rates.

Ramsey Russell: Go ahead.

Rocco Marano: No, it’s okay. That’s fine.

Ramsey Russell: No, I was just, 20 years later, you’re now at a professional capacity into your career. Do you ever miss those days? Because I do. I think back to some of those technician days, and they were some of the best days of my life, just going out and getting out in the resource, not making a lot of money. I didn’t need a lot of money. It was the kind of work like what you just described, going out and doing that. It was the kind of job description that led me initially into the field of wildlife with just the technician stuff. Do you ever miss those days?

Rocco Marano: In a way, I do. But the nice thing about my job too is that I still get to do some of that work. In the summers, I band mourning doves and lead a goose-banding crew, and I help out with duck banding in South Dakota. We actually rocket net in South Dakota instead of swimming traps. But I help out with rocket net locations. I still get out to do enough to still make it fun, I guess. One nice thing about being the supervisor in some of that work is you can get out and do that if you want to.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah, man. You got your cake and you have your cake and the icing too, is what it sounds like.

Rocco Marano: Yeah. We get to do things like migration surveys, and I just got done flying the midwinter waterfowl survey a couple weeks ago, things like that. We still get to go out and do some fun stuff. A lot of it is more meetings and editing manuscripts or whatever it is. But we still get to do some of the fun stuff too.

Ramsey Russell: You told me as we were warming up, you told me a little bit, you shared with me that you started off kind of over habitat in South Dakota. What was the nature of that position when you came to work?

Rocco Marano: I was a private lands habitat biologist, and it was very similar to the work I did with Pheasants Forever. Landowners would come to me, and they would have a piece of property that they’d want to improve. It was my job to piece together as many different funding options, whether through the state or the feds or NGOs or whatever the funding options were, and try to piece that together and make sense for the landowner, while also trying to maximize habitat on the ground. We would try to steer the landowner in the right direction too. Maybe a landowner would come to you and say, “I want more pheasants,” and in their mind that meant, “I need a food plot,” when what they really need is maybe to restore that wetland and plant some grass.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocco Marano: That would be the job, to piece together funding, but also to steer the landowner in the right direction.

Ramsey Russell: So up in the prairie pothole region, which is kind of a production area for waterfowl, was most of your habitat work centered around increasing production on private land? Those grasslands would be great for upland birds. Versus down here in the Deep South, really and truly, a lot of the habitat work is about producing food sources for wintering waterfowl. I mean, when you start talking habitat in the Deep South, it’s like, how can I take my property and make it more attractive to waterfowl in terms of kilocalories? So, was it different up there in your area?

Rocco Marano: Yeah, it’s all production-based, basically. It’s restoring wetlands that have been drained. It’s trying to restore grassland habitat to either previously cropped areas, or maybe they’re just annually hayed or something, and you’re trying to do haying deferments or grazing plans, just anything to have some residual cover in the landscape so the birds can nest. The only winter habitat nexus, I guess you’d say, is for upland game and deer, where people want cattails for winter cover. For waterfowl specifically, it’s all about production. We like to say it’s keeping the table set. Even if it’s dry for a year or two, that habitat is there. So when the water returns, the birds can immediately utilize that wetland resource and those grassland resources. Because, as you know, every spot on the prairie isn’t wet all the time. This is a really good example, we are dry currently.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I was just fixing to ask you, how dry is it, Rocco?

Rocco Marano: It’s dry. I don’t know where we’re sitting as far as a deficit, but the eastern Dakotas are not wet right now. It looks like October out here. There’s zero snow, and we could certainly use about two to three feet in March.

Ramsey Russell: I sure hate to hear that because it seems to me, going to Canada, like we are running around, Canada’s been in a drought. In fact, really and truly, traveling around the United States and Canada, I would say that overall, maybe the entire North American continent has been in a drought for the past several years. In terms of annual production of waterfowl, for the last couple of years anyway, the Dakotas have really bailed us out of a bad place because of their habitat. Am I right or am I just delusional?

Rocco Marano: No, you’re absolutely correct. Also, the Dakotas, acre for acre or piece for piece of ground, outproduce anywhere else on the continent as well. So even if prairie Canada was wet and South Dakota was wet at the same time, South Dakota would still produce more ducks acre for acre than Canada.

Ramsey Russell: Why is that?

Rocco Marano: The further south you get in the pothole country, the more productive it gets. It’s just how it works based on productivity, the wetlands, and residual grasslands. We still do have a fair amount of CRP. We still do have a fair amount of grasslands left, where there are a lot of areas in Canada that are just one big wheat field.

Ramsey Russell: Oh boy. Out to the horizon.

Rocco Marano: Yeah. More and more, it’s one big cornfield. But we still have some nesting cover. Honestly, even into, say, Iowa, if Iowa had a good wetland base, it would be more productive than South Dakota. If we still had wetlands in Iowa. It’s just how, the further south you get, the more productive it gets.

Ramsey Russell: In this very productive piece of real estate like South Dakota, how has the amount of production, grasslands and wetlands, and I’m not talking about the year-to-year variability, because plains always come and go. Sometimes it’s wet, sometimes it’s dry. But overall, with drainage, with grasslands, with all the habitat features that go into a production ground like in South Dakota, is it the same as it was when you started or has it gone down a little bit despite your best effort?

Rocco Marano: We’re definitely losing habitat. Looking back, when I would have started professionally, mid to, say, 2005, we had a lot more CRP on the landscape. We also had a lot more native range on the landscape. Every year we’re losing native range to row crops. At that time, tile drainage was pretty much nonexistent in eastern South Dakota, where now it’s pretty advanced. As far as tile drainage going in eastern South Dakota, most wetlands are still drained through surface ditches. But tile drainage is certainly making inroads. So the habitat base in general is certainly less than it was when I started my career.

Ramsey Russell: You would have been employed as a professional biologist in the Dakotas when mallards hit an unbelievable high of 10 million thereabouts. What was it like then versus what it’s been like, say, the last five years?

Rocco Marano: That would have been like 2013.

Ramsey Russell: Something like that. Yeah.

Rocco Marano: Something like that.

Ramsey Russell: It was unbelievable.

Rocco Marano: A lot of that was driven by some really wet conditions. Sometimes if it’s wet enough, it kind of overwhelms some of the habitat deficits. There are areas that don’t get planted, right?

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Rocco Marano: You have all these areas that are just prevent plants. Or you have all this additional wetland base, all these odd areas that aren’t planted, that serve as nesting cover. If it’s wet enough, you kind of have that swamping effect where it overcomes some of the losses that you’ve had. But the trend is still, the habitat base is not growing. We’re not making more wetlands. We’re not making more grassland. We’re losing both of those every year.

Ramsey Russell: We’re having to fight tooth and nail to keep what we’ve got.

Rocco Marano: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: At the state level, the federal level, the NGO level, we’re having to claw and fight just to keep what we’ve got. But we’re still losing a little bit every year for some reason.

Rocco Marano: Yeah, there’s an attrition rate for both wetlands and grassland every year. There are a variety of reasons for that. That’s also why, in my career, in my capacity, serving on some of the joint ventures, I sit on the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture Tech Committee, that’s one of the things we go to bat for, literally every year and every day, trying to increase habitat base in the Dakotas.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Let’s jump into splash limits.

Rocco Marano: You bet.

Ramsey Russell: Which I’m gonna roll it like this because this topic came up with a very good friend of mine, Pat Gregory. We were talking about diver hunting and somehow or another me, him and Doc got to talking and he mentioned it and he was very excited about it and he said, they got this new splash limit. I see a great future for it because we can introduce new hunters, blah blah blah. And maybe it’s just I’m an old timer. People in general don’t like change. Whether it’s a change on the landscape, or a change in your backyard, or a change in homeowners association rules, or just a change in general. Change affects people. But here’s where I’m at. Rocco, I’m sure your grandmother, if she was a duck hunter, just like my grandfather, just like the men that mentored me, one of the basic tenets of waterfowl hunting is know your duck. I mean, we’ve always had full matter limits, two hen species bag limits. So it’s just kind of like at a glance over time. There’s no shortcuts to it. It comes with experience. I know what’s coming in. I shoot it. I know in the shadows that square tail means a wood duck, not a hooded merganser. It’s just a basic life skill if you’re a duck hunter. And it just, it kind of, sort of, I’m not saying I disagree with it, because I don’t. I’m just saying it just rubbed me a little different. Like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, no, no, no. We shouldn’t be giving kids a soft way out. There’s no participation trophies. They need to buy a guy, know that duck before they shoot. That’s the whole essence of being a duck hunter. But, you know, there is a but. You know, there’s got to be a great reason, and that’s what we’re here to explore, of why this quote splash limit, this two-tiered system, has come into being. And you all are in an experimental reason. I went to Nebraska this year to hunt in January. And when I went to get my license, I had an option. I had two options of what I wanted for a license, the full limit or a half limit. Anything I wanted to shoot, a full limit as prescribed by all the regulations. Or, you know, maybe that was five mallards out there and blah blah blah, or three ducks, my choice. And because it’s so heavy in that area to mallards, I said, well, I’m gonna both the duck fly. I’m gonna stick with my five mallards. When did this new two-tiered system or splash limit, when did this whole thing take effect? When did it start and why did it start?

Rocco Marano: Yeah, so just at least to start with kind of what you were talking about at the beginning about the paradigm of have to know your ducks. We’ve done a really good job, and I’m saying we, as far as wildlife professionals, have done a really good job at hammering at people that they have to know their ducks, right? We have species-specific, sex-specific limits, and we have for a lot of years. And in order to be successful at navigating that, you do, you’re supposed to know your ducks. The whole impetus behind this two-tiered system is we’re trying to look at not only the waterfowl populations that we’re managing, we’re actually doing this regulation option to manage for duck hunters. So we’re looking at the duck hunting population as actually one of the managed populations, if you will. And the reason for that is because, at least in some states, and Nebraska and South Dakota are two prime examples, we’re losing a lot of duck hunters. We’ve lost half of our duck hunters since the late 1990s. We’re losing roughly 500 a year. It’s about 2% a year. And obviously, when you have a rate like that going down, eventually you don’t have any, right? Nobody wants to see that. And there are a number of reasons, which we can go into in a little bit here. But I guess it’s a four-year experiment. It started in 2021. This is the final year of the experiment right now, as far as the waterfowl season that just ended or will be just ended on the 31st, probably in some of the zones in Nebraska. The thought or the idea started really early after I started on in 2010. I’m going to give credit to Dr. Mark Fratiska.

Ramsey Russell: I know Mark, yeah. Mississippi State graduate.

Rocco Marano: Yeah. So he was the biologist in Nebraska at the time. He was the waterfowl biologist. A splash limit was not a new idea, but this two-tiered option or the two-tiered experiment was. And he started talking with the flyway about it probably in 2011 or 2012. At that time, the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, or the NAWMP, had an update in 2012. The human user or the hunter and the viewer was identified as a co-equal objective or a third leg in this management stool. Where it used to be populations and habitat were the two legs, now the human user or the hunter and the viewer were identified as a co-equal objective. That kind of opened the way to do some more human dimensions research in waterfowl management and allowed us to start talking with the Fish and Wildlife Service, talking to other flyways, and going through things like the Harvest Management Working Group and floating this idea. It took a while to get traction. We’re talking 2012 to 2020, let’s say, of massaging this. We conducted several research projects trying to prove or show that identifying ducks on the wing was a barrier to people participating. And we successfully showed that in a number of research projects, human dimensions research projects, that showed that people are hesitant to try it. And a good way to. You’re talking about how in your mind that’s what it meant to be duck hunter. And that’s how I felt too. Let’s say growing up or even early in my career. A good way to put it is, you’re going to start out, whether it’s bowling or golf or any kind of pastime, and in order to try it, you have to be reasonably proficient at it. And if you’re not, you might get law enforcement involved. That’s a good way to think about it. Also, I’m sure you had a mentor when you were first getting into duck hunting. There’s a lot of people that don’t have that anymore. Especially young adults that grew up in a non-hunting household and now they’re, say, 20, 23, they want to try duck hunting. How do you start that? How do you even get your foot in the door when you don’t know your ducks and you’re scared to try it? That is an absolute barrier to participation. This experiment is to try to show, if we give a simplified option, can we increase recruitment, retention, and reactivation? And that’s the R3.

Ramsey Russell: The three Rs. Yeah.

Rocco Marano: Yeah. So recruitment, retention, and reactivation. We’re trying to see if we can basically move the needle on any of those through this experiment.

Ramsey Russell: And why are some of the reasons for hunter decline in South Dakota and elsewhere? I’m sure you all did a little research or some surveys on this. What were you all seeing as the main reason you all are losing hunters?

Rocco Marano: So we did ask people, and that was some of that research that we conducted. It’s all across the board. It’s time, it’s money, it’s people identifying places to hunt. Depending on where you’re at, access is a barrier. The interesting thing about this two-tiered experiment is you look at things that agencies have control over. We don’t have control that your kids are in five things. We don’t have control that inflation is increasing all kinds of costs. We don’t have control over a whole host of things. The things that we do have control over, like access, license fees, those are either pretty basic or they’re not scalable. We do access programs, but we can’t make a place for everybody to hunt all the time at a cost-effective fashion. Most states can’t. So we’re trying to look at something that we both have control over and is scalable. This two-tiered option is, because it’s available to everybody. It’s not free, but it’s close to free. If it would go operational, it would just be regulation, and you’re aligned in your regulation book. We’re trying to get something that was extremely scalable. Also, we have a whole host of other R3 programs, whether it’s mentored hunts, youth hunts, decoy loaners. There are all kinds of things that we do in South Dakota. But again, that’s one hunter at a time. It’s worthy to do, and it’s awesome to do those efforts. But to make something that’s scalable to thousands of people is pretty rare, and it’s pretty unique in the R3 world.

Ramsey Russell: What states are participating in this four-year experiment for splash limit?

Rocco Marano: Currently, it’s just Nebraska and South Dakota. Other states were invited to try back in 2020 when it was approved. When the experiment was approved, other states and flyways were asked if they wanted to jump in. In reality, most states just wanted to see if it would work. They’re definitely waiting to see how this worked. Then that’s when the discussion is going to be, as far as if it works here and we can show that XYZ happened, we didn’t cause harm to waterfowl populations and we actually maybe recruited some people, how does that scale beyond South Dakota and Nebraska? Then just start to have those conversations.

Ramsey Russell: How many states were invited? And let me ask another way. Were any Deep South states invited or was it just upper flyway?

Rocco Marano: All states.

Ramsey Russell: All states. All 50 states had the options.

Rocco Marano: All states were invited in the original ask. Yep.
Ramsey Russell: How do you ask everybody? Just send a group email or do you,
Rocco Marano: No that was actually a formal process through what’s called the Service Regulations Committee. If I ever mention SRC, that’s what it is. And that’s a formal process where all states and flyways engage the Fish and Wildlife Service on all migratory bird regulations. That’s the formal body that approved this experiment, was the SRC. And at the SRC meeting where it was approved, it was basically floated, and there’s representatives for all flyways there. It was floated there that other flyways can be involved if they want to be. But at the time, the Central Flyway was the only flyway that had an interest in doing it.
Ramsey Russell: When I think about identification problems for myself, let alone somebody that’s only been hunting a year or five, first thing that jumps to mind is Canada and the upper flyways, where because the season opens so early, you’re shooting “brown ducks.” It’s crazy. I can remember one particular season where Canada, for example, has an eight-mallard limit, no distinction between hens and drakes, whatever. And I can remember hunting up there a little bit and then jumping down and hunting with my friends over in North Dakota at Dirty Bird Outfitters. We were there for the opener. There were no clients. It was just straight-up friends and family. And boy, let me tell you what, now we’re south of the border and there’s a one-pintail limit, not eight. And there’s a two-mallard limit, two hen mallard limit, not eight. You’ve got to let those flocks work close. And they’re all brown and they’re all young, especially the hatch-year birds, which there’s a lot of. You’ve got to really pay attention. And the only way I could tell the difference in a hen and a drake is look at the bill. And for my old eyes to see the bill in early morning light, they’ve got to be sitting in your lap. And we were just all hunkered down in the blind and we’re whispering, we’re communicating to everybody. Look at the three on the left, look at the three down low, look at the ones coming up through the middle, look at the three falling in. So the bird would work in, work in, and then it might fail a little bit. We called them back. You just had to really pay attention. And it got to be where you couldn’t volley into them all. All five or six, eight of us couldn’t just volley into the flock. We had to really, if you see a drake, go for him. But it’s doable. But Rocco, that is what I call bringing an A-level game to the equation. When you’re hunting mid-September in North Dakota, late September, North Dakota, shooting hatch-year birds and having to look at their beaks, that’s a whole different ballgame than coming down here to Arkansas in the first week of December. It’s just different. In that case, I can see where if we want to recruit new hunters, they can grow into shooting drakes only. But from the get-go, it might be conducive to just say, okay guys, you can shoot three of them. Three your choice. That makes perfect sense to me.
Rocco Marano: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a huge deal up the northern end of the flyway. I mean, when you have these production states where you have birds in eclipse plumage, you have hatch-year birds, like you said, I don’t care who you are. If it’s low light, half hour before sunrise, and there’s a mixed flock of birds coming in, you’re going to struggle. It’s just kind of the nature of the beast. And this option definitely gives folks an opportunity to take that pressure off. And honestly, one of the things I’m sure we’ll talk about is who’s been doing this. And one of the cohorts is older hunters, and they’ve contacted me specifically saying that, yeah, I know my ducks, I’ve hunted for 30 years, but I don’t feel comfortable IDing ducks on the wing in early morning anymore. So I’d rather just shoot three ducks and be done and not have to worry about it. And they’ve also told me that perhaps this will give them a few extra years of hunting, when they were going to hang it up because they just didn’t feel good about it anymore. And that’s part of the retention part. One of the R’s is retention. If we can retain some of these hunters for a few extra years, that’s a worthy goal just to have that regulation option. But yeah, you’re absolutely correct. It’s a challenge not just for novice hunters but for anybody trying to identify ducks on the wing.
Ramsey Russell: I would add to that. I’m just sitting here wondering out loud, Rocco. I would add to that, an older hunter that I want to retain, buy your duck stamp, contribute to conservation through spending and participation. In addition to just older eyes, myself and many others my age, I know, three ducks is plenty. What are those stages of hunters? First, you want to just shoot a bunch, then you want to learn the skill. Then you start to fade from numbers into more of an artistic approach. Just the participation part of it, not just the gross bag. Maybe to an older guy that’s been there, done that for so many years, three is plenty. I went out, I had fun. Now I can go back to the coffee shop or go back and watch The Price Is Right with mama. Yeah, seriously, three is plenty. A lot of us older guys, we don’t need a bag limit. We don’t judge the success of our morning based on bag limits. It’s just, okay, we succeeded. We played the game, we got what we needed, and we’re happy. Have you talked to enough people? Is that maybe a possibility that just as hunters begin to age, that’s okay?
Rocco Marano: Yeah, absolutely. And we actually asked that specific question in our surveys. The top reasons why folks choose this option are, of course, the ones you think about, trouble identifying birds on the wing, but right there with it is, “I prefer simple regulations,” or “Three ducks is enough.” And it’s not just old hunters, but I think that demographic is probably overrepresented in that sentiment, like you said. I think that probably is true. And then there’s also the satisfaction, sometimes it can go up for some people if they have a lower bag and they attain it.
Ramsey Russell: Thank you for saying that. You blew my mind, because I talked to a state biologist down South many years ago. They’d been doing boat ramp surveys and judging everybody. And he told me, “Ramsey, duck hunters are hard to please. They are the most grouchy bunch of people.” He said, “How do we make duck hunters happy?” And this was way back, not 20 years into the 6 and 60, but maybe five, ten years in, 25 years ago. And I said, “Lower the bag limit.” He said, “Why would that work?” I said, “They got their limit. If the limit is only three, think about it. Limit’s five or six or four or three, how many ducks you kill?” Limit. “Boom, I hit the benchmark. I succeeded.” That’s a good point. So if I choose to do three, any choice, boom, I got my limit. Every time I can kill three ducks and I’m not sitting out there grinding until 11 o’clock in the morning trying to get three more. I got my limit. I never thought about that.
Rocco Marano: That’s part of the beauty of this system too. We’re still giving folks the opportunity that want to scratch out their six and their bonus blue-wing teal. We’re giving those folks, the really avid people that want to have high harvest, they can choose that. Because there is that tension between trying to get every duck we can out of regulations, which is kind of where we’ve been for a lot of years. That’s why you end up with these complicated regulations with species-specific and sex-specific regs, we’re trying to parse maximum harvest out of these populations. There’s a tension between that and simpler regs for people that don’t know their ducks. So the beauty of this is that we’re giving the option for the really good avids that know their ducks, who want to hunt 30 days a year, whatever that is. But the folks that don’t, and just want to buy a duck stamp, support conservation, go out one or two times, which is kind of what we’re seeing on the three-duck option folks, they’re not big users of the resource. They’re not shooting very many ducks. But you know what, they’re going out, they’re supporting the North American model of wildlife management. They’re hopefully getting an appreciation for wetlands and waterfowl, and they’re trying it out. And to me, that’s a win-win.
Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. I’d almost like to survey them, the three-duck folks versus the full-limit folks. I’d love to do a hunter satisfaction survey to compare the two groups and see who’s the happiest, who goes home happy. I would think the fact that they chose three and they’re going out to enjoy nature, they’re probably just happy regardless. That’s what I would think.

Rocco Marano: Yeah. Well, we’re definitely, you know, well, we are asking satisfaction in the survey, and the support for the two-tier, of the people that choose it, is like 80%.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. 80%, you got a demographic of 80% of them are happy.

Rocco Marano: Yeah, exactly. Have you ever heard of that, ever?

Ramsey Russell: That’s great. Tell me more about this demographic. How many people in Nebraska and South Dakota, and I guess it could be resident or nonresident, what percent of hunters that are hunting in Nebraska and South Dakota choose the second-tier option, for the three duck option.

Rocco Marano: That’s a great question. So, at the beginning, in South Dakota, it was about 5% of all HIP registrants. So, for those that don’t know what HIP is, it’s the Hunter Information Program. It’s when you answer the questions when you buy your license about how many ducks you shot. It basically collects information for harvest surveys for the Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s where you make your choice, whether it’s tier one or tier two. Tier one was the normal bag, the traditional bag. Tier two is a three-bird bag. And we’re up to about 8% in South Dakota now, which is roughly,  like, I don’t know, I’m trying to find the number here,  it was around 2,000 last year for South Dakota, with about a thousand active estimated duck hunters. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but South Dakota only has 10 to 12,000 active duck hunters right now, resident duck hunters. So it’s a pretty big percentage of that duck hunting population. And if you think about it, let’s say, and it compounds on itself, right? Let’s say we got to do this for five more years, if we’re recruiting 300 new duck hunters a year, that’s compounding interest.

Ramsey Russell: You are offsetting that loss. You’re actually gaining on that decline. So, you are recruiting new hunters and retaining more hunters into the fold. You’ve put a stop loss into the equation.

Rocco Marano: Yep. And that’s actually part, and I’m sure we’ll go over some of the measures of success here in a little bit,  but that’s part of the measures: actually, I think it’s 500 documented, at least 500 per state, recruit, retain, and reactivation by the end of the experiment each year.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic.

Rocco Marano: So, yeah, and I do believe that we’re having a meaningful impact right now. If you look at hunter trends through HIP, you do see kind of a leveling off of that loss right now. I hope that’s sustainable through time, and I hope that we have an opportunity to maintain this going forward. So, in Nebraska, it’s been roughly 11 to 13% of the total HIP, and they’ve been averaging about 1,000 to 1,600 active hunter estimated. But Nebraska also has a much larger population base of people. There’s a lot more Nebraskans than there are South Dakotans. But percentage-wise, we’re looking pretty darn good in both states as far as uptake. And just to give you an example,  the first year of the experiment, we had no clue how many people were actually going to do this. We thought, man, if we can get 500 people in each state to even register, it’d be a win. We blew past all those estimates almost immediately. So the demand is out there for this option, and the uptake has been really good. We’ve been pleasantly surprised with how many people have actually tried to do it.

Ramsey Russell: I was shocked the other day when we first visited, when you told me that a lot of participants were older. I was shocked to hear that. Who are some of the other, of that percent of people that are choosing this option? You’ve got a surprisingly older generation, because of their eyesight or convenience or whatever. But who are some of the others that are choosing this option?

Rocco Marano: The largest cohorts that we’re seeing right now are young adults.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Rocco Marano: So that’d be like, you know, 18 to 25, let’s say. And of course, there is a pretty good bump at youth hunters as well because people are encouraging their kids. My kids have done it for four years now, and they’ve enjoyed it. Actually, my daughter’s to the point now where she thinks she knows her ducks, so she wants to graduate.

Ramsey Russell: So it’s working.

Rocco Marano: Yeah, and that is one of the goals of this project is to teach people their ducks. Hopefully, the ultimate goal would be that they graduate to the traditional limit eventually. But, yeah, that does happen. But yeah, young adults. And then it’s kind of just even as far as percentage until you get out to some of those older cohorts, like 55-plus, and then you start to see a bump out there as well. What’s really nice about that young adult cohort is that’s the sweet spot with R3. If you talk to any R3 professional, those are the people that you’re trying to recruit. Maybe they’re not totally entrenched in the family stuff yet. Maybe they’re still in college or they’ve got some time and disposable income. It’s harder to recruit somebody that’s 35 and their kids are in five things. It’s really hard to actually recruit a youth hunter because when you’re a kid, you don’t have control over anything. We can take you out on a mentored hunt, but then if you want to go out again, you can’t take yourself. You can’t buy your shotgun. You can’t buy the shells.

Ramsey Russell: You can’t drive to the duck cult.

Rocco Marano: It’s a harder thing to do. So that young adult cohort is the sweet spot for R3.

Ramsey Russell: Now, you briefly talked about your objectives of this two-tier system. Get into some of the results, how data is collected, and what you’re seeing. As we’re coming to the end of a four-year experiment, 80% of the people are happy, that, to me, is a success in and of itself. But what are some of the other things you all are seeing, and how are you all collecting data for this experiment?

Rocco Marano: One of the things we’re doing is we’re actually collecting duck wings from hunters, just like the federal parts collection. If your listeners are familiar with the federal parts collection, the Fish and Wildlife Service, through the HIP data, collects a sample of duck hunter wings that are used for harvest and sex ratio and production estimates and things like that,  we’re doing that for a different reason. We’re trying to see if hunters are shooting extra ducks of those species, like, let’s say, canvasbacks, or scaup, or pintail, or hen mallards, species and sex restrictions of those birds. We’re trying to see if the three-duck hunters are shooting more of them than they should, and how many more.

Ramsey Russell: So when you say more of them than they should, you mean if they’re shooting more pintail or shooting more hen mallards than the limits of the other, Okay.

Rocco Marano: And we can estimate the extra ducks based on those bags. What we’re finding is that it’s very limited. Even in these years where we’ve got, let’s say, 1,500 active, estimated Tier 200 in South Dakota, we’re looking at less than 200 extra pintail, let’s say. Because how you do it is, you figure out how many apparently birds above, let’s say the pintail limit is one. Well, you figure out how many hunters had a bag of two or above. Then you figure out, per hunter, how many pintails that is. It’s going to be less than one. It’ll be a fraction of a pintail. You take that, then times the number of times, on average, a hunter hunts, and you can get a value on how many extra birds are actually harvested. It’s not very big. It’s in the hundreds, if that. A lot of times, it’s even less than a hundred. If you think about it, it’s not that easy to do this. In some unique situations, yeah, you could go out there and shoot three pintail, but folks aren’t doing it. They’re just flat out not. They’re going out, shooting the first three ducks they see. And actually, on average, they’re not shooting a limit of three anyway.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Wow. So a lot of them are just going out. They can shoot up to three, but same as a duck hunter, they can shoot up to six, they’re not shooting their full bag limit. They may shoot one or two.

Rocco Marano: Yep, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: And they come back, and 80% of them are happy just to be there. Wow. Man, that’s incredible.

Rocco Marano: Yeah. And also, that 80% say that they’re likely to use the regulation next year. So that’s a pretty good indication of satisfaction if you’re going to do it again.

Ramsey Russell: Rocco, you’ve just about talked me into going to the splash limit myself. I’m not going to lie to you. I’m starting to get a little bit excited for this thing right here. When we talk about measures of success, you’ve mentioned R3 a lot. Is the biological part of that success what you just discussed, the fact that we’re only shooting 200 more pintails and that doesn’t matter? Is that the biological success of this program?

Rocco Marano: Exactly. So we had a kind of agreed-upon list of measures that we have to meet as benchmarks to see if we were actually successful. And that’s always an arbitrary thing, but we have to have those sideboards. So if we can show that we’re not increasing 10% additional harvest on those species or sex cohorts, pintail, scaup, canvasback, on average. We use the average harvest of, let’s say, pintail from 1999 to 2020. If we don’t go above 10% of that on our estimated extra harvest, then we’re good. And we’re nowhere near it. I mean, it’s such a tiny amount. We’ve basically shown that that’s been achieved. I also mentioned, are looking at the duck hunter population as the managed population here. What I mean by that is that you can actually model duck hunter survival just like you can model duck survival. It’s not that the duck hunters are literally surviving or not, but if they actually go to the next year to duck hunt, then that’s a survival. You can use them as a managed population. Our goal is to have what’s called a lambda rate or survival rate of 0.9 or 90% or higher by the end of the experiment. That’s not a total stop loss, but hopefully a slow loss. That’s a goal. We also had recruitment, retention, reactivation goals. The goal is to be able to show at least 500 per state per year by the last year of the experiment, which was this year. We’re also going to be comparing hunter trends to neighboring states to make sure it’s not just a blip. Let’s say, a rising tide raises all boats type of situation. We’re trying to show that we have an impact on our two states, even independently of other states. We’re trying to quantify increased conservation funding, not only through duck stamps, but we can also estimate economic impact per hunter to show what kind of support we’re getting for conservation by recruiting, retaining, and reactivating these hunters. As you know, the North American model is a user-based system. We’re not going to have social, political, and financial support for wetlands and waterfowl, if we don’t have hunters and viewers out there wanting to see them and pursue them. You’ve got to have that angle, and we’re trying to quantify that as an objective. We’re obviously quantifying motivation, satisfaction, and utility of the simplified option for hunters. We’re surveying hunters every year. We’re also doing voluntary interviews, sit-down interviews with hunters at the end of the season. They contact us. We give a little checkbox on the survey site, “Would you like us to call you?” We’re getting some fine-grained motivations and satisfaction information from those hunters.

The last measure of success is just showing that by implementing this, it’s not a big administrative burden. So the juice is worth the squeeze. You don’t want some big bureaucratic nightmare that costs a lot of money that you don’t realize in gains. We’re showing that’s definitely not the case. This is a very overhead-lean type of situation. We’re not worried about the administrative costs of implementing this option, but we’re certainly seeing an increase in funding for conservation.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. We talk about this R3, R3, R3, you just nailed it. But I want to discuss it further. Now, I stumbled across a group, and I hear rumblings on the internet. We’ve got too many hunters. Rocco, we got too many hunters. I’m sorry, we got too many hunters. There’s a surprising organization, I won’t even say their name, I think they’re aimed mostly at big game hunters out West, but they are adamantly opposed to R3. “You need to shut up, sit down, don’t say anything to anybody about hunting. And if fewer hunters are coming, that’s more for me.” That’s the gist of their group. But you’re in wildlife management. You’re very active in ensuring we’ve got hunting and we’ve got resources to hunt. When you start talking about the economic impacts of hunters in conservation, I’m always reminded, never heard it put better than what my buddy Heath Hagee stated, “Hunting is crowdsourced-funded conservation.” And I mean, it is. How important are hunters to your budget and what you do in the state of South Dakota and surrounding states in the United States? I mean, why do we need more hunters? We’ve got folks saying, “Man, I don’t want as many people out here at the boat ramp. I don’t want as many people stomping around the woods. I don’t want as many people at the trailhead.” How do we really make sense of that? How important is hunting to delivering a resource out here, delivering that habitat, putting those wetlands on the ground? How important is it, Rocco?

Rocco Marano: It’s completely critical. So many different facets of that. It’s not just direct license dollars, which is huge, whether it’s duck stamp dollars, HIP registry, or any of the licenses you pay every year just to hunt. There’s also Pittman-Robertson funding, which is enormous. That’s an excise tax on ammunition and firearms. That’s a huge budget augmentation. Like I said, the duck stamp itself goes directly toward habitat. The vast majority goes to easement acquisition and wetland work, whether it’s in the Dakotas. Right now, there’s been a big front-loading of duck stamp dollars for a number of years now, close to at least 10 years, going directly toward easement work and trying to fill that backlog of landowner interest in conservation easements for wetland and grasslands in the Dakotas. There’s so much interest in that, there’s a backlog. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s great to have all the interest, but you never know when that’s going to go away. It’s a waiting list. That’s critical. I mentioned the North American model. If we don’t have that user base, we won’t have the wetlands and wildlife because politically and socially, there’s not a need for it. You don’t need 10 million mallards to have a healthy mallard population. But you want 10 million mallards if you’re a hunter, and we’re going to do our darndest.

Ramsey Russell: I want 50 million mallards. What are you talking about?

Rocco Marano: Yeah, but just as a point of common sense, you don’t need that many if there aren’t people there to pursue them. That’s why we’re managing for these aspirational population goals, because we have a very active and engaged user base. They’re supporting crowdsourced conservation. That’s exactly what it is. Implicit in this experiment is a continuation of duck hunting heritage. I don’t want to see that go away. I know you don’t want to see that go away. You talk about the folks who want to be the last duck hunter, right? They want to be that last duck hunter because it’s all for them. I reject that on its face. I think it’s very short-sighted, and it’s not going to be a winner in the long run, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: No way. Because we started off this whole conversation talking about the monumental effort to conserve what we’ve got, just to hold the fort, to slow the loss of habitat, production ground, and wintering habitat. And we’ve got all these NGOs and research universities and state and federal government offices doing everything we can. We’ve got 254, I don’t know, some astronomical amount of money through Pittman-Robertson and spending the economic boost that hunters are generating, and it still ain’t enough. We can’t stop it. I’m saying we need more, not less, going into this effort. That’s what you’re saying. That’s what I’m saying.

Rocco Marano: Absolutely. If you look at things like habitat loss rates versus protection in a place like the Dakotas, we still have a lot to protect, right? It hasn’t all been converted. There still is a lot there. But eventually, if you go through time, those two lines will intersect, you know, loss and protection will intersect. And then you’re in a restoration regime. You no longer can protect anything because there’s nothing left to protect. And so what you want to do is make sure you’ve protected as much as you can for as long as you can so that when you eventually hit that point, there’s a better habitat base there to keep the table set. And then you’re in a restoration regime, which there are some places where that’s where you’re at. Basically, every gain you get is a restoration. And while I’m not saying we certainly will restore things in the Dakotas, we will, we do it all the time, but our main focus is still protection because we’re trying to protect what we have.

Ramsey Russell: Rocco, as you come towards the end of the four-year, two-tiered regulations experiment, what are the next steps and what do you see as the future of the so-called splash limits?

Rocco Marano: That’s a great question. We certainly are not done analyzing data yet, but it appears that we’re going to meet most, if not all, of our measures of success. I think we’re going to be able to show that. I’m going out on a limb, but I think we will. And we’re kind of in some preliminary talks right now with other flyways and the Fish and Wildlife Service, and we’re trying to see what next steps would be. Now, what I think likely may happen is maybe something like a phase two of the experiment, where maybe a couple of states from the other flyways ask to jump on.

Ramsey Russell: Are you hearing that? Are you hearing a little bit of rumor, a little chatter, people calling you up and trying to get some information? I know I don’t want you to finger any state or somebody. You can’t speak for anybody else, but are you starting to see some excitement and buzz like, “Hey, wait a minute, we opted out to see what would happen. But hey, this is showing some real potential”? Are you starting to hear a little excitement for it?

Rocco Marano: Yes. And we actually did a webinar series for all the other flyways last summer, showing our initial results. And we even surveyed all the states to gauge their potential interest. So there is interest out there in all four flyways, some more than others, but there’s certainly interest in all four. And like I said, we’re in the initial stages of framing what a phase two of the experiment might look like. That’s going to happen, let’s say, through this fall. I’m going to be doing another webinar series with the flyways probably in July. A final report to the Fish and Wildlife Service on the Nebraska–South Dakota experiment is due at the end of the summer. And at that point, we’re going to figure out where we’re going to be. Are South Dakota and Nebraska going to go operational? Are other states going to be allowed to jump on? Are there states where it’s just not going to work? I mean, there may be states where it just doesn’t work.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And why might it not work in other states? Just make sure I understand.

Rocco Marano: Some states don’t want more duck hunters. I mean, some states truly believe that they’re kind of maxed out.

Ramsey Russell: Would that be because they feel like there’s already 70 hunters in a duck hole with what resources they’ve got?

Rocco Marano: Yeah. And there are also some states where maybe the avids would choose it because it’s not a mallard-dominated or a teal-dominated harvest. It’d be most of the ducks you see are some of those canvasbacks, redheads, scaup. And part of me wants to have a state try it and try to break it. But also, there could be some biological impacts at that point too.

Ramsey Russell: But I’m kind of a Jethro Bodine when it comes to figuring, right? I mean, I’m not quick, I need a calculator and a lot of thought to do the math. But, you know, I was sitting there thinking: if 5% of 900,000 duck hunters participated, when you were talking about 200 more ducks in South Dakota, 200 more pintails in South Dakota, I was trying to think what would happen. And pintail is not a good example because I think the national limit’s going to be three next year. But maybe the canvasbacks or the bluebills, what would happen if 10% of 900,000, so 90,000 hunters nationwide, participated in this program? It could be a little too many canvasbacks or something. You know, it could be. But I don’t know. Have you all tried to spitball some numbers and try to figure out what would happen if this became a nationwide thing?

Rocco Marano: We certainly haven’t gotten that far to try to extrapolate that yet. And it’s all going to be based on, I mean, some states have very low harvest of, you know, actually, most states have very low harvest of, let’s say, redheads or canvasbacks.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Rocco Marano: So the vast majority of states, it’s just not going to be an issue. But there are a few states where it could be. But then there’s also the need to look at the value of managing either the duck population or the hunter population. And see, that’s where it’s just a paradigm shift. We’re not just looking at the duck population at that point. Some states, with anything, you may have to say, “Okay, some years we may overharvest a little bit on species X to maintain the hunter population in some cases. I’m not saying that’s going to be the case, but that’s just one way you’ve got to start thinking about this. If you’re in your state, duck hunter numbers declining is our big issue, which in South Dakota, it is. And South Dakota also has really low harvest for most of those species. So does Nebraska.

Ramsey Russell: So it’s mostly puddle ducks in those two states?

Rocco Marano: Yeah. And it’s just not an issue. Our canvasback, redhead, scaup harvest is just low. It’s just low anyway. So yeah, it’s just going to depend, like there are a lot of states where it’s just not going to matter.

Ramsey Russell: Can you see a future where all 49 or 50 states opted for a two-tiered system?

Rocco Marano: I don’t think so. No, I think what it’s going to be is you’ll have maybe several states in each flyway that opt in, and there’ll be some states that probably self-regulate themselves not to do it because they know they may have an issue. And then there are going to be some states that just don’t want it because they don’t see the need for the R3 in their state. There are states like that. But there are a lot of states that either want more duck hunters, or they just want a simplified option for duck hunters, because maybe they’re a state that has really low duck hunter numbers anyway, and they’re just never going to have a lot. So they just say, “Why not let people shoot three ducks?”

Ramsey Russell: In the context of your statement that some states feel, managers of some states feel, that they’re already kind of capped out on hunters. In other words, whew. Between residents and non-residents, we’ve got plenty. And for the habitat we’ve got to hunt, for the access we’ve got, I’m trying to transition to one of the last topics I’ve got is hunting pressure. Okay. And I’m asking and saying it at the same time. Seems like we got a whole lot of hunting pressure in the United States of America. Everywhere I go, every single place I go, from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, from North Dakota down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, hunting pressure, hunting pressure, hunting pressure. And it may not always be hunting pressure in the sense of 70 or more hunters crowded into a flooded timber hole on opening day. It could be just hunting pressure. I mean, every square foot of everywhere that a duck might land is getting shot a lot of different days. And the ducks are under pressure and they’re going into refuges and turning nocturnal and turning into a lot of disgruntled duck hunters. No, there’s still the myth. Down in the Deep South, I still hear the myth, as recently as two days ago, I hear the myth, we need to extend our seasons to February 15 because that’s when the ducks show up. Break, break. No, it ain’t. That’s when they come out of hiding because there ain’t no shots on the landscape. We got a hunting pressure issue. And I’m sitting here rambling and running on, Rocco, but I’m reminded of a conversation I had with another biologist out in California one time. Back in the day, the limit in California was two specks and you could go out and, bam, bam, get your two specks. If you were in speck country, bam, bam, get them. Well, the speck population, the white-front population, began to build up. And now the limit in places in California is 10 white-fronted geese per day. Well, the average American duck hunter, it ain’t about going out and having a good time. Hey, I got my two birds, let’s go on back to the house. It’s about get that limit. And all things equal, it takes longer, much longer, to kill 10 speckled bellies than two speckled bellies. And as hunters are sitting out in the field and putting more pressure on this resource, guess what? It’s harder to kill two than 10. It’s harder to kill two than it was because of hunting pressure. And I’m just sitting here thinking to myself, well, dadgum, in the state of South Dakota or anywhere that had a three-duck. I mean, all things equal, it takes less time to kill three ducks than six. People are back at the biscuit pit earlier than later, leaving the resource alone. Maybe in addition to hunter satisfaction, hey, I’m happy because I killed, quote, a limit, I’m happier now because I’m seeing more ducks. I’m interacting with more, less-pressured ducks because I’ve cut the pressure on the landscape figuratively by half. That makes sense what I’m kind of saying and asking at the same time. Do you see benefit in that regard?

Rocco Marano: I can see benefit maybe in some places. South Dakota, specifically. I would venture to say that the pressure isn’t a huge issue yet in South Dakota, just based on the fact that we’ve lost half our duck hunters, especially water hunting. And now what we have here is kind of a bottleneck of people that want to shoot greenheads in dry land corn and kind of in the big push. And there is a pressure issue for sure during that timeframe. The nice thing is I don’t think that’s what you’re seeing in most of these, these three-duck option people. They’re just running out there in October. And we’re seeing that because I’m keeping track of when they’re hunting too. They’re hunting in late September, October. They’re running out there shooting a shoveler, a blue-winged teal, and a gadwall. I mean, they’re just out there enjoying the resource. There’s so much public land in South Dakota when it comes to water hunting. And another nice thing is we actually are surveying people to ask them if they think that pressure on public land is increasing through this, and they’re not indicating that.

Ramsey Russell: So how are you all managing, with as much public resources you all have in South Dakota, how are you all managing out-of-state hunting pressure? I know I had this conversation with federal duck stamp winner Adam Grimm, three-time winner, lives in South Dakota, and we were talking about this briefly. South Dakota is one of those, I have to apply for a non-resident tag. There must be a cap on it. And crazy enough, it’s right in the middle of summer when the last thing I’m thinking about is hunting in South Dakota. It’s June. I have to remember, oh, it’s June or something like that. But is that, how are you all managing hunting pressure in South Dakota?

Rocco Marano: Yep, there is a cap or a quota on non-resident waterfowl licenses, and that’s actually in statute. That’s not something that Game, Fish and Parks can change. That’s a state law.

Ramsey Russell: It’s existed for at least 30 years, when I was in college.

Rocco Marano: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Forever. Yeah.

Rocco Marano: Yeah. There’s actually been restrictions on non-residents since the late 1940s. And it’s gone through all kinds of iterations and gyrations, but what we can do, the Game, Fish and Parks, can change the number by 5% annually. We can increase it by 5% annually, if we so choose through statute. But otherwise, there’s a cap.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, tell you what, Rocco, it’s just been an amazing conversation. I’m excited. I’m better understanding. I’m more accepting, far more accepting, of splash limit and the concept and what it represents to conservation, and recruitment and retention and reactivation of hunters, and mitigating hunting pressure. I hear a lot of people say, well, we need to lower the limit. And I kind of sort of agree, for reasons I talked about hunter satisfaction, not for reasons of some dismissing the science. I agree with the science implicitly. But I do see some major benefits to this opportunity throughout most parts of the United States, if it existed. Of course, then again, if I disagree with the bag limits, I can always volunteer myself. I can just voluntarily restrain from shooting six ducks given the chance. I can say, hey, I’m going to stick with three ducks and go on back to the house. There’s always that option. I don’t have to have a state law or an option on licenses. I can go out there and shoot two ducks and call it a day if I want to, if I think it’s a problem, can’t I? But Rocco, you have shed so much light and thought for discussion on this topic. I can’t thank you enough. Do you have any parting thoughts that you’d like to share?

Rocco Marano: I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this, Ramsey. There’s more to come. I mean, this is kind of an evolving topic. It’s been really fun. It’s been a really fun adventure for me, the journey that this has been, getting this experiment some legs and collecting data and surveying hunters. And now we’re getting kind of toward the end of it where we all kind of have to collectively look around and say, well, now what, right? And it’s exciting. I really hope that there is a future for this option moving forward. You may see this as an option in a few years when you register for HIP in your state. Who knows?

“Yeah. Thank you very much, Rocco. I appreciate your time. I appreciate you giving me a great, exciting education and optimism for the future in the talking of splash limits, formerly known as the two-tiered regulations experiment. I greatly appreciate you for this.”

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Thank you very much, Rocco. I appreciate your time. I appreciate you giving me a great, exciting education and optimism for the future in the talking of splash limits, formerly known as the two-tiered regulations experiment. I greatly appreciate you for this.

Rocco Marano: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you.

Ramsey Russell: Folks thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where I ask you now, what do you think about this option? Would you take it? How would it affect hunting in your local area? Let us know your thoughts. See you next time.