EP 563. Dead Hens Don’t Lay Eggs and Other Topics

“Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. In the studio today is Mr. Scott Stevens, Ducks Unlimited, my buddy from way back at Mississippi State University.”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. In the studio today is Mr. Scott Stevens, Ducks Unlimited, my buddy from way back at Mississippi State University. Now mover and a shaker in the world of waterfowl habitat. Scott, how the heck are you today?

“we have known each other for a long time, back to the days in Mississippi.”

Scott Stevens: I am good and pleased to be with you. And yes, we have known each other for a long time, back to the days in Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we were just talking about it, I still remember, every time I see you, I think that’s that son of a gun I had to beat to the duck hole on public land back when he was down in my neck of the woods, man.

Scott Stevens: Yeah, that’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Sometimes I’d come around and you’d already beat me to the duck hole, and sometimes it was the other way around. But it’s funny, we didn’t duck hunt together back then, but that’s what rivals are, man. You were just that Yankee guy coming down to my neck of the woods trying to kill a duck, I couldn’t hunt with that.

Scott Stevens: That’s right. But I can tell you this, we both definitely earned it when we found birds that made it work on public land.

Ramsey Russell: Even back in the good old days, those good old days back in the 90s, hunting public land, ducks didn’t just come easy, you had to work for it. You’re right about that.

Scott Stevens: Yeah. Well, and we’ll probably get into this, but I distinctly remember Ramsey like I remember, I was in Mississippi for the tail end of the 3 ducks and 30 days and being very happy and excited about shooting two greenheads in a green winged teal in the delta.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about that right there because there’s a growing concern in the United States of America among duck hunters that think we to go back to that. And truth matter is now I’m an old man, Scott, boy, I was very happy like you were back in the 3 and 30 to go out and shoot my two greenheads. And not only did I shoot my 2 greenheads, I wasn’t after 3 duck, I was after my 2 mallards, and I was happy.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I could be happy again as an old man doing that. But I did enjoy, I did greatly enjoy the 6. I mean, I have enjoyed the 6 duck back in the day but times are different man.

Scott Stevens: Yeah, but we both enjoy going to Canada and shooting 8 ducks, that feels pretty generous. But when things are right, it is fun to take advantage of that, too.

Ramsey Russell: Just during our lifetime, just during our friendship, Scott, we have gone from 3 and 30 to the 6 and 60. We have hunted together since up in Canada shooting the 8. And now we’re still in 6 and 60 and it doesn’t come as easy. In fact, the 2 mallards doesn’t even come as easy now as it did then. In fact, it’s far more difficult. Do you know Scott, today I just completed, just this morning, woke up, got a cup of coffee, checked my emails and had my Fish & Wildlife survey, I participated in, I think this year I filled it out for, I think they drew me to complete my season survey, I know for West Virginia, Mississippi and some other state, maybe North Carolina or South Carolina or somewhere, I hunted and I filled out, just this morning, I filled out my Mississippi report, went through my Huntproof app so I could look up and get the real numbers. And I hunted 5 times at my club in the state of Mississippi and 3 times with a buddy and one day zeroed, one day limited, and for the remainder of the season shot about 2 or 3 ducks.

Scott Stevens: Yeah. Sounds like duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: And that’s duck hunting. I mean, it’s like, I didn’t think anything about it and I just submitted my numbers and went on and I’m looking forward to next duck season. Speaking of Canada, us hunting together up in Canada, you were situated with Ducks Unlimited Canada last time I hunted with you up there and now you’re back south of the border. Where are you at right now? What are you doing?

“And I’ll be straight with you, Ramsey, when that job opened up, they had advertised it, and given my background, I knew that that was a really critical area on the continent for waterfowl and it’s like having the chance to spend time and energy to make good things happen there was pretty darn attractive for a duck guy like me.”

Scott Stevens: Yeah, I am in South Dakota. And, yeah, for about 13.5 years, the main role that I had in Canada while I was there was I had the great pleasure of working with the conservation staff who were responsible for delivering all the conservation work on the ground with landowners across the 3 prairie provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. And I’ll be straight with you, Ramsey, when that job opened up, they had advertised it, and given my background, I knew that that was a really critical area on the continent for waterfowl and it’s like having the chance to spend time and energy to make good things happen there was pretty darn attractive for a duck guy like me. So that’s why I picked up my family and moved to another country and don’t regret it a bit. But have come back south and am in a new role and really, I characterize my new role as, I am supposed to help the teams that are still trying to deliver those things in the US Prairies, in the Canadian prairies, in the Boreal Forest. And now we’re working on having a greater engagement in Alaska, too. So I would call all those really the key breeding areas on the North American continent. My charge is to help them achieve success and make progress, whether that be chase policy things, chase funding from private donors to help them do what they need to do. But that’s what I’m doing now.

Ramsey Russell: So for reasons we’re going to talk about in the upcoming episode, I’m cheering you on, I’m wishing you the greatest success on God’s earth. And also this morning I got this postcard my daughter went to the post office box and I personally got one item today, my wife got a lot more checks than I got, but I got one item this morning, it was a postcard from Ducks Unlimited thanking me, telling me I had millions of reasons to be thankful. And fiscal year 2025 highlights 1,081,227 acres of conservation delivered in the fiscal year of 2024. And that is a reason to be thankful. Boy, am I thankful to hear something like that. But on the other hand, it ain’t enough.

Scott Stevens: That’s the biggest single year sort of acreage total that we’ve had as an organization in, 86 years of history now. So it is something to celebrate. I would tell you that, and you know this, there are still challenges, there’s still habitat challenges that we need everybody’s help with, especially on those key breeding areas like the prairies. But we’re having that scale of impact, and that’s a good thing for the future of ducks.

“I wish that number said 10 million acres, to be honest with you. But I am very thankful, that’s millions of reasons to be thankful.”

Ramsey Russell: And we need every bit we can get. I wish that number said 10 million acres, to be honest with you. But I am very thankful, that’s millions of reasons to be thankful. What did your duck season look like this year south of the border?

Scott Stevens: Well, you know what, I spent probably more of my duck season north of the border than I did south, Ramsey, because I still had buddies in the north that I had hunted with still new areas to go to, so yeah, it was okay. But maybe I would characterize my duck season as about what I expected, given how dry conditions were and the population levels of ducks that we have now. Like, when I looked at conditions, things were pretty dry, the pond count surprised me and was up a little bit, but conditions were still very dry, across the Canadian prairies for sure, there was a little water in the US Prairies, but I can tell you that has dried up since this past summer. I was hunting pheasants here in South Dakota, and almost all the wetlands that we were trying to find pheasants in were dry. We were hunting dry cattail margins, but the wetland itself was dry. So, it was okay. I got into birds. I went back to Manitoba in early November, there was nobody else hunting birds then, it was unseasonably warm, they had not frozen up, and we shot mallards and a few pintails for the few days that I was up there. And then wasn’t too long after that, they kind of froze up and ducks pushed south. But we don’t have the ducks that we had even 10 years ago at the peak of population numbers. And I sketched some of those out in prep for our talk, if you want me to kind of give you some of those highlights.

Ramsey Russell: I do. I spent a long time up in Canada this year. Also hunted 6 Canadian provinces, mostly to the east, but in western Canada, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba was a dust bowl this year compared to years past, but a year or two ago, they were extremely wet and it’s scary. We had some memorable duck hunts up there, no doubt, but thankfully, we chase geese. I’m up there for white geese, dark geese, but the ducks, what I’ve seen increasingly is the ducks are getting more concentrated in little areas, little pockets that there is water.

Scott Stevens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: And where there’s water and there’s ducks, there’s a lot of freelance and Canadian outfitters and everybody else chasing them so that they’re just getting wonky to hunt. And you talk about a drought and how dry it is, this precipitated our phone call this morning, it’s not that the Canadian prairies are dry or that the Dakotas are dry, it’s that the continent is dry. Dry like maybe I haven’t ever seen it. In fact, this past Sunday, we had a Zoom call with upcoming hunters going to Mazatlán, Mexico and it’s dry. And it came the warning, hey, guys, we talked to a crowd full of people, we still got 6, 8 weeks to go down there and just heads up, it’s dry, dry like I ain’t never seen it, dry like I’ve never heard it dry. And of course, we’re in the Sonora desert, but it’s dry and it’s abnormally dry. And we’re just giving you a heads up that if the easy limits that we’re accustomed to are the end all be all for you, let us reschedule you, we’ve made arrangements for refunds on the resorts, blah, blah. And we did have a couple of teams say, let’s reschedule for next year and take our chances that it’ll be wetter. But rest of them just shrugged and said, sounds like hunting back home to us, here we come. But it brought in that from Mazatlán Mexico, down in Sinaloa, you go north in Mexico, it’s still dry, you cross the border into the United States, it’s still dry, you cross the Canadian border, it’s still dry. It is dust bowl dry. And for the past couple of years, it seems to me from the outside looking in, not knowing everything, but that really the saving grace for waterfowl production, especially to us Southern duck hunters, has been the fact that the Dakotas have been mercifully wet. But that ain’t the case this year, man. I’m hearing that short of an absolute miracle, South Dakota is dry, North Dakota is dry. North up into the borders, and the prairies are dry. And I think, we’re recording right now in mid-February, it’s going to take a miracle to bail it out of the tolls this year.

“So, it is not going to run into the wetlands, like it would if we had rain and then that’s what freezes up, is good soil moisture.”

Scott Stevens: And what I would say is, you’re right. Like the conditions writ large across the Canadian Prairies and the US prairies. I’ve been doing this duck gig for about 30 years now, it’s as dry across that geography as I’ve ever seen it. Now, 30 years is a short window in the bigger picture, but that’s as dry as I’ve ever seen it. And the challenge that we currently have, I’ll go back to being in Manitoba in early November, as I was driving around with one of my hunting buddies there, I had to slow down because the dust was so bad I couldn’t see where I was going following him. I had to slow down, let that clear. So the challenge that presents is that means we have almost no soil moisture, right? And then things froze up, but that soil is still dry, even though it’s frozen. And even if we put two foot of snow on top of that, when that melts, that dry soil is going to soak it up like a sponge. So, it is not going to run into the wetlands, like it would if we had rain and then that’s what freezes up, is good soil moisture. That’s the conditions that we have when snow really has an impact and runs off into the wetlands. So, that’s a nuance in the way that runoff happens, but it’s an important one. And we are not set up to have the right conditions, to take advantage of what snow we may get, which there isn’t much of that right now. But even if we got 2ft, not much of it’s going to run into the wetlands, given how dry the soil is.

Ramsey Russell: That’s scary, Scott. Ducks Unlimited, you all had the biggest year in conservation you all have had since you found him. But you all were founded pursuant to the dust bowl.

Scott Stevens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Back in the 30s?

Scott Stevens: Yeah, back in the 30s. 1937, I think, is the inaugural year that we came into existence. And there were more game birds in America as the predecessor to DU before that, who helped start some of the surveys and look at those things, too.

“And the most terrifying part, let’s say okay, the soils are dry, it’s dry, the continent’s dry. But hey, a nice weather cycle blow in, couple of years, we’re right back where we were, well, maybe that’ll happen.”

Ramsey Russell: And the most terrifying part, let’s say okay, the soils are dry, it’s dry, the continent’s dry. But hey, a nice weather cycle blow in, couple of years, we’re right back where we were, well, maybe that’ll happen. But back in the 30s, right after Ducks Unlimited, right before Ducks Unlimited formed, it was dust bowl. And all we’ve done continentally as a civilization, not as duck hunters, as a civilization, the United States of America all we’ve done in North America since the 1930s is drain and tile and clear vegetation and build parking lots. I mean, whatever conspired back in the 20s and 30s to a literal dust bowl that created a global economy collapse. Boy, if we don’t get that miracle and it turned wet again, God, we could see a dust bowl like we’ve never seen.

Scott Stevens: Yeah. And here’s the way that I try and think about it. We can’t change those environmental conditions, right? Because you and I would have turned on the tap and made it rain and snow if we had that control long ago. So we don’t control that. But what we do focus on is making sure that that habitat base stays in place so that when those rains and snows return, that we have the wetland basins to catch the water and the grasslands to provide the nesting habitat that the birds need. Because, you know what we saw in the early 90s when it got wet, is we had a pretty good habitat base in place then and wow, did the ducks respond? Like we were talking before you hit the record button, that we’ve seen the glory days, which was driven by that early 90s wet conditions that we saw. We dried out a little bit, and then we had some other wet conditions and peaks in populations about 10 years ago. But the question is, have we maintained that habitat base? And the answer is no. We’ve lost some ground on that habitat base even since 10 years ago. So that’s what we try and stay focused on, that’s what you read in the DU magazine is, hey, we’re focused on the habitat base. But the reality right now is, I looked at the survey numbers, Ramsey. So in 2015, total ducks, we had 49 million ducks out there this past year, 2024, just shy of 34 million. So just that change, that’s about a 32% decline just from 2015. Now, that’s total ducks, right? We want to dive into some of the details? Mallards, right? Everybody’s focused on mallards, or lots of people are. Their peak was in 2016, 11.8 million mallards. 2024, we were at 6.6 million. So not quite half, but close. Blue winged teal, you mentioned blue wings and indigo, the peak for them, 2012, 9.2 million in the spring survey this past year, 2024, 4.6. So half right. Pintails, same story. 2011 was when they peaked 4.4 million, we’re down last year just below 2. 1.9 million. And we’ll even throw in shovelers. Peak for them was in 2014, 5.3 million ducks, in 2024, 2.6. So again, half. Now, what I would cite is when I look at the pond numbers. So 2014, 7.2 million, that was the peak of ponds, so it corresponds with during the same time period that we had kind of peaks in most of those duck species. And in 2024, we were down to 5.1 million. So not as much decline in the ponds, but what I would say, Ramsey, is that’s sort of pond counts is kind of an imprecise index for us. What we really think about matters for the ducks is, how much of the area around the perimeter of deeper wetlands that’s between 12 and 18 inches deep, that’s really providing food. So pond counts aren’t perfect, but we know that as things have dried out, there are less of those resources available. And when we get wet again, we know that those systems will bloom and flourish, the wetlands that are still on the landscape and ducks will take advantage. But those are the realities of the numbers. If folks are like, hey, I don’t see the ducks that I saw 10 years ago, it’s like, yeah, you don’t, our surveys tell us that, we have declined in ducks. But I would argue right now that’s mostly been driven by the decline in environmental conditions and wetland conditions across key breeding areas in the prairies.

Ramsey Russell: I would agree. I mean, it’s all about the habitat, right? Wetlands and habitat doesn’t make it easy. I mean, there’s a lot of folks, lot of deep south hunters, a lot of folks throughout the United States that are really throwing the towel, Scott. I got a text the other day from somebody very close to me that says, there are zero honest people in America saying duck hunting has not declined year after year after year since the 90s. Zero improvement, strict decline. It’s hard to be a duck hunter when it’s that way. And there’s just a lot of how that thought is becoming manifest in American duck hunters, to me, is the scariest part of it all. I mean, I know for a fact, just having met with a lot of folks in government, that we do have anti-hunters here in America. Oh, boy. They’re alive and well. They’re not out parading around, they’re not demonstrating at the boat ramp, they’d get their butts kicked. They’re not paddling through our decoys, like the jokes like they do in Australia, they are litigating and litigating behind the scenes through their little network, they’re litigating Fish & Wildlife Service, and they are calling for a cessation of duck hunting in America. And what our government and our officials are holding up as a defense is a scientifically proven model that says this science says we can continue to hunt without these variabilities, we can continue to hunt. And what I’m seeing, especially in social media and on other podcasts is, I think, unwittingly disgruntled duck hunters, tired of going out like Ramsay did this year and shooting 2 or 3 ducks. The ducks ain’t coming, the ducks ain’t here, we ain’t got, therefore we ain’t got no ducks, are really unwittingly, if they don’t see it, they’re unwittingly teaming up with the anti-hunters. They’re becoming a part of the problem instead of the solution, if we want to continue duck hunting, if we want our grandkids to duck hunt.

Scott Stevens: Right. Well, and it’s important to keep in mind that the legislation that allows for the seasons, the default is the season is closed unless the Fish & Wildlife Service has the information to justify holding the season and not having long term impacts on the population. So just like you said, if nothing happened, if God forbid, we had a government shutdown and none of that stuff occurred, the season is closed by default. That’s the default setting. I know it seems like these days it’s not a popular time to sing the praises of government employees, but I’ll do that a little bit here. The ones that I know personally who work for the Fish & Wildlife Service, and it goes the same for state agency folks, they’re folks like me and you who are doing their best in their job because they care about ducks. They have to do all of that stuff. They have to do the surveys, they have to get that information pulled together. They have to make sure it’s right and makes sense. And I know there are a bunch of those folks who are way smarter than me, who work on the population models and all of those things are saying at the level of harvest that we have now, we are not negatively impacting the population. And I trust the expertise of those folks who are doing that. But it’s important for folks to keep in mind if those civil servants don’t do that stuff, the default is the duck season is closed.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it. And you make a good point though, Scott. And I’m just almost say this before we move on, but number one, there was a time in the past decade I too was wondering where the heck the ducks are, why we have a decline and pointing to those men north of Richmond, so to speak, the government at screwing things up, you know what I’m saying? And we’re over harvesting, adaptive harvest management doesn’t work, blah, blah. And I began to use what little resources I could, stir this podcast to have a lot of NGOs, state and federal employees, university researchers on this podcast. They’ve been a lot of them on here and to a single person, to every single one of them, every one of them grew up duck hunting, loved a duck hunt, so much so that they committed their lives and their career to the welfare of waterfowl. That’s a big distinction for some bureaucrat, wearing big glasses and working in D.C without a window and crunching numbers behind a computer screen that’s so far removed from this. I mean, I’m sitting here looking at a bunch of bright and smart and ambitious individuals that committed their life, they’re smart enough to have worked anywhere in the world doing anything, making probably a hell of a lot more money than they can make working in conservation. But nonetheless, they traded that for the welfare of ducks. And that’s given me, it’s boosted my support, my understanding of how this system works in North America. And I’ve just got to say that as recently as this year, going to the UK and meeting with some of their game managers and some of their people, it really drove home the point this year. I knew we had the best science and the biggest model and the most hunter funded, crowd funded type of conservation model on earth, but I didn’t realize that it was practically the only science on earth that’s going to waterfowl. I mean, even my friends down in Australia, they got a little research going on over in the UK, man, they can’t fly over Russia and count duck, they couldn’t tell you how habitats changed on the breeding grounds in Russia because Russia doesn’t let foreigners fly over their airspace to count ducks, of all things. So, I mean, we’ve got the only science. And I sit here and think that if you start looking at some of the harvest numbers and the time I googled around and found it, back in 2021, 2022 season, the United States of America killed 8.1 million ducks, Scott, prove me wrong, if I’m wrong. But I would say that’s 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 times more ducks than the rest of the world combined kills, which to me is a smoking gun of, hey, maximum sustained yield, science based maximum sustained yield works. And if I’m driving down the road and just doing redneck math like I’m doing, I’m saying, okay, we killed 8.1 million ducks, we got 900,000 duck hunters, that’s 9 ducks a piece.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How many people complaining? How many people ready to throw in the towel will kill more than 9 ducks this year? Probably a bunch, I did. I had a whole lot of days killing 9 ducks, but I killed more than 9 ducks this year just in Mississippi. See what I’m saying?

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Change of subject. Dead hen don’t lay eggs, Scott. And if you shoot a hen duck, put them on the strap, there ain’t no eggs, there ain’t no ducks coming out of that thing right there.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I sent that text to you the other day to kick off this conversation, you coming on podcast. I sent that to you the other day.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I have killed hen ducks, I have killed hen mallards, can’t think of any I killed this year, but I know it happens. Because sometimes it’s dark sometimes – but I had the state waterfowl biologist Marcus on here last year and he sent some information, I read through this very interesting spreadsheet. And in the state of Arkansas, for example, which I think is where the greenhead truly is king, in the state of Arkansas, 3.9 plus greenheads per 4 mallard limit. And then even when you get up north to Wisconsin, Minnesota, where they open on September, in September, and it’s very hard to distinguish brown drake from brown hens still, they’ve got more drakes than hens being killed in a 4 mallard limit. Which tells me nobody is going out with the intention of shooting hens.

Scott Stevens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: So nobody is going out with the goal of shooting hen mallards. And I still don’t understand why shooting hen mallards is such a big deal when we shoot hens, I can go shoot 100% hen for all the other species and I’m not penalized or criticized for that matter. I mean, if I come in with 6 ring neck hens, nobody says a word.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And there’s a lot fewer ring necks than mallards right now.

Scott Stevens: Yeah, well, and I would say from a population standpoint, and there are folks who are smarter with those population models than I am, but I know what those models tell us is doesn’t make much of a difference to the population. You’re exactly right. I looked at the harvest survey information from last year and across the continent, in total, 3 to 1 males to females. So just like you said, Arkansas, it’s a little higher, it’s a little lower in the north, but overall its people are killing 3 drakes for every hen. But when we look at things like harvest rate on female mallards, even with the liberal seasons we have, it might get to 8% or 9% of the population is the harvest rate. And yet we know that survival rates for females for adult females might be 55% or 60%. So, okay, let’s say we’re shooting even 10%, there’s another big chunk of those that aren’t making it to breed anyway. So, that’s where the population dynamics and the models have to become a little more complex, than just saying, yeah, dead hens don’t lay eggs, but when we only harvest 8% or 9% of them, only 55% or 60% of them survive the year anyway. And so, you know what I would say right now is I’ve heard the same thing, people talking about, oh, maybe we need to cut back with the conditions that we see across prairie breeding areas right now, sending more ducks back isn’t going to make much of a difference right now.

Ramsey Russell: That’s exactly the answer I was fishing for there, Scott. If we sent 100% of the hens back right now, 100%. If we shot nothing but drake ducks of any species and we sent them back to the prairies and the potholes, right now there’s really nothing for them to do up there but hopefully survive, which is no guarantee they’re going to survive. Somebody told me one time that the greatest mortality, especially of hen ducks throughout the calendar year is not during the hunting season, it’s between the time hunting season closes and the hunting season opens. That’s when ducks are most vulnerable.

Scott Stevens: Yeah, it’s when females are setting on eggs in grassland, that’s when they’re vulnerable to predation, and they’re trying to incubate and protect those eggs that they’ve invested a lot of time and energy in. And they’re playing trade-offs between do I jump off my nest and fly away when the coyote or the fox is a long way away from me and potentially lose my nest, or do I try and stick tight maybe they don’t pick me up. And different species play that game differently. Pintails are really cool when they’re sitting on nests like I think pintails choose nest sites based on where they can see a long ways and nests that we have marked for pintails, those pintails will see you coming and they will sneak off the nest and cover it up and they will flush 40 or 50 yards away if you even see them. So, ducks are playing these trade-offs between I need to survive, but I’m trying to reproduce. And what I would say is when the conditions are right, like they were, the last time I would characterize, we had really good conditions across most of the breeding areas would have been 2011. I mean, we had so much water across the Canadian prairies, across the US Prairies, and there is so much food resources, and the ducks do awesome when you have the habitat base to take advantage of then, and production is so awesome then. It usually happens when we get those populations coming out of hard winters, that’s what produces the snow that we need. And I can tell you, living in the north, when you go through one of those winters, it’s like those are the winters that you’re hearing about deer dying off, and we think that those conditions knock back predator populations. And then, guess what, spring comes, there’s water everywhere, the ducks, thank goodness have wings, they show up from being down south and they do their thing. But it takes a number of years for those populations of mammals and predators to build back up. So we have the ducks in there, they have great conditions, they’re making hay, and then eventually the system sort of catches back up with them. And so we may still have wet conditions, but the production isn’t as good as it is during those initial years of the wet period. And there’s good research on that, one of my colleagues that followed some of my research that I was doing for my PhD, Johan Walker, he documented some of those lag effects and some of those impacts of, initially when you’re wet, things are pretty good, but then things kind of catch up and tend to tail off from a production standpoint.

Ramsey Russell: Great answer, but dead hens don’t lay eggs, Scott, at the end of the day, dead hens don’t lay eggs. And I’m just going to repeat kind of sort of what we talked about just now. There was some research, I heard somebody say it’s terrifying along the lines of dead hens not laying eggs, it’s terrifying that a banding project down the deep south, they go off right after the season, they band a lot of ducks, they’re targeting mallards, they banded a lot of mallards. And let’s just say during the past 10 years, what they started noticing is that their band recoveries, which are taking place after that hunting season opens. This all takes place in the period between hunting closing and hunting starting. They band the ducks, the ducks fly north, do their thing, they come back south, they start getting shot, the ones that get shot get reported. And one of the most interesting things they noticed or can talk about is that back when they started, there were more hens, hens relative to the total bag being represented than now. It’s like, say, I’m just making these numbers up, don’t quote me as the gospel. But let’s say when they started it was 1 in 5 mallards being reported was a hen. Then it just started skewing further and further to where now it’s 1 in 10 or 11. So, way fewer mallards. And dead hens don’t lay eggs, we’re shooting too many, we need more going up there, I get that, that makes sense, I can draw that conclusion. But at the same time, based on your numbers that you just said 7.2 million ponds in 2024, 5.1 million ponds. My question was, well, is it possible that the reason there’s fewer hens being reported is because this tap, this water tap is turning off the last 10 years and it’s getting drier and drier, less habitat, so they’re especially more vulnerable? I mean, to me, that’s a reasonable conclusion, that as the prairies are drying up, these ducks are more vulnerable, especially these hens trying to nest wherever they can find a ditch bank to nest on. So it’s possible. To me, that skewed that those fewer hens, they’re thinking it could be not because hunters are shooting them, but because they’re becoming increasingly vulnerable up there on an increasingly dry prairie, that makes sense to me. Yeah, circle back to habitat. See, boom, it’s all about the habitat, Jack.

Scott Stevens: Yeah, absolutely. It is all about the habitat. What I would say is we do have information on research on radio mark 10s on breeding areas, we know actually that it’s during the wet times that they will tend to have lower survival rate. And that may seem counterintuitive at first, but what goes on during those wet periods is, Ramsey, if they lose the first nest, they will try again and again and again. So when you think about that, over the whole nesting season, during those wet times, the hens are spending way more days in that vulnerable position, being on a nest. Then in dry times when they may say, it’s kind of dry, I’m going to try it once or maybe twice, and then I’m going to call it good, and I’m going to go and molt and I’m going to try again next year and hope maybe the conditions improve. So, yes, at the last duck symposium, there was a lot of discussion, and there are a lot of smart people working on the issue of change in sex ratios between drakes and hens. There does seem to be a trend in that, that there are more drakes in the population now than there were 10 or 20 years ago, and folks are working on that, that does have important implications from a population standpoint. But I think that’s what you were saying is the females in the population is, females are a smaller proportion of the overall population than they used to be.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And again, they’re most vulnerable hunting closing period. That’s the point I was trying to make. And it’s hard to sort through all this stuff. Somebody asked me just yesterday, I was a guest on a podcast, Scott, I was in the Hot Seat. Somebody asked me, if I only had one more hunt or if I only had one more duck I could shoot or if I could only shoot one species, you know what my answer is? Out of all the species and cool things I’ve seen, you see that game room in the back? You know what it is? I want to go shoot a wild mallard duck.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, it wrote the playbook. There’s no other duck species, I do like shooting some of the divers when they come in. Canvasbacks, I got a sweet spot for black ducks, but come on, man, a mallard duck? I’m freaking greenhead, man. I don’t care if I’m sitting in a dry field with Scott up in Manitoba or I’m in deep south Arkansas or tucked up in the willows, I want to shoot a mallard duck, I love them.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They are the rock stars of the universe. They drive this whole thing. Heck, I mean, that’s you all’s logo, Ducks Unlimited, that mallard duck. Because they are that duck, right?

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I saw something on the Internet the other day. In fact, the board that wrote me that text sent this, and it drives home a pot, and it’s a graph, I sent it to you. Percentage change in mallard harvest comparing to 2020-2022 season average versus the 1999-2000 average. And the US total is 51% decline in mallard harvest, I don’t know where they’re getting at numbers, but let’s assume it’s true. Pacific Flyway, minus 40%. Central Flyway minus 48%. Mississippi Flyaway minus 55%, almost 56% decline in mallard harvest between those two time periods, Atlantic Flyway almost 60%. But to your point, during that time frame, we started off talking about those good old days you and I were hunting versus now we’re talking about the pond count, we’re talking about you’ve already read the decline and productivity. It’s like it makes sense that if productivity is declining, if ponds are declining, if habitat is declining, harvest is declining.

Scott Stevens: Right?

Ramsey Russell: This is where a lot of us are getting disgruntled, Scott. This is where people are out gunning for something’s broke. There’s zero people that will admit that since you and I hunted together or raced each other to the duck hole back in the day, that hunting has declined. You know what I’m saying? But then again, now if somebody sits on the floor talking to a bunch of folks at convention, I can tell you this, there was a club in the state of Mississippi, a great, well managed, excellent piece of property with all the things you want to do to manage ducks in place. They had a record year this year. With the exception of record low mallard harvest. Record bag, record low mallard harvest. I talked some of the boys further up the flyway and man, they had better years. Some of the best years they’ve ever had. And it started off in Canada this year, I noticed when I was in Canada in October and it was being talked about, myself and all the outfitters, all the guys, everybody in the know up there, everything to include the snow geese seemed a month behind. The blue winged teal migration this year seemed a month behind, the goose, everything seemed a month behind. And we came into the season, we didn’t catch that big Alberta clipper till late. It’s funny, I didn’t hear nobody in the deep south complain about nothing come January.

Scott Stevens: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Because they’re too busy hunting ducks, catching up.

Scott Stevens: Yeah. Well, and I know that the Canadian prairies didn’t lock up until probably mid-November, which is at least two weeks later than normal. But yeah, I heard stories, there’s a guy on one of the used boards who has a nice well managed club in Missouri, in that area around the confluence over by St. Louis. And they manage the habitat well, but they also only hunt afternoons some of the days. And he said, when he hunted, he didn’t make many sunsets because the hunting was so good. Now I would say what they do well, there is they manage pressure, which is really important. They have areas on the club that are sanctuary every day, and then they don’t hunt every day, but they had a very good season. So despite the fact that we have almost half the mallards that we had, a decade ago, if you have habitat in place and manage it well and manage the pressure, I mean, you can have all the food you want. And if you shoot those areas every day, you know one thing I’ve learned, and I always joke a bit about it, I tell people, oh, been studying ducks for a long time and you know what, they don’t like getting shot.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Scott Stevens: But that is a truism too. That’s kind of in the same category as dead hens don’t lay eggs. It’s like, yeah. And ducks don’t like getting shot. You can have all the food you want, and if the pressure’s there, they will go find food somewhere else.

Ramsey Russell: I read out that mallard harvest chart, which we’re talking about harvest, not spring surveys.

Scott Stevens: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s right in line, it’s very consistent with the spring surveys you read earlier. The decline between peak and present about half. So it’s a function of productivity. And you and I were talking about this via text message a few days ago and the key ingredients here, habitat, drought, hunting pressure, that’s what we’re talking about here. And it’s always very hard for me, Scott, it’s always very hard for me to delineate between habitat and drought, between wetlands and habitat. No, to me, it’s all lumped up, I call it habitat, nesting ground. I need wetlands and I need grasslands.

Scott Stevens: They’re definitely interrelated.

Ramsey Russell: They’re definitely interrelated. So I just lump them together. In that instance, I’m a lumper, not a splitter. I need them both. So I call it all habitat. Do you have an idea? Let’s just say during the time period we’re talking about between early 2000s, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2012, 2016, that time frame to now with those peak numbers, like, oftentimes, let me stick with this. Do you have an idea of how habitat and wetlands have declined? Have wetlands and habitat also declined about half during this time period, between peak and present, when we saw a 50% decline?

Scott Stevens: I would say that fortunately, we have not seen that level of habitat loss.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Scott Stevens: Wetland loss, those are measured in probably less than a percent, a fraction of a percent of the total wetland area might be lost in a given year. So that’s the good news. But it accumulates over time, right? So if you have 10 years at a 1% loss rate, well, then it’s kind of like compounding interest, right? You’ve tallied stuff up and you’ve had an impact. So we know wetland loss rates are pretty low, but there are a bunch of things that play into that. There’s policy and conservation compliance in the farm bill that’s important to keeping wetlands on the landscape in that ag setting, folks hear about Swamp Buster, that’s a really important provision in the farm bill that says, hey, if you’re a producer and you’re going to accept government support and crop insurance and subsidy payments, you are required to maintain the wetlands on your property and you can’t drain those. If you want to drain them, you can do that, you just aren’t eligible to take the taxpayer subsidy. So there are things like that that help us keep those wetlands in place. But during that time period that you ask, fortunately, we’ve not seen half the habitat base gone, that would be really alarming. But with the drought, we’ve seen a decline in the wetland basins available. So to the birds, it looks the same, right? Like, they can’t tell if the wetland’s been drained or it’s just dry because it hasn’t rained. And this is where you said, those two are confounded for me and it’s like, yes, they are. Because, right now we have a bunch of ponds that the basins are intact, and if we got frost seal and snow and the water comes back, they will be there and the birds will be able to take advantage. But we also have ponds, a small number of them that there’s now a drainage ditch that goes through. And even when that water comes back, it’s not going to hold water and it’s not going to provide those resources for the ducks. So those are keeping that ditch out of the wetland, those are some of the things that I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about. What are the strategies that we can do to keep that habitat base in place? That’s what I get paid to think about on a daily basis. How do we do that? What are the policy plays, what are the habitat protection that we can do through conservation easements and things like that? So the good news is that a bunch of the decline that we’ve seen in populations, I would argue, is just the drought. Now, we don’t want the habitat base to sort of come down to that level and have everything that’s dry now, be drained, because then we’d be in a world of hurt right, then there’d be no chance for recovery. So, we always talk about trying to keep the table set, and that means keep the basins intact, keep the grasslands there. And then when the environmental conditions turn, which we know they will, like I wouldn’t tell you, hey, it’s going to be drought like this forever and we’re never going to see ducks recover. Because this system in the prairies, it don’t work that way. It cycles between drought and being wet. And when it’s wet, the ducks will do their thing again if we can keep that habitat base in place to let them do their thing. Because the other thing that I would say after, spending 30 years thinking about ducks and studying ducks and trying to provide them with habitat is it’s a good thing that they are amazingly resilient amidst all of the challenges that you talked about in the beginning that we’ve put in front of them, we’ve altered the whole continent. And fortunately for us, all of us that are listening to this fell in love with a group of species that are pretty damn resilient and they have wings and they move all across the continent and they find the resources that they need. That’s a good thing.

Ramsey Russell: Great answer. Scott, when we look at all the variables that go into this, to catch everybody up right now, we just, heck yeah, harvest has declined very similarly to duck populations. Duck populations have declined because of habitat and wetlands.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You got this big long algorithm, I’m going to pull this up right now, I also sent you a pretty cool picture the other day. Somebody made a cover of Time magazine, want to know my future? Dude, I saved that, I shared that, I love this, I absolutely love it. And I really don’t know who posted this up initially who made this, but I absolutely loved it. It’s a Time magazine cover with a picture of a hen mallard and it’s got a little line point that said drought and influencers, liberal limits, spinning wings, liberal season, big old block pressure, social media, climate change, habitat loss, overcrowded WMAs, mud motors, guide culture, game farm genetics, boy, death by a thousand cuts is what it’s depicting. And we’ve talked about a lot of these so far today. There’s a big, long scientific algorithm that go into that I can’t articulate that these smart population ecologists can articulate. And plugged into those algorithms are what you just talked about habitat and drought.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What about this complex, like on the cover of that magazine, I can tell you what we can control. I know the things that we can control. But we start talking about your wheelhouse of habitat and that production center for these ducks. Scott, what can we control? What can we control? What you’re talking about the habitat, the ponds, the wetlands, what of that can I, and the duck hunters listening and the scientists and the managers, what can we control?

Scott Stevens: Yeah, well, and when you sent me that, I looked at it and I said my top 3 would be habitat, and that’s something that, we don’t have total control over, but we can influence. We can do the policy things, we can purchase conservation easements, we can try and keep that habitat base in place. That’s what I’ve spent better part of my career trying to do. So we know we can have an influence on that, that’s important. I think you and I both also said, yeah, drought matters, but ain’t much we can do about that one. We know it’s going to come and go, and if we keep the habitat base in place, that’s okay. And then I think we also agreed on, when we think about the hunting component, and if you want to have successful seasons where you harvest ducks, you better pay attention to pressure because it matters. Ducks don’t like getting shot, if they get shot, in the same spot too many times, they’ll go somewhere else where they don’t get shot. And I know you’ve probably talked to some of the folks down south there who have been doing those radio studies looking at birds on wintering areas, it’s like, man, do those ducks ever know where the refuges are?

Ramsey Russell: You better believe it.

Scott Stevens: Yeah. So, they are keenly in tune with that. So, that’s what I would say. The other thing that I would point out, Ramsey is, what can we control? We can also control sort of our expectations. And I think having that in the right place helps, right? Because if the conditions on the breeding grounds don’t change much from what they are right now, I’d say, you know what? We are not going to have great conditions up there, which means, we’re probably going to have a smaller breeding population. And the big thing that will influence how the season goes as the birds move south is, if we don’t have much production and it’s dry, there aren’t going to be many young birds in the population, right? And that creates conditions where I’ll see people on social media say, man, the ducks just like they were tough. They wouldn’t cooperate. They were hard to deal with. And it’s like, yeah, that is much more common when we have mostly adult birds in the population. Now, that script flips pretty quickly when we get wet conditions and we get all those young birds, like, I would characterize, when we go back to fall of 2011, 2012, 2013, man, we had so many young birds in the population then that folks were probably like, hey, they work great.  They loved the call, it didn’t matter what we did for the decoys, that things are just much more forgiving. So that’s one thing that I think folks can keep in mind, if conditions don’t change, it’s like, hey, even if the counts are up, which I wouldn’t expect them to be, I would expect them to be down again. It’s like you’re going to be dealing with tough birds that, you get characterizations of the birds are stale, right? And it’s like that is much more common when you have adult birds that have played this game because, once again, don’t like getting shot. They try to avoid it like the plague.

Ramsey Russell: As an aside, I was over in the UK talking to that game manager, and they don’t have a lot of the science, they don’t have the numbers that you’ve presented here today, they don’t have those numbers, they can’t possibly. What they can tell you about their wintering ground habitat is that since the Vikings, I mean, basically, essentially all the United Kingdom has been induced by man, it’s no longer wild and natural. And I asked this guy, man, it was a slap in the face in a good way. When I asked him, I said, well, you’ve been duck hunting for 50 years, how has your hunting success declined? And he smiled and said, it hasn’t. I said, how could it not? How can you not know what you all are producing up in Russia? How can you continue to hunt and really not have a great idea of harvest? How can you not know you’re overdrawing your bank account? And he said, Mr. Russell, there’s good years, there’s bad years, I can’t help what the migration does. He says, but ducks have wings. They fly to places they don’t get shot. He said, and we see it here the same as you all see it there, they go to places, they don’t get shot. We can’t possibly kill them all because they’re a place that they can go they don’t get shot still. And we see it here, and they see it there. And oh, man, it was so good to hear a duck hunter over in the United Kingdom of all places say that his hunt hadn’t changed in 50 years. He’s got good years and bad years, and if anything, he’s old and grumpy now and he doesn’t chase him as hard as he did, I don’t chase him as hard as I did back when you and I were Mississippi State, Scott. He said, so I’m not killing as many birds as I did because I’m not chasing them as hard. He said, but they’re still there to chase and it was a very good thing. And I bring this subject up to hear you say it with state and federal policies, agricultural practices, conservation programs, we can influence the amount of grasslands and habitat that ducks can, I’m going to keep it in the context of productivity, they can make babies.

Scott Stevens: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: We can’t control the water. We can’t control the snowfall. We don’t have that magic spigot we can go flip a switch on. It either happens or it doesn’t, it’s beyond our control.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And getting along the lines of this time cover and I read this other thing, this other graph, the decline of mallards in the United States. What I didn’t read is at the top of that post was the quote, they, whoever they are, they try to sell you gadgets and take your money, but the ducks are going away. That’s what it said on top of that United States graph. And I’m hearing this over and over from people close to me, from people at large. They are trying to sell your gadgets and take your money, but the ducks are going away. And I mean by going away, what they mean is those declines you talked about earlier with mallards and pintails and blue wings and even shovelers with that harvest graph, they’re going away. But now they’re trying to take my money. And I’m picking my words here, Scott, so I’m quiet for a minute. Here to me, is a thing we can control. The Pittman Robertson Act on sales, they be an industry. The companies that are selling camo and guns and ammo and product and decoys and all this good stuff to us rabid duck hunters that want every advantage we can get. Because as the going gets tough, the tough get going, I need an edge, I’m buying product. I’m buying gear to go out and duck hunt, I’m got to kill them ducks. If it’s tough, I’m going to kill, I’m going to work harder to kill my ducks. But here’s the deal, and I’m trying to drive home a point, I’m struggling just a little bit to articulate it perfectly. But pursuant to that 200 some odd billion dollar industry, we’ve got something called the Pittman Robertson Act. And to me, those sporting goods sales, that percent, that 7% excise tax goes back to something I can control, which is habitat.

Scott Stevens: Same thing with the duck stamp, right? That everybody has to buy it.

Ramsey Russell: I was going to let that sit for a second, but the duck stamp has generated a billion dollars. And here’s the best part, 98% of those funds, so we’re talking about $980 million is earmarked specifically, it cannot be spent otherwise in creation of habitat.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I can control that.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And so to the people that are wanting to – Go ahead, go ahead.

Scott Stevens: Well, I was going to say, and you think about the scale too, like, you had the harvest numbers up. What was the number for duck hunters that we had last year? Let’s say duck and goose hunters.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t remember.

Scott Stevens: I don’t know that number either.

Ramsey Russell: But yeah, let’s say there’s 900,000 waterfowl hunters in the United States of America.

Scott Stevens: How many?

Ramsey Russell: 900,000.

Scott Stevens: Yeah. Okay. Or even if we say a million, right? Like we’re in a country of what, what’s the population of the US?

Ramsey Russell: Let’s say 330 million.

Scott Stevens: Yeah. My point would be we’re a small fraction of the total. Yet you and I were both saying, hey, there are some things that we can influence, but I guess a message that I would deliver to folks who maybe take the time to listen is, you know what? We need all million of those folks who really care about ducks kind of pulling together and we are all on the same team of saying we want healthy populations of ducks. And there are a bunch of things that we can do together to make sure that happens. But I can assure you there are not people who have some hidden agenda about trying to make sure we kill too many or all of those things, it’s like the people who I work with, who help set seasons and develop those population models, they care about the birds like you and I do. So that’s the message that I would share with folks who are listening, is we need all of us together, if we’re going to keep – if a million folks are going to help keep landscapes functional for ducks across the geography that we have in the Canadian prairies and the US Prairies and habitat base across all those migration and wintering areas, we’re going to need everybody’s help and pulling together and not sort of digging at each other and saying, oh, we don’t know, and folks are trying to deceive us. There are not folks that I’ve encountered who are trying to deceive anybody. Do we have less ducks than we had 10 years ago? Absolutely we do. Is the hunting as good? No, and it’s not going to be as good as it was back then until we see key breeding areas get wet again and production go up, those are facts. Anybody who tells you, it’s going to be a great year before we have decent production and wet conditions on the prairies is probably not in reality, I would say. So those are the things that I think about. We need help from everybody because it’s a big task. You think about all the money that’s in agriculture trying to drive profit and get more acres and more commodities and make money, and commodity prices are low right now, so there’s pressure on those farmers, there is pressure to convert that habitat that ducks care about, wetlands and grasslands to other uses to try and make ends meet. So if we are going to have an impact, we will need everybody in Mississippi and Louisiana and South Carolina and California helping us address the real issues which, we think our habitat, the habitat base and keeping that in place. So that’s the perspective that I would share.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a great perspective, Scott. And it’s a great note to get to because we – I mentioned earlier that some disgruntled hunters railing against the system have inadvertently placed themselves at odds with the science, with the leadership, with the managers, and put themselves kind of sort of in the same boat as the anti-hunters. And here’s the premise of the anti-hunting movement in America as it affects me, a duck hunter, and I can’t argue with their logic. There’s 330 million Americans, there’s only 900,000 duck hunters.

Scott Stevens: We’re a small minority.

Ramsey Russell: And yet the state and federal agencies are catering and driving wildlife management for waterfowl for deer, for elk, for moose on maximum sustained yield to cater a growing minority among us Americans, therefore, why don’t you manage for us? Why don’t you manage for the remaining of us? There may be as many anti-hunters as duck hunters. Why do the hunters get special privilege? Well, it goes back to the Pittman Robertson Act. It goes back to those license sales. It goes back to those duck stamp dollars.

Scott Stevens: Well, and I would even add that all of the things that we’re doing on behalf of ducks has a whole host of huge benefits for everybody else in society. And throughout my career, Ramsey, we’ve done a better job of documenting those benefits. There’s water quality benefits, there’s carbon benefits, there’s all these things that what I tell people now is at the start of my career, the projects we were doing, they’re the same projects we’re doing now. They are there to benefit ducks. But those projects have always been the water retention, the flood reduction, the biodiversity project. I mean, you know this too. You go out to a wetland, I go out to a wetland to chase blue winged teal, there’s long billed dowagers, massive flocks of long billed dowagers flying through in September. Wetlands are biodiversity hotspots. So to that question that you posed, it’s like, oh, why should we cater to this? Well, there are benefits to ducks and duck hunters, but they’re of the investments that we make in the habitat base that delivers, a whole host of benefits to society writ large that most of them probably aren’t aware of. But those are realities and we have the science to document those benefits. So there are those broader benefits too.

Ramsey Russell: Dead hens don’t lay eggs, Scott. And so a duck flies up to the prairie and it’s dry, whether we shot them or not, they’re probably not going to lay eggs in present conditions, 9t’s going to be very tough for a duck to make babies with the ongoing drought and habitat loss as it is right now, we’ve said that. But first the ducks got to got – what I learned in class back in the day is, the reason that habitat is so important in the wintering grounds is because those ducks that live and fly back north have got to be in great condition.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: To make eggs and have great, big viable egg that are going to hatch and survive anyway. It’s a managing habitat is not just the nesting ground for productivity.

Scott Stevens: Right.

Ramsey Russell: It’s also getting them in great shape to fly back home and make those babies.

Scott Stevens: That’s right. As the biologist just like to complicate it and say the whole annual life cycle, Ramsay.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it. I like that. I’m not smart enough to throw that stuff out there.

Scott Stevens: We throw out jargon, but it’s exactly what you described. We got to take care of them all.

Ramsey Russell: Life cycle is continental. And it’s such a complex time, there’s things I can control, there’s things I cannot control and I’m powerless to do this stuff. But there’s just this overwhelming, I see it, it’s overwhelming me. It’s becoming almost like a wet blanket on my positivity about people saying there’s too many hunters. Well, man, we need more hunters, not only do we need more hunters, we 900,000 duck hunters need to somehow tap into that 330 million and get them involved. If they don’t care about the ducks, maybe they care about the carbon sequestration, some of this other stuff. But here’s kind of the last point I’m trying to drive up is if we see a decline in duck hunters, if they that are trying to sell us gimmicks and gadgets and take my money as that number declines, there’s less conservation dollars going into the system. As populations decline, as hunters decline, there’s less hunters buying duck stamps, there’s less hunters contributing. And I was talking, we were talking about this one time in a duck blind up north hunting on some great private land. But 72% thereabouts of all duck habitat is expressed in kilocalories in North America, in the United States of America is on private land.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s not just that we’re losing duck stamp dollars and whatever excise tax benefit to habitat come off of product sales. What I predict, and I’ve had people tell me this, break, I’m down in Texas and back during those bad old days of the 3 and 30 that you and I met Scott, one of the great old outfitters I hunt with and I’m close friends with down in Texas, described that 75% of his clients quit hunting, when it went to a 3 and 30, they quit. And when it came back to 6 and 60 there in Texas, he said they didn’t come back.

Scott Stevens: Right.

Ramsey Russell: They aged out. They went to the golf course, whatever they did after they quit duck hunting.

Scott Stevens: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They didn’t come back,75%. And I feel like I don’t see any way around that, if not next year, at some point in time in the near future, unless this drought, unless this miracle happens up in the prairies, we’re going to a 3 and 30. And the thought of a 75% decline in duck hunters is terrifying. Not because the boat ramps are going to open up. Oh, it’s going to be fewer, going to be 75%, I promise you there ain’t going to be 75% fewer people on the public boat ramps.

Scott Stevens: It’s not going to feel like it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s not going to feel like it. What I do see is that why are private landowners, where there’s 72% of continental habitat in the breeding ground, and especially down here in the deep south, getting those ducks fit for that life cycle you talk about, what’s going to happen when they quit making capital contributions to conservation in their backyard. Now that 72% piece of the pie is going to decline also.

Scott Stevens: Right.

Ramsey Russell: That to me, is the terrifying part of this conversation. And to me, it’s just way bigger than whether or not dead hens laying eggs.

Scott Stevens: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Dead hens don’t lay eggs, but boy, it’s a whole lot more to it than just that.

Scott Stevens: Yeah, that’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Not all live hens lay eggs either.

Scott Stevens: That’s right. Especially when conditions are like they are.

Ramsey Russell: We need more habitat, that’s my whole point. And so this whole thought that we need less duck hunters, we need less sales, we need people quit trying to sell us stuff. And dude, at the end of the day, we need more. We need more conservation dollars going on to the landscape, that’s it in a nutshell. That’s what I’m trying to kind of articulate and floating around with. Any parting thoughts, Scott? What are your thoughts about that?

Scott Stevens: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think the future of healthy waterfowl populations depends on our ability to influence the habitat base, like, purely and simply, like across the whole annual life cycle, like you said. And if we have half the people interested in chasing ducks that we do now, that’ll be a harder task for us. So, yeah, we need to maintain the ranks, we need to kind of all come together and pull on the rope in the same direction. And like you said, we need to reach out and pull in Some of those other folks who care about those other benefits that come to the table of doing duck work, and we’ve tried to do that. We’ve had some success in bringing a few dollars, but I know at times people are worried about that, oh, are you losing track of your roots and doing that stuff? And my perspective is always, if I can add someone else’s dollars, add 10% more money to a duck project that we want to do anyway because somebody cares about, water quality benefits, like, I will take that all day long.

Ramsey Russell: Scott, what can I, disgruntled or disillusioned or discouraged duck hunter do? What can I do to help the cause? What can I do to ensure that more hens lay more eggs and that this hunting tradition of ours continues?

Scott Stevens: Yeah, I think those things are pretty simple. We’ve already talked about a few of them. I mean, if you’re going to hunt, everybody buys a duck stamp, right? That’s an easy one. I know you’ve probably seen, you probably follow the guy there in Fargo who, promotes buying duck stamps, the stamp it forward guy.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, Sam.

Scott Stevens: Sam, Yeah. I connected with Sam this fall and I sent him, 100 bucks for whatever that buys 4 or 5 duck stamps this year. So that’s an easy one. Like you said, 98% of it goes into the habitat base, that’s easy. It sounds self-serving, but it’s like, you can support groups like I work for in Ducks Unlimited. I can tell you that we are doing our best to put those monies that you send on the ground to benefit ducks and waterfowl populations, end of story. That’s the objective. That’s what I think about every day when I come to work. So there are benefits to that. There are policy issues that we may ask folks to engage in, when we’re having discussions about the next farm bill, it will be important to maintain those conservation compliance things like Swamp Buster. We may ask you to write your senator or congressman to do things like that. But there are a bunch of things that you can do. Maybe fundamentally at the core of it is, I understand why folks get discouraged, because it’s leaner times than it has been, like, it is tougher to have hunts where you shoot limits of ducks 10 times in a row these days, that is hard to come by. But I would just say the folks that are engaged in trying to manage the resource, federal partners, state partners, all of those folks have the same interest you do, maintaining healthy populations, there is not a conspiracy to have a shoot too many or shoot too few. They are wanting to help maintain populations out there so that we can continue to do this. So understand that. I would say check with other people, don’t take my word for it, but the folks that I have interacted with, there is not some crazy idea out there that they’re trying to do something different. They are trying to maintain healthy populations so we can maintain the traditions that you all care about. So understand that. But the reality is there will be tough times. If you’re a duck hunter and you didn’t think there were going to be tougher times where populations are going to decline, just look at our track record. I mean, that’s what this species group does. It goes up, it goes down, if you want more study hunting, yeah, maybe you need to be in the deer stand because, ducks are going to fluctuate and they’re going to be lean times, and there are going to be times of plenty of that we’ve seen not that long ago. So hang in and support the habitat base, because that’s going to be what determines how long we’ll be able to maintain healthy populations, I think.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Scott. As always I enjoy our conversations. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s duck Season Somewhere podcast. Man, the bottom line is get involved. Like my daddy said, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And, man, times are tough right now for reasons we’ve talked about and a whole lot more. We’ve got to get involved. We need to join Ducks Unlimited. Don’t buy a duck stamp, buy 5 of them like Sam Advocates. Let’s get the ball rolling. Take some buddies of yours, get them involved in conservation. We can sit around on the sidelines and be a bunch of cry-babies about it, or we can get in the game and do something about it. See you next time.

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