EP 574. Chicken Little: Debunking Waterfowl Management Myths (Part 1)

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where I’ve got a great show for you all today, a very special guest, you all have heard him before this my buddy, Michael Schummer, a Mississippi State graduate and host of the Foul Weather podcast. You all go check it out for the facts check. Mike, how the heck are you, man? Say it again.

Michael Schummer: I am fantastic. Ramsey, how are you?

That’s what initially led to me reconnecting with you and many, many other wildlife professionals, I flew all the way to South Carolina to meet with a former mentor of ours and my question was, where the hell are the ducks?

Ramsey Russell: Good. I’m doing fine, I’m glad to have you on here. Last night I was thinking about our podcast, our meeting today and I was reminded of a kindergarten parable, I never thought much about all these years, but I hadn’t forgotten it, isn’t that something, all these years later from kindergarten, talking about Chicken Little, The Sky Is Falling. And for those of you all that had or hadn’t, don’t remember it, this little old hen was sitting out in the barnyard and acorn fell, hit her on the head and she thought the sky was falling, she run around like a chicken with her head cut off and got everybody all riled up. I mean, she got Loosey Goosey and Henny Penny and all of them riled up, about the sky is falling and along comes Foxy Locksy and says, well, no problem, you all can just crawl up in my den and the fox won’t hit you and they all crawled up in the fox’s den where they were presumably eaten and it’s just a – I thought of that story because I think about this topic, Mike, during the pregame, you were talking about Infowars and really and truly, that’s the world we live in now. I mean, I’m not prowling the halls of a wildlife department anymore in college and reading all the white papers turned out and the information, a lot of people aren’t. I mean and it’s like once hunters get something in their head, real or true, it becomes the truth just because they keep hearing it and I’m going to raise my hand and kick off this whole conversation today by saying that as a former wildlife major, I, too, was dubious of adaptive harvest management. That’s what initially led to me reconnecting with you and many, many other wildlife professionals, I flew all the way to South Carolina to meet with a former mentor of ours and my question was, where the hell are the ducks? We’ve killed too many, we’re killing too many, there ain’t no more, it ain’t what it was. Where the hell are the ducks? And asking that question of a lot of professionals and doing a little bit of reading, a little background search and falling into some different orbits, it led me to better understand where the heck the ducks are. So, thank you very much, you did a show and I’m going to put a link in the caption below for anybody that missed it, you did a take on this very subject earlier this fall, burning down, what was the name of that episode, Mike? Burn It All Down.

Michael Schummer: Too many episodes to remember, but I think it was the Burn It Down, episode part 1, because we didn’t want to say this was the end of it, right? If there’s misinformation out there, we’re going to call it with – if we hear it come across our wavelengths, we’re going to call it out.

Ramsey Russell: You did, it was episode 74 of the Foul Weather podcast titled Burn It All Down, episode part 1, the misinformation rhetoric about waterfowl management must end, and buddy, you were like a Baptist preacher behind that mic, son, you were burning it down. It got my rapt attention, I ain’t going to lie to you.

Michael Schummer: I had people call me and boy, they’re like, boy, you were an angry elf there for a little bit, so, to quote the movie Elf. But yeah, I mean, but you got to, it gets – you have the hackles up sometimes. When everything that you work on professionally and all the students you trained and all your colleagues get told that what you’re doing is complete BS when you know that’s not what’s going on, so folks got to stand up for themselves and make sure that the proper information is reaching, Joe Duck Hunter out there, which are – those are our people, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, and to be clear, I don’t think, Mike, I don’t think that anybody out there is intentionally insulting the power that be, as much as I think it really is a little bit of Infowar stuff going on, it’s a little misinformation that’s based on – because too many people like myself and others lack a formal background or understanding or stay current on relevant facts regarding waterfowl population management. I mean, that’s what I think and where do you get it? Where do you get that information? I mean, if you don’t go to a waterfowl proceedings and listen to a bunch of dry papers being presented and you don’t understand the data you’re seeing, how the heck can a common guy understand it?

I think that the waterfowl hunting community has been so successful because we are passionate about the ducks we pursue, we’re passionate about wetlands and that always leads us to a place where we feel like, we want to feel like we can help control some of what’s going on.

Michael Schummer: And that’s one of the things when we started out with the Foul Weather podcast there was going to be some entertaining fun content, then it was going to be the migration forecast and what we realized very quickly was what you just said is that a lot of the quality information that sits in documents that I regularly go to, they are available on the Internet, but a lot of folks aren’t exposed to them and that that information wasn’t making it to the public in a form that tended to be digestible so we kind of latched on to that. And another thing you just said really resonates with me is that in no way is this like you’re bad and we’re good, that’s not it at all. I think that the waterfowl hunting community has been so successful because we are passionate about the ducks we pursue, we’re passionate about wetlands and that always leads us to a place where we feel like, we want to feel like we can help control some of what’s going on. And so, when you stop seeing ducks, you want something to grab a hold of that you feel like you can change. The other thing here I want to be clear on is that the waterfowl world in North America is a big place and there’s lots of people seeing plenty of ducks and shooting plenty of ducks, but there is definitely a group of people that seemingly are very disgruntled with the results they’ve had over the past few seasons and increasingly so. But then when we think about the broad spectrum outside of kind of that real ducky culture, I always do it as, like, the Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee that kind of part of the world, there’s a lot of folks out there in every little nook, cranny of this great continent and great country that are still shooting ducks and very satisfied and you don’t hear from them.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Michael Schummer: Like, that’s one thing we got to remember, too.

Ramsey Russell: Or that cold front finally shows up in January and there’s radio silence, an absolute radio silence, because finally the ducks show up and everybody’s out there making hay, water, sun shines.

Michael Schummer: Hey and it’s the same thing here. I have a few people I will share information with in my backyard, but if I just let her rip and let everybody know what I was shooting and put pictures up and stuff when it’s happening, when it’s hot, I’m going to get overwhelmed, because that information travels fast nowadays. I’ve got friends I text during season and it’ll be right, good friends, like, they come to our summer party at the farm and big bonfire, all that and great friends live around the corner from them trade eggs and chickens and all that stuff, but you won’t hear a peep from them when the ducks are good in the area. So yeah, people get quiet and you got to read the tea leaves there a little bit, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Mike, you got really fired up on that episode, you hit a lot of big topics, we’re going to get into today, but I’m going to start off this way. What are some of the prevalent myths circulating about waterfowl population declines and how do they deviate or reconcile with actual scientific findings?

Michael Schummer: Yeah, I think the first thing people got to realize is that the highs and – let’s just go with mallards, let’s just do that right now. The highs and mallards have only happened since 1955 for possibly 4 periods. The last peak, this is the one that People are questioning if we actually had that many ducks in this last peak, say between 2005 and now, there was a really good period there, I don’t want to pick the exact date, I want to say like 2015, 2016 was pretty good or something like that. But there, before that, there were only 3 big peaks in mallards and albeit that the mean in our long term average is like 7.7 million, the reality is that those periods when mallard populations are at their high, when the prairies get wet and numbers go up almost exponentially over a few years, those periods of high populations are very short, actually. But it’s what we remember, the lower periods in the moderate periods are a lot longer. So if we’re at 6.5 million ducks right now, man, if you think about it like, I say, 5 to 7’s more normal, maybe 6 to 8’s more normal million, 11 million, 10 million mallards, it’s not normal. I think a lot of people have tried to normalize very high mallard populations when that is not the case at all. That’s number one, I would say, on the list of kind of misconceptions out there. And then I really think a lot of this is perception, if areas where there are a lot of waterfowl hunters and there’s waterfowl hunting is the center of the universe for folks and the ducks don’t get there, the fingers start pointing and the perception is that ducks are in worse trouble than what we’ve seen, we know they cycle. So you’re going to remember 2005-2008 and the organization, this is when Louisiana started having problems with mallards and you’re going to remember the organization, the Flyway Federation, that blamed it on flooded corn to the north and now that’s kind of a muted comment, although it seems to have kind of come up again a little bit in this recent lull in numbers, but there was this blame put on something to the north and it had to be the guys in the north just flooding corn and DU’s paying them to flood corn and you and I know none of that is true.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Michael Schummer: Right, that’s not how the system works. And then it got really quiet, Ramsey, while we had ducks and people were shooting them.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Michael Schummer: And then guess what happens? Mallard stopped showing up at – Now, the new location’s a little further north. It’s kind of at the top of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and now we’re in this Period where and I think this is what’s raising concerns is that, in just sheer numbers of duck hunters, people in Arkansas are having lots, enough folks are having a tough time seeing mallards to shoot and so now we’ve come up with this perception that ducks are in trouble and it’s not just part of the normal cycle. And the reality of it is, is that duck numbers fluctuate and we’re at a bottom and we should be able to come out of it.

Ramsey Russell: There’s things that we can fix and things we can’t and I’m not picking on the state Arkansas, because if you think Arkansas declines, step across river in the state of Mississippi that, now we’re talking market differences and then versus now, but there’s so much going on besides population, besides hand harvest, besides any of the things going out there, I mean, mallard ducks are staying further north because on the one end, down the deep south, duck use days have declined, agricultural and other land use practices have changed drastically, whereas further up north, duck use days have increased for a lot of the same reasons and then there’s this variability of when and how often the timing and severity of winters, maybe the winters are getting warmer so it’s a lot of different differences, so let me say this, in what ways do you feel that social media platforms to include podcasts, have contributed to the dissemination of misinformation within our waterfowl hunting community?

Michael Schummer: Very simply, in short answer, it’s very easy to find the answer you want to hear.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, whether we’re talking politics or duck hunting, you ain’t lying.

Michael Schummer: Not touching it, but duck hunting I’m talking about.

Ramsey Russell: Right, Duck hunting.

Michael Schummer: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Any answer?

Michael Schummer: Yeah, that’s it. I mean, so when I see something on social media, even if it conforms to what I think is going on, the first thing I try to do is say, no, maybe that’s not what’s going on, like any type of data out there, any graph, anything, I don’t look at it and go, oh, that’s what I think, so I’m going to accept it and I’m going to wave it around, I’m going to run around waving it on social media, I actually tried to dig into that information. In a perfect example of this, Ramsey, there’s a – And it’s been on a bunch on social media of just this plummeting since 1999, mallard harvest in Arkansas. I’m just going to keep going back to that because that’s the most vocal voice out there, I mean, as I said, lots of corners of the waterfowl universe, but this is just the point to talk to you today. So I looked at that and I said, okay, so the harvest is declined, that could be for lots of reasons, but it didn’t kind of move around at all with the breeding population, which just didn’t seem to make much sense and I’ve dug into this based on the weather and the BPOP and stuff before, so I went into the data and I said, well, that doesn’t account for how many people are out there hunting or how often they hunt or anything like that, so went into the data and looked at the numbers of hunter days that the Fish & Wildlife Service collects through the Harvest Information Program and yeah, it’s got its faults. But the hunter days, how many days duck hunters are actually going, comes from the diaries that you fill out and say, this is how many ducks I shot on any given day and then it’s multiplied by the number of estimated hunters, which we know has some issues with it, but it takes that line from being a plummeting total mallard harvest to fluctuating up and down through time in Arkansas and actually, statistically, significantly following the breeding population. Now, it’s not everything. There are some really low harvest years, 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2023-24, which was 2 years ago, which were notoriously warm years, that shows up in the Mississippi data, it shows up in the Missouri data and it shows up in the Arkansas data, which – Those are the types of things I look for, consistency and evidence across broad spatial scales that are saying, hey, there’s something going on with these 3 years and then I went and looked at the weather and they were really warm years. When you control for the amount of effort in harvest, Missouri’s basically, you’re saying numbers of mallards people shoot per amount of effort has flatlined, Mississippi actually continues to plummet. So I think Mississippi’s got something for sure going on, but Arkansas’s mallard harvest actually, over the last decades, couple decades or so, has fluctuated up and down with the mallard BPOP, to some extent, there’s nuances in it and things like that, but it paints a totally different picture than people, I’m going to go with your little tale there saying the sky is falling. So the kind of thing is like, don’t fall for it right away, look around for information and try to figure out what is the what is the answer, what is really happening, what is reality? Because it’s very easy to get sucked into a narrative and again, I don’t think that people are intentionally misleading anybody, people just want to feel like they can have an effect and quote, unquote, save the ducks.

Ramsey Russell: But you bring up a great point, so with all this information, just deluge of information and misinformation and misinformation presented as the gospel and everything that we can very easily access on the Internet today, what proactive measures can people like myself and others take to verify credibility of information before sharing it within our networks? Well, I mean, how do I know that this is quote, the truth, unquote, before I just go and repeat it? How do I know the sky is really falling?

Michael Schummer: Yeah, well, I think that’s hard because I don’t think a lot of folks have a network of its – They’ve got a trusted network around them and there’s like dude’s hunted for 35 years and knows what he’s talking about, so they listen to that person. Well, I’ve duck hunted for 35 years too, I just happen to choose waterfowl ecology, management, conservation, crunching numbers is my profession. So, I’d say try to reach out to folks that are out there –

Ramsey Russell: Real quickly, Mike, take a side step and tell me why you decided, because you’re a hunter, anybody that can crunch those numbers and do what you do for a living could have worked for a Fortune 500 company. Why did you commit your life to the wildlife profession, which is all things equal somewhat, you get paid in benefit, a lot of your pay and benefits as compared to Fortune 500 companies is the satisfaction of committing to a future, but why does somebody like yourself decide to get into wildlife instead of working for somebody else?

Michael Schummer: Well, I think we could ask that question of anybody that’s a guide or yourself or in wildlife management, working for folks to keep duck clubs running, folks that work for Fish & Wildlife Service, state agencies, DU. We wanted to be right on the ground doing the best work we could for the ducks and for conservation. All those –

Ramsey Russell: Make the world a better place.

Michael Schummer: Trying to make the world a better place. Here’s the deal, I have a forestry degree, originally, I worked in the timber industry, all that stuff, I am not a tree hugger, but I’m definitely Environmentalist. The ducks need clean water, ducks need grasslands, ducks need wetlands and so do humans, we need these places too, to live a clean life and so deep down, I think birds are a barometer for humans. At the end of the day, Ramsey, if you really got enough beers in me, I’d be like, I’m doing this because I love people, but in that equation if you save the ducks, if you keep ducks with us, of all these different species that live in all these coastal habitats, arctic habitats, prairies, wetlands, west coast, east coast, down to the Gulf coast, if you keep all those ducks with us and sustain quality populations that are huntable, I bet you that people do pretty well in those environments too. And so, I did it because I was a duck hunter, I got into duck hunting and I said, trees are boring, you can cut a timber stand, it takes you 50 years to see the results of a well marked timber stand, but you can restore a marsh and see one year later, thousands of pintails piling into it, one year later, after you take and restore what was a farmed wetland and you put it back into wetland, you can see that right away. Some of it is I just didn’t have enough patience for it, but I also just caught the duck hunting bug and I think if you look across the Fish & Wildlife Service, DU Delta, Ducks Unlimited and all the state agencies and stuff, that answer I just gave is fairly universal, maybe tweaked a little bit here and there based on folks different approaches to it, but it’s the –

Ramsey Russell: I agree, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot, but I just wanted to convey that point because the whole time when I entered into the wildlife forestry curriculum, every professor from Lecture 1 to the end told me you don’t get into this field to chase the almighty dollar, you get in this field because you love it and you get in this field because you can make the world a better place, you’ve got to be committed and I see that in every single person I know that wherever in the while I feel they fail, that they could articulate it almost exactly like you did, Mike and that’s the point I’m just trying to make out.

Michael Schummer: And the one thing I want for any young listeners on here and folks that are at university right now and going through these programs and looking at really getting into being a waterfowl professional is that it’s comfortable. I would not say that I – Okay, so we scratch through financially sometimes My wife and I, but it’s not that bad, you can still make a good living –

Ramsey Russell: Make a great –

I wouldn’t trade what I’m doing for anything and I think there’s a ton of us out there that say the same exact thing.

Michael Schummer: And be very satisfied. I wake up sometimes at 4 in the morning and I cannot wait, first of all, to get on the computer and get some good work done with students and then when the sun finally comes up and I can start getting out and moving around all the other outside activities, I wouldn’t trade what I’m doing for anything and I think there’s a ton of us out there that say the same exact thing.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. I wasn’t trying at all to be insulting, but my point is, it’s a living, it’s a great living, but it’s one hell of a good life. And you can retire or move on knowing that you did your part to leave the duck hunting world in a better place than it was otherwise and that’s the whole point I was trying to draw out that every wildlife professional like yourself and covering a lot of the different topics we’re going to talk about, man, they’re committed to this, but first and foremost, as they connected to the resource as hunters themselves and it led into a lifelong commitment for the welfare of the resource, that’s the only point I’m trying to make.

Michael Schummer: And I’ll go a little deeper into this because once I moved, so I did forestry school in the Adirondack Mountains in New York for 2 years, got an associate’s degree, came here to actually where I’m teaching now, didn’t think I’d be back at ESF teaching, but in the city of Syracuse, near Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge and the state land. And once I got there, my father had gotten me into duck and goose hunting a little bit back home, but we just had a few birds on the river, not a lot. But once I got to Montezuma, bought with duck stamp money, bought with Pittman-Robertson money, paid for by hunters, think about it this way, man, did I catch the bug, I had never seen the diversity of species, I’d never seen such huge wetlands. No one should ever come hunting here because it’s not actually that good, but it is what got me going and that’s kind of the circle of life in wildlife and waterfowl conservation, if those 100$ were never there through duck stamps and through Pittman-Robertson funds, that place would have been still probably farmed wetlands and not been in that restored state where I could see all those birds get excited and then take on the career I took on and I think that’s a tale a lot of people can tell across this profession.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. I pulled you off – We were talking about how regular folks can verify, that don’t have a background and don’t understand the graphs and don’t understand the science, like myself, I call Mike or somebody smarter than me, I do because of where I went to school have, can call up Mike or many others that can explain it to me. But how? What can I do to verify the credibility of information before sharing it or before buying into it like Chicken Little, The Sky’s Falling?

“But I also think as a profession of waterfowl professionals, we have done a very poor job of getting the information out to the public with the fear, I think that they will use it the wrong way or something like that, rather than just say, hey guys, we should probably engage a lot more with folks because waterfowl hunters are passionate and if they get a wrong narrative and run with it, it can be damaging.”

Michael Schummer: Yeah, I think you question it first and look at I don’t know, it sounds snarky and I don’t want to sound better than anybody, it’s not really it, because there’s lots of folks out there that are great duck hunters, great habitat managers that have never professionally done this, they’ve just got an eyeball for it. But I think the lack of trust in what we’re doing is genuinely unwarranted, that’s a start, really. We’re all working our asses off every day for it, we don’t always have a perfect answer, but we’re always working towards a better answer to do a better job of managing the resource. I have put out on the Foul Weather podcast, look, just if you got questions, reach out to me, like, especially if you run a podcast and Ramsey, you have and other folks that we’ve talked about that are running podcasts are like, hey what about X, what about Y? What about Z? I want to make sure I get this right when we talk about it. I think that type of stuff is important like, even myself in my profession and doing this professionally, teaching an ecology and management waterfowl class, sometimes when I build a podcast, I spend about 2 hours digging into information to make sure what I’m reporting is right, do your homework. I think just blurting things out that people might, followers of you and such might take to heart without knowing if it’s right or not is – it’s not doing anybody a service, I think. But I think this is – one of the things I do want to say is, professionally, I think we are at fault and as the podcast has evolved, one of the things I’ve tried to do is make sure and get the good information into people’s hands so that they can be better informed hunters and make good decisions about where their conservation efforts go, where their dollars go, how they talk to each other about these topics and I just think we have to be a little more careful about it. But I also think as a profession of waterfowl professionals, we have done a very poor job of getting the information out to the public with the fear, I think that they will use it the wrong way or something like that, rather than just say, hey guys, we should probably engage a lot more with folks because waterfowl hunters are passionate and if they get a wrong narrative and run with it, it can be damaging. I mean, here, example, inside knowledge, Delta Waterfowl held a whole entire meeting to discuss all the uproar that’s going on about low populations and this and that, it’s eating people’s time when in fact, what’s happening in the waterfowl world is we’re not blind to it, talk about drain tile, talk about sex ratios, talk about where AHM is at all that stuff that’s out there, that there’s a lot of chatter of how horrible all our data streams are. We’re talking about it constantly, we know that there are some discrepancies in the data streams that we have, but none of it is at a point where anyone in the waterfowl profession is saying the sky is falling. We have enough safety valves in all of this stuff that, it’s not like the decision making process is causing the demise of ducks that is in no way happening. So, I’d say try to reach out, don’t take the first thing you see as gospel, look around your neighborhood, look for other information and goodness, half these documents are online right, too. So, I mean the information is available, all the harvest information, all the survey information, all the age ratios, you can just Google like Mississippi Flyway data book and it gives you every ounce of data. The intent of this whole entire process is to be transparent too.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Michael Schummer: But anyhow, a long winded way of saying personally as a duck hunter it takes a little more effort, like do a little bit of homework and then to find what is the correct information and then second, from the waterfowl biologists out there, I think we need to try to communicate the information and decision making process a little better. We’ve definitely legally done our thing through the Federal Register and all that stuff, all the documentation is out there to make waterfowl seasons legal and sustainable and all that stuff, but that doesn’t mean that just putting that out there, the public can digest that and understand it.

Well, the thing about it is, it just made me think that whereas in the social world I can make a graph, make a meme, talk to a few of my buddies, ask, Oh char dog, how’s this look, you agree with it, you wagged your tail? Heck yeah, I’m going to post it out there as the gospel.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the thing about it is, it just made me think that whereas in the social world I can make a graph, make a meme, talk to a few of my buddies, ask, Oh char dog, how’s this look, you agree with it, you wagged your tail? Heck yeah, I’m going to post it out there as the gospel. But man, when you start talking about state and federal governments and research at the university or other level, it’s all peer reviewed. Nobody’s just throwing it out there and putting it in a publication to present it without having gone through a lot of extensive review to make sure it all makes sense and all the I’s are dotted, t’s are crossed and the graphs line up and everything, everybody’s in agreement, outside of your little char dog think tank, you’re reaching way outside, the front seat of your truck and getting to get some real insightful input before it becomes, quote, the gospel, before it’s presented and projected out to the world or instituted into policy. Am I right?

Michael Schummer: Yeah, and critical review is a thing. I take reviewing scientific manuscripts and white papers and stuff that come across my desk very seriously as an ethical responsibility to make sure that that information is correct or is correct as possible and written in a manner that is up to snuff. And I am genuinely, like, one of my favorite things is to play devil’s advocate on this stuff too. I’m in the Atlantic Flyway and those folks are super conservative with their seasons, it’s just the group of folks in the flyway and they’re – it’s how we ended up at 2 mallards, there’s other reasons for that, we end up with 2 mallards for a while, we’re going to be back to probably a lower goose season structure and bag limit and I don’t think the sky’s falling on those geese as much as we’re being conservative about it. So, it’s funny, like I say those folks are way too conservative with it and so sometimes, hey, Ramsey, you and I agree on a lot of things, but just for fun, like if you said in a conversation on the porch one evening over a bourbon or whatever, if you said black, I’d probably say white and if you said white, I’d probably say black. I do the same thing to my students in class.

Ramsey Russell: Sure.

Michael Schummer: By the end of the semester, they don’t even know what I stand for because all I’ve done was make them critically think about everything.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Michael Schummer: And I think that’s what we can ask of the hunters is just like think critically about this stuff and look at the different avenues, look at the information that’s out there, but from the data, the process, I mean, man, all this stuff, the amount of time and effort that went in, to say like, the new Pintail strategy and stuff, as years and years in the making –

Ramsey Russell: Boy, is it.

Michael Schummer: Thousands and thousands of hours of people’s time to try, to get that as right as possible.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s really no telling how many scientists touched or reviewed that from coast to coast, north to south, state, federal, NGO, it’s really no telling how many people contributed to that final thought. I mean it really isn’t, I mean, I heard it from a lot of different areas, saw it and heard it explained from a lot of different arenas within, I mean state, federal, NGO. I mean there was a lot of input on that process.

Michael Schummer: Well and I just got off a call this morning for about an hour and a half with an NGO that I sit as a scientific chair, so one of the things people don’t understand sometimes too is that we voluntarily have scientific advisory groups for activities that are out there because we want to be questioned and we want to collaborate where we can and none of nobody does this stuff in a silo. I mean, it takes a team to get this stuff done.

Ramsey Russell: Mike, can you think of any instances where misinformation directly led to detrimental policy decisions or conservation setbacks? And to me, a lot of this falls under the realm of biopolitics, not really biology, but where you’ve got some kind of personal bias in the system. But can you ever, can you think of any instances in your career where misinformation led to something that really shouldn’t have been put into place?

Michael Schummer: Well, I think that a lot of, where we’re seeing this now – this stuff’s a slippery slope. We think we’re doing all this to be strong conservationists and such, but there’s a lot of – I’m just going to go with the western stuff, like the big cat stuff, the big game stuff, the wolf stuff, the anti groups just latched onto that, they do referendums, Montana went through a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, we’re on the verge of misinformation, misuse of well, pseudoscience let’s say, eking into the wildlife field in general. If you think about, let’s go back though and talk a little bit about the waterfowl world and how we’ve built safeguards into that, is that prior to AHM, let me ask you a question, prior to AHM, how do you think decisions were made on season lengths and bag limits?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t Know, but I suspect a lot of state representatives were sitting around a conference table, belly ache and negotiating.

Michael Schummer: Yep. Politics –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s what I am thinking.

Michael Schummer: And biggest voice in the room and I just go with smoke filled room, kind of an idea like, smoke filled boardroom, look at the survey –

Ramsey Russell: Tit for tat.

Michael Schummer: Look at – what’s that?

Ramsey Russell: Tit for tat. You do for me, I’ll do for you.

Michael Schummer: Some of that. And that stuff was really starting to eke in a lot. The black duck limit went down, there’s a lot of history behind that, but defenders of wildlife were involved in a lawsuit against Fish & Wildlife Service and there was a lot of politicking in there that kind of wanted to take control of the process because people get unhappy and here’s the deal is as soon as you just get legislators and representatives making decisions, it gets, it’s a pretty darn slippery slope and it can put you in a pretty bad spot. Adaptive harvest, so all that stuff was subjective. I feel like the pintail population’s down and we got to stop shooting them. So, a lot of feelings in that room and my sense is the narrative nowadays of ducks are in trouble is perception and feelings to some extent not understanding the sways, the ebb and flow of the mallard population, things like that. But AHM was a – it’s an imperfect objective decision making tool, we know that. But the intent of adaptive harvest management is to learn, use data to learn about the system and then provide an objective decision making framework so that subjectivity and the politicking, including, not just the folks that are like duck hunters that think this is what I want, but so the other end of it, the anti end of it, can’t eke in there and have lawsuits, I mean, there has been no lawsuit brought against the Fish & Wildlife Service since AHM was put in place and that is a good thing.

Boy, I tell you what, that’s a long and short of it. I’ve long since believed that a lot of misinformed or disgruntled hunters are accidentally siding with anti hunters, we don’t know any better.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I tell you what, that’s a long and short of it. I’ve long since believed that a lot of misinformed or disgruntled hunters are accidentally siding with anti hunters, we don’t know any better.

Michael Schummer: You’re playing into their hands. I don’t know that the –

Ramsey Russell: Damn sure you are.

Michael Schummer: Slippery slope, enough of a slippery slope or we’ve opened that gap up enough to, I don’t know, I’ve been watching Stranger Things, so and in the upside down, I don’t know that we’ve opened that gap up enough. But there’s cracks, in those cracks I think are dangerous to the general process of learning about the system and conserving ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Mike, let’s talk about evaluating waterfowl population models. I think that is one of the most misunderstood things out there, unless you’re a part of that process and truly understand it and I’m going to put it this way, like yourself, I’m a forester first and foremost, I mean, when I went through Mississippi State University in the wildlife program, I became a forester and man, cruising timber, when I think of counting ducks and coming up with these waterfowl population models, boom, it’s as simple as cruising timber. Now wait, hold on, based on my time and money, you know what I am saying? Because it’s time and money on how big a crude and how intensive of a crude and how much time I’m going to spend walking through there doing a transect, pulling plots, calculating volume and all that good stuff and the thing about it is, Mike, if I can set a confidence interval, okay, I need more, I need less, but at the end of the day, my trees aren’t moving, they’re there. They’re sitting right here, I’m going to walk a straight line and those trees are going to be their next time, they’re not going to move in or move out of my survey area, they don’t have wings, they’re not going to fly. They don’t have the – Somebody told me one time the average life expectancy of a duck was less than a year from the time it’s had, I mean there’s a million different things, they’re at the bottom of the food chain, everything wants to eat them and so many variables that contribute to them, we start talking crazy little things like Mourning Doves and Bobwhite Quail, their survivability probability is just getting into months, not anymore, but timber, I can understand cruising timber, I can understand getting a survey, but that is not, when I come in with a survey, I haven’t gone out and calculated the form class and the height and the stem diameter of every single tree out there, it’s an estimate. So I can come in and with this confidence interval, plus or minus 5% estimate, I can tell you this about what you got out there in volume. And the only way we’re going to find out is going to cutting it and just how right I was, counting ducks is a total different element of survey, because now I’m not on a track of woods, I’m all over the continent, I mean there’s just so many places they can hide and if it’s dry here, they can move off my survey area and so no wonder it’s a misunderstood model. But let’s talk a little bit more about that, can you explain the primary data sources and methodologies used especially as compared to timber doing that, this constructed accurate waterfowl population models.

Michael Schummer: So, here’s where I’m at with that, Ramsey, is that the Foul Weather podcast because of the kind of misinformation and comment of data streams, all the data streams are wrong, that are out there. We are running kind of an info series throughout the spring and summer. So, we’re finishing a 4 part series about 2 weeks from now, 2 Mondays from now I think on the history of the North American mallard. The last one is the future of the wild mallard in North America, we’re going to talk a lot of the game farm stuff and things like that, I’ve worked real close with Phil Lavretsky over the years on that topic and so can speak to it. And then we’re launching into our summer info series that’s going to go through each data stream, so how is the BPOP conducted? What type of data does it give us? How’s the Harvest Information Program and the Canadian Harvest Survey run? What is duck banding and what information does it give us? The wingbee, which is part of the Harvest Information Program or the parts collection survey, what type of data does that give us? So if I am a little – so this is the thing, like, this is what I do professionally, but to get down into the nuts and bolts, of how all this stuff works and I’m going to deliver these podcasts once every 2 weeks. I’m probably spending at least 2 whole days to make sure when we write the script for those podcasts that we get this information correct, because there’s a lot more detail beyond typically what we teach in the classroom, believe it or not, because we got a lot of things to cover as far as waterfowl goes. So we don’t get as much down into the weeds, which is kind of where I want to go with this kind of data series that we’re going to do. But in these models, births, deaths and a lot of this is coming from, sorry, age ratios at banding, age ratios in the harvest, differences in survival rate from banding, which can be one season banding, 2 season bandings better, because you banned a bird in the fall and then if you recover it in the winter after hunting season’s over, it survived hunting season. And then if the likelihood of you recovering that bird again, back in the fall is low, that’s how we – lot of, on the large scale, how we figure out that these ducks are just disappearing during the breeding period, not the hunting period as much. And so, we can calculate those types of things in the effect of harvest, the breeding population survey, as much as it has, it’s a great record through time and we know its weaknesses, it still is robust enough in almost all cases, I’d say most cases for decision making, despite the known biases and issues with it. Just mallards, for instance, because a lot of these species actually, within the traditional survey area of the prairies, the parkland and the boreal forest, that’s their core, your gadwall, your blue winged teal, trying to think of other ones that are in that group, but there’s a lot of them, that’s the real core area. Mallards, when we use banding and ray alas, Oscars[–00:53:10] did a great paper years ago, when we use banding and get Lincoln estimates, which is another way to estimate the population, pretty straightforward stuff and you use banding data to do that, which is a much more kind of sample of all the mallards across the whole continent. You come up with, I’m just going to say way more mallards on this continent than the BPOP even counts, but what the breeding population survey does and we know this is when that core prairie area gets wet, those numbers go way up. So, the rest of the continent, when the prairies isn’t doing its thing for mallards, probably insulates us quite a bit because there’s more ducks out there than we even fly over and count. But we have to have some standardized way to track the core areas where ducks exist, that’s why if you look at the Alaska survey strata, they follow these kind of lowland river valleys and stuff where we know there’s concentrations of birds in the east, we kind of survey the core areas and then once you get it way into Northern Quebec, we know there’s ducks there, but we’re not going to count every last duck. So we have a series of surveys set up that allow us to see the trends in those birds through time as far as their populations that give us some sense of, that are good enough, say for decision making. Age ratios, sex ratios, if those things change drastically in the harvest or in banding, that starts to inform the model to say oh, its reproduction, that’s our problem spot or its survival, that’s our problem spot. So, without going further into it right now, Ramsey, that’s the kind of long and short of it as far as info.

Ramsey Russell: We’re all going to tune in to listen to your podcast for more in depth, I still got a few more questions because these waterfowl population models are so misunderstood by us and a lot of people question the accuracy. And I was reminded thinking about this question, how, I talk about counting timber, but let’s talk about counting money, I mean, I can sit there and thumb it out and lick my thumbs and count out dollars on the table or maybe I’ve got a fancy money machine like they got at the bank. I saw a movie one time called Blow, you all remember that movie where them old boys were hustling cocaine back in the 70s and 80s and they had so much cash, they were just weighing it, they were just taking big old boxes and weighing it, saying, oh, that must be this much money. So how accurate do you want – do you really need or want it to be? And speaking of accuracy, Mike, what are some of the challenges faced by researchers and managers to ensure the precision of these models?

Michael Schummer: So that’s a good one and that’s where I was going to go is that more recently, we – so some of the challenges is that at times a data set just doesn’t correspond to another data set, like easy one, the breeding population, one year the breeding population is 10 and I’m just throwing out numbers and the given what we know about the reproductive output of this duck, the highest that next year can be is 15 and guess what we count, 17.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Michael Schummer: And the lowest it could possibly be is 5 and maybe another year we count 4 or 3, but one of the things we’ve done is in the adaptive harvest management modeling we’ve gone to and this is, I covered this last Monday on the podcast and I don’t want to talk by people, I don’t run these models. I am – and I want to caveat that I know enough about them to talk about them, but I don’t run them myself. So the Todd Arnold’s, the Ben Sedinger, the Dave Coons, those are the people that really fully understand the guts. But what these are is Bayesian integrated population models. The Bayesian portion of it is just this, that what I just told you it doesn’t let happen, it says I’m going to look at last year’s count and say this year that we just counted can’t be stupid. So, it deals with, it uses past information to inform the current information, because the likelihood is that, these things can’t biologically be so out of whack from one year to the next and that cures a fair bit of our, let’s just say miscounting and data that varies maybe sometimes strongly from year to year. The integrated population model portion of it is a very powerful tool that takes survival, reproduction, age ratios, sex ratios and it says all these things really need to agree with each other. And actually, in an integrated population model you can be completely missing one of them and it’ll calculate it for you, given what your population is at the end, if you’ve got all these survival and harvest rates and all these types of things, well, this variable right here that goes into the model that then gives you a predicted breeding population the next year, it can calculate it. So what it does is it cross validates in that model to help increase the precision of the estimate and I know that all sounds vague enough to be confusing and that’s kind of right about where I’m at too, so I Don’t want to really overstep my bounds on it. But like, this is where I think people are getting too excited about like the sex ratio thing, where there’s way more male mallards out there now than there used to be, the male to female ratio is skewed, that’s from, damn it, that’s like the habitat’s bad, hens are not surviving at the rate that they should probably. And so, we’ve got all these males in the population and we are still counting them, once they hit a certain number, I think it’s like 5, they’re no longer considered, that’s just a bachelor group, if you count 5 mallards when you fly over, but if I think it’s 4 or less, they’re considered a pair when there may not actually be a hen, given the sex ratio thing. But the process we have now is pretty resilient to that type of error in the estimates. There are people actually reevaluating the breeding population survey by correcting for that bias in there, but here’s the thing, Ramsey, fundamentally, it’s probably not going to change how we approach waterfowl seasons because the information we have increasingly so doesn’t say that harvest doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t, we cannot detect such a strong effect that we’re going to run headlong into a moderate or restrictive season. That is probably not where they’re at, right now in the matrix, the matrix does Mapons and it does mallard breeding population, those are the 2 and then there’s all those L’s for liberal and M’s for moderate in that matrix, you follow like, hey, there’s 5 million ponds and there’s 6.5 million mallards and this is the season you get.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Michael Schummer: If you go all the way across that line with 6.5 million mallards on like as low in the number of ponds as you possibly can, you’re still in a liberal season.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Michael Schummer: And the reason for that is that, it’s a little complex, but like all wildlife, all populations are density dependent to some extent, Ramsey. That is, as you cram more individuals in to an area, the number of juveniles they produce goes down because resources are limited. So, all these animals are density dependent, but what we’re finding in the model is that mallards are weakly density dependent, it’s there, but it’s weak, which basically says we could continue to cram more ducks in less space and still get reproduction out of them. And so, I’m going to go on one more rant, people keep saying AHM is not adaptive, it adapts every single year. That matrix changes every year depending upon the weights in the model that tell us whether harvest is compensatory or additive or reproduction is weakly or strongly density dependent, so where those L’s are for liberal, where those M’s are, that moves around on an annual basis.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’m glad you brought that up because I hear it and hear it and everybody does, we hear that 6 or 60, whatever, the model must be broke, they’re stuck on six or 60 because they got to sell hunting gear. Well, let’s take a look at blue winged teal, baby, because the minute blue winged teal fell off that ale, this year we’re going into a half seasonal blue winged teal, the prairies were dry, their habitat was lacking, their survey showed this. We’re now going to have a, what is it, 4 blue wings, 9 days instead of 6 and 16, I mean, half, because their numbers hit, they followed their own science and we’re going to respond with a blue winged tail. And so, I think –

Michael Schummer: We are behind the times on blue wings, scaup are the same way, there is no way that any of the restrictions we have on scaup are saving scaup. The pintail model is what we worked on first, hey, the mig bird office, the US Fish & Wildlife Service migratory bird office is a skeleton crew, they can only work on so many things at so much time and collaborate with really good, high quality professors at universities, there’s only so many bodies around to do this stuff, it’s got to go through that process we talked about before of peer review and thousands and thousands of hours of making sure we get this right, as right as we can, given the known error and things like that out there and I would say these are things we have to work through and somebody shouldn’t look at that and be like, well then why aren’t we going to a 30 day season for mallards? There are differences in how we approach these and mostly because this is a – science is a process and what we thought was right before, might not actually, we’re refining it and it’s actually not right, today like all the tinkering with the duck seasons we did previously, the point system, all this and that, probably didn’t ever save the ducks, they were just going to ebb and flow anyway, no matter what we did with these seasons. So then people are like, well, why don’t we have 100 day season and just be able to shoot 15 ducks? I’m like, all right, let’s not talk about hypotheticals, it’s just like socially right now where we’re at 60 and 6 seems reasonable people seem relatively happy with it, at that harvest rate, like hen mallards is like what, 6, 7% harvest rate and you don’t affect the population till they’re like 11, 12%. Everybody seems happy with it, that’s kind of where it’s at and nothing that we can find says it’s going to crash the duck population.

Ramsey Russell: Well, in that – Following up on that, I got a question and I know you’re going to get deep down into the bushes in a 4 part series on Foul Weather podcast, but how significant is the impact of hunting pressure versus habitat degradation on waterfowl populations? Because I mean a lot of finger point going at the – when they’re saying 6, 60, they’re talking about hunting pressure, not being accounted for or something or being too liberalized in the model. So what in the context of these models, how significant is the impact of hunting pressure versus habitat on waterfowl populations?

Michael Schummer: So, I think for the pressure end of things, there’s a lot of folks out of Brad Cohen’s lab in Tennessee that have done a very good job. Doug Osborne’s done a bit of stuff in Arkansas too. I would say talk directly to those folks about the pressure stuff, that’s a big area that they’ve been studying for a long time to understand what that does. But on that end of things, I’ll speculate like I’m fine with that. The thing that we saw this year is the folks that had food in refuge shot ducks, let’s not pretend like everybody had a horrible duck season, that is not 100% true. And there’s a lot of complaints about folks having 14,000 acres and 7,000 of its refuge and they’re just holding all the birds and it’s like – and all the public hunters are getting screwed and it’s like, okay, full disclosure here, let’s talk about this folks, if you’re all for – if you’re conservative and you’re all for like, pull your bootstraps up and make something to yourself, I’m not going to vilify the guy that somehow found a way to own 14,000 acres and have 7,000 acres of refuge, that’s the American dream. And have – maybe public hunters taking it on the chin a little bit, yeah. But that’s up to folks to figure out. We’ve got public areas here that only hunt 3 days a week till noon, nobody wants that in lots of places, fine, but then you’ve got to take the consequences of blowing ducks out every single day. There is a way, if it is a pressure thing, if that’s what shows up in the science, there is a way to regulate that, to keep some birds around, on the food end of things, that’s kind of what I said, man, if you’ve got food and you’ve got refugee here, you’re going to have ducks. Let’s go back and just hit on Arkansas a little bit and so Louisiana lost its mallards, some of that’s weather, it’s just not getting cold enough to drive them down there. But they lost a ton of coastal marsh stuff, they lost a ton of food in Louisiana. Arkansas in the heyday had really messy farming practices. Soybeans were a thing that were harvested late because we weren’t caught up technology wise, rice farming was really dirty, there was just food all over the ground and then there was green tree reservoirs and other naturally flooded areas that birds went into during the middle of the day, they went out to the fields, they filled themselves up and then they flew into the woods, that is gone. And one of the things I’m going to say, from what I can see and I’m going to relate it to this, I’m going to tell a story about American woodcock first, Ramsey, is that when small farm abandonment happened in the northeast United States and kind of down the Atlantic Coast, woodcock numbers went through the roof because there was all that early successional forest, that young forest that woodcock rely on. Over the years, what have those turned into? They either matured, they were reclaimed as farmland as we figured out better farming practices on lands to be able to use it or they turned into housing developments to a large degree. There is nothing that we can do, Ruffed Grouse Society has all this early habitat management stuff, they take a rotary cutter out there and they make some small plots and stuff, there is no way they are recreating a entire cultural societal shift away from small farms towards large industrial farms to create a landscape level of massive amounts of early successional forest and what have we seen? Our woodcock numbers have gone down, they were probably artificially high when we started counting them. This is the bad news. I don’t think Arkansas gets their mallards back, I think those days are actually gone.

Ramsey Russell: Because –

Michael Schummer: At the 1 million mallard harvest level, I just don’t think that the landscape, so there’s all these programs now to try to help kind of recreate some of the food value on the landscape, but it’s kind of like this young forest thing that the Ruffed Grouse Society and such is doing. I don’t think you can get back to, the precision farming is just there now, there’s just not enough food on that landscape, I don’t see it happening and other places have food and the weather just doesn’t get a foot of snow and 2ft of ice at places that need it, not in the time frame.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about Louisiana losing their mallards. And I have had so many old timers on here and I’m talking from the east side of New Orleans, Cross River on the east side, clear over toward Lake Arthur and they remember shooting those mallards, heck, one of them was a freaking market hunter back in the 70s, he remembers those mallards, lots and lots of them and she over on the east side remembers them too, a lot of folks remember them, but one thing in common is when they describe the habitats they were hunting in, it’s totally different than what is out there on the landscape today, on the east side, boy, a lot of those oaks and a lot of that kind of stuff, I mean and anybody that’s gone south out of Venice, out into the marsh, sees those old remnant houses that at one time, back in the 60s and 70s and 50s, back in those days, it was hardwood and pasture going on out there in that coastal marsh, now it’s gone. A lot of those oaks and stuff out there are gone, when you get – as you start moving west in Louisiana back in the 60s and 70s, the heyday of soybean is gold on a global commodity, man, those hardwood were slashed and burned and planted up in the row crop agriculture and that began, according to them, the timeframe that they were shooting old ducks until that happened and the habitat changed, now add on top of that, climate changes along the flyaway from north to south and everything else and it’s cumulative and when we talk about Arkansas, somebody told me, Mike, just because of the agricultural practice and everything else evolving, the technology evolving, man, there’s a unbelievable amount of quote duck use days out on the agricultural landscape today versus then, just because of technological advancements. And so, I mean, that’s a scary thought that no matter what, some of these areas may not achieve what they achieved in the past, there’s a massive movement at the governmental level right now to rehabilitate and to manage, go back and set and correct some of the bottomland hardwood, GTR problems that are now becoming manifest. So even in the beloved green timber, the habitat values are not there like they once were and they’re having to go back and reset it, to get it back on track for future generations.

Michael Schummer: Which is going to take a long time.

Ramsey Russell: A long time.

Michael Schummer: That is a system that was mismanaged for years and not managed how a system would traditionally flood and how water would move across the roots and it really caused a lot of those quality oaks that we want to decline and overcup oaks, which is not useful to ducks to start to dominate. That’s a tough one to digest because what, there’s the argument of like, I just want my woods flooded and some of that is that very extended flooding, that early flooding is what causes this shift in species. And yeah, you can do it, you can flood it and you can shoot ducks in it and it can attract ducks, but your kids aren’t going to see squat then because the degradation of that forest is substantial, the science behind that, just looking at shifts in species and such is really solid and it’s funny, people have been working on that one since, I want to say like the mid-80s and we finally got to the point where we’re enacting some of that stuff. We’ve been seeing that stuff for years.

Ramsey Russell: Again, it wasn’t by accident. It was just what people knew to do back in the 50s and 60s to manage for green tree was totally different than what, if you want to regenerate, the future regeneration, advanced regeneration of red oaks, it ain’t what it calls for.

Michael Schummer: Yeah, it’s not a blame game, it’s just, as this is the thing, it’s not like science is a one and done, we continually learn and hopefully improve in that process as we go, it’s not a stagnant thing.

Ramsey Russell: Mike, I tell you what I want to do is I want to put this conversation on pause and come back next week and finish it, we’ve still got a lot of great information to cover that you really, truly got into, I’m enjoying this and you Burn It Down episode, I want to come back and revisit, thank you very much. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast with my buddy, Mike, Dr. Mike Schummer. Join us next week for more information about the sky falling or ain’t it?

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