EP 592. Blazing Bluebills—and Beyond

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today’s episode takes us up into central Illinois to a place called Forbes Biological Station with a buddy of mine, also a Mississippi State graduate, to dive into a diver duck ecology, most especially bluebills. Josh, how the heck are you, man?

Josh Osborn: I’m doing good, Ramsey. Thanks for having me. I’m honored to be a part of this one.

Ramsey Russell: Shoot, man, I’m glad to be here. Introduce yourself real quick, Josh, to those listening.

Josh Osborn: So you kind of said it before, but we come from the same dirt hill down there in Mississippi. I’m a Mississippi State grad, I got my Bachelor’s there in 2011 and then moved on and got a master’s degree at the University of Tennessee studying black ducks in west Tennessee. As I currently live and breathe, I’m a waterfowl ecologist for the University of Illinois. I’m station at a field station about 2 hours away from campus on the Illinois river, the Forbes Biological Station. It’s the oldest inland field station in North America. We just celebrated our 130^th anniversary 2 springs ago. And it’s a kind of steeped in waterfowl research tradition. It’s some of the more seminal research that we still use today came out of our lab right here in central Illinois and it’s something we’re super proud of.

Ramsey Russell: Where’d you grow up, Josh?

Josh Osborn: So I grew up in Tishomingo county on Pickwick Lake, if you know where that is. So about as far northeast as you can go in the state without being in Alabama or Tennessee.

“Well, Tishomingo county is not the nexus of duck hunting in the great state of Mississippi. And if you remove Pickwick Lake, there probably wouldn’t be nothing but. But did you grow up duck hunting?”

Ramsey Russell: Well, Tishomingo county is not the nexus of duck hunting in the great state of Mississippi. And if you remove Pickwick Lake, there probably wouldn’t be nothing but. But did you grow up duck hunting?

Josh Osborn: I didn’t. So I grew up deer and squirrel and rabbit hunting, I really fished more than anything.

Ramsey Russell: I was going to say on the bank of Pickwick Lake, how could you not?

Josh Osborn: Yeah. But I didn’t grow up didn’t grow up duck hunting. We jump shot wood ducks off of the creek and stuff down below the house. But I joined the Navy straight out of high school, so I was in the Navy for 6 years and I came home on leave and a friend of mine that I grew up hunting with said, hey, bring some stuff with you, we’re going to go duck hunting the next time you’re home. And so my buddy Nick Young took me duck hunting and it’s really outside of just kind of the stuff beating around the creek growing up, that was really my first shot at it.

Ramsey Russell: Where’d you all go? What’d you do?

Josh Osborn: So we went to a little area called Yellow Creek. I don’t feel like I’m giving anything away because that’s not the hot spot that people want to go to. I think we shot 4 or 5 gadwall and a couple of buffleheads and not much to amount to anything, but for somebody that never really done it before, it was a lot. So we had a grand old time. And then when I moved home from the Navy and my girlfriend at the time, she’s my wife now, we’re kind of talking about what I was going to do post Navy, and it led me down the wildlife field. I didn’t even really know that jobs and research were a thing that shadowed a regional biologist by the name of Jerry Hazelwood. And so Jerry took me on the fun stuff the first couple of months that I worked for the state, and I got to blow beaver dams, I got to do whitetail deer herd health checks, I got to do all the fun stuff. And that’s kind of when I fell in love with it and decided to pursue a career doing this stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Who were some of your earliest influence in growing up? Did somebody influence you into the wildlife field or influence you into the Navy?

Josh Osborn: So probably my cousin. My dad didn’t hunt or fish, my grandpa didn’t. I grew up on a small farm, and so we were just always outside. I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, we were working and playing and we were lucky to have a couple hundred acres where we could just run around and do whatever we wanted to. And I had a cousin that was 3 years older than me, and he and my brother were the same age. And so I was the cute little brother chasing around them, trying to tag along and be cool like them. And my cousin Jacob is the one that really got me hunting and then it just kind of turned into what it was. So kind of non-traditional. I didn’t have parents that hunted, I didn’t have a whole lot of family that hunted, so I just kind of happened into it, thanks to the good graces of my cousin.

Ramsey Russell: Were you the smart kid in high school? I mean, did you have like a 4.0 GPA and study all the time?

Josh Osborn: No. I probably should have been, but I would have rather been anywhere else than sitting in a classroom learning about stuff that I didn’t care about. But hind size 2020, you look 25 years or however long it’s been, you look back on that and wish you’d kind of applied yourself a little bit differently. But I was the kid that was skipping class to go fish the little backwater ponds off of the Tennessee Tom Beckbe river there. That was how most of my high school years was spent.

Ramsey Russell: And the rest, you just wasted.

Josh Osborn: The rest of this wasted.

Ramsey Russell: So you come home from a Navy, you end up on a yellow creek duck hunt with a buddy, did you kill a duck? Do you still remember your first duck?

Josh Osborn: Yeah. So my first duck was probably wood ducks off of the creek growing up, but with him, I don’t – you got 3 guns blasting into a pair of gadwall, who knows who kills what. But we did. We walked out of there with 4 or 5, 6 gadwall and a couple of buffleheads, and I don’t remember what else, but it was a good experience. I was only home for a couple weeks, I got to hang out with a buddy that I grew up with that I hadn’t seen in probably a year and it was just a real good experience. I’m sure I didn’t have waders, we probably didn’t have much or nothing to hide behind. We were just kind of laying on the bank, shooting whatever came in, and we just got lucky.

Ramsey Russell: It makes a lot of sense that a farm boy from Tishomingo county goes and sees some of the world in the Navy and had shot some ducks and what I want to do with my life and take apart his GI Bill and go to school, it makes perfect sense to me that you ended up in wildlife management at the great state of Mississippi State University, I should say, God’s country, I call i. When you started off in that program, were you thinking, man, I’m going to be a duck guy, I’m going to be in research.

Josh Osborn: No. So I knew I wanted to kind of go that direction as much as possible. I was just kind of, I didn’t have that experience growing up that kids have where they just fall in love with duck hunting and they’re all about it, they want to consume every little bit of information they can. So I had that experience after I moved home, I had it later in life, late on set duck hunter, I guess you could say, I was in my 20s, my mid-20s. And so when I was going to school when I first started at junior college down there at Northeast Community College and I just knew that I wanted to do something wildlife related. I had a great forestry professor there that kind of could see that I wasn’t some 18 year old kid, that I was really trying to make something out of it. And he had the contacts at Mississippi State to make it work to kind of steer me in the right direction of the people that could get me where I wanted to go. And so that’s how I came in contact with Rick Kaminski who became my advisor at Mississippi State and I guess the rest is history.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ll tell you what, Rick was not my faculty advisor at Mississippi State, but he is nonetheless a huge influence in the direction my life and my studies and then my life took. There’s no doubt about that. Tell me briefly about, you went to Mississippi State University, got your undergraduate, then went over to West Tennessee and studied black ducks, number 1, at what point in your undergraduate career did you round a curve and say, I want to get a master’s and I’m open to doing waterfowl. And then tell me a little bit about what you studied and who you work for over in Tennessee.

Josh Osborn: Yeah, so I mentioned Jerry Hazelwood earlier and traveling around with him, he always had this kind of chuckle and Jerry was late in his career at this point. I mean, he must have been late 50s, early 60s. I know he retired just a few years after I left Mississippi State. But he would always like, even we’re getting up at 05:00AM to go do bobwhite quail counts and he’s chuckling saying, can you believe they pay me to do this?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Josh Osborn: And I just knew that I wanted a job where I could do that, where everything was enjoyable, and I knew, as a 24 year old kid, I knew that wasn’t the case 100% of the time. But if you could get a job doing that where you’re happy, say 60%, 70% of the time, you’ve really kind of got this whole life thing figured out.

Ramsey Russell: You ain’t lying.

“I worked for Delta Waterfowl, I got a couple of summers experience working with them up on the prairies on their, I guess, predator control nesting project, which kind of exposed me to Frank Rohr and Rob Olson, who was the president at the time, and Jim Fisher, who still does a lot of super important policy work for him, he was there with him as well.”

Josh Osborn: And so that’s kind of when I started realizing I probably needed to consider doing a master’s degree. When you get to Mississippi State and you start seeing, the juniors and seniors start looking for work, you really realize this is a field that’s super competitive and you almost have to have a master’s degree anymore to be competitive, even for management positions, habitat management positions. So it was kind of a thing that I knew going into it after working with Jerry that was going to be the path for me. I worked for Delta Waterfowl, I got a couple of summers experience working with them up on the prairies on their, I guess, predator control nesting project, which kind of exposed me to Frank Rohr and Rob Olson, who was the president at the time, and Jim Fisher, who still does a lot of super important policy work for him, he was there with him as well. And so that was really my first exposure to the prairies. And then I started looking for grad work. Brian Davis had kind of come on at Mississippi State and he was doing some digging for me. He was kind of a co-advisor with Rick of mine and we looked around and I applied for a couple and eventually this project with Dr. Matt Gray at University of Tennessee came up studying black ducks in west Tennessee. And I thought, west Tennessee, that’s close to home, I was married by this point, my wife and I grew up together, it was close to her family. So even during field work I could travel a couple hours south and see family to get a little bit of break. And I was super familiar with the Tennessee river, obviously growing up in that north Mississippi area, so it’s something that I felt was kind of a message from God that I should probably pursue this.

Ramsey Russell: What did you study about black ducks?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, so we looked at food availability. I had a lab partner, he kind of did all the other duck species and I did more specifically black duck stuff. We looked at behaviors, we looked at habitat use among 7 different wetland types over there. We looked at activity budgets, so how long in each activity black ducks and other ducks spend over time and how that relates to the decline in food over the winter. So as they feed these moist soil units out or these cornfields out, how they move around and how they change their behaviors over winter. So it was a pretty intense project. We covered a lot of ground over the 2 winters that we worked there. And we got a lot out of it. There was a lot that came out of it. We published, I think, 3 or 4 papers out of it, so it was a good experience. And I left there directly and came up here and started working at Forbes.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. You touched on it previously, but for folks who aren’t familiar, give us the backstory. How did Forbes Biological Station come to be and what makes it such a cornerstone of North American waterfowl research?

Josh Osborn: Sure. So Forbes has been around for a little over, I think 132 years now. And the way it started was Stephen Forbes, who was the founder of the Illinois Natural History Survey and one of the fathers of modern ecology, really. He spent all this time working on the Illinois River specifically. So his job was to catalog the fish, the microinverts, aquatic vegetation, all this stuff up and down the Illinois River. And we have a really cool data set of all the populations of all these different critters along the Illinois River since the late 1800s and Stephen Forbes did that. So one of his main camping sites was on the Illinois River right near Havana on Quiver Lake, he set up shop there. Once they kind of established themselves in the area, they built boats. And so they would live and work off of these boats, kind of mobile research laboratories. And then moving on past the fish squeezers of the time, Art Hawkins and Frank Belrose were tasked with starting the waterfowl program in the 30s. So I think Art was hired somewhere in 1936, maybe a little bit before that. And Frank came along and around 1937, 1938, somewhere in there. And after a few years, they were kind of doing the same thing, except they were living out of their cars, they were renting houses, renting hotels in town and that was the depression era, that was post world war or that was the depression area, the post black market or post market area. And so there’s a big push then to hire federal workers, kind of the opposite situation we’re in now. But we’re hiring all these federal workers to do all these conservation projects and to build all and construct all these places and so that’s how our station was built. Our station was built in part with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the late 30s, early 40s. And so they started some of the earlier banding studies. 1939 they hired Frosty Anderson and he started a banding study that went until the early 50s, I think 1952 or 1953 and he banded about 75,000 mallards during that time, just locally here about 4 different places. So some of the early banding studies where we talk about migration flyways, the administrative flyways that we know exist now, a lot of that work came from here, the migration corridors, we still have the hand drawn maps from Frank Belrose where he was drawing out the migration corridors based on banding data. And so just tons and tons of important stuff that was happening during that time. Frank also knew that it was going to be important, just like Stephen Forbes did with fish and aquatic veg and mussels and all these other critters, Frank knew that it was important to figure out when waterfowl were getting here and start kind of recording that time lapse of their migration through Illinois. In 1938, he started traveling around to local backwaters here during the peak of the fall migration and just writing down in a book what he was seeing, how many birds he was seeing on this spot, how many birds he was seeing over on Quiver Lake, all these places that he was looking at. He was monopolizing his time. He was taking him a ton of time to cover a ton of ground and after World War II ended and pilots and fuel and planes were became available, he spent from about 1946 to 1948 finding a pilot that wouldn’t make him sick and wouldn’t kill him and a plane that would actually work. And so that’s where we consider the actual beginning of the data set that we have or that we have and we use right now is 1948. So Frank started flying the survey in 1948. The survey covers currently from the bend in the river just south of Donnelly and Depew on the Illinois all the way down to the confluence of the Illinois and the Mississippi Rivers. So the St. Louis area down there, there’s some super historic clubs there. And then we fly north along the Mississippi River all the way up to Moline and then we deadhead over finish the Illinois River and that’s our day. And so Frank started that back in 1948, it’s the longest running data set of its type and it’s something that we still use to publish papers. It’s like still informing research and management to this day, which is something that we’re incredibly proud of. I could talk all day about the survey because it’s just such a cool –

Ramsey Russell: We’re going to talk a little bit about that survey. Firstly, did you ever have a chance to meet Mr. Frank Belrose?

Josh Osborn: I did not. So Frank was passed on before I ever got here.

“To this day I still regard his book Ducks, Geese and Swans is one of the absolute bibles of waterfowl. And I still refer – he’s got some charts in there, but one table in mind that measures the bill length and width and whatnot, some of the characteristics of Canada geese, that’s my go to reference.”

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, he did. He actually came to Mississippi State University, if there was a reason, I don’t know why. But Rick Kaminski brought him to class one time and we got to – I mean for my generation it was the closest thing to meeting a pioneer like Aldo Leopold. To this day I still regard his book Ducks, Geese and Swans is one of the absolute bibles of waterfowl. And I still refer – he’s got some charts in there, but one table in mind that measures the bill length and width and whatnot, some of the characteristics of Canada geese, that’s my go to reference. If I’m hunting where there’s a bunch of subs and I don’t recognize a man, I got to pull out the calipers or, and still I think a lot of the migratory corridors that he charted are, it was groundbreaking at the time and it still is.

Josh Osborn: Yeah. And so Frank, he’s part of the reason we still have the wood duck today. So Frank started the wood duck project –

Ramsey Russell: Talk about that just a little bit.

Josh Osborn: Started here, I don’t think his design was the first. I think a local friend of his had created this box that he was hoping to use for wood duck or for wood duck box. And I think Frank said, he said, we’ve been talking about this, I think that’s a phenomenal idea and Frank just expanded on it. And so Frank put out, gosh, I don’t know how many of those things over the years, but for sure thousands. And he started monitoring these boxes, that was one of his first projects here was putting these things out on the backwaters of the Mississippi and the Illinois Rivers and monitoring hatches and broods and how they were surviving. And so Frank’s one of the reasons we have wood ducks to shoot at these days.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder what his backstory was as a young man, how he got into the field. Have you ever heard?

Josh Osborn: Frank wasn’t a hunter. He wasn’t a hunter growing up, and he never really became one to my knowledge. Frank was a naturalist at heart, he loved everything that nature provided. And I read in a book that we have here that he was going to get a merit badge for something and he had to learn 40 different species of birds. And he told his dad that and he said, I just don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to learn 40. The guy who is one of the major pioneers in the waterfowl community at that young age had no real idea how he was going to learn 40 song birds.

Ramsey Russell: Ain’t where you start, it’s where you finish.

Josh Osborn: That’s right. And so that’s kind of how Frank got his start. He wasn’t from this area specifically here in Havana, he was actually from a little bit south of here, but this is where he set up shop. And when they built the station, they were actually going to build the station down near Grafton, which is a little bit closer to the St. Louis area. And Art Hawkins kind of talked him out of it and said, we’re going to be spending more time up here monitoring these backwater lakes and monitoring the duck migration and this is where all the work is basically, is what Art told him. And so they kind of agreed that this is a good place to set up shot. Frank was also pretty – Go ahead.

Ramsey Russell: No, you go ahead.

Josh Osborn: So Frank was also pretty instrumental and a lot of people don’t know this. But Frank was also pretty instrumental in the first lead shot studies. And not just Frank, but the staff, all of the staff here was seeing die offs and in the spring, mallards and all these other species of waterfowl.

“About what era would that have been? If you put it on timeline, ballpark guess 70s, 80s?”

Ramsey Russell: About what era would that have been? If you put it on timeline, ballpark guess 70s, 80s?

Josh Osborn: No, that would have been 40s.

Ramsey Russell: 40s.

Josh Osborn: 40s and 50s. I want to say the first publication was in 1957. The first real big publication was in 1957 and that was about a 10 or 12 year study.

Ramsey Russell: And it took almost half a century for them to legislate lead shot.

Josh Osborn: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Out of waterfowling.

Josh Osborn: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Josh Osborn: So they were collecting hunter harvested birds, sure. And they were collecting all these birds that they found dead. But we also had a pretty large captive facility at that point. So they were taking these captive mallards and dosing them with lead shot and seeing what the lethal dose was, seeing how birds responded, seeing how birds that didn’t die responded and what their body condition was afterwards. So that, I want to say it was 1957, that first big lead shot publication came out and I think that was Jim Jordan, so Frank worked pretty closely with Jim Jordan and believe it or not, Winchester Olin was a big part of that work back in those days too. This brings up a question, especially when you were talking about the location of Forbes Biological Station. What makes Illinois and especially the Illinois River Valley such a rich area for studying migratory birds and to that point, diver ducks?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, so it’s the backwaters. We don’t quite have them like we used to. We’ve damaged the Illinois River pretty bad. In fact, Frank and Steve Rivera put together some publications that kind of showed the decline of the Illinois River backwater lakes, a publication called the Fate of the Lakes. But this area was super rich in aquatic vegetation, like coontail, pickerel weed just super productive. And for that matter, so was the Mississippi River, the central Mississippi River in Illinois. So those areas over on pool 19, that just looks like a big lake now, those areas used to look like, some of the more northern areas of the Mississippi River kind of choked out a lot of aquatic vegetation and that’s what those birds were after. And so back in those days there was a little bit less ag on the ground too. And as we move through middle of that century, even when ag became pretty dominant on the landscape, it wasn’t efficient ag, it was pretty inefficient. And so even when we started impacting the river and there wasn’t as much food in the river, it was a ton of waste grain out there. In fact, one of the early kind of notebooks that we have around here, Frank did this waste grain study. So they went around and looked at just how much waste grain was left and how much birds were using it. And believe it or not, people were already asking the sanctuary food question back in those days. So we have all these refuges, why do we plant food on these refuges? And in those days Frank agreed with them. We don’t need food on refuges because there’s all this waste grain out there that’s readily available and we don’t necessarily have that anymore. So I like to think that he probably would have changed his mind on that question. But to get back to your original question, it was a super productive area, it’s kind of a pinch point for the Mississippi Flyway for waterfowl at least especially down at the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi River, that’s one big massive bottom down there that when the rivers got out, there was tons and tons of habitat. And that’s something we don’t have anymore.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that confluence around St. Louis is amazing. You’ve got those 3 rivers, the Missouri River, the Illinois River, all converting into Mississippi River and it is just a busiest 4 way stop on the continent for waterfowl migration. It’s unbelievable. I’m going to take an aside, please don’t say any locations. But are you a part of the annual diver duck banding program over there in Illinois? You all just wrapped up, how’d that turn out?

Josh Osborn: We ran out of bands.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good, isn’t it?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, it was good. So we’ve been banding divers targeting bluebills, specifically on the Illinois River since 2012. And so Dr. Al Afton started a banding program over in the early 2000s on the Mississippi River north of Keokuk there. And when Al retired, we kind of took that over a professor over at Western, kind of handled it for the first few years we had it on our permit, but we were collaborating with him to keep that going. And then he later moved on to DNR and so we kind of took it over completely. So, it’s pretty good. We caught a lot of redheads this year on the Illinois at least, which was different for us.

Ramsey Russell: You mean a lot of redheads relative to normal?

Josh Osborn: Yeah. So normally we’ll catch a handful, 10, 20 a year, 30 a year, but the first day we trapped over here on the Illinois, we caught 112, 100 and some redheads. And we couldn’t keep them out of the trap for the first week. It was pretty impressive. But yeah, we’ve been doing that for a while, it’s something that we’re trying to keep doing as best we can. That thing operates on a shoestring budget like most of those small projects do, but it’s really the only banding data that we have for bluebills. Because of where they breed, there’s not really a good way to get post breeding season banding. And so we’re kind of –

Ramsey Russell: You all also catch a lot of canvasbacks over in there, don’t you?

Josh Osborn: We do. We sure do. So not quite as many this year, but we caught some. And right now we’re working with Delta Waterfowl, Chris Nikolai’s doing a geolocator study on those canvasbacks to try to figure out where they’re going and a bunch of different things with a hen. So, Chris and a couple of his students were over this year putting geolocators on the canvasbacks over there.

Ramsey Russell: My buddies Doc Leonard and Pat Gregor have invited me, they participate regularly.

Josh Osborn: Oh yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And matter of fact, I had volunteered a couple of days this year and just couldn’t swing it, just couldn’t make it work. Why the interest in bluebills specifically, but also the divers? What’s the importance of this research you all are doing up here?

“Yeah. So bluebills specifically, they’re just a species that’s not doing so good. They haven’t been doing good for the past, I would say, 20 years.”

Josh Osborn: Yeah. So bluebills specifically, they’re just a species that’s not doing so good. They haven’t been doing good for the past, I would say, 20 years. They’re well below their targeted goal that Fish & Wildlife Service has for them. And so it’s a species that isn’t doing very well, used to be a staple in the hunter bags throughout Illinois and really throughout the northern Mississippi Flyway. So it’s a species that’s not doing pretty good and when a species isn’t doing good, we try to figure out why. We started a project in 2013, it was a large scale project, but we went from southern Illinois all the way up into Wisconsin in the spring, collecting these divers and looking at parasite communities in their lower intestines, looking at diets, looking at a thing called blood metabolites. So there’s 2 markers in their blood that’ll tell you whether or not they’re putting on fats or whether or not they’re kind of metabolizing fats. And so we’re trying to figure out what kind of body condition they were in and whether or not they had enough food. So if they have enough food here, they ought to be putting on fats. And that should not be the limiting factor for them breeding. And so that ultimately led to a project where we knew what that parasite community was, we know that there’s a couple of intestinal parasites of interest that are causing die offs up on the upper Mississippi River. So these birds will get up there and they’ll get infected with these intestinal parasites and it’ll kill them by the hundreds and sometimes thousands up there. And so that was a big piece of that puzzle. And we had a graduate student at that time that looked at kind of the prevalence of that. So how many of these birds actually are impacted with these intestinal parasites that are causing die offs. And he mapped out the parasite community on top of that. So we added another graduate student right after that project came to a completion. And she looked at kind of similar to the lead shot studies that I was talking about earlier. She was holding these scaup captive and dosing them with a known amount of these parasites and trying to determine at what level these birds would die. And then for the birds that did actually survive, what was their body condition like? So even if these birds make it through the upper pools, get infected with these intestinal parasites and live, what are the chances that they are in good enough body condition to successfully breed once they make it to the breeding grounds? And so that was a super interesting study that turned out that these, even the birds that survived were in pretty poor body condition. Right now, we have a graduate student that’s on to the next piece of that puzzle. So Scott Herman is looking at, we’re implanting migrating lesser scaup with these transmitters, following them to the breeding grounds and trying to see of the ones that stop over on the upper Mississippi River in those parasite infected pools, how many of those move on and successfully attempt to nest.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, you talk about those implants, Josh, it’s got to be related. Although, I thought it was a lady researcher, of course it could be one of dozens that are studying those implants. I was in Panola research and they had a pool of bluebills and they were just doing the surgical implants. And when we think of these geolocators, we think of being a track movement. Okay, they went from here to here and over here and over there. The stuff they were telling me about this new implant they’re putting in is not only will they be able to model where the duck is flying and when, when he’s sitting, when he’s feeding, how much time, how much energy he’s spending preening himself, I mean it like takes it to 4D level of what this scaup, how he’s living his life? Is that related research to what you’re talking about?

Josh Osborn: So you probably ran into Cheyenne Beach down there.

Ramsey Russell: I believe that was her. Yeah.

Josh Osborn: Cheyenne was piloting this project. Cheyenne did a ton of good work down there. So we wanted to know if we implanted these birds with these transmitters, were they going to try to nest? Because if we put all these transmitters in these wild birds and they go up there and none of them nest, we really don’t have any kind of answer. And so she spent some time at Panola down there looking at those captive birds and I think Dr. Scott Ford may have been the vet that was down there with her. And they implanted these transmitters and she did a whole bunch of kind of observations, watching them to see what they do and trying to match that up with the internals of the GPS on the transmitter. But that was the pile –

Ramsey Russell: What did she find out? Will they nest?

Josh Osborn: They will. Yeah. So that kind of confirmed for us that they will successfully nest.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, it’s kind of an invasive procedure as compared to putting on with a backpack. But then again, they don’t have the weight and an ounce doesn’t seem like much, but it can be when you’re a duck trying to conserve energy and yet fly and do all this stuff, it seems to me to be a superior, at least if I’m a duck, I’d maybe opt for that.

Josh Osborn: Yeah. So there’s a lot of truth in that. So Doug Osborne and Ryan Askren actually just finished up a study looking at comparisons between backpacks and surgical implants in mallards because they’re putting on tons of transmitters over there in Arkansas. I don’t think they’ve put those results out yet, but it was a super cool study that’s going to answer a bunch of those questions. But from a 10,000ft viewpoint of it, the implants look super invasive. You’re putting these birds under, like they’re going under anesthesia and you’re opening them up and sowing this big hunk in their abdomen and then closing them up and just waking them up. But for diving ducks, that’s what you have to do. Diving ducks their physiology, their morphology, they don’t handle backpacks, it kills them, it just outright kills them and there are tons of studies that show that. And so it’s kind of a necessity with diving ducks, you just have to have to implant transmitters with diving ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Super interesting. What do you all hope to find out with a lot of this banding study going on in central Illinois? Because banding has evolved beyond Frank Bellrose’s day of needing to know where birds originate and where they finish, that’s a misconception. What all benefit can you get from banding the divers today?

Josh Osborn: In some ways it has, but in some ways it hasn’t. So we’re still asking a ton of those same questions, as we get more extreme weather events, as we get warmer winters, as we get warmer summers, are these birds shifting their breeding grounds? so there’s a ton of work going on with stable isotopes to try to look at our breeding grounds shifting for different species of birds. And so we’re still asking some of those same questions and with scaup, there’s just not good answers on demographics of these birds. So are they surviving at a higher rate as adults than they are juveniles? That’s what most of the research would tell you from other species and from back in the day. But a lot of those answers aren’t necessarily there for scaup and because of the way the hunting season works and the breeding season and those questions. And I think you’ve had Todd Arnold on here before, Todd’s the king of this information. But informing those models is a lot easier when you have pre-hunting season, post-breeding season data, it becomes a lot more hairy when you have banding data in the spring. And so we’re just trying to continue to add to the data set in hopes that someday we’ll be able to get those answers out of this very specific data set.

Ramsey Russell: Right. While we’re still talking about bluebills, what do you know about what bluebills feed on further north where, bluebills mean one thing to an upper flyway hunter versus a southern flyway hunter, it’s a total different critter. Down south, it’s an odd duck, it’s a scrap duck. It’s not a targeted species, darn sure, it ain’t a greenhead versus up north pole. Let me tell you what, I fell off into a team this year and have been around these guys up north that commit a lot of decoys and a lot of time and a lot of talent to targeting these divers. Long Point, Ontario down the river, you know what I’m saying? Hunting with Doc Leonard and Pat Gregory that put out 350 hand carved decoys, and I mean it’s the art and the religion of diver duck hunting.

Josh Osborn: It’s a real tradition.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a big tradition. But some of the birds I put my hands on further north this fall, those little bluebills were as fat and succulent and delicious as any duck I’ve ever seen. Of course they were feeding in wild rice and celery still, you know what I’m saying? Versus you get down, way down south, south of the border south, I’ve shot blue bills that were feeding and you can feel it in their gullets, feeding on shrimp food. And even the locals don’t really want to eat those birds. But let’s just say in normal terms, is their diet transitioning as they move down? That may make their fat content or you are what you eat, their palatability different? For example, I’m going to throw this at you, snow geese. There is not a bird in prairie Canada in the spring or the fall that I would rather eat than a snow goose, they are loaded with fat, they pop open when they hit the ground, they’re so fat that their meat is very light pink, because they’ve got all that fat in there versus the birds in late spring down the deep south that have very dark meat, very low fat residue, they’ve transitioned their diet more to high protein than carbo loading. And I still eat them and do like to eat them, I’ll say, but not as much I like to eat them birds up north that are gorging on carbohydrates. Are scaups diet similar throughout north to south transgressions?

Josh Osborn: Yeah. So I think you could make that, that’s a pretty painting like you said earlier about something else, painting with a broad brush here. But I think it’s safe to do so in this case because the needs of birds are very similar throughout their life cycle all right? They’re feeding up during migration, eating those high energy foods all the way down. And in some cases some birds are more omnivores than other birds or some species are more omnivores than other species are. But for the most part, birds are seeking out those high energy foods as they migrate down. And even when they get further down south in their wintering areas, they’re just kind of maintaining, they’re feeding up and then maintaining through the winter because there’s a cost benefit analysis that they have to do there. Okay, I don’t want to get too fat because I still got to get away from predators, but I got to make it through this winter. So I’m going to feed up to this level and then just kind of coast through the winter. So, I think you could say that with scaup for sure, I know in the spring, so as part of that initial diet or as part of that initial bluebill study from I’d say 2013 to 2015 or 2016, their diet changed from south to north. So the backwards of that was true. So birds were more, as we started further south, birds were more omnivorous. And as they got further and further north in the spring wore on, then they needed those foods that were going to help them produce eggs that were going to help them produce ducklings, basically. And so that’s kind of the opposite of that. And I think it changes from species to species obviously, but I think you could paint with a pretty broad brush and say that about most waterfowl species. There are specialists, but gadwall are going to eat a little bit of everything, but boy, they sure like SAV. And you could say that about, there are always going to be those exceptions out there.

Ramsey Russell: Where are most of the Mississippi Flyway bluebills that you all are catching in the spring? Where are they originating or where had they overwintered? Out on the Gulf?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, we get a lot of Gulf reports. So we get some from South America, we get some from Mexico down there. We get a ton of harvest reports from Louisiana and Texas. And I think it kind of stretches out. So I think some of the birds still winter on Kentucky Lake and Barkley Lake there and Tennessee and Kentucky. And I think that’s kind of speaking broadly here because we still hang on to some through the winter here when it’s not cold. But I would say from their south with the most of them kind of along the Gulf coast down there. They shoot a lot of them in Texas and Louisiana.

Ramsey Russell: They do. And I’m leading up to another question. Last year when you all were banding, I was down south of the border of Mexico and there were a couple of mornings we were shooting bluebills. It was early to mid-March and I’m seeing the photos coming from you all’s banding effort, Pat, Doc, other folks smiling ear to ear, getting to lay their hands on wildlife and put those bands on. And at the same time way down south of the border in the different flyway now these birds are originating, when we shoot bands from over in that part of the world, they’re coming out of Montana, so I understand it’s different populations, but it just blew my mind that every bird we were putting our hands on, in fact Frank Rohr and I took a knee and looked at them all one day, they were all hatch year birds. And meanwhile thousands of miles north, the breeding population is coming through, they’re hot to try to get up north and make babies. And so I’m just wondering, had you all gone all the way through March and not run out of bands? Are you seeing a progressive trend towards hatch year birds? Is it starting off with the adult breeders and then starting to become more and more concentrate of – and is that the same as in the fall? Is it the same gap between breeders and juvenile birds as it is in the spring?

Josh Osborn: Yeah. So ideally in the fall it works that way. I can say, from banding birds here for 12 years or however long I’ve been here, that’s 100% the case. So we’ll get those adult birds, especially the adult males first. Our sex ratio was awful here in early spring. So when they first start showing up, we might catch 10 to 15 males for every female that we catch, sometimes even worse than that. And so we’ll see the adult males show up and then the juvenile or the adult females will kind of follow them a little bit. And then the hatch year or, I guess at that point they’re after hatch year. But the second year birds will show up and we’ll get a good run on second year pretty much until that’s all we’re catching anymore is those last year’s hatch birds.

Ramsey Russell: Right. When you’re catching 15 to 1 breeding age males, I mean they might be breeding age, but apparently they’re not breeding, are they?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, I mean, they might be, that’s a question we hope to answer with these transmitters that we’re putting in these hens is, just how successful the hens, how many of the hens that we’ve got transmitters in are actually successfully nesting. So if there’s 15 of them to every female, probably not a lot of them. What do they call with the term for it, where multiple males can breed one female?

Ramsey Russell: Polyamorous.

Josh Osborn: So that occurs for sure. So I guess what I didn’t do a good job is finishing that statement. That sex ratio gets better as the migration wears on. So as we move through the spring migration, we’re catching more and more birds. We do see a closer ratio. I don’t think it’s still close to one to one, but it’s a lot better.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of social structure going on that we still don’t have our hands on, isn’t it?

Josh Osborn: That’s right. And some of it could be body condition stuff too. It’s the males that are going up and fighting for breeding grounds maybe, there’s a lot of stuff going on during the spring.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And it makes me wonder, like I began to wonder last year while you all were catching breeding age birds and we were still down catching the birds that had hatched that spring, second year birds now that did it after Christmas, but that aren’t breeding, that’s a lot to ask for a duck to fly all the way back up to Canada, all the way back down to the wintering ground to find a girlfriend, then go all the way back up north and make a baby. Man, that’s a lot to ask of a duck.

Josh Osborn: That’s a long way to go.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a long way to go.

Josh Osborn: Long way to go. And they’re being shot at, they’re being chased by every other critter that wants to eat them. So they got a lot going on. So one of the bigger things that after I got to work for Delta Waterfowl in prairies up there that I told anybody that would listen that was in this field that wanted to work with waterfowl, you need to go up and see the prairies. If you’ve never seen it, you can look at the nest success numbers. You can have anybody with, that’s been up there explain it to you. But until you see it, you don’t really get a good grasp of what’s going on up there and just how hard it is to make a duck. It’s a lot of effort.

Ramsey Russell: Go see it in a dry year like the increasingly the past 4 years have been and see those cattails that were dry this year, little depressions being disks over or levelled and it really hits home on what we’re losing in the dry years, it’s scary.

Josh Osborn: Habitat loss goes from being a catchy phrase to being something that’s real and something that you can see it.

Ramsey Russell: You can get out of the truck and walk across thinking, man, this won’t ever grow another duck again. Last question about scaup, well, I’ll say that, but are you all catching any greater bluebills in that part of the world? And if not, where are the greater scaup? Where would be the southernmost terminus of their core migration?

Josh Osborn: So we’re not. We catch one or two a year. I’m sure there’s some that winter, past us for certain, but we just don’t get them through here in the spring for whatever reason. We kill them here, so on the Illinois riverside of Illinois, we don’t really kill a lot of bluebills in the fall. And when we do, it’s sometimes greaters. I’ve killed more greaters on the Illinois river than I have lessers.

Ramsey Russell: Ecologically, how do bluebills fit in the broader wetland and food web picture and in that region that you all study? And what makes their needs different than dabbling ducks?

Josh Osborn: So their diet and we talked about that a little bit more or a little bit earlier. So they eat a lot of different things than mallards do. Mallard can live on the moon if you ever wanted to. Yeah, we could send a mallard up there and he’d make it. Scaup are smaller bodied waterfowl, they have different diet needs just because of the way that they evolved over time. In the springtime especially they love those little fairy shrimp, those amphipods, they love fingernail clams, they love the corona meds, the little blood worms. And that’s something that historically the Illinois river was rich in and even the Mississippi river because of the impacts of us as humans on both river systems. That’s something we don’t necessarily have a whole lot of anymore.

Ramsey Russell: How deep will they dive to feed?

Josh Osborn: I mean, they’ll dive pretty deep. So unfortunately, the Illinois here is all sediment in, so there’s not a ton of deep areas here. But they’re not a sea duck, they’re not going to get way down there to 90ft, 100ft or whatever, that long tail that was trapped in fisherman nets was 120 something feet down like that. Yeah, I don’t think they’re going down that far, but when we catch them in the spring, more often than not about half of our traps become too deep for us to wade to about by the end of the spring.

Ramsey Russell: 6ft, 10ft about their wheelhouse.

Josh Osborn: Yeah. They’ve got no problem going down that deep. That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the most recent or surprising research around scaup that we duck hunters or land management should know about?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, so I think, that whole kind of path that I laid out before about where we specifically are as our lab, where we are in kind of figuring out some of these problems with scaup are, there’s a lot of belly aching and I can raise my hand because I’m one of them. There’s a lot of belly aching about some of the limits, regulations that we come up with for these species, the one for scaup is super, I guess it’s just not straightforward for a lot of people, it’s a lot to remember. One of my favorite, and I’ve said this before, I think I was telling Mike Brazier on the DU podcast, but one of my favorite findings from that, this whole kind of 10 or so year study that we’ve had going on over here is that in the springtime what we were finding was, and not just scaup, but ducks in general were using all these hunted areas more than they were refuges. And so after the first year I was real concerned that we had kind of flip flop some of the names on these places in the data because I just couldn’t figure out why all the bluebills in the hunted areas were full of food and all the bluebills that weren’t in the haunted areas didn’t really have much in them.

Ramsey Russell: Interesting.

Josh Osborn: And so what we figured out is, these birds sit on the refuges all winter and they feed and they feed these refuges out. Well, we as hunters during the fall and the winter, we’re hunting, we do what we do and we’re keeping these birds out of these super well managed places that we spend a lot of time, money and energy managing to try to draw them to. And so what that turns into is, good hunting for us in the fall, but really good spring habitat for these birds as they’re passing back through. So I feel like that’s super, especially at southern latitudes because there’s this want to as soon as hunting season is over, pull your boards and your control structure and drain this place and get it ready for corn or get it ready for whatever the next go round. Well, there’s still a lot of birds hanging around even in Mississippi and Tennessee in February and March, so those birds got to eat something and you’re kind of pulling the plug on the best habitat that’s available to them, certainly the best food that’s available to them. And so that was pretty eye opening to me was that these hunted areas provided the best habitat. So it’s like we’re doing a really good job of providing habitat, but we just have to provide the habitat like, we just have to keep the water on it while the birds are still here in the spring.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, you set the stage to have the birds come back the following year if you’ll leave that water up and give them some good feeding habitat. I don’t know how a bird with a lentil sized brain can imprint remember, but he does. They know where the gravy trail is.

Josh Osborn: I mean it’s just like site fidelity for breeding. These birds know where they’re successful. They’re going to go back to where they were successful. And so there’s a lot of that that happens in breeding, there’s a lot of that that happens when they’re finding their way on the wintering grounds. Not to anthropomorphize them, but they’re smarter than we give them credit for, a lot of time.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of those birds are probably going during the hunting season to the no hunt zones, to the sanctuary areas to evade hunting pressure, but they’re starving. And the minute the guns come off a landscape here, they go back into the private lands to avail themselves of those calories. Have you got any thoughts on how we can balance hunting pressure with providing habitat during the hunting season?

Josh Osborn: No. If I had the answer to that question, I’d be in good shape. I know, Brad Cohen’s doing some phenomenal work down in west Tennessee. Doug Osborne is doing some of that work as well. Yeah, so that’s the question of our time right now is how to offer hunter access and opportunity, but also, simultaneously offer habitat for the birds, disturbance free habitat for the birds. And so that’s a huge question. That’s something we’re trying to wrap our arms around here also. So we hired Abby Blake Bradshaw as a postdoc here. She worked with Dr. Cohen down there on her, her PhD. Abby’s a brilliant scientist and she and her partner Theron Bradshaw are kind of spearheading that project for us here. We just wrapped up our last field season putting transmitters on mallards and green wing teal and putting these recording units out to try to record some level of hunting intensity and to see if we could kind of mimic their study a little bit, but do it at a mid-latitude state where there are other questions at play too. So if these birds, are they responding the same in the Midwest as they do down south? Are they making migratory decisions based on the number of times that they’ve or the hunting intensity around them? Do they get shot at 3 times and just decide, I’ve had enough of this, I’m going down south, they’re not open yet, that kind of deal. So that’s the question of our time. It went from this, should we provide food on sanctuary to how do we move sanctuary around, which I know Corey is working on right now. How do we move sanctuary around to open up movement of birds and provide more access for hunters to birds? I don’t know the answer to that question, I wish I did.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard about some of those studies. Like maybe you could have the same amount of acreage of sanctuary, I’m just going to pick out a number 1000, but instead of a unit of 1000, maybe you could have 10 units of 100 more evenly dispersed throughout the habitat, throughout the landscape.

Josh Osborn: So they were a little bit behind the ball, honestly from North America perspective, because some of that work was done across the pond in the early 2000s. I want to say it was Denmark, I forget exactly where it was, but they kind of did that. So they had a couple of places that had these really big refuge refuges surrounded by hunting sites. And then they had this really big area that had refuges and hunting sites kind of interspersed throughout, and then they compared the two. And so that I feel like that’s a piece of that puzzle. I know Nick Masto and Abby and Dr. Cohen had some really good results from their stuff, looking at when you push these birds, what do they do? What’s the food like? They had a ton of publications out of that super informative stuff. And Corey’s project, which is, how to provide these sanctuaries in between sanctuaries to see if you can get the birds to move around. And I think that’s a logical next step and I’m pretty excited to see what Corey finds down there. I think it’s going to be pretty cool stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Me too. Good stuff.

Josh Osborn: Yeah. I mean that’s the question of our time. From my perspective, I try to always go back to the habitat side of things. Like if we don’t have habitat on the breeding grounds and we’re not producing ducks then a lot of that is kind of moot. We’re in a situation right now where 10 years ago we had, I don’t know, 40% more mallards than we have right now on the breeding ground. So there’s a lot of things to figure out. Job security for researchers.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. I want to fly back over to a topic we touched on earlier about the aerial waterfowl surveys in Illinois. And it just occurred to me, you’re kind of the new Frank Bellrose. You’re in his seat now on the plane.

Josh Osborn: I’m definitely not that. But I do sit in the plane.

Ramsey Russell: Well, walk us through what goes on or what goes into an aerial waterfowl survey in Illinois. And what’s it like being up there? What’s it like counting duck from the air?

Josh Osborn: It’s different. So there’s a couple of different styles. We do a cruise style survey which is more of an inventory. There are transects, Mississippi does transects, Louisiana does transects. But for our landscape because everything is so ag dominated, the wetlands are super concentrated and so we can fly around and count everything within these refuges and get a good estimate of what’s going on. And so my numbers aren’t perfect, our numbers have never been perfect, it’s a trend analysis, but it’s a pretty darn good trend analysis of what’s coming through when the peaks are and when we have the most ducks at one time and kind of when the rise and fall of those trends happen each year. So this is a data set that’s supported by the Illinois DNR. And a big reason that they support it is because it helps inform their hunting seasons. So we fly 214 miles of the Illinois river and 212 of the Mississippi river as it occurs in Illinois and we do it all in one day. So it makes for a pretty long day. We take off from Pekin, Mike Cruz is our pilot, he’s been flying the survey for us for about 17 years now. And we’ll just fly the perimeter of a refuge. We’ll fly at 200ft thereabouts, sometimes lower, sometimes higher, at about 150 to 160 miles an hour. We’ll fly the perimeter of a refuge and try to get a good estimate of everything that’s there. And then we’ll fly through the center. Usually I can get a pretty good estimate just off of that. The refuges are small enough here where we don’t have to kind of fly around a lot, that’s not the case down at the confluence of the rivers down there, we have to do some bebopping around a good bit. But in peak migration, we have to concentrate a little bit more on bigger flocks of birds because there might be a 120,000 birds sitting at the south end of Chautauqua. So it matters a lot more to go count that very carefully rather than cover the whole area of Chautauqua and count the rest of the 2,000 ducks that are there. So there’s some push and shove that comes with it and some figuring some things out. Things change a lot when we start putting on ice. Birds get super concentrated. But for the most part, we’re just trying to get a good solid estimate of species numbers and what’s here at any given time.

Ramsey Russell: I see. And how specifically is the aerial survey data, especially the huge long term database you all have used in real world management decisions, for both hunting seasons and for broader conservation planning?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, so I mentioned the DNR thing, that’s how the hunting seasons are set here. Our data has been used on a ton of different projects. There’s a big push to try to use the citizen science e-bird database to create the migration curves and to try to offset some of the loss in conservation funding when it comes to planning and setting federal frameworks and those types of things, so we’ve used the data for that. Restoration and monitoring restorations over time is a big piece of that puzzle. So here locally, we’ve had a Nature Conservancy property that kind of changed the distribution of the birds in our area. And so it’s been really cool to see the success of that restoration project from waterfowl perspective. I’m constantly getting text and phone calls and emails from managers on the ground, hey, we burned over here last year, keep an eye on this spot and let me know how it looks. Hey, can you go over here and take a picture? We want to know how this looks. So it’s a data set that has a ton of uses from the guy managing a state waterfowl area all the way up to folks trying to conduct research to better the planning and the funding of these conservation restoration projects. It’s a pretty big task to maintain it, but it’s a super important data set. It’s something that I like to play around with.

Ramsey Russell: I know that a lot of aerial surveys are more about trend than actual numbers, for a lot of different reasons. But have you seen any major shifts? Have you seen trends in duck number or species compositions? Have you seen anything changing in the last couple of years in either numbers or species?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, you can look. So it’s pretty interesting with the survey data, because we have it separated by year on multiple accounts. So we have all of the raw data at all of the individual sites and then we’ll have every year’s peak. So this was the mallard peak this year, and this is the date it was on. And so you can look at peaks and how they shift over time. And they’re shifting a little bit, but not a ton. Especially mallards are shifting a little bit to the right. Probably one of the more interesting things, at least in our area is in the – we never used to count speckle bellies here, we never used to count snow geese here. And especially specks just in the last, I would say 15 years that we’ve started to count and become a huge part of the survey, it’s gotten crazy specks and snow geese. So you can see those distribution changes, those are happening real time with specks and snows, and I think the folks in South Texas will tell you that for sure for snow geese. But it’s been interesting to see that change over time. And you can see in it for us, we’re so backwater driven here on the Illinois, you can see the good river years and the bad river year. So some years, we’re flooded out, there’s no food, you can look at the species composition and say, well, we didn’t hang on to green wings at all, we didn’t really hold a ton of mallards. But in the good years when the river cooperates, all these backwaters can draw down and put on good moist soil, we have some pretty cool duck numbers around here.

Ramsey Russell: Good stuff. You’re a biologist, Josh, but you also hunt. How do those two roles influence or inform each other? Has science changed how you hunt?

Josh Osborn: No, not really. That’s a good question. I don’t think it changes how I hunt, so it changes the way I look at hunting places. It changes the way that I look at how places are managed because I’m much more of a, I like research with real management implications. We can say if we do this over here, it’s going to impact duck numbers in this local area stuff like that.

Ramsey Russell: Applied research.

Josh Osborn: Yeah, right. That’s kind of my jam, I guess. So it makes me look at places that are managed differently and try to figure out what’s going on. Is it a river thing? Only Illinois especially, we’re very river driven. Sometimes you just can’t keep the river out and that happens in a lot of years here. But sometimes you can and sometimes there’s a need for setting back plant succession or doing any number of things to kind of help the habitat out. So I think it’s changed that’s what this job has changed the most for me is not necessarily how I hunt, but how I look at hunting areas.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Amen. Last question is, when you think about the next 10 or 20 years of waterfowl hunting and Management, what gives you the most hope and what are your greatest concerns?

Josh Osborn: Yeah, I think I’ll start with my concerns and try to end on a positive note.

Ramsey Russell: Good.

Josh Osborn: We’re trending away from, and there’s certainly pros to this, but we’re trending away from hook and bullet programs. And there’s not as many people coming into this field with real practical management on the ground management experience anymore. And that’s a good thing because we’re getting more people involved that weren’t necessarily involved in the first place. But it’s a bad thing that, because I feel like we’re losing some of these people that have this intimate relationship with land already, they know how to be good stewards of the land and they bring a certain amount of practical knowledge to the job. So I fear that we’re getting away from that and getting more kind of towards the folks that love it but don’t necessarily have the practical knowledge that sometimes required to make habitat management decisions. They can certainly learn that. But if we get to a point where there’s not a lot of people that have that experience, then there’s nobody there to teach this newer generation of people that are coming at it from a different angle.

Ramsey Russell: The thing I’ve always most appreciated about a hook and bullet background is, even beyond the applied practicality of how to trap ducks or how to do this or how to do that, just an innate understanding through experience is just the fact that there’s so much emotionally committed to the welfare of what they’re actually studying and managing.

Josh Osborn: Right. They’re duckheads. They love what they do because it’s what they do, it’s what they’ve always done. And I think, we’re losing a little bit of that. I definitely see it at the university level, I think it’s happening in other programs as well. And again, it’s a good thing that we’re bringing more diverse ideas to the table, more people that maybe have different backgrounds. But I think if we lose that hook and bullet mentality completely, then there’s going to be some catching up to do and I don’t think we’ll be able to do it. And I think we’ll be able to do this job quite as effective.

Ramsey Russell: What gives you the most hope?

Josh Osborn: So, I guess I’ll speak out of both sides of my mouth here because what gives me the most hope is some of the younger folks that we have coming in that are really passionate about the work, and it’s good. I’m at a point in my career now where I’m seeing students and technicians come in that are kind of going through the same growing pains that I went through, 15 years ago. And to see them kind of come up with their own out of the box ideas and way to do things, it can be refreshing. I get a real kick out of that. I like to see students put together their own projects, I love to see students that are putting together projects with real management implications in mind, not just here’s a question, I want to get a master’s degree, somebody fund this, but here’s a real problem that’s happening, how can we answer this problem and everybody get something out of it? And so I think there’s a lot of hope with the folks that are new to this, I think. And in a lot of ways it’s important to have folks that do come from different backgrounds because if this gets to a point where we’re worried about being legislated out of having hunting seasons altogether, it’s going to be super important to have people from varied backgrounds fighting in our corner. I think that’s going to be an important piece of that puzzle moving forward.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that’s a great ending. But Josh, you know what gives me hope is, a lot of smart and dedicated people like yourself and many others and a lot of places like Ford biological stations and many others that are committed to this. There’s so much in the duck hunting world that I can’t control the condition of the prairies or how much snowfall or how much rainfall, that’s beyond me, I can’t control it, I can pray for it and do, but other than that, I’m powerless. But it does give me a tremendous amount of comfort to know that people like yourself and just hundreds, if not thousands of other people to include the volunteers that show up on some of these banding projects are giving their time and their money and their lives to conserving this resource that we so care about. So thank you very much for that, Josh. Thank you for coming on today and thanks for all that you do to make the world a better place, to make the duck hunting world a better place for sure.

Josh Osborn: I appreciate that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, we’ve been talking to my buddy Josh Osborn up at the Ford Biological Station about bluebills and way beyond that. See you next time.

[End of Audio]

LetsTranscript transcription Services

www.LetsTranscript.com