EP 607. How Ducks Die

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today we are flying headlong into a topic that every duck hunter and conservation think they understand. What actually kills duck. But often wrong, never in doubt, most of us may have it all wrong. Like myself and others, you might assume that hunting is the leading cause of mortality. We’ve been in liberal frameworks for decades. The United States kills 8 million ducks annually, and a lot of us don’t see ducks in our backyard like we did 20 or 30 years ago, right? But the reality is far more complex and frankly, surprising. Today’s guest is Paul Wait, Senior Manager of Communications at Delta Waterfowl, he recently wrote a detailed feature entitled The Ways Ducks Die, unpacking decades of research into predation, disease, habitat loss, and how each factor shapes the future of North American duck hunting. How has predation become the dominant threat? What’s behind the skewed sex ratios? How do diseases like avian cholera, botulism, avian influenza decimate entire flocks? And what can hunters do about it? So whether you’re a lifelong waterfowler or just getting started, good, this conversation may challenge assumptions and hopefully inspire action. Paul Wait, how the heck are you?

Paul Wait: Hey, I’m doing good. Glad to be on with you, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Glad to be on with you. You were writing this article, and we talked about this very topic, we had probably a conversation sitting in my booth at Delta Waterfowl Expo last year to cover a lot of these topics last year and I’m glad to finally have you on. I would assume that hunting is the leading cause of mortality for ducks. I mean, we’re killing 8 million of them, it’s got to be the major way of doing it. And before we get good into this conversation, Paul, introduce yourself to everybody.

I’m a lifelong waterfowl hunter, grew up hunting in Wisconsin, where I’m from, as a young boy with my dad, enjoyed it, and I’ve been hooked ever since

Paul Wait: Yeah. Like you said, I’m Senior Manager of Communications at Delta Waterfowl. I have been at Delta for 14 years in communications, run the magazine for most of that time. I’m a lifelong waterfowl hunter, grew up hunting in Wisconsin, where I’m from, as a young boy with my dad, enjoyed it, and I’ve been hooked ever since. So I love waterfowl and waterfowl management. I studied wildlife management for a couple of years in college before I switched over to be a communications major. And yeah, I’ve been in Media for 30 years, and I really enjoy being part of the conservation community in these kind of conversations about, shedding some light on the truth and the science behind waterfowl management.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Talk about growing up in Wisconsin. Where did you grow up? What was it like growing up? What did a young Paul Wait, do as a little boy? And I like this question because so many people I have on this podcast have a background in wildlife management and as a duck hunter. And I just see a lot of common threads to how you grew up in Wisconsin, how I grew up Mississippi, and how somebody else grew up in California, Texas, and around the country. So what did Paul get into when he was a little boy?

Paul Wait: Yeah. So when I was a young boy, my dad took me duck hunting, I think I was probably 8, 9 maybe 10 years old in Wisconsin. My uncle owned a cranberry bog marsh, it was not a marsh that was still producing cranberries, but it used to be a cranberry bog marsh, so there’s lots of food in there, lots of oak trees along the creek. So there were wood ducks all over the place. We had teal, we had mallards, we had ringneck ducks primarily a few other species, Canada geese were a lot of geese, sandhill cranes on there too. And I just fell in love with just being out there, being out there with my dad and seeing the ducks come in, seeing the geese come in, the cranes and I was itching to hunt them and got a shotgun when I was 12, in those days in Wisconsin you had to be 12 to hunt. So got a shotgun, got to go along, got to shoot, was a terrible shot.

Ramsey Russell: Weren’t we all?

Paul Wait: I figured out that I’m cross eyed dominant, so couldn’t hit anything but kind of work through that and got my first duck finally, blue winged teal. I remember it to this day, there were 4 of them in a line and I shot at the first one and of course folded the 3^rd one. And not long after that one morning I went behind my parents house into the cornfield edge, snuck down in the corn and the geese were landing in the adjacent field. So shot a Canada goose, first time I’d ever tried to do that and lo and behold it had this little metal ring on its foot. So my very first goose was banded up near Hudson Bay in Ontario and I didn’t even know what that meant, but I just thought it was pretty neat. And I’ve never looked back. I haven’t hunted all over the world like you have, Ramsey, but I’ve sure hunted a lot of great places in North America and boy, I enjoy every hunt.

Ramsey Russell: What was the principal species you all were targeting in that cranberry marsh back when you were a little boy?

Paul Wait: Yeah. So early in the season it’d be wood ducks and we get a fair number of green wing teal too. But mallards, my dad loves the mallard, he’s the mallard guy. I like mallards plenty too, but I like all ducks. We shot a lot of ring neck ducks, it seemed like that marsh attracted a lot of those, so they kind of became like one of my favorite ducks right away, because we could get them, and they were around, even on opening day, they’d be around, later in the season, they’d be around. So we got quite a few of those.

Ramsey Russell: Right about time, I think I’ve seen and heard it all, I just added something to my bucket list, I want to shoot ducks in a cranberry marsh, I didn’t know there was such a thing. I mean, is that a Wisconsin thing? I mean, is that where cranberries are grow?

Paul Wait: Yeah, there’s other states that are high in cranberry production, but, yeah, Wisconsin is one of the leading producers of cranberries.

Ramsey Russell: Describe a cranberry marsh to me.

Paul Wait: Yeah. Well, working cranberry marsh, it’ll have several impoundments to it, and they raise and lower the water levels. They raise it to harvest the berries, and then they lower it and just kind of keep moist soil in there.

Ramsey Russell: So how do cranberries grow then? I mean, I’m assuming at some point in time they were native, and now they’ve been cultivated.

Paul Wait: Yeah, I’m not an expert on it, but yeah, they’re a crop and there are cranberry farms, working cranberry farms.

Ramsey Russell: And they grow on the ground?

Paul Wait: No, they’re on a plant. They raise the water to harvest them. Kind of like rice a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Paul Wait: I mean, they’re not rice, but similar way of doing it where they raise the water level to harvest.

Ramsey Russell: And do the ducks come into those impoundments to eat cranberries?

Paul Wait: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Now I really want to do it.

Paul Wait: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a preferred food for a lot of them, but yeah, they come in there and they eat them. The marsh that my uncle had was no longer a working cranberry marsh, but there were remnant patches of cranberries in there. And the ducks particularly, I don’t know why, but the green wing teal seem to hang in there, and mallards, too, in those areas with the berries. But yeah, that’s what I started hunting.

Ramsey Russell: That just appeals to me, I want to hunt a cranberry marsh. Here’s the crazy thing is, my old buddy Mr. Ian’s bride, Giselle, makes an amazing cranberry relish. And it’s not like cranberry, it’s not like the old canned stuff. This has got a lot of orange zest and peels and lemon juice and cranberries, real cranberries, all kind of crushed up in it and it complements seared duck breast better than any anything, it pairs so good with it. I’m thinking, I want to shoot ducks in a cranberry marsh now. It just sounds like, a need to do thing, that’s a good story.

Paul Wait: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So, Paul, what inspired you to write the article exploring duck mortality beyond the obvious impact of hunting? What inspired that?

Paul Wait: Yeah. You hear all these things, all these opinions on podcasts and social media and just talking to different hunters and I think the duck hunting public is under the impression that, most of the ducks die at the end of a 12 gauge shotgun and that’s simply not the case. Yes, like you said earlier, 8 million ducks in the US killed, some years it’s more than that a little bit, some years it might be less. And that sounds like a huge number and it is, but the majority of mortality in ducks does not happen during the duck seasons, that’s not as a result of a 12 gauge or a 20 gauge shotgun. And so I wanted to just bring that point forward for folks and there’s science behind, this isn’t Paul Wait’s opinion, this is scientific fact, there’s lots of research on it. And to be honest with you, too, the other thing that kind of brought this to the forefront is the change in the pintail regulations. So the US Fish & Wildlife Service harvest strategy changed and so as a result of that, this coming season, the bag limit on pintails is going to be 3 instead of one. And a lot of people are very concerned about that because there’s this strong belief that, oh my God, we’re going to hurt the pintail population by increasing the bag limit that way. And so there’s a lot of science behind that move that Fish & Wildlife Service made. And so the article has some of those components in it, but I wanted to just explain to folks that, hey, predation is the number one reason why ducks die, it’s not shotguns.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s a very good point. And of course, the assumption and the thing you’re hearing so much and there are people shouting it from the mountaintops and they’ll die on those mountains is we’re killing too many ducks. I mean, it’s become a war chant. We’re killing too many ducks. And it’s bad enough that the anti-hunters are saying, our own people are saying it now, we’re killing too many damn ducks.

Paul Wait: What’s interesting to me, Ramsey, is if you look at harvest statistics, compared to some of the times where we had wet cycles and we had a lot more ducks, we’re not killing nearly the number of ducks we used to.

Ramsey Russell: No, we’re not.

Paul Wait: We used to have 2.4 million active waterfowl hunters in North America, now we have less than half of that. And so just by that alone, the sheer number, there’s half as many hunters and so there’s not as many shotguns out there. We couldn’t kill the number of ducks we used to because there’s half as many of us shooting at them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Perception is reality. And most of us, our looking glass into waterfowl is from a duck blind, that’s it. Our whole passion revolves around our days, our limited days might be 60 days, most of us is 20 or 30 in a duck blind. And the ducks we see die, that’s how they die is at the end of a shotgun. Do you think that’s why that misconception persists so strongly?

91% of the drivers of duck populations occur during the months of April through July, 91%

Paul Wait: Yes. That and the fact that, we as hunters are regulated. The raccoons and the skunks and the coyotes and the red foxes, hey, they’re not regulated, they can do whatever they want out there on the prairie and they do. And we as hunters, we’re not on the prairie most of us, we’re not seeing that, we don’t see that that hen that lost her nest and her life that ended up in the mouth of a predator, we’re not seeing that duck. Now, our research students are, and I’ve been out on the prairie enough times with our students to do stories and take pictures and write about what they’re up to see it. So I think, if every duck hunter, and I’m not picking on people, but if every duck hunter, especially those in the south, could go to the prairie in June and just see what goes on up there, they’d have a much better understanding of how the whole thing works. So one of the things we point to, and this is a scientific study not done by Delta, by a guy named Steven Hochman in 2002 was published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. And his study was really important, and here’s the key point of it. 91% of the drivers of duck populations occur during the months of April through July, 91%. So that’s the key period. And what are we not doing April through July? We’re not hunting. So only 9% of the mortality in ducks, and this is mallards, happens the rest of the year, which includes hunting season. So that just shows you that, the amount of impact that hunting has is so small compared to the predation and the nesting period for ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Right. For someone new to the conversation, how would you summarize the state of North American duck populations today? Are we in crisis with this drought and this recent decline because of drought or are we in recovery or somewhere in between? How would you describe today’s North American duck population?

Paul Wait: Yeah, I don’t want to call it a crisis, I don’t think it is. Are we dry in the prairie? Yeah, absolutely. The breeding population survey will come out in August and my expectation is that that total duck population is going to be lower and that the prairie pothole region of the survey is going to show declines. And so we’re headed the wrong direction right now, but we’re in a dry cycle. I started duck hunting in the 80s, it was dry, we had fewer ducks then in the breeding population than we do right now. So I’ve lived through the 3 duck 30 day waterfowl seasons, which a lot of the people listening to this may not have. So are we in a crisis? I don’t think so. Is there cause for concern? Yeah, absolutely. We’re losing habitat, there’s more predators than ever on the landscape, so should we be concerned? Yeah, but I don’t think, we’re not in dire straits, everybody should go hunting, I’m going to.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Paul Wait: And everybody else should too, and feel okay about that. Do your part for conservation, but go hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. When you say that only 5% of annual hen mortality comes from hunting.

Paul Wait: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What data and methods help scientists to derive that number?

Paul Wait: Yeah, so that’s all banding data.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?

Paul Wait: And yeah, it’s all banding data and survival data that they derive from band returns, primarily. And so the banding data is really critical there. And I’m not a scientist, I just write about the activities of all of our scientists and waterfowl management in general. But yeah, that banding data is critical and that’s where those statistics come from, from people who are way smarter about waterfowl than I am.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. You talk about a lot of that mortality takes place April through July.

Paul Wait: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Could you explain why predation during the nesting season, which is April through July, is so disproportionately deadly to hens?

Paul Wait: Yeah. So when you think about ducks, you think about a hen and a drake on the prairie. The drake, he’s out there in a pothole, swimming around, having himself a good time, chasing hens around. The hen, she’s got to build up her body reserves so that she can form and lay eggs, and then she’s got to pick a nest site and go in the grass, most ducks nest in the grass, so she’s got to pick that nest site and so she’s visiting a spot in the grass and laying an egg a day and then when she gets all the eggs laid, 10, 12 days in, assuming she’s got 10, 12 days or 10, 12 eggs in the nest, then she’s going to sit on that nest for 22 to 24 days. So you think about that. That hen, literally, that’s where the phrase sitting duck comes from, right? So that duck is going to sit in one spot and go to that one spot how many times and be right there in that one place where every critter, and there’s a lot of things that eat a duck egg and will seek it out. Every critter that comes by is a threat to that hen. And meanwhile, the drake’s still over there in the pond swimming around, I’m not saying nothing’s going to get him, but the chance of the him, that drake getting, having a run in with the predator is way less than that hen. So, that hen, nesting and reproducing is inherently dangerous for that duck, that hen.

Ramsey Russell: If hens nest gets raided, they will attempt re nesting. What does telemetry show us about how often hens will attempt to re-nest and how that cycle increases her risk?

Paul Wait: Yeah. So not all species will re-nest, but mallards and pintails particularly will because they’re an early nester and if there’s good water conditions, they’ll try again, usually, especially mallards. Some other species do too, is my understanding and I’ve seen it. But think about this, so that hen that lost a nest already, she went through all the work to create all those eggs and probably started incubating them, then lost the eggs. So she already had what, depending upon how many days she had into that nest, she already had 15, 20 days maybe into that first nest. Now she’s got to start all over and do it again. So that hen, if it’s on the second nest, instead of having 22 days of incubation and all the laying time, now she’s got round two. So she’s exposed, a whole bunch more. So, it just starts all over. So that’s why re-nesting hen she’s on the nest, could be 40 days to pull off a hatch. So, it really increases this vulnerability to predation for that hen.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve already talked about skunks and raccoons. How has the expansion of raccoon and skunk populations changed the predator landscape compared to what it might have been 50 years ago?

Paul Wait: Yeah, I think –

Ramsey Russell: And just how bad is it? I mean, are those the two main culprits?

Paul Wait: Yeah, they’re two of the main culprits, there’s certainly other ones too. I think it might even go back farther than 50 years. You think about homesteading on the prairie, and a lot of those folks got a small plot of land, 100, 160 acres or something like that, 200 acres, and tried to make a go of it farming, and they abandoned that because they couldn’t make a living at it. And so they left, but they left behind the buildings which are great shelters for skunks and raccoons and other critters. And meanwhile, the bigger egg producers came in and they’re still farming that ground instead of a 200 acre farm, now it’s 2,000 acres or more, and so the food’s there, the shelter’s there for these mammalian predators. And then we’ve had warmer winters, right? So it’s easier to survive a winter on the prairie. we’ve got possums in places that we didn’t have them, 40, 50, 60 years ago because they can survive the winter. And so there’s one more factor too, trapping. Trapping has largely disappeared from the landscape, there are still people who do it, but the money’s not there, so the effort isn’t necessarily there either. And so you know these predators are abundant and they’ve got good places to live and enough food and they’re thriving.

Ramsey Russell: I tell you something else and this is a pet. Look, I don’t criticize nobody, whatever somebody wants to do is up to them, you be you and I’ll be me. But I’ll tell you something else that’s changed in the last 50 to 100 years is yeah, people went out and trapped for coyotes. Yeah, people went out and shot coyotes getting in the chicken house, whatever like that. Goddamn people are killing coyotes like they hurt their mamas now. I ain’t got nothing to do on a winter day but go out and kill a coyote and line the next 15 miles of fence post with hung up carcasses and just rid the world of coyotes. And we start talking skunks and raccoons their number one predator that keeps them in check are coyotes. So let me ask a question, make sure I’m not just a complete nutter quack, relative to skunks and raccoons, just how bad is coyote in depredate duck nest?

Paul Wait: Yeah. And again I’m not a biologist but my understanding of it and I have written about this in the past too. So coyotes they can be a positive or a negative to duck populations because of what you just said they do control some of the other duck nest predators. And the other thing they do is they run off the red foxes. Now, red foxes, if you’ve got a denning red fox nearby, an area where there’s a lot of ducks nesting, the foxes will go out there and they are going to hunt down those ducks and they’re going to kill the hen. Foxes are good, they’re a pounce predator, right? They’ll pounce on that hen and probably kill her and they get the eggs and the hen. So now you got a dead hen. With coyotes, my understanding again, is that they’re more opportunistic. So if they come across the duck nest, are they going to wreak havoc on it? Yeah, probably, but they don’t necessarily seek them out. And again, not being a biologist, but what I understand about it, the home ranges of a coyote are much larger, usually than that of a red fox. So a red fox is more localized and is more likely to hunt harder in its home range because it’s a smaller area that it has to get all of its food.

Ramsey Russell: I’m reminded of this, where that flew up on my radar is, I’ve got a friend you probably know, Mr. Rob Sawyer, the Texas historian, formerly a duck guide, very interesting person that’s been on this podcast several times. And he was working on a ranch down in Texas and they had a chicken house, the chef raised his own heirloom legacy all this and more chickens to produce these eggs and produce chicken meals and stuff like that and they started having a predation problem getting in the henhouse, and they broke out all the stuff and they couldn’t keep the meso predators, the foxes and raccoons, out of the henhouse. And one day at a larger staff meeting, one of the cattle foreman said, well, if you’ll quit killing the coyotes, you won’t have this problem. And they quit killing the coyotes on the ranch and guess what? No more critters were getting in the hen house. And I’m like, I never thought about that. Yeah, so that lowly old wily coyote could be a benefit to us producing ducks.

Paul Wait: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: We talk about this, you talk about those warm winters and let me tell you what’s going to be apocalyptic crisis mode is if these feral pigs ever migrate in full force from the deep south to the prairie potholes, it is over. Short of us breaking out, I don’t know what, you can’t control them by hunting, obviously we see that down in Texas and Mississippi, we even see it Paul, to where the deer camp I’m in will at times right now, for example, it floods, and so 2/3^rd to a 1/2^th of the property is underwater, just backwater flooding. And so all it’s right in the middle of fawning season, and all those doe are sitting up on the dry ground. And in the years that we’ve got a big hog population going into the following year, you see a market decrease in fawns because you got all these little hoover vacuums combing the landscape, eating any freaking thing they come across, anything from cottonmouth to fawns. And boy, if these wild feral pigs ever seize and get a stronghold in the prairie pothole region, I just don’t believe we’re going to ever have a duck again.

Paul Wait: Well, I hope none of that happens.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, that’s a lot of what if. But anyway, with the world changing like it is, it’s something to consider. You once described the prairie pothole region, speaking of changes, you once described the prairie pothole region as having been a massive sea of grass, what are the most dramatic changes you’ve seen in that landscape during your career?

Paul Wait: Yeah, I think it’s agricultural practices, really and not that Wisconsin is the prairie, but my grandfather was a farmer, and a lot of my uncles were, and some of my cousins were farmers and they’re dairy farmers and they had small farms, 120 acres or so. And none of them farm now, none of them. Well, no, I take it back, we have one, but there’s very few left of those. And I think that the changes on the prairie, in agriculture really have had a huge impact on ducks. And you went from these homesteading farms that were smaller to these large operations, big equipment and they’re set up for efficiency, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m not knocking farmers in any way here. But the way that they produce grain on the landscape has really impacted duck production. You’ve taken the grass, those areas of nesting cover and that sea of grass that used to be there, and you fragmented it and also there’s not that many fallow fields. So you’ve got a landscape that’s really broken up now and a lot of the wetlands, of course, were drained as part of that farming efficiency. And so, a duck has a whole lot less places to nest and where there is cover, guess what else is in the cover, all those raccoons and skunks and foxes and all those other predators we’re talking about. So instead of a duck being on the landscape in this massive sea of grass where they truly are a needle in a haystack, they’re less likely to be discovered, now they’re in the one strip of cover or their one small area of cover on a parcel of land that has those wetlands on it. And so everything else is in that cover, too. And so the chances of successfully hatching a nest in that kind of landscape go way down.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. From a policy perspective, what’s being done or what needs to be done to protect our remaining prairie wetlands?

Paul Wait: Yeah. Delta has some really innovative programs, and we work on a policy basis. We’re working with governments to incentivize farming, incentivize farmers to keep those wetlands, those small wetlands that are in their crop fields don’t drain those, we’re trying to incentivize farmers to leave those alone, keep those on the landscape. And of course, we advocate in the farm bill for as much CRP acreage as we can get and swamp buster provisions and other things. Delta is blessed. We’ve got a great policy team led by John Devney in the United States, and Jim Fisher’s working on it up in Canada and we have other folks, too, but we’ve got people who, this is what they do every day. Their role and job in life is to make sure that we keep as many of those wetlands and that associated wetland habitat on the landscape as possible, because we’ve got to keep the duck production potential there so that when it is wet, which it’s not, this year it’s not very wet, but in years when it’s wet, those ducks can really produce. But if we don’t have that habitat, we’ve got to keep that. So Delta’s working on that all the time. And it’s an unsung job. It’s a long game. John Devney is playing the long game, he’s been at it for decades, really. You don’t think about it, you don’t see it that often, but we’re doing some things that really do contribute dramatically to the fall flight every year. And like I said, it’s an unsung, he’s not a very big guy, but he’s like an offensive lineman in football. If you don’t see him, he’s doing a good job, right? And he is.

Ramsey Russell: Well, as I understand it, a lot of that prairie is short grass prairie, very easily converted into agriculture. And what role do agricultural incentives play in the continued loss of grassland nesting cover?

Paul Wait: Yeah, I think John Devney would tell you this, that the habitat protections that we have, particularly on the prairie in Canada, are not doing enough. We’re losing wetlands at an alarming rate. And so we’ve got something in Canada that we’ve implemented now that worked with Manitoba provincial government called the Shallow Wetland Incentive Program. And basically what it does is it compensates farmers to leave those small, shallow wetlands in their fields, don’t disk over them, don’t plant through them, just leave them there. Now, if it’s super dry, they can actually plant through them. But they need to not drain them, right? So what that does is, like I said before, it keeps that duck production potential there on the landscape. Because once you drain that wetland, no ducks are going to use it, there’s no wetland there. So those incentives are critical that way. Because last summer I was up in Manitoba, I’m talking to a farmer that’s in this program, good guy, he doesn’t care about ducks, he cares about what that land can produce for him. Like, his goal is not how many ducks are around. He doesn’t hate ducks, he doesn’t want them gone necessarily, but he’s not doing things for ducks. So if we can take a producer like that and incentivize him to just leave that alone, then his place, his farm has duck production potential on it. But if you don’t do that, he’s plowing that he’s going to drain that little wetland, get that back out of his way, I don’t even know his big tractor that’s twice as the width of a lane on the road, takes up the whole road when he comes down the road with that tractor. So that tractor, he can turn that baby in the field and not have anything in the way. Yeah, so that’s the thing we’re doing is keeping that duck production potential on the landscape.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of people I’ve heard voice opposition to the 3 pintail limit, we were talking about earlier there, Paul, and you know that short grass prairie converted to agriculture, especially in the no teal farming, in the age of no teal farming, that’s the black hole that all our pintails are going in. It’s not whether we’re killing 3. In fact, I’ve seen graphs that I’m not smart enough to articulate the why, but I’ve seen the graphs, if told to me by several biologists, it says really and truly, for as long as the pintail limits, that pintails can be hunted in North America, we could shoot 7. We could shoot 7 is what those graphs are saying. But we’re going with 3 to err on the conservative and the reasonable and acceptable limit of the American duck hunter today. But the black hole that’s been documented since the 1970s is millions upon millions of hen pintails and their eggs are being lost on the landscape as short grass prairie is converted to no teal farming, grass crops, pintail don’t know the difference. She shows up and says, hey, this is sparse cover, I can stick my neck up, my long neck up and look around for predators and get back down, here comes that tractor, boom, it’s over.

Paul Wait: Yeah, and in those landscapes too, because they’re an early nester, when you think about the predator dynamic, predators come out from their winter nap and the pintails are one of the first ducks trying to nest on that sparse cover like you said and they’re easy prey that way too. So if the raccoons and skunks don’t get them, yeah, the John Deere tractor will. So yeah, that’s a major issue with pintails.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s talk about disease and mass die off. You detailed several diseases, avian botulism, avian cholera, highly pathogenic avian influenza, it was just a couple of seasons ago, snow geese in the deep south were raining like a hailstorm on buildings and cities and ag fields in the deep south because of that HPAI. And you talk even about something called a trematode worm. Which of these are currently posing the greatest long term threat to waterfowl populations?

Paul Wait: You know my end and I’m not an expert in this at all, I did interview some folks who are really knowledgeable about this. So I’m not sure I can say which one of those or if there’s a different one that poses a long term threat. The thing about it, I think, here’s my thought on this. So just like hunters only see the hunting, the mortality from hunting, I think that when you have these big die off events, they’re pretty dramatic because like you said, all of a sudden there’s a whole lot of dead snow geese laying in the field and you’re like holy crap, what is going on? And last fall I went to Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, California, Oregon, and they had a horrible botulism outbreak and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I rode with the refuge manager on an airboat and we picked up, I don’t know, trash bags of ducks, like lots of them, hundreds. And we took 50 or 60 to the rehab center. But yeah, we picked up hundreds of ducks and the guy said it’ll be just like this again tomorrow, and they were in like day 10 of that outbreak and they’d already picked up 10,000 or 15,000 dead birds. And it was like, wow, and it was indiscriminate, like it wasn’t all coots there was just about every species you can name. There’s pintails and cinnamon teal and green wings and mallards and there were geese, it wasn’t all waterfowl either. There were lots of different shorebird, shorebirds that were sick and dying in there. And it was almost surreal, like it was like a zombie apocalypse or something, there’s dead stuff everywhere.

Ramsey Russell: What can hunters of the public do in monitoring or mitigating disease outbreaks? Anything? Is there anything at all we can do?

Paul Wait: Yeah, I think just notify your local DNR officials or call the local wildlife manager and just let them know, hey, this is going on so that they can monitor. It is interesting, talking about avian flu over winter here in Wisconsin, there was a little pothole that had a bunch of ducks on it, this was in February or March and there was like 50 dead birds there and they came and got them and they suspected it was going to be high path avian influenza and it wasn’t, it was some other bacteria or something. It wasn’t any of the things I listed in this article. So, it’s good to report that stuff and allow the officials to figure it out and if there’s anything they can do, they will.

Ramsey Russell: Is there any effective management intervention that can be deployed with those big outbreaks or is it just kind of like letting nature run its course?

Paul Wait: Yeah. So I was talking to Chris Nicolai, our research scientist our waterfowl biologist at Delta about this and also being out at Klamath, manipulating for botulism, particularly manipulating the water levels can really –

Ramsey Russell: That’s what I’ve heard. It’s got a lot to do with hot stagnant water.

So if you can either dry that out completely so the ducks aren’t there or the opposite way where you can flood it, cover up that bacteria in the soil that causes a botulism outbreak, those are your two remedies

Paul Wait: Yeah. So if you can either dry that out completely so the ducks aren’t there or the opposite way where you can flood it, cover up that bacteria in the soil that causes a botulism outbreak, those are your two remedies. Now, unfortunately, in Klamath, they had a lot of restrictions on water because water is a huge issue in the West, so they couldn’t manipulate the water. So basically their strategy was to try to remove as many of the dead birds as they could and stop that fly cycle, that larva cycle, but that was really a losing battle to try to do that. So if you can manipulate the water levels so that you don’t create the conditions where botulism, an outbreak can get started and thrive, but that’s not always possible. Chris Nikolai was telling me about there’s certain wetlands, particularly in Nevada, in the desert there, where there’s no way to manipulate the water level. And so some years it happens based on evaporation and heat and other factors and you have a die off.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. A few years ago I was down in Texas, East Texas, hunting blue wings and there was a lady there from University of Georgia doing HPAI samples on blue wings. And I was surprised to learn that the largest waterfowl vector in North America was blue wings. And she said it had to do with their life cycle requirements, you know, how their behavior requires big flocks, shallow water, you know what I’m saying? I mean, think about it. They spend their whole life in, or try to in warmer climates, shallower water where they can just contaminate each other. Now, she said both of these were non virulent strains, and what was so weird is how the HPAI strain that she was getting in East Texas was completely different then the HPAI strain just an hour east of there in Louisiana. Those two populations had totally, they both had HPAI, but not viral. I mean, she said, where we get concerned is if those two start overlapping, that’s when we know something’s going on. But it was crazy. All the things these birds have to deal with besides shotgun, it’s almost like especially the way some of us shoot sometimes, we’re the least of their worries it seems like so far, man.

Paul Wait: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: The sex ratio trends, especially in mallards and pintails are very striking, 3 drakes per hen. And I’ve heard biologists, had biologists on here before talking about that ratio becoming the disparity between drakes and hens increasing as time goes on. Why do you think this aspect of the data hasn’t received more public attention and why is it even important?

Paul Wait: Yeah. I did write an article about it too that appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Delta Waterfowl magazine. I think it’s a hard thing to explain to folks, but I tried, I gave it a good shot. I leaned on some of the leading researchers about this. One thing is, again talking to Chris Nikolai about this a little bit, he said it’s a recent thing that the sex ratios are this far askew, that they’re this far out of whack. And he said that biologist community was talking about this and there’s papers on it in like 2009 talking about the fact that, hey, this is a relatively new phenomenon, that the sex ratios are messed up, it’s important for many reasons, to have that many drakes in the population can mess up the models, can mess up the population modeling a little bit. If you have too many drakes, if you’ve been on the prairie and you’ve seen the courtship flights, there might be 15, 20 drakes chasing one hen and they just flat wear that hen out and she’s trying to nest and lay an egg and she’s got all these drakes chasing her around it. It’s really disruptive in terms of their ability to nest. So, yeah, it’s an issue.

Ramsey Russell: It is an issue and it is a recent phenomenon. And it goes back to – because we’re talking about how ducks die in the context of are we killing too many ducks? And that’s a very temperamental subject, killing hens, we’re killing too many hens. And I’m like, wait a minute, these populations are skewed anyway, they’re more vulnerable. I mean, it’s like, I asked a biologist one time, I can’t remember what he said, he was talking about the disparity of drake to hen ratio based on band recoveries in the Deep South. And I just had the thought, well, if some of the stuff we’re talking about that hens are most vulnerable during the nesting season and you’re banding them in the spring and capturing them in the fall, that’s when the band’s being recovered and you’re seeing a great disparity, obviously, the increased disparity is not happening during the hunting season, it’s happening during the nesting season, could this be related to a drought that started really a long time ago? It’s just getting worse, it’s like a faucet droughts are like that, like faucets turning off and getting worse and worse over time on the prairies, so it could be something like this. And when you look at the long term harvest data, we’ve got protections in place for especially mallards to a degree, pintails. But everything else is a free for all. I mean, if I want to go out and shoot 6 hen ring necks, nobody cares, if I want to go shoot 6 green wings, nobody cares. But you know what’s so interesting is somebody that duck hunts a lot and duck hunts with a lot of duck hunters a lot, Paul, is from anywhere on the world that you can tell the difference in hens and males and females, let’s say, hens and drakes, nowhere in the world that I hunt does anybody go out and target hens of any species. When green wings come in, everybody I know yourself and everybody listening, guaranteed, if a flock of green wings comes in, they’re grabbing the drakes if they can see them. Wood duck, same thing, mallard, same thing, pintail, same thing, ring necks, same thing, we’re all targeting drakes.

Paul Wait: And if you look at the harvest stats for that, when you look at the ratio of harvest, you’ll see most years, like mallards, the harvest is usually about 3 to 1 drakes to hens, right?

Ramsey Russell: And even in the northern, like Wisconsin, even when you start looking at Wisconsin and Minnesota, it’s almost 3 to 1.

Paul Wait: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: The birds are still molted and very difficult to tell, still way up in the northern flyway, most people are targeting drakes.

Paul Wait: Yeah. And so if you think about that for a minute, two things there, one, there’s more drakes in the population. So if you just shot into the flock, you’re going to end up with more drakes in most species anyway. But then secondary, yeah, most people don’t try to shoot the hens or they try to shoot the drakes out of the flock, given the choice. And so we as hunters do select for drakes already. And so that’s interesting. But part of the thing you said earlier about the fact that it’s been dry and droughts, when you look at duck production, when the ducks come out of the eggs, it should be 50-50, right? Half the ducklings are hens, half the ducklings are male. So when you have low production years, and again, I’m not a biologist, but this is what’s been explained to me. When you have low production years, you’re not adding that whole new shot of young ducklings that 50-50 mix, right? You’re not adding that new crop of 50% hens, 50% drakes, you’re not adding as many ducks to the population. So those sex ratios keep being skewed because you’re losing the hens to predation on the nest.

Ramsey Russell: Often wrong, never in doubt, my memory is fuzzy at best, but I swear that back during grad school I read a paper that, it requires more energy to produce a hen egg than it does a male egg. And I have looked through my notes and tried to find that paper again and can’t find it. But I know that I read that one time. And if somebody listening knows, let me know, if you know this for a fact. Does it take more energy of that hand to produce a hen egg than it would a male egg? I would think it did, but I don’t know that.

Paul Wait: Yeah, not sure on that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, good stuff. Delta’s Predator Management and hen houses, those have been the cornerstones of Delta Waterfowl and have been described as the Perfect complement to habitat conservation. How do these strategies work in practice?

Paul Wait: Yeah, so both things, but they do it in different ways, are designed to level the playing field or allow hens a chance to actually hatch a nest. And so how predator management works, obviously, we’re intensely trapping specific areas to reduce the predator populations in those areas during the nesting season. So our trappers are contracted to start trapping on March 15^th every year, and they run through July 15^th, which is the nesting season for ducks on the prairies, where we do predator management. And basically, we’re thinning out the predators so that those hens that choose to nest in those areas have a much better chance of not losing their nest and the improvement is dramatic. So, it’s double or more as far as the nest success. And a nest success is a successful nest that hatches, right? So all the way to completion. Hen houses work in a similar way and that we’re taking that hen mallard and we’re putting that duck in a tube out over water so a lot of the predators can’t get to that duck. So basically, we’re putting that hen mallard or that hen mallard has got a nesting availability and a structure that keeps her out of the teeth of raccoons and skunks and a lot of other predators. And so the nest success there is really dramatic in certain areas. And we use these strategies in areas that have a lot of wetlands, so they have a lot of nesting pairs that come to those areas because there’s a lot of wetlands, but that don’t necessarily have that sea of grass, that big, dense stand of cover where they can go be that needle in the haystack. So, around our Mendoza Research Station in Manitoba, there’s some areas where the nest success is terrible for ducks that nest on the ground because there’s so many predators and not enough grass on the landscape. So, hen houses work really well there because you can keep those hens out over the water and out of the teeth of predators. And predator management works well there, too, because a lot of ducks are attracted to that area and there’s abundant wetlands, but the cover is not there, the amount of cover you want isn’t there. So those two solutions really take an area where you actually create something called a sink, which means more ducks go there, then come out of there because you lose so many hens on nests and as opposed to a source population, where the duck population increases because the nest success is good. So by employing hen houses and predator management, we can take areas that would actually be a net loss for ducks and turn them into good duck production.

Ramsey Russell: Just how much more productive are hen houses to nest access relative to just natural nest? I mean, I’ve heard up to 12 times more, that’s unbelievable.

Paul Wait: Yeah. And some of these areas I was just describing, these are areas where there’s farm fields, small wetlands and farm fields, and there’s just a little strip of cover around that wetland right? Where it’s not being farmed. So you create this area, there’s a small strip of cover and every predator that’s on that landscape is going to do what? They’re going to go in that little strip of cover which is where that duck is nesting. So now if you take that hen and you put her in a tube out over the water, she’s not in that strip of cover anymore. So the duck that’s got a nest in that strip of cover, in some cases, I’ve seen different studies that we’ve done, where nest success is like 0.5%. So one duck out of 200 nests in that little strip of cover actually hatched. And then you take that and you put that same thing in those hen house, and the nest success is like 50%, 60%. So 50 or 60 ducks that nest out of 100 in that hen house are going to hatch, in the cover 1 out of 200, it’s that Stark. And not every landscape is like that. In areas where you’ve got enough grass, the predation factor isn’t quite as high as that, but a lot of these working landscapes like that, that’s the only way you’re going to – predator management or in henhouses, those are the only ways you’re going to produce any ducks on those landscapes, otherwise you’re losing ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I’ll tell you what, the Alberta Professional Outfitter Society put their money where their mouth is, and they just partnered with you all to deploy a lot of these hen houses out on their landscape. That was unbelievable.

Paul Wait: Yeah, it was. And we’ve got a lot of support like that, and it’s really great to see people lean into the programs and understand that, it’s not just having habitat and wetlands on the landscape, you have to have that, certainly. But there’s ways that we can maximize duck production in those wetlands. And that’s what we do, that’s what Delta is trying to do, is make sure that we maximize duck production on the wetlands that are out there. Because we all want more ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah, we all want more ducks. Thanks to my buddy, Mr. Rob Olson, 25 or 30 years ago, my introduction to Delta waterfowl, he used to say, trap the best, conserve the rest, that was kind of the mantra about this predator control. But predator control can be controversial. What would you say to critics or to critics who question whether it’s ethical or effective?

Paul Wait: Well, let me cut that in half or split that into two parts, effective, it’s effective. Like, we’ve been studying predator management and we continue to study it to refine it, we’ve been studying predator management since 1994, when we started in Towner County, North Dakota way up near the Canadian border. We’ve been studying it, we know it works, and it is effective. We employ it in places where it can have the most impact. So create the most ducks. So in those areas, like I was talking about that are intensely farmed, where we can really make a big difference. As far as, the controversy, we as humans, we took out a lot of the predator, prey balance. Like you were talking before we kill the coyotes, well, okay, that has an impact. So what predator management does is, restore that balance. Restore that balance to the landscape where ducks have a chance. Like, our goal at Delta is not to kill every raccoon and skunk and every predator there is, that’s not what we do. Our goal is to selectively help increase the duck population in landscapes where ducks need help, they need it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, absolutely. A couple of years ago, Delta Waterfowl rolled out the Million Duck campaign, talk about an ambitious initiative. I’m not asking you for a spoiler alert, because I’ve not yet attended the Delta Waterfowl Expo that we’re going to in a couple of weeks. How close are you to those goals and what challenges remain?

Paul Wait: We’re going to meet them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Way ahead of schedule?

The goals of the Million Duck campaign are to put predator management and hen house programs, scale them up, so that we can produce one million ducks every year, forever in perpetuity

Paul Wait: We’re going to meet them, I don’t know about the schedule, but we’re going to be there. So the Million Duck campaign, the goals of the Million Duck campaign are to put predator management and hen house programs, scale them up, so that we can produce one million ducks every year, forever in perpetuity. So it’s an endowment, we’re creating an endowment, and then we’re going to use the money from that to really increase those duck production tools that Delta’s developed. And yes, without spoiling everything, we are going to hit our financial goal of $250 million, which is incredible to think about. And so I’m excited that we’re going to get to trumpet that out into the world and what it means. And the second part of it is Delta’s working to change the idea about how we do waterfowl management, not to criticize any other organizations, but for a long time, the message has been habitat. And habitat’s critical, no question, but we need to do more than just have habitat. Because we’ve got to take the habitat we have and make sure that that habitat is working for us, it’s actually producing ducks. And so we want to measure, at Delta Waterfowl, we want to measure success in waterfowl management by how many ducks we can produce. How many ducks are out there? Again, wetlands are important, but ducks should be the metric that we use to measure whether or not our efforts are working or not.

If your dreams, don’t scare you, you’re not dreaming big enough. That’s been my mantra since forever

Ramsey Russell: If your dreams, don’t scare you, you’re not dreaming big enough. That’s been my mantra since forever. And a million ducks is a lick. But I’ve just heard, maybe you all are going to dream bigger and I’m cheering you on.

Paul Wait: Yeah. And you know what, we’re trying to set the example. I think one of the things with predator management and hen houses, Delta’s been the science behind all of those things and a lot of other things, too. And I think, for a while, we were waiting for the rest of the waterfowl management community to kind of look at that and go, yeah, this stuff really works, let’s do it, let’s adopt these things. And I think we kind of got tired of waiting around for other people to adopt it. And so we just said, let’s do it, we’re going to do it. And so, yeah, we are dreaming big and it’s cool to be a part of, really? Quite honestly.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. Paul, what is the single most impactful action that hunters and conservationists can take to improve duck production.

Paul Wait: Yeah. So I would say this. Keep hunting, stay involved, don’t hang up your waders just because it might be a down year, because it’s dry or whatever. Stay involved. Buy those duck stamps, if you’re a member of waterfowl conservation organization, and I think everyone should be, of course, I have a little bit of bias in that way. But yeah, stay involved. Keep hunting. Don’t let it stop you. And look, it may or may not be the best season you ever had in terms of the number of ducks you see, but there’s so much more about hunting that taking kids, taking your dog, being in the blind with your buddies. I mean, I’ve been on hunts that have been slow in terms of ducks, but been big in terms of fun with people. And so if you look at it – and this is a thing and it’s probably a whole another conversation, but social media is a highlight reel, we don’t have to make piles all the time. I mean, I’ve got a new dog this year and I can’t wait to get that first retrieve, no matter what else I do this season, that will probably be the highlight of my year, is that dog going out and getting that first duck and it’ll probably be a blue wing teal during our teal season in September. And if you’re within half a mile of me, you might hear me.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Kyle Winterstee and I just did a recent conversation about The Thrill. Keeping the thrill in duck hunting, is the thrill gone? It seems to be. I tell you what, a lot of the comments you read in social media on just about any post you make, it seemed like a thrill is gone for a lot of people. And I’m with you, I think we got a keep on hunting. Love duck hunting for what it is and what it ain’t. But now this in the year 2025, I look back 25 years, Paul, boy, 2000, that era of duck hunting was all the stars aligned.

Paul Wait: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I told my old son, recently, I said, duck hunting, now that you’re 27 versus the first big years of your life, I mean, you just kind of hit it right, born in 1997, you kind of hit the best 20 year stretch that anybody in the Russell family for 4 generations has had in duck hunting, but you got to keep hunting. You got to love it for what it is, and hope that through your efforts, your time and your money, it’ll circle back around when the stars start lining up again, that’s just how it is.

Paul Wait: Yeah. I wrote a story in 1985 in my little journal that I kept back then about my hunting exploits. I remember this story, and I’ve kind of pulled this out a few times, but at my uncle’s cranberry bog marsh in Wisconsin, I went hunting, it was mid-October and the limit was 3 ducks during that 30 day season we had. And I saw 4 ducks that day. And I remember it because I wrote it down, of course, but I saw 3 ring necks and one mallard and I shot the mallard and I got a pair of ring neck ducks. And that was the best hunt I – at that time in my young hunting life, that was the best hunt I ever had and I saw 4 ducks that day. I didn’t see any others flying around, nothing, and that was hunting like a 3, 4 hour time window too, and I thought I was the king of the world that day. I came in, I had my limit of ducks and I was 16 years old or whatever. And I found joy in that and I still find joy in that, so it’s all about perspective, right?

Ramsey Russell: It’s all about perspective. Back in the mid-90s, when the limit was on that restrictive season, I was hunting with a group in Arkansas, it’s where I cut my teeth, it’s where I caught the fever, limit was two mallards, we didn’t shoot wood ducks because we was in flooded timber and that was plenty at the time, it was plenty to project me into what has since happened. But when you look at the last 25 years, what gives you hope regarding the next 25 years and what keeps you up at night, Paul?

Paul Wait: Yeah. So I guess the hope is what we were just talking about, that I’ve seen the drought cycles before, right? I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the duck populations below, lower than they are now. And I’ve also seen what you talked about too, the wet years where, every little hole had ducks on it and it wasn’t hard to shoot a bunch of ducks. I’m hopeful that we’re going to see another period like that, but we’ve got to keep doing the right things for conservation and make sure that we conserve the habitat and do the other things, the duck production programs and make sure we have ducks. So I’m hopeful, I’m optimistic that way. As far as, pessimistic, keeping me up at night, the fact that we’re losing so much habitat, our refuges are in disrepair, and we’re not doing enough, it feels like we’re not doing enough. We’re doing a lot, but it’s still not enough. And so I’m going to do my part, I’m going to enjoy as long as I can enjoy it. And I hope it’s here for the next hundred years too.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think there’s a disconnect between the public perception of hunting’s impact and the reality of science based management?

Paul Wait: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to say that hunter harvest doesn’t matter, it matters, but it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think it does.

Ramsey Russell: For reasons that we’ve just talked about.

Paul Wait: Yeah, for the all the reasons. It’s what we see as hunters. Like you said, our most hunters, their view is from the duck blind and not anything else. And so if they understood how the prairies work and they looked at the science behind this, there’d be a different understanding of how the whole thing works. And the debates about whether we should shoot 3 pintails or one, or whether it should be 3 with one hen, or whether we should shoot a second hand mallard or not in the bag, I’m not saying those things would go away, but I think that people would come to a different understanding about how much those things really matter. And the fact of it is they don’t matter all that much in this scheme of things. Like I said before, when 91% of the population or 91% of what happens to the population or affects the population number happens between the months of April and July, not during hunting season, the impact of what we do with 12 gauge shotguns is very low in comparison.

Ramsey Russell: Good note to end on, Paul, thank you. Thank you very much, I appreciate you.

Paul Wait: Thank you, appreciate it

Ramsey Russell: Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. I’m going to ask you all a question, you all can reply in social media comments below. But if you could change one major policy or public attitude overnight, what would it be? I want to hear your thoughts. See you next time.

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