Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listeningast, you can't predict.
Speaker 2: Anything presented by First Light creating proven versatile hunting apparel
Speaker 2: from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear. For every hunt,
Speaker 2: first Light, Go Farther, stay longer. Is it on Phil
Speaker 2: Machines on?
Speaker 3: Do you want to put your headphones on?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: You don't have to suggestion?
Speaker 5: Okay, good, definitely got to hit Phil's upcoming show.
Speaker 6: We already you mention that it's in here.
Speaker 2: I gotta I'm gonna give I'm gonna give Cren a
Speaker 2: comment sandwich. Okay you ready? You guys know what a
Speaker 2: comment sandwich is. If you need to critique someone, right,
Speaker 2: you don't come in and critique them bad's in the medal.
Speaker 2: You come in and say something good, then you say
Speaker 2: the thing you're trying to get across, and then you
Speaker 2: end on something good. So uh, Crinnell is great that
Speaker 2: you got that red stag in Scotland. See thanks. Sometimes
Speaker 2: you can do what's called the open face sandwich anywhere
Speaker 2: you don't end it with the comments. So there and
Speaker 2: then now I'm gonna go crindas. The notes today are
Speaker 2: it's like eight hours worth of material sloppily arranged. And
Speaker 2: then you so you got that, and then I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go on, God, you look great today, Krin.
Speaker 7: It's a true.
Speaker 8: Okay, well we can cut out of you can cut
Speaker 8: out of fair bit.
Speaker 2: You try a new soap. She bought a new kind
Speaker 2: of so open in Scotland. Did you have fun in Scotland?
Speaker 2: For real?
Speaker 4: Had a fantastic time like it? It was, it was wonderful.
Speaker 4: I mean, the hunting process is obviously a bit different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, deers are like for sale in some market. Ye's
Speaker 2: eating your deer like that he bought at the store.
Speaker 8: That's or like dog food.
Speaker 4: But but yeah, I mean the government, the Scottish government
Speaker 4: tells an a state how much I mean, it determines
Speaker 4: how many animals on its property need to be called.
Speaker 4: And then you're you know, so there's a professional stalker
Speaker 4: at each estate and that's their duty to carry out
Speaker 4: what's required. And then if you're there hunting it, you're
Speaker 4: kind of helping to you know, fulfill fulfill the aim.
Speaker 4: And and each animal is then sold to a a
Speaker 4: game dealer. And I was told that it's like sold
Speaker 4: with the coat on and the head off.
Speaker 2: When you guys got it, did you you gutted it
Speaker 2: from the diaphragm back right? Yes, which they got a
Speaker 2: weird sounding name for like glat glock.
Speaker 4: I don't I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember the
Speaker 4: name of it, but they didn't. Yeah, they did it
Speaker 4: a different way.
Speaker 2: Look that up, Yanni, I type in something like Scottish,
Speaker 2: I don't know, gutting, gutting method, diaphragm. I'll get you started.
Speaker 6: Was it a drive hunt? Was it like driven or
Speaker 6: were you stocking?
Speaker 2: Yeah, ladies and gentlemen. That was voice of Phil Lovretzky,
Speaker 2: Russian born researcher who has a University of Texas at
Speaker 2: El Passel. Krinn has pointed out, you have a whole
Speaker 2: lab named after you. Sure explain what you guys do.
Speaker 2: You're here to talk about mailard ducks and some real problems.
Speaker 2: We are real problems. So yeah, no, yeah, I run
Speaker 2: a wildlife genetics lab. While we focus on ducks. You know,
Speaker 2: our whole stick is feel to gene We are right now.
Speaker 6: I have Cruise in Arizona catching Mexican ducks, and other
Speaker 6: crews in Texas catching model ducks, and we do everything
Speaker 6: from catching, banding, telemetry work all the way to population genetics, evolution,
Speaker 6: these types of things. And basically the difference or the
Speaker 6: big thing about us is we use genetics to identify
Speaker 6: individuals correctly, so we have no you know, you can't
Speaker 6: run away from your genetics.
Speaker 7: It is what it is.
Speaker 6: So by understanding who we're working with, we can matter.
Speaker 2: Who has in critters creators. Now this is all just
Speaker 2: a prey lude to her answering the question, but I
Speaker 2: just wanted to people know who they were here and talking.
Speaker 6: Who it is the foundation? Yeah, so our foundation is genetics,
Speaker 6: and then we explore everything from migration to morphology, how
Speaker 6: hybridization causes issues if so if not, how releases feral
Speaker 6: populations in New Zealand here in North America, Europe, How
Speaker 6: are they establishing, why did they established, and how they
Speaker 6: look like compared to the things that they came from.
Speaker 2: God, we're gonna get into that head yeah, real heavy
Speaker 2: kring go on though.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, So the animal is sold in full coat
Speaker 4: to a game dealer, and then that game dealer turns
Speaker 4: it around again and sells it to a butcher, which.
Speaker 2: You guys, cut it off at the knees right when
Speaker 2: I was there, they did. They got it diaphragm back,
Speaker 2: cut it off at the knees and out the door.
Speaker 4: So diaphragm and guts were cut out, left for the
Speaker 4: eagles and then everything. We drug out the animal for
Speaker 4: a little bit and met horses and then we threw it.
Speaker 4: Oh you know, head comes off, but nothing was cut
Speaker 4: off at the knees. It came all the way down.
Speaker 6: Back to the horse on a horse.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 4: They come out with horses and one one horse like
Speaker 4: holds the head or that's kind of like the horse
Speaker 4: in training that eventually might have the body of the
Speaker 4: animal on it, and you walk it down.
Speaker 2: On a horse. How made you guys?
Speaker 4: Shoot Morgan Morgan Potter who's been on the show before
Speaker 4: he got to I got one, and our friend David
Speaker 4: who invited us, got one.
Speaker 2: Are they gonna do? You get to send the head
Speaker 2: home and keep it?
Speaker 4: I've got the antlers, uh somewhere in the mail on
Speaker 4: their way over to Bozeman.
Speaker 2: With the skull cap or you just saw them all
Speaker 2: so they.
Speaker 4: It's kinda yeah, skull cap like kind of like a
Speaker 4: yamica where.
Speaker 2: That there you go yeah, yeah, I'm dragging. Yeah, phill's draggon.
Speaker 8: I don't know what you call that, but that's.
Speaker 2: A skull cap.
Speaker 8: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: As if you cut a little deep around your yamica.
Speaker 4: Like slices the eye sockets in the middle to it's
Speaker 4: not it's not like just tight around them, that.
Speaker 2: Saves you a lot of cutting. Yeah. When you when
Speaker 2: you get the eye sockets into your cut.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it also makes for a nice flush mount.
Speaker 6: To the wall.
Speaker 8: And that is right.
Speaker 2: It's uh years ago. We were hunting Alabama in Tuskegee
Speaker 2: National Forest and I killed a little teeny spike horn
Speaker 2: that had you know, inch and a half spikes. And
Speaker 2: when I scull capped the might just cut this super
Speaker 2: narrow strip of bone to connect the two little spikes.
Speaker 2: And I'm not joking. I went home. I flew home
Speaker 2: with his rack and my shirt pocket. Probably I could
Speaker 2: pull it out of my shirt pocket. Man, holy cow. Man.
Speaker 2: Like I said, we got so much talk about we're.
Speaker 4: Gonna let's not make the show like two hours and
Speaker 4: a half. Let's like maybe cut a thing out you want,
Speaker 4: you can, we can cut the non waterfowl stuff out.
Speaker 2: Listen. Let me just let me take a look here.
Speaker 2: The Flying V guys are here. Introduce yourself, boys, Brady
Speaker 2: who goes first?
Speaker 3: Matt McCormick here, yep, Living Bozeman.
Speaker 2: My partner, Brady yep, Brady Davis.
Speaker 9: I also live here in town Flying THEE. Matt and
Speaker 9: I have a couple of companies called Flying Thee. This
Speaker 9: year is gonna be really fun. We're going to be
Speaker 9: doing a bunch of waterfowl content with Meat Eater and
Speaker 9: for meat Eater, so we're super pumped about that.
Speaker 2: And you guys manage land.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we've got another business where we do land and
Speaker 9: ranch management. So we do you know, habitat construction, restoration
Speaker 9: and management.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, these guys like the Army Corps of Engineers. Man,
Speaker 2: I went on these guys in terms of like waterfowl
Speaker 2: Habitat's impressive.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and then waterfowl is the primary focus. Ducks,
Speaker 3: you know around here, ducks are a primary focus for us.
Speaker 3: But there's inherently some elk stuff and some deer stuff
Speaker 3: and some upland stuff that kind of comes along with it.
Speaker 3: Excited to be here, talk a little bit more with
Speaker 3: with you, Phil, But yeah, it's development and restoration man.
Speaker 3: And it's for the greater good, you know, providing food safety,
Speaker 3: nesting habitat all that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of lends work you guys get involved in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we have to work with the Army Corps
Speaker 3: of Engineers and a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 2: Because I know, I was just making a joke, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean when you.
Speaker 3: When you start doing stuff like this, there's natural wetlands
Speaker 3: and everything. I mean, they got to come out and
Speaker 3: they'll they'll bring a big roll of red flags and
Speaker 3: they'll put it all over the property and say you
Speaker 3: cannot touch this. I mean all the way across the board.
Speaker 3: You can't. You cannot mess with it.
Speaker 2: You can add to it, but not mess with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if you take some you have to give
Speaker 3: some back. But they have parameters around that. There's a
Speaker 3: bunch of permitting and everything. But you know, the state
Speaker 3: of Montana, they they love trout, so you kind of
Speaker 3: lean on the trout thing and trout then everything that
Speaker 3: a trout loves, the duck loves too.
Speaker 2: So so you know how to game it. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: have to game and are going to love it.
Speaker 3: And yeah, yeah, it's really fascinating. I mean it's the
Speaker 3: it's the same. It's the same answer but a different question, right,
Speaker 3: what's good for the trout? What's good for the duck?
Speaker 3: But it's the same answer.
Speaker 2: And then you guys, that's good that aligns. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you guys gave up on like basically most kinds of
Speaker 2: hunting just to focus on ducks over the years.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you know, it's it's funny. We both grew up
Speaker 9: doing all kinds of hunting. Matt grew up waterfowl hunting
Speaker 9: when he was young.
Speaker 2: I did not. I got into waterfowl hunting in my
Speaker 2: early twenties because you're from the arid West. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, when I got into it in my early twenties.
Speaker 9: The problem is, once I got into it.
Speaker 2: It was over, no looking back.
Speaker 7: The very first day I had some decoys called in
Speaker 7: a few geese.
Speaker 2: I remember you told me about that.
Speaker 9: And the day those geese died, I walked into the
Speaker 9: house I was a newlywed, told my wife, I'm like
Speaker 9: game over.
Speaker 2: I had I had hounds.
Speaker 9: I was hunting lions and bears and stuff with dogs,
Speaker 9: and those dogs got sold.
Speaker 2: Next thing, you know, I had a labrador and.
Speaker 9: More decoys and more decoys, and if you ask my
Speaker 9: wife more decoys.
Speaker 2: Well, surprise, those line dogs didn't team up and kill
Speaker 2: that lab out of spike.
Speaker 7: I moved them out of the asylum before the next
Speaker 7: inmate came in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like, this sun bitch is gonna be trouble. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Now I had a question, Now, do you guys go
Speaker 6: after knockout grants? Is that how you guys do a
Speaker 6: lot of the habitat work?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is some. There is some of that, and
Speaker 3: we and we work with a couple of different consultant
Speaker 3: agencies that just focus on permitting, right because you need
Speaker 3: you need people that can read the fine print. And
Speaker 3: at the end of the day, we're looking to do
Speaker 3: macro you know, macro restoration, and so a lot of
Speaker 3: those guys are handling the the the details of that.
Speaker 3: But yes, to your to your.
Speaker 2: Question, there are some of that.
Speaker 9: We also a lot of our clients are people who
Speaker 9: purchased the land for the purpose of hunting, so they
Speaker 9: are willing to invest more money and you know, they're
Speaker 9: they're they're good to put the money in for the
Speaker 9: end result.
Speaker 2: And so at the end of the day, what.
Speaker 9: We care about is that the birds are there and
Speaker 9: that the habitat supports holding the birds, not just having
Speaker 9: them there for a shooter or for a hunt. And
Speaker 9: so we're looking at everything from Okay, how do we
Speaker 9: get them here? But then how do we hold them
Speaker 9: and maintain and keep them there? So you know, the
Speaker 9: wetland stuff is a big part of it, but we
Speaker 9: also do a ton of farming, you know, planning, consulting
Speaker 9: which crops go in the layout on the property, where
Speaker 9: the corn needs to go in, the spring weight and
Speaker 9: the barley and the peas, and how all that lays
Speaker 9: out on the property.
Speaker 7: And in reference to the water sources as well.
Speaker 2: Ohuld maybe have you guys take a look at my
Speaker 2: pumpkin patch.
Speaker 7: We're here, We're enough to I've never done anything with pumpkins.
Speaker 2: Pumpkins and I want up with just two. But we
Speaker 2: can talk about it later. I got three kids, so
Speaker 2: this is not going over the well. Yeah, I'm stick
Speaker 2: of doing it. Plug the me Eater Live Show. Let
Speaker 2: me hear you just tear it up.
Speaker 7: With no notes.
Speaker 5: No here here, there's no notes in this documentary Like.
Speaker 2: It just didn't do a very good job of producing.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to spend seventeen minutes on us talking about.
Speaker 2: All is going to do it for speed version.
Speaker 5: If you're looking for something really fun to do in
Speaker 5: December and uh, you live somewhere between Colorado and Philly,
Speaker 5: your luck because meteor.
Speaker 2: Is you know, so it makes like a little line
Speaker 2: across the country.
Speaker 7: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 5: And I know a lot of people are upset from
Speaker 5: the South, Southeast, Texas, other parts of the country because
Speaker 5: they're like, what about us, And we only have so
Speaker 5: much time in our lives.
Speaker 2: And when the pandemic curry you got keep in track
Speaker 2: how long we talk about this before the pandemic. We
Speaker 2: were going out the other direction, but it all got
Speaker 2: canceled because of the pandemic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And we have hit you know, states and cities
Speaker 5: all over the country in the past, and I think
Speaker 5: that in future versions of this, we probably will hit
Speaker 5: the South and we'll hit the West coast. But this
Speaker 5: time around, we're in Denver, Kansas City, Missouri, Davenport, Iowa, Kalamazoo, Michigan, Detroit, Michigan, Cleveland, Ohio, Pittsburgh, PA,
Speaker 5: and Philly, PA. So all VIP tickets are already sold out,
Speaker 5: but there are general admission tickets left. Come and see us,
Speaker 5: go to the mediator dot com. If you want to
Speaker 5: see the dates that we'll be at each one of those,
Speaker 5: it's roughly December sixth through the December fifteenth.
Speaker 2: A lot of great guests lined up. We've got guests
Speaker 2: lined up all or damn place. Kevin Murphy's coming out.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: You're gonna have We're gonna have Wolf, You're gonna have
Speaker 2: We're gonna have a casting contest at every show in
Speaker 2: order to win a seat at the trivia table. How
Speaker 2: long was that? Kran good? M hm, thanks you loving
Speaker 2: that is great. Phil over to Phil speaking of the live show,
Speaker 2: Take it away, Phil.
Speaker 10: I, okay, yeah, very very generous. I think this is
Speaker 10: the third time we've talked about this local community theater
Speaker 10: thing I'm doing.
Speaker 2: Bill is the Thespian.
Speaker 10: This one's for all you and Michigan. Come on out,
Speaker 10: uh Yellen Theater October twentieth doing a show. It's a
Speaker 10: nineteen thirty screwball comedy called you Can't Take It with
Speaker 10: You Jo, Phil, just one, oh no, We're doing six
Speaker 10: or seven shows. It's two weekends, two weekends, long starts.
Speaker 10: The twentieth goes through the twenty ninth.
Speaker 7: Okay, yep, still tickets available.
Speaker 2: There are still some tickets available. Yes, okay, dude. I
Speaker 2: went to a live show the other night and it
Speaker 2: was my one of my favorite bands, but probably the
Speaker 2: worst show I've ever seen, Brian Johnstown Mass And I
Speaker 2: didn't mean to stay. I told my wife I had
Speaker 2: a bunch of friends, not a bunch.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I went down to a bunch of friends and I said, listen,
Speaker 2: I want to have my own car because I'm not staying.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to have a look like I don't
Speaker 2: like you know, I'm gonna have a look, and I'm
Speaker 2: gonna go home. So if you want to stay, drive separate.
Speaker 2: But we all left at the same time early. This
Speaker 2: is a horrible job. Wow. But he said something that's
Speaker 2: been keep me up at night. He said, it's good
Speaker 2: to be back in this part of the country that
Speaker 2: I love so well that teeters between rugged individualism and
Speaker 2: common sense. Please don't let it tip too far? Now?
Speaker 3: Is that why you left early?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 2: But was keep me up at night? Is what way?
Speaker 2: Does he mean that it's tipping? Which is a good way?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like tip, like you know you could read it
Speaker 2: that he doesn't think it should tip too far. In
Speaker 2: either direction because it teeters on the edge or he
Speaker 2: feels that it's tipping.
Speaker 10: Well, the term common sense has scent of connotation. I
Speaker 10: would say, so, my my gut would be he's saying
Speaker 10: it's tipping too far towards rugged individualism.
Speaker 2: He's saying that's not keep me up tonight. Maybe I
Speaker 2: wasn't even in the talking points.
Speaker 5: Maybe he's trying to say that he would like us
Speaker 5: to keep that balance and that we should just hold
Speaker 5: those two qualities near and dear and don't tip out
Speaker 5: of wherever else we might end up.
Speaker 2: Stay on the knife edge. Stay on the knife edge.
Speaker 8: Uh man, he is giving me stink eye.
Speaker 2: This is all great. I don't even know where to begin.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna jump around for a minute. Oh, here's the
Speaker 2: thing I want to talk about. This is a craction
Speaker 2: to a craction. You should will limit it to like
Speaker 2: there'll be a statement, a correction, a correction to a craction,
Speaker 2: a craction to that correction, and then we usually drop it.
Speaker 2: That's what this is. This is where we're at. I
Speaker 2: don't even want to get into it. So number of
Speaker 2: episodes ago I talked about a piece that came out
Speaker 2: I believe in Free Press Barry Weiss's publication Free Press,
Speaker 2: where I have an article coming out, I'll point out, uh,
Speaker 2: and it was a researcher who just written a piece
Speaker 2: about wildfires in California. And he was writing and he
Speaker 2: published it in the journal. Like there's two the two
Speaker 2: most prestigious scientific journals on the planet are Nature and Science.
Speaker 2: You agree, I agree? Okay, he agrees. You ever had
Speaker 2: anything in there?
Speaker 7: They don't like ducks.
Speaker 2: Well, let me give you a tip. You want to
Speaker 2: get something in there, listen to what I'm gonna tell you.
Speaker 2: I'm all yours, he said. He wrote he published in
Speaker 2: Nature about the role of climate change in wildfires in California,
Speaker 2: and then publishing ed saying, if you want to be
Speaker 2: published in Science or Nature, you have to focus exclusively
Speaker 2: on climate. You could all the myriad factors that go
Speaker 2: into wildfires, like why the increase in human caused wildfires,
Speaker 2: forestry practices, the lack of forestry practices leading to wildfires,
Speaker 2: electrical transmission practices leading into wildfires, and he says, no
Speaker 2: one's going to care. If it's climate change, you will
Speaker 2: get published. Then some stuff came out where they revealed
Speaker 2: that in the review process of his article Nature, the
Speaker 2: editors at Nature had said, well, have you factored in
Speaker 2: all this other stuff? And he said, well, I'm going
Speaker 2: to get to it in later research projects. So they
Speaker 2: kind of did like a gotcha, meaning, oh, no, we
Speaker 2: did ask about all of that stuff and he is
Speaker 2: going to get to it later, but we specifically asked
Speaker 2: about all these other factors. Then what came back he said, like,
Speaker 2: but we would have never had that conversation had I
Speaker 2: focused on those other factors. Heffelfinger writes in your discussion
Speaker 2: about climate change writing in Nature confused me when I
Speaker 2: sent you the link to that guy's blog, I didn't
Speaker 2: realize that was exactly the story you were talking about
Speaker 2: in the original procast number four seventy eight. I sent
Speaker 2: you that as supporting information for what you were talking about,
Speaker 2: the positive bias and climate change publishing publishing, which is
Speaker 2: absolutely a rampant problem. Everything he said in that article
Speaker 2: was true completely. I see it all the time when
Speaker 2: researchers are writing a proposal to get a research grant,
Speaker 2: they have to make everything about climate change follow the narrative.
Speaker 2: That's where the money is. A study on summer precipitation
Speaker 2: on elkcaff recruitment becomes all about climate change, dry summers.
Speaker 2: The first draft of one of my son's papers from
Speaker 2: his master's degree mentioned climate change in six of ten
Speaker 2: sentences in the abstract because his major professor was trying
Speaker 2: to get in a prestigious journal and it has to
Speaker 2: be about climate change to accomplish that. It was simply
Speaker 2: a mule deer fonn survival study in Nevada, and the
Speaker 2: abstract was all about climate change. The narrative. Again, this
Speaker 2: is a huge problem in scientific writing. And he goes on.
Speaker 2: Then he goes on to say, basically, how could you
Speaker 2: have been surprised by the thing that the rabbit don't
Speaker 2: die when it comes to pregnancy test? Because it's an
Speaker 2: Aerosmith I'll point out is Aerosmith's only good song where
Speaker 2: he says, what does he say, because the rabbit done died,
Speaker 2: meaning a pregnancy Right? That's good? Yeah, you're doing well.
Speaker 8: It was the time on that twelve seconds?
Speaker 2: Uh, New Jersey? Can we hit this Krinn?
Speaker 8: Yeah, it'll take a minute.
Speaker 2: Remember when I said my least favorite politician in America
Speaker 2: was New Jersey's Governor Murphy Whoe. I wouldn't know him. No,
Speaker 2: I wouldn know, hi, because I remember when he got
Speaker 2: he was one of those governors that got real, telling
Speaker 2: everybody not to do anything during the pandemic, and then
Speaker 2: he gets caught out in a restaurant without his mask.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyways, he campaigned on shutting down the black bear hunting
Speaker 2: New Jersey, which makes him my least favorite politician in America.
Speaker 2: My current least favorite politician in America is Jay Insley,
Speaker 2: but back then my least favorite politician in America was
Speaker 2: Murphy Well. The New Jersey hunt is back on. The
Speaker 2: New Jersey bear hunts back on New Jersey. Screws with
Speaker 2: the hunters real bad, so they'll do it. They'll do
Speaker 2: a black bear hunt. And when you kill a BlackBerry,
Speaker 2: you have to bring it in. This is quite common
Speaker 2: across pretty much. I can't think a single state where
Speaker 2: you kill a black bear and don't bring the black
Speaker 2: bear and so they can collect some biometric data off it.
Speaker 2: Here in the state we're sitting in right now, in Montana,
Speaker 2: which teeters on the edge of common sense and rugged individualism.
Speaker 2: When you kill a bear, you take it down the
Speaker 2: fishing game. You go into the front office, you say, hey,
Speaker 2: I have a bear. I like to check like a
Speaker 2: biole just to come out. You go on the back.
Speaker 2: You'll do your bear check in privacy. Right, you go
Speaker 2: to in catch kan Alaska, you'll bring your bear in.
Speaker 2: You go to a place you go in in some
Speaker 2: level of privacy, you do your bear check. New Jersey
Speaker 2: when they do a bear hunt, they're like, hear ye,
Speaker 2: hear ye. All bear hunters will have to come walk
Speaker 2: the gauntlet of protesters to publicly register their bear hunt
Speaker 2: while getting was that word we talk about their day
Speaker 2: The mean a cost by getting a costed good job,
Speaker 2: you honest.
Speaker 5: We talk about a lot of words over the years,
Speaker 5: so it's hard to remember the last one.
Speaker 2: But yeah, So it causes all this trouble and all
Speaker 2: these protests and then everybody gets bent out of shape. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: it has the highest density of black bears anywhere. New
Speaker 2: Jersey has the highest density of black bears anywhere in
Speaker 2: the country. So the controversial black bear hunt is back
Speaker 2: on in New Jersey following a Superior Court judge ruling
Speaker 2: that did not favor animal rights groups and de facto murphy.
Speaker 2: Monday mark the first day of the October hunt. So whatever,
Speaker 2: what the hell? Monday was at whatever the hell Monday.
Speaker 4: I think this came out like last week, so this
Speaker 4: is like early October.
Speaker 2: Another is scheduled in December. Hunters brought the bears they
Speaker 2: killed to the Waiting Haam Wildlife Management Area in Newton.
Speaker 2: One limitation is the bears weighing less than seventy five
Speaker 2: pounds can't be harvested.
Speaker 5: Ooh, that's tricky.
Speaker 2: I like that. Oh man, you do well. I like
Speaker 2: it because of the alternative. Because remember what happened last
Speaker 2: time when New Jersey did a bear hunt. Some killed
Speaker 2: that bear pedals that had like the deformed feet. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: everybody liked it because it had no feet. John Muellen,
Speaker 2: who's been on the show twice and I love the
Speaker 2: guy to death. I'd like to strangle him for this,
Speaker 2: rote an obituary of the bear. Great guy, great writer
Speaker 2: wrote an obituary for petals was and it was when
Speaker 2: he when when a hunter killed pebbles, it was reported
Speaker 2: that Pebbles has been pedals had been assassinated. So where
Speaker 2: was I seventy five pounds limit?
Speaker 7: Uh?
Speaker 2: That is tricky. While the officials say the hunt is
Speaker 2: the most effective way to prevent bear and human encounters
Speaker 2: in densely populated in New Jersey. I can't remember how
Speaker 2: many bear complaints they had.
Speaker 4: Well, well, so New Jersey resumed hunting in twenty twenty
Speaker 4: two or bear hunting and so last year due to
Speaker 4: reports of the animals causing property damage and being a nuisance,
Speaker 4: with reports of those up nearly two hundred and forty
Speaker 4: percent since the previous year twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a lot. Flora's going to face a similar
Speaker 2: situation Florida to try to bear hunt. They ran it
Speaker 2: very conservatively. Everything went right, but they blew past their
Speaker 2: their harvest quarter. Like you if you're doing a hunt
Speaker 2: and you have a harvest quota, a lot of times
Speaker 2: you'll have to you'll check every night. Like let me
Speaker 2: just let's say you have a hunt. You say that
Speaker 2: there's a harvest quote of ten, and you open it
Speaker 2: up in this big area. Well, every day you're counting
Speaker 2: how many things get registered. But the rule is that
Speaker 2: it shuts off in forty eight hours because people need,
Speaker 2: you need time to spread the word, or it shuts
Speaker 2: off in twenty four hours. So Florida hit their quota
Speaker 2: way quicker than they thought. They closed it, but then
Speaker 2: the twenty four hour window made them blow past the quota.
Speaker 2: Everyone had such a conniption. Half the country looked, my
Speaker 2: half looking just like, man, there must be a lot
Speaker 2: of bears. And then the other half looked and be like, man,
Speaker 2: they killed all the bears. Just like different worldviews, right,
Speaker 2: and there's there are they getting? They're gonna take another
Speaker 2: shot at it? I believe in Florida, I don't know
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 4: Can I just jump back to Jersey for a second.
Speaker 4: So we're really only talking about two short weeks, so
Speaker 4: October ninth through the fourteenth and December fourth through the
Speaker 4: ninth as hunting days, so we're not talking about like
Speaker 4: a long season of months and months. So and then
Speaker 4: it's it looks like on the first day of the season,
Speaker 4: one hundred and five.
Speaker 2: Bears were killed on the first day.
Speaker 8: Can they bait out there?
Speaker 2: No way?
Speaker 8: Probably probably not. But and I don't know how. I
Speaker 8: don't know. Statistics sound like sounds like yeah.
Speaker 3: And they don't hibernate over there. Apparently, well, they stay
Speaker 3: up all year. I don't know if in December.
Speaker 2: I bet they go down eventually, they probably intermittently. Maybe
Speaker 2: that's why they.
Speaker 9: Did the December hunt because they know they're.
Speaker 7: The you win this one, we're gonna give you a
Speaker 7: hunt in December.
Speaker 2: Oh, check this stuff out, so everybody knows f HF.
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Speaker 2: see our stuff, you all to see that that we
Speaker 2: wear a lot of f HF binyl rigs, which are
Speaker 2: the best vinyl rigs on the planet. Paul's been in
Speaker 2: the binyl rig game since the binyl rig game began.
Speaker 2: What's funny is our camera guys discovered that they had
Speaker 2: been on wasting all of this real estate on their bodies,
Speaker 2: and so they started wearing binyl rigs to carry their
Speaker 2: junk in it. So nice, Yeah, mos, like I can't
Speaker 2: leave my whole life. I just wasted this area in
Speaker 2: front of my body when I could have had all
Speaker 2: my shit there. So he started wearing binyl rigs and
Speaker 2: just filling the full of batteries and lens wipes and
Speaker 2: whatever stuff you wanted. Like he'll he'll be in some
Speaker 2: restaurant in Paris with a binyl rig on you know,
Speaker 2: filming anyhow. So eventually the FAHF binyl rig morphed into
Speaker 2: like a chest rig, just a gear rig, and FAHF
Speaker 2: now has the waterproof chest rig. So for when you're
Speaker 2: out hunting ducks or I don't know, trap muskrats, you
Speaker 2: got a total waterproof rig, which I guess has been
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Speaker 2: come up your phone and all your stuff still good.
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Speaker 2: out of it. And then the best thing on the planet,
Speaker 2: I don't know how it is one, I guess it's
Speaker 2: fair those cows. Idea the cow pouch, which has changed
Speaker 2: my life because the cow pouch.
Speaker 8: Oh that's what it's short for. I thought it was
Speaker 8: like short for Colbert kid.
Speaker 2: So it's a shell bag, okay, pictures. It's this little
Speaker 2: square shell bag with a hand on it and a zipper.
Speaker 2: You can dump three boxes of shells, like I think,
Speaker 2: you know, it'll hold three boxes of two and three quarters,
Speaker 2: maybe three boxes at three inch. I know because we
Speaker 2: have the bird loads, I can dump twenty Well, okay,
Speaker 2: let me say this. I know for a fact that
Speaker 2: for my kids, I can dump three boxes of twenty
Speaker 2: gage six shot in the bag. It's zips and it's
Speaker 2: like this square little bag. And then it's got a
Speaker 2: slit in it with a clear plastic window. So you
Speaker 2: cut out of the shell box what the hell is
Speaker 2: and slide it in the window and you can got like.
Speaker 2: So there's cameo side panels, there's orange side panels. When
Speaker 2: I organize mine, I know that the orange is upland shells,
Speaker 2: the Campbell's waterfowl shells. Then I took a mark and
Speaker 2: wrote twelve twenty because my kids shoot twenties and I
Speaker 2: shoot a twelve. It's the greatest this year hunting youth duck.
Speaker 2: I took one of those bags, unzipped it, set it
Speaker 2: in front of all the kids, and everybody just shoots
Speaker 2: out of the thing. You're not messing around with boxes
Speaker 2: to get wet and fall apart.
Speaker 4: Cattle pouch, So philm has a lab named after him,
Speaker 4: and Cal is a pouch named after pouch steed.
Speaker 11: I also use that for dog food if I'm doing
Speaker 11: like a day tripper two daily trip, throw dog food
Speaker 11: in there.
Speaker 2: Works out great. I love it. No, it is a great, great,
Speaker 2: great idea. Yeah, it's called Steve Reno, just the same ring. Also,
Speaker 2: dsd's Honker Maximum line available this fall. DSD is Uh.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing about DSD decoys in such demand that,
Speaker 2: like I think, I hear more people are trying to
Speaker 2: I shouldn't say this because works again, DSD. You gotta
Speaker 2: wait in line to get DSD decoys.
Speaker 8: Sometimes because they're so good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I never realized this. People want those decoys, so
Speaker 2: get in line. Well, they're kind of getting all this
Speaker 2: taken care. But just an enormous amount of demand for
Speaker 2: DSD decoys and their Maxima Honker line available this fall,
Speaker 2: and a brand new Maximum Full Bodies Geese full Bodies soon.
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Speaker 2: it sounds like your problems are over. DSD has also
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Speaker 2: the Duck and Goose calls over at Phelps Game Calls Jersey?
Speaker 2: Should we talking about New Jersey?
Speaker 8: More crinn No, we already that was That's I'm joking.
Speaker 2: I have something on ducks. Oh please.
Speaker 9: So I don't know if you guys have seen it yet,
Speaker 9: but there's a meat Eater collab collab call coming out
Speaker 9: from seven thirty seven Duck Calls that is bad to
Speaker 9: the buzzes good. Yes, it the call runs awesome. We've
Speaker 9: we've used their calls for a long time. But Matt
Speaker 9: just got the proof texted to him yesterday. We were
Speaker 9: on a call with those guys yesterday. But that call
Speaker 9: is going to be coming out in November.
Speaker 2: Yet one you got one in your pocket right now?
Speaker 3: I go. It's a limited sneak sneak peek on the picture.
Speaker 9: So there's only going to be a couple hundred of them.
Speaker 9: Oh really, So they're they're going to go like hotcakes
Speaker 9: and no one quick.
Speaker 2: Can you you can buy?
Speaker 3: It's going to.
Speaker 9: Guy that could help you acquire one. Yeah, man, that'd
Speaker 9: be cool. But they're they're awesome.
Speaker 7: So Singler Double it's going to be a single single
Speaker 7: read Yeah, so that'll be coming out early November.
Speaker 2: Yep X party really quickly introduce yourself to you. Come
Speaker 2: on all the time. Have you ever won trivia? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 2: A couple of times. Yeah, a couple of times before,
Speaker 2: a couple of times.
Speaker 11: Well I've I've been on the podcast a couple of times,
Speaker 11: but I haven't. I've only won trivia once.
Speaker 2: Great, was doctor Randall there?
Speaker 6: Doctor Randall was there? Was there? And you want to yeah,
Speaker 6: I want overtime.
Speaker 11: So no, I think the only reason why I'm here
Speaker 11: because I like ducks and I want to talk about
Speaker 11: ducks and learn more about ducks.
Speaker 2: So yeah, this case, he's taking dun pictures. He's like,
Speaker 2: look at all these ducks I killed, and I might
Speaker 2: where just a spot.
Speaker 7: It is a great answer.
Speaker 2: You should be able to black people's numbers based on
Speaker 2: what they text, like filters like gripping grinds. You got
Speaker 2: to like opt in or out for their gripping grands man. Right, Oh,
Speaker 2: what's super cool is the guy right down the road
Speaker 2: in Belgrade, Montana, won the federal duck stamp contest. Have
Speaker 2: you guys heard of this artist before?
Speaker 3: I had not heard of him.
Speaker 2: No, I hadn't either. Chuck Black, He's gonna come on
Speaker 2: the show, but not for a while, right, m.
Speaker 8: H yeah, early early in the new year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was surprised how young you was. I don't
Speaker 2: know what I was picturing. Good for him, you know
Speaker 2: when I was picturing in my head Elliott West.
Speaker 8: He's in his seventies.
Speaker 2: I'll picture Elliott West. But yeah, like so he he uh,
Speaker 2: he's been in this business his whole life. Right, is
Speaker 2: that cracked? I'm asking you?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I mean.
Speaker 8: It looked like he started drawing at least when he
Speaker 8: was a kid.
Speaker 11: And he doesn't do just docs either. He does Kyle's
Speaker 11: Birds Elk Scenic.
Speaker 3: It's incredible landscape stuff.
Speaker 8: Too, Yeah, painting.
Speaker 3: Sorry, This this video that FIL's showing right here kind
Speaker 3: of documents the process, but it also shows him up
Speaker 3: in red rocks, up in Montanne getting the inspiration video
Speaker 3: for this duck. So this duck is actually like a
Speaker 3: Montana duck, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 7: Steve, do you know what kind of duck that is?
Speaker 2: It's pin tail? Okay, just making sure tell you what
Speaker 2: we got. We got a we ate a pintail two
Speaker 2: nights ago that the end just got. He got an
Speaker 2: antelope punt of all things with the proper firearm. That's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 2: So congratulations Chuck blackfirst. So he'll he'll be on next
Speaker 2: year's duck stamp, right. Yeah. Yeah, I was hunting. I
Speaker 2: was hunting and my kids, my boy and my daughter.
Speaker 2: My boy's old enough and my daughter's not old enough.
Speaker 2: And he gets a buck and we get it all
Speaker 2: caught up and we're carrying it and we hit a
Speaker 2: road and I'm like, oh, this world. To go to
Speaker 2: the truck. So I tell the kids you wait here,
Speaker 2: and uh, I'm gonna get the truck. And so they
Speaker 2: want to go up to this little hill to look around.
Speaker 2: I come back a while later. I had to walk
Speaker 2: a mile come back or to be seen some honking horn.
Speaker 2: What the hell happened to him? Al said, Rosie comes
Speaker 2: running over the hill. We got at You got a coyot, Yeah,
Speaker 2: just actually flea ridden this. Yeah, so we got all
Speaker 2: that skinned out. Oh dude, my ears. I had those
Speaker 2: bugs in my ears for the next two days coming
Speaker 2: off that thing. And then on the way out he
Speaker 2: got himself a pintail. Nice, So you had a quite
Speaker 2: nice little mixed bag. It's perfect antelope, coyote, pintail. Uh.
Speaker 2: Can we skip this one?
Speaker 8: Yeah, we can skip the next one too.
Speaker 2: Well. I don't know this is bad news. Can we
Speaker 2: just roll this into the other stuff?
Speaker 8: Mm hmm.
Speaker 12: Head.
Speaker 2: Last year duck hunter numbers on the decline. Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: So there was an uptick and duck hit duck hunter
Speaker 2: numbers during COVID and then an and then a slight
Speaker 2: decline afterward. Right they realized how hard it was. Yeah, kid,
Speaker 2: and they had to go back to work.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, hunters begin Duck hunters drop out at around age seventy,
Speaker 2: which means neither of our presidential candidates are going to
Speaker 2: be duck hunting are in the duck hunting mix. Minnesota
Speaker 2: mallard harvest numbers declining. Now, is this because of there
Speaker 2: aren't as many people out or because of some other issue?
Speaker 2: You guys should be able to answer this. I have a
Speaker 2: theory on it. Go ahead, Okay, let's do around and
Speaker 2: do a round table.
Speaker 11: I think these mallards are just getting smarter and when
Speaker 11: they're migrating through. I think they're just hitting the cities
Speaker 11: and they just become city birds. You obviously can't hunt
Speaker 11: them in the cities, and I think that's where they're going.
Speaker 2: During the golf courses university campus.
Speaker 11: Well, yeah, I mean just like town parks too. Like
Speaker 11: I mean even just driving around Bozeman too. You there's
Speaker 11: a bunch of city birds.
Speaker 6: We'll actually get to that really a little while.
Speaker 2: Great. Uh, I was talking about this with Matt and
Speaker 2: Brady here. We were talking about the way that if
Speaker 2: you go along the I ninety I guess it'd be
Speaker 2: ninety four out there, right, ninety four corridor after Gooseyes,
Speaker 2: has been a running a while, and you see like
Speaker 2: all the places you'd expect to see a goose and
Speaker 2: he's not there. But they're piled up in the weirdest
Speaker 2: little spots basically like they got one foot in the highway.
Speaker 2: They're like sun dudes yard, you know, I mean, like
Speaker 2: a pretty smart approach to it, man.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, that's what I would do if I was
Speaker 9: a goose and all my friends were getting shot, I'd
Speaker 9: hang out somewhere like that for sure, like.
Speaker 2: In the highway media.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, somewhere right on the shoulder.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: What what's fascinating is the the population numbers of mallards
Speaker 3: aren't necessarily down. I mean they kind of do this
Speaker 3: number regardless.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, we've been we've been bound and around right
Speaker 6: with those numbers. I think we went under ten million
Speaker 6: this year, but we the height.
Speaker 7: Was what three three years ago we hit.
Speaker 6: Like thirteen million, fourteen million, and uh. But yeah, they
Speaker 6: basically cycle. A lot of it is cycling with the
Speaker 6: may ponds up in the Dakotas where they where they
Speaker 6: use some of that data to.
Speaker 7: Estimate those numbers.
Speaker 6: But then some interesting aspects is that it looks like
Speaker 6: some mallards are starting to overfly into into areas Nunavate
Speaker 6: territory further north where you're not where we don't have
Speaker 6: anybody checking. But I was moose hunting on the Yukon
Speaker 6: VC border and they were everywhere last year.
Speaker 2: Did you get one? I did?
Speaker 7: It was great. I made my.
Speaker 6: You know, I don't want to talk about that.
Speaker 7: No, no, no.
Speaker 2: I was just holding you say like, well, how big
Speaker 2: was your moose? Yeah?
Speaker 6: You got one?
Speaker 7: Well let's hear about it.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you when you go to Register of
Speaker 2: Moose online. There's a drop down where you enter how
Speaker 2: many brow times it has? Mm hmm. I had to
Speaker 2: go all the way. No, No, you couldn't get there.
Speaker 2: You had to lie to drop down, didn't It ends
Speaker 2: at nine? He just kept going it ends at nine. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I couldn't. The number was not high enough to accommodate
Speaker 2: the brows. Did your bull move ten?
Speaker 6: Wow?
Speaker 2: One more than nine?
Speaker 9: This actually teased back up into the duck number thing.
Speaker 9: So Matt can talk about we we have a theory
Speaker 9: as well that I think.
Speaker 3: Well, and it's more of a question for you know,
Speaker 3: somebody like yourself, phils. So if population numbers continue to
Speaker 3: do this, but hunter harvest numbers are down when you
Speaker 3: look at how they actually gather that data for hunter
Speaker 3: harvest numbers, they use a hip survey, right like everybody
Speaker 3: has to, you know, fill out a hip survey.
Speaker 2: I got two of those sitting on my desk right now.
Speaker 3: Well, here's the thing about a hip survey is they
Speaker 3: don't they they they max you out. They say thirty
Speaker 3: one or more.
Speaker 2: Two hundred yeah, oh is it thirty one or more?
Speaker 2: It's like eight to eleven, thirty one or more.
Speaker 7: I'm so high thirty one plus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, well, well, and most like guys that are
Speaker 3: going hard are thirty one plus. But how do they
Speaker 3: get accurate numbers with thirty one or more?
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me hear the couple. Let me hear a
Speaker 2: couple of stats from this deal that we're looking at,
Speaker 2: and then then we can take off from there. So,
Speaker 2: for the first time in more than a half century,
Speaker 2: mallards were not the most common duck. This is from
Speaker 2: Twin Cities What is this newspap Twin Cities dot com?
Speaker 2: What the hell's at?
Speaker 3: Probably the Pioneer Press or something.
Speaker 2: Okay, for the first time in more than a half century,
Speaker 2: mallards were not the most common duck shop by Minnesota
Speaker 2: waterfowl hunters in twenty twenty two. Okay, Mallards were topped
Speaker 2: by both blue wing teal and ring neck ducks. Mallards
Speaker 2: had been the most harvested duck in the state since
Speaker 2: at least the nineteen sixties, and that's coming from Steve
Speaker 2: Courtz Waterfowl Specials for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Speaker 2: So here's some numbers. One hundred and twenty five eight
Speaker 2: hundred and twelve blueing teal last year, up from eighty
Speaker 2: one thousand, so significant incline from twenty Okay, so we're
Speaker 2: talking about twenty two and twenty one. In twenty one
Speaker 2: eighty one thousand blue I'm rounding. In twenty one you
Speaker 2: had eighty one thousand bluing teal, and twenty two you
Speaker 2: had one hundred and twenty six thousand blueing deal ring necks.
Speaker 2: Check this out. These are like wild fluctuations. Twenty one
Speaker 2: you had twenty nine thousand ring necks, twenty two seventy
Speaker 2: two thousand ring necks. So there you have like over
Speaker 2: two I don't know, two point twenty five whatever the hell.
Speaker 2: The mallard decline is not nearly as like as a percentage.
Speaker 2: The mallard decline is not. It's stark, but it's not
Speaker 2: like as stark as it's other declines. So or other increases.
Speaker 2: So you have those big creases increases then with mallards
Speaker 2: and twenty one eighty four thousand mallards harvested and twenty
Speaker 2: two sixty three thousand mallards harvested, and then wood ducks.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like wood ducks are like wood duck
Speaker 2: number and mallard numbers are like nuts on a dog.
Speaker 2: I mean they're right in tight. Like you add eighty
Speaker 2: four thousand mallards, eighty four thousand wood ducks sixty three
Speaker 2: and twenty two sixty two thousand wood ducks in twenty two.
Speaker 2: That's kind of incredible. Is that just coincidence?
Speaker 6: That's gotta be coincidence, right, So, so the bluing teal.
Speaker 6: The reason that those numbers, my guess is you have
Speaker 6: to look at a weather severity for that that time
Speaker 6: of year, during that entire hunting season.
Speaker 7: My guess is it was a milder season winter.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so those otherwise they split yet exactly so blue
Speaker 6: wings like if they feel a northern wind, they go,
Speaker 6: got it. Like, the only reason that they would stick
Speaker 6: around in Minnesota is it's it's not it's not. The
Speaker 6: weather severity is not long enough and it's not strong
Speaker 6: enough for that to move them. The same thing for
Speaker 6: the ring necks, although ring necks are doing better.
Speaker 2: Now too, got it.
Speaker 6: The interesting part is on the mallard side that could
Speaker 6: be a hunter thing. I would imagine a little bit
Speaker 6: of that where those number because wood ducks are also
Speaker 6: bred in the state. I actually have a wood duck
Speaker 6: project right now in Minnesota trying to ask some of
Speaker 6: those questions. But uh, wood ducks are mostly bred in
Speaker 6: the States, so those numbers shouldn't fluctuate unless hunter hunter
Speaker 6: numbers are a hunter what's the word ate effort is
Speaker 6: not equivalent.
Speaker 2: This throws out this hits Max thing where it says
Speaker 2: it seems more ducks are avoiding Minnesota during their migration,
Speaker 2: at least when most hunters are in the field. M like,
Speaker 2: they fly over Minnesota like peace. They just fly around it.
Speaker 6: I just don't.
Speaker 7: I don't think they do that.
Speaker 2: I've never had for Minnesota hunters so bad, hunter's so
Speaker 2: not bad, hunter's so good. Ducks avoid us.
Speaker 3: Docks will fly over Wisconsin. I've just never been asked
Speaker 3: ever species specific surveying.
Speaker 2: On my hip me neither.
Speaker 3: No, I've never been asked how many ring necks I've killed?
Speaker 2: How many Yorks? Yeah, well they must be doing I mean,
Speaker 2: they got some pretty precise damn numbers. They must be
Speaker 2: doing some kind of uh, they must be doing some
Speaker 2: kind of survey information.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so a lot of those surveys and this is
Speaker 6: one state, right, Yeah, of course those will come from
Speaker 6: wingbe harvest. If anybody knows what I think you guys
Speaker 6: talked about wingb's where you, uh, random number of hunt
Speaker 6: waterfowl hunters in the country are asked to cut off
Speaker 6: a wing and send them.
Speaker 2: In with that for years. One time it was a
Speaker 2: lot of paperwork. It was a lot of envelopes. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you just kept shooting them, didn't you.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, motivated me to hunt more research. I was like,
Speaker 2: I don't want these suckers think I'm no good because
Speaker 2: they sent me all these envelopes. Man, and then they
Speaker 2: would take I'm lazy.
Speaker 6: On top of it, they'll have surveys at all of
Speaker 6: the w m a's or wildlife management areas well. They'll
Speaker 6: be where you have to go in and say and
Speaker 6: they actually check your bag and they're like okay, and
Speaker 6: then they extraple you can.
Speaker 2: Extract, so they do model it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, got it that they.
Speaker 2: Have not like specifically counted all of these ducks.
Speaker 6: I mean, if if I'm in my backwoods shooting wood
Speaker 6: ducks and stuff and nobody's nobody's asking that, because you're right,
Speaker 6: the only other survey direct survey is just a general
Speaker 6: number of how many ducks did you shoot?
Speaker 2: Which is the hip.
Speaker 12: Uh.
Speaker 2: Can I tell you quick thing about wood ducks. It's interesting.
Speaker 2: One time when I was a kid, Uh, we would
Speaker 2: hunt wood ducks in their roost ponds that night. M hmm,
Speaker 2: and uh with a baby. I don't mean at night,
Speaker 2: but I mean like it'd be you know, I'd hate
Speaker 2: to go there now and with a game warden and
Speaker 2: have them with a watch. You don't know what time
Speaker 2: it was. I mean I do remember, like we're like,
Speaker 2: you know, just it just was different. I don't know,
Speaker 2: we just weren't aware of stuff. But I do remember
Speaker 2: like marveling at the sparks coming out.
Speaker 6: Of the the marl shot first light, last light.
Speaker 2: Right right at the end. Man, and it'd be uh, yeah,
Speaker 2: you'd be out with a flashlight trying to find down ducks.
Speaker 2: But it'd be like a great way to ruin a spot.
Speaker 2: That we had enough spots that you know, we keep
Speaker 2: real busy for like five six days and we just
Speaker 2: blow every spot because it just ruins it. However, one
Speaker 2: time we were cleaning wood ducks and had a wood duck.
Speaker 2: Check this out. You know what his crop had in it?
Speaker 2: What is it? A bunch of salmon eggs.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's down.
Speaker 2: In the creek picking up salmon spawn.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's amazing. That you're you're so I don't know that.
Speaker 6: So I have a study look at using DNA from
Speaker 6: poop of ducks to do diet. We're trying to do
Speaker 6: a different way the original ways you go out, you
Speaker 6: shoot like two hundred birds, you figure out what they eat,
Speaker 6: like kind of like cropping outs. But instead we're using
Speaker 6: DNA analyzing of the feces and we're getting and we're
Speaker 6: matching up pretty well so far with like crop, but
Speaker 6: we're getting a ton of ton of the vege that
Speaker 6: you can't analyze because it's green veg. But the other
Speaker 6: thing that keeps coming up is is fish fish keeping
Speaker 6: with all the ducks. And my hypothesis right now is
Speaker 6: that it's bycatch. Right, fish are putting eggs on all
Speaker 6: the vege and they're eating the vege there and they're
Speaker 6: taking it as bye catch.
Speaker 2: There's no way that they're fish eggs. Oh oh, this
Speaker 2: was like a full fish. No, you know what a
Speaker 2: salmon egg looks like. Yeah, no, no, this isn't. This
Speaker 2: isn't by catch.
Speaker 6: I understand that might be like actually target because Mallard's orange,
Speaker 6: I understand.
Speaker 2: I understand, But you're thinking he's trying to eat weeds
Speaker 2: and catching fish or fish eggs.
Speaker 7: Fish eggs, eggs, eggs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we keep coming up with yeah, that was
Speaker 2: pissed for a minute. I'm with you, no eggs, eggs.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but they're in everything, gadwell, wigeon, everything we've been
Speaker 6: studying to star though. Yeah, it's a complete different calorie
Speaker 6: count that we've never really considered as far as I'm
Speaker 6: as I as I see it. So it's kind of
Speaker 6: interesting that it's that I'm the woody. I'm sure maybe
Speaker 6: mistakenly got them, which is interesting in itself. But we've
Speaker 6: had mallards on bad diet in Minnesota. There's a paper
Speaker 6: out there, I think it's Minnesota where they would go
Speaker 6: into salmon ponds and actually catch some of the like
Speaker 6: fry Oh.
Speaker 2: No good, Yeah, Okay, Now, why do you think that
Speaker 2: a duck isn't Why do you think that a duck
Speaker 2: isn't selecting for vegetation that's coated in eggs.
Speaker 7: That's a good question. I don't know. I just don't think.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't know. I mean, they could be,
Speaker 6: but it would be.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 6: It just wouldn't make sense right now, I guess I
Speaker 6: don't know.
Speaker 7: I mean, they you're saying.
Speaker 6: You're telling me they're like looking around at the veget like, Oh,
Speaker 6: that one's got a whole bunch of eggs.
Speaker 7: I'm going to eat that.
Speaker 2: Yes, they could do that. Well, I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 2: that's what I'm saying. That's what I mean, That's what
Speaker 2: I would be wondering.
Speaker 6: Because I mean, nobody's really tested the Colorado baby is
Speaker 6: calorie rich.
Speaker 2: I need to dive down and get that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because you've got you've got things like Widgeon that
Speaker 6: are specialists on just veg right, so they're not even
Speaker 6: omnivorous really and so and they're still picking it up.
Speaker 7: So that's got to be bycatch.
Speaker 6: But you're right, I mean, this is completely new like
Speaker 6: that we that every time we analyze something. Fish is
Speaker 6: like ninety percent in all in all of the feces.
Speaker 6: And what's that ninety percent? You said, Yeah, like of
Speaker 6: the samples we've collected, and that's you know, we focus
Speaker 6: on Mallards, Mexican ducks, Model ducks because it's in Texas,
Speaker 6: but we have sample you know, Wigeon, Gadwell, other stuff
Speaker 6: that that we've sampled.
Speaker 3: It's in ninety percent. It's not ninety percent of.
Speaker 6: The Oh yeah, it's in ninety percent of the samples, right,
Speaker 6: so that's a hot that's that's some amount of fish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, god it You know remember when, uh, when they
Speaker 2: banned lead shot for waterfowl, which have been what like
Speaker 2: eighty eighty It was a good old ninety two when
Speaker 2: the band led for waterfall.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the legislation was late eighties and then it finally
Speaker 6: went into effects states.
Speaker 2: Ahead of it though it was when Kirk Cobain died.
Speaker 7: Yeah, right around that.
Speaker 2: I don't know those are linked checks out. Uh. I
Speaker 2: used to tell people, but my understanding was that that
Speaker 2: they would the reason ducks were ingesting a lot of shots,
Speaker 2: they were picking it up as grit for their crop.
Speaker 7: That's correct, Okay, that is Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've heard other people say no, no, no, no, they're just
Speaker 2: getting it. No, no, they would, they were going they
Speaker 2: would pick shot for their crop.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And there's been plenty of studies that showcase that
Speaker 6: that it's all it's all accidental pickup because they're going
Speaker 6: to get rock, right, grit, and it just the amount
Speaker 6: of lead shot at that time that was at the surface,
Speaker 6: you know, at the surface of the lake, sediment was
Speaker 6: really high so they were the probability of picking it
Speaker 6: up was really high. But then they did several studies
Speaker 6: where they just basically turned the sediment over and all
Speaker 6: of a sudden they don't pick it up. And then
Speaker 6: obviously when the lead band went into effect, there was
Speaker 6: studies ten years later, you know, two years later, five
Speaker 6: years later, ten years later, and constant decline of lead
Speaker 6: in in waterfowl. So because the sediment kept.
Speaker 2: Bearing, the lead settled down.
Speaker 6: So now all the leads way down there for someone
Speaker 6: else to have a problem with later on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, speaking of ducks eating stuff, I was always amazed
Speaker 5: as a fishing guy. You'd be out there during just
Speaker 5: an amazing hatch. I think it used to mostly be midges,
Speaker 5: I think, or mayflies, not so much the caddis, but
Speaker 5: you'd see those ducks get into an eddy where all
Speaker 5: those bugs will be getting caught, and they would just
Speaker 5: be pounding away and he'd be like, oh, I thought
Speaker 5: you just state like white bread and let us leap.
Speaker 3: But well, the salmon fly hatch for the geese, I
Speaker 3: mean you watch those like during the salmon fly hatch, oh,
Speaker 3: you see those big broods of geese up on the
Speaker 3: bank shores, they're just smashing salmon flies. Oh yeah, like
Speaker 3: if you ever hit the samfly hatch right, which is
Speaker 3: incredibly challenging regardless.
Speaker 2: Like on Canada geese, Yeah, feeding on those.
Speaker 3: Oh you see whole brute. I mean you'll have you know,
Speaker 3: eight groups of groups of eight or whatever, and they're
Speaker 3: just smashing those those salmon flies. But I mean sam flies.
Speaker 2: I'm not a squeamish man. Yeah, but when you open
Speaker 2: up a crop, I'd never like to see. Uh. I
Speaker 2: don't like to see I don't like to see critters. Yeah,
Speaker 2: especially because they're still live. You know. It's like yeah,
Speaker 2: I was like, dude, come on some clover the right
Speaker 2: over there. I don't need to see all this. It's
Speaker 2: upset my meal plan. Phil. How'd you get interested in ducks?
Speaker 7: Duck hunting?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so now walk me through. Take me back to Russia.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was cold.
Speaker 2: You never want a ducks in Russia because.
Speaker 6: You're probably yeah, we were.
Speaker 2: I was so you were born in Russia in Moscow
Speaker 2: talking Russian?
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, so my parents the way in Russia it works,
Speaker 6: you know, you just drop your child off in the
Speaker 6: middle of the woods and if they come back, it's okay. Yep, Yeah,
Speaker 6: that's what happened. It was January, so it's cold, but
Speaker 6: I made it. No, So we were we we got
Speaker 6: over to the States in eighty nine, and I think
Speaker 6: I was telling you, uh, the choice of two evils,
Speaker 6: Los Angeles and New York.
Speaker 2: And because you guys just weren't into the whole Russia.
Speaker 6: Scene, correct, Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 6: if you know. Note this, but a lot of Russians
Speaker 6: fall out of windows occasionally, just my chance and bears
Speaker 6: every time.
Speaker 2: Sure as we just learned with when why did name
Speaker 2: he was the most interesting man in the world for
Speaker 2: a few.
Speaker 9: Days the leader progosen Yeah, airplanes.
Speaker 2: Said like progos, and everybody's like, I wouldn't go near
Speaker 2: an open window. Sure enough.
Speaker 6: So yeah, anyway, so we got over, uh, and then
Speaker 6: my folks obviously had to work. And but then eventually
Speaker 6: my dad finally got enough cash and bought a shotgun
Speaker 6: and we went.
Speaker 2: Because how did he How was he even aware that
Speaker 2: hunting was a thing? This is the thing I was
Speaker 2: because my dad was raised by Italian immigrants, and the
Speaker 2: journey of becoming even aware that this is like a
Speaker 2: thing you can engage in is interesting, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So the interesting thing is Los Angeles has a lot
Speaker 6: of really great sporting plays area and he shot I mean,
Speaker 6: he hunted in Russia, so we wanted.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 6: So he wanted to do it, so he kind of
Speaker 6: got it. We started going to some of the sporting
Speaker 6: clays areas. Eventually I competed there and and then.
Speaker 2: Really, yeah, how good are you?
Speaker 6: I'm thirty one plus on ducks every year.
Speaker 2: So that's pretty good. Yeah, he quits at Yeah.
Speaker 6: So there's a place called Sultan Seed, do you know
Speaker 6: what that That's where I grew So that's where we
Speaker 6: started hunting, mostly dove initially, and then uh started to
Speaker 6: hunt ducks. And that's where I shot my first dove
Speaker 6: when I was ten with my dad's twelve gage and
Speaker 6: I was probably the most expensive shot ever because you know,
Speaker 6: that set my entire life forward of putting a lot
Speaker 6: of money into this sport. And then we started hunting
Speaker 6: ducks and I loved it. I mean that's what we did.
Speaker 6: I didn't really get into big game because California is
Speaker 6: a hard place, especially without without private property and knowing
Speaker 6: people and all the time.
Speaker 2: I have a little bit of a hard time believing it.
Speaker 6: Look, I hunted a zone a ton. The only thing
Speaker 6: I got was a two by one. All those years,
Speaker 6: I was real proud and you should have been. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and it's it's just hard. And also my dad hunted
Speaker 6: big game Russian style, which is a lot more drive
Speaker 6: driving with shotguns.
Speaker 2: There's no right, I'll say, with those giant Soviet helicopters.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, first one of those.
Speaker 6: So it was completely different, right the way big game
Speaker 6: hunting here is. So I didn't really get into it
Speaker 6: until like fourteen fifteen. So until then I was I
Speaker 6: was duck hunting most weekends in LA. I was mostly
Speaker 6: I would tell them I'm just fishing because apparently fishing
Speaker 6: is okay, hunting not so much.
Speaker 2: So, so like when you had to explain where you'd been.
Speaker 7: Yeah, where were you this week? I was fishing, yeah.
Speaker 6: And so yeah, so I got into it, and then
Speaker 6: that sort of set my tone forward. I went to
Speaker 6: undergrad at UC Davis up in Sacramento. One of the
Speaker 6: reasons I went there besides getting in the hunting ducks yeah, uh,
Speaker 6: sack refuge and all of that is there. So it's
Speaker 6: great hunting.
Speaker 2: So did you know you're gonna be a duck researcher.
Speaker 2: At that point, I didn't.
Speaker 6: I thought I was going to be the guy in
Speaker 6: Jurassic Park that brings back all the dinosaurs. But then,
Speaker 6: and that's why I'm a geneticist.
Speaker 2: Oh you were interested in that? Oh yeah, do you
Speaker 2: remain interested in that?
Speaker 6: I I am, but it's impossible. Although well so I'm on.
Speaker 7: I'm part of.
Speaker 2: The way. My kids understand it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, so it's gonna be interesting.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So I'm on the board with a Reviving Restore as
Speaker 6: well as Colossal, the ones trying to bring back the mammoth.
Speaker 2: Are you on the advisory panel or the board?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 6: Advisory just like science, especially in fact, there's a meeting
Speaker 6: right now that I'm missing. But that's okay, that's good. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so I am interested in it. But to be fair,
Speaker 6: I got into fisheries at UC Davis. So I was
Speaker 6: doing trout Sacramento Purge, doing genetics on them, creating uh
Speaker 6: captive breeding programs for releases and stuff like that, looking
Speaker 6: at hybridation between red bands and rainbows and all this,
Speaker 6: and then I realized, like, I like talking about fish,
Speaker 6: but I really like talking about ducks. And so for
Speaker 6: graduate school, I went to Ohio at Wright State University.
Speaker 6: There was a guy there had the money that I needed.
Speaker 6: I told me I could do whatever I want, and
Speaker 6: it was perfect and the only the only difference is
Speaker 6: that I became a white tail hunter for a little
Speaker 6: while while in Ohio. I never understood this field hunting situation.
Speaker 6: Eventually I figured it out.
Speaker 7: But it wasn't for me.
Speaker 6: I like, I like the gop in wetlands and calling
Speaker 6: big spreads these types of things. But yeah, so, and
Speaker 6: that's where I dove into waterfowl research, primarily mallard complex.
Speaker 6: So I don't know if you know this. There are
Speaker 6: fourteen species of mallard like ducks all around the world.
Speaker 6: Here in North America we have the mallard, American black duck,
Speaker 6: two types of model duck Florida and West Golf Coast,
Speaker 6: and the Mexican duck.
Speaker 2: And those are all real tight sister species.
Speaker 6: Yeah genetically. Yeah, so those are the most recent recently
Speaker 6: diverged groups.
Speaker 7: So they diverged about half a million years ago.
Speaker 6: The rest of the group the African black duck, yellow
Speaker 6: bill duck, mallards duck in Africa, a couple spot build
Speaker 6: ducks in Asia, Pacific, black duck, New Zealand, gray duck,
Speaker 6: hawine duck, Laysan duck. Those are more old than about
Speaker 6: million two million year old divergence. Yeah, so I started
Speaker 6: diving deep into it, and we're gonna start getting into
Speaker 6: some some of this stuff that I am interested in.
Speaker 6: But more or less, what I do is I take
Speaker 6: genetic information, I ask questions in the evolutionary side, trying
Speaker 6: to get into nature, you.
Speaker 7: Know, you know, and now I know climate change.
Speaker 6: And then uh, but but I'm really big on management, right, so,
Speaker 6: and it's taken me over a decade to show how
Speaker 6: genetics can play in management, uh more applied aspects. And
Speaker 6: so how that kind.
Speaker 2: Of what you mean by that?
Speaker 6: That means, Uh, when I talk about genetics to a
Speaker 6: bunch of wildlifers, they usually like roll their eyes back
Speaker 6: and they're like, oh, this is gonna be abou drosophilo
Speaker 6: or mice or something like that, because that's that's what
Speaker 6: they've known what genetics is. And so they are just like,
Speaker 6: that's not applied. You know, band recoveries, telemetry units, you know,
Speaker 6: habitat server, that's applied. That's right, uh. And so and
Speaker 6: so you know, we finally come to this time point
Speaker 6: where these new methods that I was part of developing,
Speaker 6: developing and kind of bringing to the forefront. Lots of
Speaker 6: people use some of the methods that I do, but
Speaker 6: what it does is it allows us to get a
Speaker 6: snapshot of a genome of every individual for low cost
Speaker 6: and very quick. The turnaround times are quick quick enough
Speaker 6: that data can be attained within months and can go
Speaker 6: into models or anything else and actually feed feed into
Speaker 6: decision making. Before you know genetics, you go out, you
Speaker 6: shoot a bunch of birds or collect them from hunters,
Speaker 6: and sometimes it would take five six years just to
Speaker 6: get the data. It was hard. Computationally we weren't there.
Speaker 6: Methodologically we weren't there. But thankfully when I was coming up,
Speaker 6: all of that computers, sequencing technology, all of that kind
Speaker 6: of like came to a point where we were able
Speaker 6: to do some real world questions and applications with And
Speaker 6: obviously I did it on ducks. But if you look
Speaker 6: at what I've done, I've anybody anything that's got DNA
Speaker 6: and some money.
Speaker 7: You know, we work on So.
Speaker 2: Can you run test real cheap?
Speaker 6: When I send you bones, bones, bones are gonna be Yeah,
Speaker 6: how old are those bones?
Speaker 7: Ancient, ancient bones.
Speaker 2: I'd like them to be a lot of times are not.
Speaker 2: I would have to I've gotten some disappointing results. So
Speaker 2: but it was so deep.
Speaker 6: So we uh, the best we've done, and I would
Speaker 6: have to go to my Smithsonian colleagues is because they've
Speaker 6: got an ancient lab there where we work. And we
Speaker 6: did a one thousand, five hundred to one thousand year
Speaker 6: old bones out of Hawaii.
Speaker 7: Duck bones.
Speaker 6: And the fun part about this, in the same cave
Speaker 6: where Polynesians were eating, there was a laysand duck, a
Speaker 6: Hawaiian duck, and something they thought was a Hawaiian duck
Speaker 6: based on the bone morphology, turned out to be a
Speaker 6: northern shoveler from a lot of really yeah.
Speaker 2: And then they have butcher marks on the bones.
Speaker 7: I don't know. I didn't get to look at them.
Speaker 6: Oh uh no. Yeah, So so we sort of So
Speaker 6: the paper that where we're going right now, so something
Speaker 6: that we can do we've got to study, hopefully published
Speaker 6: in a year or so as we finish up. But
Speaker 6: we've got mallards now sampled from eighteen hundred to today
Speaker 6: across space time.
Speaker 2: Really yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So so where'd you get there.
Speaker 2: Where'd you get the eighteen hundred mallard from?
Speaker 6: They're from twenty seven partnering National Museum, So thank you all.
Speaker 2: Oh did you get anything from Cornell? We did, dude,
Speaker 2: we went to Cornell. We were at Cornell and they
Speaker 2: opened his door and we're in their their bird collection thing,
Speaker 2: and so you know, I asked, like, what apparently everybody
Speaker 2: in the planet asks, is you guys got any passenger pigeons? No,
Speaker 2: not passed with the helmet was yeah, yeah, and an
Speaker 2: Ivory built woodpecker. Everybody asked about the same birds so
Speaker 2: much to keep them the same drawer. They're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: here's a drawer that like every like idiot wants to
Speaker 2: look into and they open it up and it's a
Speaker 2: passenger pigeons, ivybuilt woodpecker. Who else is in there? Just
Speaker 2: like the ones, the ones where people are like, uh,
Speaker 2: extinct species.
Speaker 6: Let me think for a minute, they have a labor.
Speaker 2: I think it was in that. I think that it
Speaker 2: might have been in that thing. It was crazy man
Speaker 2: to hold one in the ivybuilt woodpecker. I used to
Speaker 2: dog on people, you know, when people are are like,
Speaker 2: oh I saw an ivorybuild woodpecker. And then they come
Speaker 2: out and be like, oh, you idiot, it was a
Speaker 2: appiliated woodpecker. Well, listen, I know a lot of people
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time out with out in the woods.
Speaker 2: I could have laid that down in the woods and
Speaker 2: they would have said, oh, appiated woodpecker. It's not it's
Speaker 2: very That is an excusable mistake. But point being, I
Speaker 2: bet they got some feathers if you hadn't thought of this.
Speaker 6: No, we're your genes, I suggested to a reviving restore.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about the mallards. They probably got some old
Speaker 2: ass mallards.
Speaker 7: Oh they do.
Speaker 6: We got eight of them. They're supposed to ship them.
Speaker 6: So we're doing we'd finished all the genetics. We're doing morphology,
Speaker 6: so we're doing three D scanning of their heads to
Speaker 6: look at change and bill. So they're feeding mechanism. And
Speaker 6: I'll explain why this is so important across time and space.
Speaker 2: You've no doubt read the book The Beak of the Finch.
Speaker 2: I have not, really. Yeah, well you might be like
Speaker 2: it might be too elementary for you.
Speaker 7: Yeah, probably, Yeah, we'll go with that.
Speaker 2: No, The Beak of the Finch, it's about how you
Speaker 2: can watch the bill size on finches. They you can
Speaker 2: watch the beak size on finches change in the Glopagos.
Speaker 2: You can like, I don't want to say in real time,
Speaker 2: but I mean it's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 6: The Grants husband and wife group watched a new species
Speaker 6: evolve since they started studying Darwin's finches.
Speaker 7: On the galop Goos.
Speaker 6: What happened was two species came on one island bread
Speaker 6: made this thing what we call a hybrid. But the
Speaker 6: hybrid was so distinct from its parents the way the
Speaker 6: types of food that they ate, that thirty years later
Speaker 6: genetically they were just their own now, their own own thing.
Speaker 2: That's what Yeah, Okay, this book might detail for a
Speaker 2: layman the research, but it was these birds are colonizing
Speaker 2: a new area with different food resources, and as they
Speaker 2: come in and they're like whatever, they're trying to get
Speaker 2: into a seed that's a harder shellacked because they're in
Speaker 2: an area they hadn't been before. And you can watch
Speaker 2: selective pressures on those birds and watch their beaks change
Speaker 2: as they become accustomed to and have selective pressures applied around.
Speaker 2: Who's really good at getting seeds and that?
Speaker 6: And then you know, I think I had this conversation
Speaker 6: another podcast about like.
Speaker 7: Evolution, another podcasts, what others? There's others really.
Speaker 6: Anyways, like people are like, oh, evolution, what's that? Honestly,
Speaker 6: the only the only name of the game and nature
Speaker 6: and what evolution is is be as good or better
Speaker 6: than everybody else. Right, So all you're trying to do
Speaker 6: is limit competition, and the good or better is that
Speaker 6: you either survive better and or have more babies.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 6: The more babies you have, the more genes that are
Speaker 6: on the landscape, and thus you're winning. And so nature
Speaker 6: in island systems like the Galapagos are so interesting because
Speaker 6: it's so fast there, right, the pressures are like nope,
Speaker 6: you didn't eat, you die. That's that's what we call
Speaker 6: a selective pressure of one where it's like no, those
Speaker 6: genes are gone. And so it's so much faster for
Speaker 6: adaptations to arise or go extinct because the ecology changes
Speaker 6: so quickly and everything.
Speaker 2: God's going somewhere with that those I don't know hmm, oh, no,
Speaker 2: I want need to ask you. I want to get
Speaker 2: to this whole thing with mallards and mallard like when
Speaker 2: you let pretend ducks go. Yeah, Okay, I want to
Speaker 2: get to that, but give me an example of how
Speaker 2: genetics could play into management. Like, I don't get it, Like,
Speaker 2: give me a concrete, specific example of how genetic analysis
Speaker 2: would play into management.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so I'll give you a study that we're doing
Speaker 6: right now. So, the model ducks on the West Golf
Speaker 6: Coast have been declining in size.
Speaker 2: Okay, slow that down, say that again.
Speaker 6: Model ducks on the Gulf Coast regions of Texas and Louisiana, Ghostly,
Speaker 6: Texas have been declining and the surveys they were doing.
Speaker 6: But at the same time in West Texas, so the
Speaker 6: brush country of West Texas.
Speaker 7: Have you been there?
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 7: Does e Averynthy know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 2: Lots of ran that Johnny Cash song. I've been everywhere, man.
Speaker 6: That's me and ya in America, in America, America. Uh
Speaker 6: and anyway. So there's a bunch of brown looking birds.
Speaker 6: So if you've never looked at a model duck, it's
Speaker 6: a it's a brown looking mallard.
Speaker 2: People.
Speaker 6: Yeah, everybody's like people mistake them, right, Yeah. But the
Speaker 6: Texas Parks and Wildlife wants to do surveys to be like, Okay,
Speaker 6: is this a population crash are the population shifting? And
Speaker 6: for that they needed to know what the heck these
Speaker 6: things are from an aerial perspective. So then they contacted me,
Speaker 6: and what we did was we took We took birds.
Speaker 7: We collected.
Speaker 6: In fact, you were having a discussion about does anybody
Speaker 6: go out scientific collecting with a shotgun anymore?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, with your fowling piece.
Speaker 6: That's that's what we do in May. So we go out,
Speaker 6: I'm free. Yeah.
Speaker 11: Does that count in the survey?
Speaker 2: Do you put down.
Speaker 7: Extra?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 6: So, so we need to have breeding pairs, right, So
Speaker 6: we took hunter harvest. We took out anything we could,
Speaker 6: but we needed also what is breeding in this landscape?
Speaker 6: So we went all the way from I'm from Texas,
Speaker 6: but I don't know anything about Texas, so like Dallas
Speaker 6: all the way to the Mexico Texas border, right, ye.
Speaker 6: And so because there's another situation happening. Mexican ducks, which
Speaker 6: is another type of mallard like duck, are expanding out
Speaker 6: of Mexico nor kind of like a bomb out of
Speaker 6: Mexico into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. There's even breeding pairs
Speaker 6: that we genetically that in Colorado.
Speaker 2: Was fly right over the wall.
Speaker 6: They just imagine that thought they would dig under anyway.
Speaker 6: So we did this, So we went from one end
Speaker 6: to the other and lo and behold, both of them
Speaker 6: came in because and so on the one side, if
Speaker 6: you get all the way to about San Antonio and
Speaker 6: you draw a line model ducks, then something that we
Speaker 6: didn't expect but hypothesize model duck Mexican duck hybrids in
Speaker 6: this tiny band, and then all of a sudden, just
Speaker 6: Mexican ducks. So they're both coming in and interbreeding in
Speaker 6: this location.
Speaker 2: So the model ducks are declining, but what's replacing them
Speaker 2: is is.
Speaker 6: High modeled duck, more model ducks and potentially these hybrids.
Speaker 2: So we did, what do you call the hybrids a.
Speaker 7: Mexican duck, model duck hybrid, Mexican.
Speaker 2: Model Okay, what do you call it? Two generations later,
Speaker 2: So that's what.
Speaker 6: So we're looking at how many generations they can interbreed.
Speaker 6: It seems like we're picking up back crosses, which means
Speaker 6: like geographically, if you're closer to the model duck group,
Speaker 6: you back cross into model duck and you become more
Speaker 6: and more model duck. Is on the other end, close
Speaker 6: to the Mexican border, their back crossing into Mexican ducks
Speaker 6: and so they become more Mexican duck like. But there's
Speaker 6: this band, this this really narrow what we call con
Speaker 6: tack zone where there it's just hybrids, which is completely new.
Speaker 2: But they're totally healthy there as far.
Speaker 6: So that's that's part of the diet analysis. With the feces,
Speaker 6: We're looking at bill morphology, muscle fiber morphology to understand
Speaker 6: can they still fly the same, do they feed the same?
Speaker 6: What you know? Is there anything that would suggest these
Speaker 6: are less adapted than their parents?
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 6: So anyway, so the point of this, how to get
Speaker 6: back to your question, how does genetics uh provide applied aspects?
Speaker 6: So that data right, So I plot all that on
Speaker 6: a map so everybody understands what's happening. That data is
Speaker 6: now fed back to Texas Parks and Wildlife to say, okay,
Speaker 6: we need to go in these regions to ban because
Speaker 6: our probability of getting a model duck, because that's what
Speaker 6: we care about, is really high, and so we're going
Speaker 6: to ban there. But on top of it, they're shifting.
Speaker 6: They're going to be shifting surveys over and start counting
Speaker 6: those ducks. So again, a population decline versus a population
Speaker 6: rain shift have very different management implications.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Right, So this is how it's feeding into that. And
Speaker 6: we've got studies in Hawaii, Arizona, all American Samoa doing
Speaker 6: similar things, trying to tell them what they're working with
Speaker 6: and how the genetics plays on the landscape.
Speaker 2: Here's a question about genetics and how it's applied. Manage
Speaker 2: it be. I'll start with a story years ago, almost
Speaker 2: been in the early nineties. I was hunting ducks on
Speaker 2: the Saint Mary's River, which separates Michigan's Upper Peninsula from Canada.
Speaker 2: And I remember getting checked by state and federal game warden, right,
Speaker 2: I remember I had. I was like, I'm sitting there
Speaker 2: with the hen Mallard and I remember they're going, what
Speaker 2: kind of duck is that? Yeah? And I was like
Speaker 2: the fact that he asked me that makes me think
Speaker 2: that that's not what I think it is. So I'm
Speaker 2: Michael Black duck good. You know, that's sure. I only
Speaker 2: said that because you brought it up. So if oftentimes
Speaker 2: you'll find when people are pointing out endemics, they're pointing
Speaker 2: out hybrids. It's like they're they're really down to the
Speaker 2: nats ass and they're like parsing things out that to
Speaker 2: a layman, they might not even.
Speaker 6: Notice if you if you don't know what you're looking for.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you had to take like duck knowledge,
Speaker 2: like average duck knowledge, I know, yeah, and then you
Speaker 2: put it on a spectrum of one to ten. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and you got to be like a ten point five
Speaker 2: to go down to this place in Texas and pick
Speaker 2: up one of those ducks and be wait a minute,
Speaker 2: this is a modeled Mexican Mexican hybrid or would it
Speaker 2: just be to a duck hunter, it would just be like.
Speaker 6: It would be called a dusky duck, because that's what
Speaker 6: they call him right now. So Texas, Texas, I think
Speaker 6: Arizona has a dusky duck limit and it's usually one
Speaker 6: or two. And they just say anything that's equivalent to
Speaker 6: a black duck, a model duck, a Mexican duck.
Speaker 7: I'll go here now, New Mexico.
Speaker 2: They're bundling black ducks, model ducks, dusky ducks. I'm sorry, Mexican.
Speaker 2: What's what's the name Mexican Mexican duck. It's just the
Speaker 2: Mexican ducky Mexican duck. That a black duck.
Speaker 7: Yeah, all I want.
Speaker 2: They're just calling them all dusky.
Speaker 6: That's that's in the game game rules. Yeah, that's in
Speaker 6: the hunting REGs. Uh.
Speaker 2: And so, so sell me on this, Sell me on
Speaker 2: the what you're talking about here, like the Mallard thing
Speaker 2: that we're gonna get to. I get. But sell me
Speaker 2: on why this matters.
Speaker 6: Oh well, I mean this would matter if we don't
Speaker 6: any If model ducks are declining at the rates that
Speaker 6: they are in the Gulf Coast region, then Texas Parks
Speaker 6: and Wildlife is probably gonna have to make some serious decisions.
Speaker 2: But they're being replaced by right.
Speaker 6: But if they're not, they're being replaced, which we didn't know,
Speaker 6: so now we have to understand. All right, so they're
Speaker 6: being replaced. They're not being replaced, they're making more. Right,
Speaker 6: that's what a contact zone. They keep coming together and
Speaker 6: it's like fringe. They're at the fringe of both of
Speaker 6: their ranges. And this is what happens. It's kind of
Speaker 6: like a growler grizzly polars on the fringes are starting
Speaker 6: to yeah, are starting to interbreed more and more. Right,
Speaker 6: And so now it's a question of all right, Like,
Speaker 6: so we have this situation not only do my maps
Speaker 6: allow people who are really interested in hybrids go there,
Speaker 6: but also that it dictates, all right, so what do
Speaker 6: we do with these types of birds? So Texas Parks
Speaker 6: and Wildlife may have to have additional season or additional
Speaker 6: inform for those areas, those regional areas. On top of it,
Speaker 6: how do what do they mean towards model duck or
Speaker 6: Mexican duck conservation? Like, how do they count towards those numbers?
Speaker 6: I can't tell you because they're the ones making the
Speaker 6: rules and I'll leave them to that. But we're there
Speaker 6: to supply the information, the maps, the idea, the knowledge
Speaker 6: of what's occurring on the landscape, and they can then
Speaker 6: use that to make better decisions outside of just being
Speaker 6: like they're all brown ducks, I guess it's let's.
Speaker 7: Just call them.
Speaker 2: So were there human causes? Is it of interest? Because
Speaker 2: it's like human behavior, human landscape changes are leading to
Speaker 2: this collision. Because I could see that, then you'd be like, well,
Speaker 2: now we're forced to pay attention to it because we're
Speaker 2: making it happen.
Speaker 6: So that's that's definitely a question so one of the
Speaker 6: issue on the Gulf Coast is eroding habitat. That's that's
Speaker 6: a thing, right. So the question is then, all right,
Speaker 6: so is that eroding habitat causing decline, you know, survival
Speaker 6: and fecundity, baby making and that's why we're seeing a
Speaker 6: decline or are those birches leaving?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 6: So that was.
Speaker 2: They're losing X thousands of acres away?
Speaker 6: Yeah, is it wetland food stuff?
Speaker 2: Both?
Speaker 6: I mean, it's wetland and then it turns into food stuff.
Speaker 6: So so, but what's interesting as I was driving around
Speaker 6: West Texas is and noticing all these large, high fenced
Speaker 6: preserves that have really beautiful stock tanks and corn everywhere,
Speaker 6: and nobody there wants to shoot a mallard because they
Speaker 6: got to shoot that Neil guy over there. So my
Speaker 6: hypothesis currently is they're both moving in because the habitats
Speaker 6: actually there. It's man made, but it's there year round.
Speaker 6: Nobody's shooting them, at least as far as we.
Speaker 2: Can tell, only a little bit. Oh no, oh, you know,
Speaker 2: he's doing it a little bit on the in the
Speaker 2: in the places with the nil guy and then the
Speaker 2: beautiful ponds, and you're like my god, the ducks. Yep,
Speaker 2: they'll now and then get some yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so and I.
Speaker 2: Walk around being like that is all I would do,
Speaker 2: so so.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I would.
Speaker 2: Uh you know.
Speaker 6: The funny thing is I contacted a bunch of landowners
Speaker 6: and I went on some other podcasts asking for help,
Speaker 6: and I got contacts and but then like I was
Speaker 6: in Texas and then nobody, like, nobody like called me up.
Speaker 6: So I had an outfitter out there.
Speaker 2: Uh, what part of Texas are you interested in? I
Speaker 2: could probably help you.
Speaker 6: It's more or less all of West. We went from,
Speaker 6: like I said, Houston, Dallas area all the way to the.
Speaker 2: The so west of that is. I'm trying to figure
Speaker 2: out West Texas. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So if you draw a line you know that way
Speaker 6: and all the way south like that triangle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well have you yeah, I feel like I know,
Speaker 2: Well we'll talk about later.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I know all kinds of people who'd
Speaker 2: let you go out there and do it with your fill.
Speaker 6: Well they say yes, and then I'm like, I'm I'm
Speaker 6: in your area, you know, calling them, and nobody's calling
Speaker 6: me back because they're like oh, And I told him
Speaker 6: I'd always be like look blinders on.
Speaker 7: Let me go to your pond.
Speaker 2: But what's that? What's the what's the Remember the guy
Speaker 2: we had those dudes we had on about the oslots.
Speaker 13: Uh huh yeah, the c yeah name, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 13: this is gonna be my contribution to American science.
Speaker 2: I will find you a bunch of places to go
Speaker 2: get your ducks.
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, that would be great because we have a
Speaker 7: few more.
Speaker 6: We have a few counties that are pretty poorly uh
Speaker 6: sampled and uh and they're right like you know, we
Speaker 6: could shift that line of where the zone is potentially
Speaker 6: a few miles this way or a few miles that
Speaker 6: way by getting them, and that would shift there.
Speaker 2: Do you like to be close to the Gulf coast though?
Speaker 6: No, No, those are all model ducks, like you know. Yeah,
Speaker 6: we went from to be fair, we went from Louisiana
Speaker 6: all the way across and it was model duck, model duck,
Speaker 6: model duck, model duck, and all all of a sudden,
Speaker 6: this like new genetic variant which are which now we
Speaker 6: know are these hybrids and hybrids and then it goes
Speaker 6: Mexican duck. So it's this very clean, sort of interesting
Speaker 6: story that will be hopefully publishing soon and figuring that out.
Speaker 2: You draw a picture of Texas and show me where
Speaker 2: you wish you could be.
Speaker 8: Where is that to.
Speaker 2: Draw the little corn kernels in the pond too? Yeah,
Speaker 2: just like exactly, Okay, there's Texas. Let's do that.
Speaker 6: I think that whole area I think.
Speaker 7: As tip of Texas going north.
Speaker 2: Oh this way, wait, no, that way.
Speaker 7: There you go.
Speaker 2: So Philip, you turned this camera, here's Texas. You know,
Speaker 2: you know everybody points us out. Do you know that
Speaker 2: you could fit EXAs, California and Molsta Montana into Alaska?
Speaker 7: Is that amazing?
Speaker 2: I don't mean to masculate you Texans, but especially when
Speaker 2: I'm trying to hit you up. If You're in this
Speaker 2: little honey hole and you got one of them sweet
Speaker 2: ponds called doctor Phil, called doctor Phil, doctor Phill, He's
Speaker 2: gonna be like, homet what the other doctor Phil.
Speaker 4: You can also write the meat Eater podcast at the
Speaker 4: meat Eater Doctor and.
Speaker 2: Have the subject line be fowling piece. Yeah, sure know
Speaker 2: what you're talking about.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So that's that was a long way of showing how
Speaker 6: where genetics has come into play. I mean, you gotta
Speaker 6: understand ten years ago I would go into a conference, uh,
Speaker 6: it's it's called the North American Duck Symposium called Ducks nads. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I didn't want to Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 7: It's called Ducks now, okay, Ducks nine?
Speaker 2: Is it North American Duck Society your cops?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm aware, I'm aware.
Speaker 2: And is that like? Are they they they recognize that
Speaker 2: that's funny or.
Speaker 6: No, it's no longer funny.
Speaker 2: They made it unfunny. Well, yeah, the joke war.
Speaker 6: Off, the joke war off eight eight eight conferences in
Speaker 6: a Yeah, so it's gonna be in Portland in February.
Speaker 7: Should come anyways. Uh yeah.
Speaker 6: So you know some of the first ones that I
Speaker 6: would go to ID be like, oh, there's that geneticis
Speaker 6: that weird geneticist dude? Because they just didn't see the
Speaker 6: like what it couldn't do? What what that data can provide?
Speaker 6: You know, there's so many studies out there, right, So
Speaker 6: you're handling all these mallards and you're putting bands on them,
Speaker 6: you're putting telemetry units, and a bird that stays in
Speaker 6: an urban setting versus a bird that does migration, You'll
Speaker 6: be like, oh, maybe that's just part of their population
Speaker 6: and their history. And genetics allows you to go in
Speaker 6: and be like, oh, that one's a faral mallard and
Speaker 6: that one was a wild mallard. You're starting to have
Speaker 6: a better and a true foundation to what you're actually asking,
Speaker 6: so your your future questions will be less biased.
Speaker 2: You know, before we get into the mallard thing, do
Speaker 2: you remember, Brady Matt, Do you guys remember when there
Speaker 2: used to be on twenty seven kinds of Canada geese
Speaker 2: and then all of a sudden one day they're like, nope,
Speaker 2: there's three. Like what is the popular number now? Seven?
Speaker 2: Eleven to eleven? So there used to be ridiculous numbers there.
Speaker 7: Think eleven's pretty pretty commonly agreed on, right.
Speaker 6: Okay, that came from you folks. That came from me, folks,
Speaker 6: That came from your No, that's not true. You had
Speaker 6: this discussion with Cornell, I believe. So we folks provide
Speaker 6: data and we're like, look at how different these things are.
Speaker 6: And then there's the American Ornithological Union. Here, there's the
Speaker 6: British Ornithological Union. Every country has their own unions, and
Speaker 6: then they use that data to say should.
Speaker 7: They be species?
Speaker 6: So they're the taxonomists that make the decisions.
Speaker 2: So they're looking at what you're looking for them.
Speaker 6: So the Mexican duck when this was a good example.
Speaker 6: Mexican duck was full species when it was first identified
Speaker 6: in like eighteen ninety something. Then everybody's like, oh no,
Speaker 6: there's lots of hybridization in the sixties, so they bumped
Speaker 6: it down to a subspecies of the mallard hybridsation with
Speaker 6: mallards was the problem. And then years later I came
Speaker 6: along and I started to use some of this latest
Speaker 6: and greatest genetic genomic techniques and actually found out that oh,
Speaker 6: all of these things that you thought were hybrids are
Speaker 6: actually juvenile or first year males, and they naturally express
Speaker 6: Mallard traits because it's still in their genetics, but they're
Speaker 6: not hybrids. And there's lots and then we found lots
Speaker 6: of unique genetic signatures that are tied with the desert lifestyle.
Speaker 6: And so AOU American Ornithological Union used that information and
Speaker 6: then re elevate them in twenty twenty twenty back to
Speaker 6: full species.
Speaker 7: Only recently so they.
Speaker 2: Got bumped back to be in their own.
Speaker 7: Their own full species.
Speaker 6: So if you've got you know, the slam going, you
Speaker 6: gotta gotta come back when you one.
Speaker 7: Is that what it is now?
Speaker 2: For forty one Mexican ducks.
Speaker 7: Is the newest?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so is it forty two?
Speaker 7: I think it's forty two. I'm gonna say it's fully
Speaker 7: How close to you guys?
Speaker 3: I mean I was like eight off here for a while.
Speaker 2: You're eight off.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Have you told you've got so You've gotten all I need?
Speaker 3: Like my model ducks and tree ducks and that that
Speaker 3: weird stuff in the South. You know he's talking.
Speaker 2: About, huh, did you get them all stuffed?
Speaker 3: But like, no, I don't have them all stuff I
Speaker 3: wish I did. I wish I would have done it,
Speaker 3: kind of like our our friend down the road, Mark Pierce.
Speaker 3: You know, he's got them all like flying in the
Speaker 3: same direction. It's like one big flaw. I would have
Speaker 3: loved to have started that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I always think, like I've gotten a lot
Speaker 2: of stuff over the years, is whatever and not going
Speaker 2: there like no, I haven't.
Speaker 3: No, Well, just tough. I mean, you know, back when
Speaker 3: we were really shooting him. You know, even when I
Speaker 3: went to Alaska, I was there on a on a
Speaker 3: photo shoot and I got to hunt a king Eider
Speaker 3: and I shot the you know, the male and the
Speaker 3: female and shot some scooters and stuff like that. But shit, man,
Speaker 3: I couldn't afford to stuff everything like you can't. You know,
Speaker 3: it's expensive to do it, you know, four or five
Speaker 3: hundred bucks apiece to do it right, and it's.
Speaker 2: More than you got paid for the photo shoot. Yeah, no, kid, deficits.
Speaker 2: So years ago, we were out in uh the east Shore,
Speaker 2: Chesapeake Bay, and we're driving down the road and we're
Speaker 2: going over a bridge, okay, and I look and it's
Speaker 2: just like I even comment on to my friend because
Speaker 2: it's duck season. I knew it was duck season. And
Speaker 2: we go over bridge and there's Maillard sitting. That just
Speaker 2: didn't seem right. And I even said to him, like
Speaker 2: I cannot believe that, you know, just like how they
Speaker 2: were sort of achi buying this slew and it's proximity.
Speaker 2: I even comment like that just seems weird those mallards
Speaker 2: be doing that right in the middle of the duck season.
Speaker 2: It was yeah, and he goes, well, how much time
Speaker 2: you got, you know, and it was and I had
Speaker 2: I didn't know that this was I didn't know that
Speaker 2: it went on that like the same way you do
Speaker 2: pheasants where you just like let pheasants out. I had
Speaker 2: no idea, yeah, that there is a thing of releasing
Speaker 2: pen raised mallards. And the reason I thought, like, the
Speaker 2: reason I thought was because pheasants, you know, peasants are
Speaker 2: non native, and I thought it was that one of
Speaker 2: the reasons they're so widely released like that is because
Speaker 2: it's a non native. Anyways, you're not upsetting any kind
Speaker 2: of wild bird population.
Speaker 7: At least as far as we think.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, at least as far as I thought. Maybe
Speaker 2: you're can tell me otherwise. And so it just winds
Speaker 2: up being like, here's a species that is out there.
Speaker 2: They require a lot of human assistance. If you want
Speaker 2: to supplement with pen raised birds. Knock yourself out, like
Speaker 2: you're not interfering with anything. But the fact that you
Speaker 2: could let mallards go is really surprised me. But then
Speaker 2: I've learned since then it is somewhat a widespread practice. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And they appoint and he said, when like this used
Speaker 2: to be, Chesapeake Bay was sort of, you know, in
Speaker 2: some ways kind of like like the birthplace of American
Speaker 2: duck hunting, and as bird numbers declined, it just became
Speaker 2: a they artificially inflated numbers to maintain that. And what
Speaker 2: you're driving by is these hunt clubs and they have
Speaker 2: mallards that are just hanging around in a way that
Speaker 2: just seems makes them seem like they don't quite know
Speaker 2: what's going on, you know, And you've spent some time on.
Speaker 7: This, now, sure did? Is that the segue?
Speaker 2: That's a segue, that's a good setd Yeah.
Speaker 6: So yes, so in a nutshell, that's that's more or
Speaker 6: less what happened. But we've I've sort of reconstructed exactly
Speaker 6: what what potentially happened. So if nobody here knows this,
Speaker 6: the mallard is the wolf of all domestic ducks, right,
Speaker 6: So like the wolf is of the.
Speaker 7: Dog, the mallard is that.
Speaker 6: To all domestic ducks. He lost all right, so peaking duck?
Speaker 6: Oh yeah yeah really Yeah.
Speaker 2: They pulled all the domestics off of.
Speaker 6: Mallards, just like you could get a chihuahua off of
Speaker 6: a wolf.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is interesting because I was you know, uh,
Speaker 2: what we pulled cattle from.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're trying to bring it is gone.
Speaker 2: What we pulled the pig from is still around, Yeah,
Speaker 2: sus scraff what we pulled sheep from I believe is
Speaker 2: still around.
Speaker 6: I think so that was out of what uh, Saudi Arabia, Arabia,
Speaker 6: Northern Africa. That would have been red cheap I think.
Speaker 2: Is the ancestral one on what we pulled the horse
Speaker 2: from is I think gone.
Speaker 6: So they so revive and restore recently cloned the second
Speaker 6: I'm gonna say this wrong, Piswick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like the foundation species. Yeah yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 2: I had no idea the mallard.
Speaker 6: The mallard is.
Speaker 2: The duck that created that. They pulled all the domestics.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so they were one of the last successful domestication
Speaker 6: events about five thousand years ago. So there's only two,
Speaker 6: well three the goose sort of, but the only other
Speaker 6: good domestication was in South America with the Muscovis. They
Speaker 6: kind of just looked like that's how you say, that's
Speaker 6: all Yeah, either way either acceptable.
Speaker 7: In my book. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So so the mallard, you know, there's good writings about
Speaker 6: the Ming dynasty was one of the first ones to
Speaker 6: start domestication, domesticating the process of domestication of of of mallards,
Speaker 6: and that was for food, right, make them fatter, fat
Speaker 6: making more eggs these types of things now five thousand
Speaker 6: years ago about yeah, and now again. Domestication is a process,
Speaker 6: so it ebbs and flows, happens all over the once
Speaker 6: it started, then those things get transitioned, just kind of
Speaker 6: like labs made themselves. You know, there's English labs, American labs.
Speaker 6: There's all sorts of stuff anyway. So sixteen thirty one
Speaker 6: is the first writing from King Charles, the second asking
Speaker 6: his squires to go, Now, I just add the squire's
Speaker 6: part to add, but to go get mallard eggs for
Speaker 6: the purpose of raising and releasing for hunting purposes.
Speaker 2: So he was a sixteen thirty one.
Speaker 7: Sixteen thirty one.
Speaker 6: The name game farm Mallard was first, as far as
Speaker 6: I know, recorded in eighteen nineties in England by people
Speaker 6: ringing them and calling them game farm Mallard. I'm going
Speaker 6: to refer to this thing called a game farm Mallard.
Speaker 6: But all it really is is a domestic variant, right.
Speaker 6: It's a name, just like a lab or chihuahua or whatever.
Speaker 6: Beagle is a name, pekin, duck rowan duck, runners call ducks.
Speaker 6: All these things have names, right, So this thing is
Speaker 6: called a game farm mallard because it was farmed for
Speaker 6: for gaminess. So what they were, what they were interested
Speaker 6: where people were interested in Europe primarily at the time,
Speaker 6: was to make something you know, flightier, something that flies faster,
Speaker 6: is you know, sportier and that.
Speaker 7: Then I don't know.
Speaker 6: Then whatever was around just just like a pheasant shoot,
Speaker 6: but with with ducks, right, they're flying more erratic, more
Speaker 6: like a make a a.
Speaker 7: Mallard fly like a wigeon.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, the objective the same way a pigeon fancier. Yeah,
Speaker 2: wants to make pigeons that have all these crazy colors.
Speaker 2: They were like, breed me outright, we want to make
Speaker 2: this hard. We're crazy flying.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, So now let's move forward to America.
Speaker 2: You know one second, Yeah, did they do what did
Speaker 2: they in Europe? Did they do the tower? Is that
Speaker 2: what they're doing? Tower shoots?
Speaker 6: They do both they do so currently how bad I
Speaker 6: guess bad is relative? I think is bad. So they
Speaker 6: do tower shoots, but they also released right before the season,
Speaker 6: France releases three million of these things to have a
Speaker 6: fall flight. Now, wow, no, that was last year's numbers.
Speaker 3: I think that's a staggering number.
Speaker 2: France cuts loose three million mallards.
Speaker 7: Something like that, like game farm mallady, game farm mallards.
Speaker 6: Things that you breed and you release right before the season,
Speaker 6: just like you would release pheasants, you know, before Thanksgiving, youth, Christmas.
Speaker 2: Maybe. Yeah, well it was another important distinction between pheasants
Speaker 2: those like the gall of forms. You like that word?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2: That was that was a you a question, that meaning
Speaker 2: your trivia that I got right not too long ago.
Speaker 2: One of the deaf defining features of the Galli forms
Speaker 2: is they don't really go anywhere. Correct, that's a small
Speaker 2: home range. When you caught a mallet, Loo says, some
Speaker 2: bitch takes off.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so so dogmatically, wait, can we go to America?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 6: Oh right, okay, all right, so so you're right. So
Speaker 6: the gunning years of the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 6: you know, market hunting was spelled demise for all our
Speaker 6: bird populations, including passenger pigeon eventually going extinct, heath hen
Speaker 6: going extinct for now.
Speaker 2: Oh we held one of those. Ah yeah, Krin they
Speaker 2: head in that drawer. I'm talking about the extinct drawer.
Speaker 2: I don't think they had the dog. I think they
Speaker 2: had the it was ivory bills, passengers and heath.
Speaker 8: Hen Okay, in the special, I don't totally.
Speaker 2: Right by the door.
Speaker 6: I will note that my contribution so far is to
Speaker 6: reviving her stories so far, just suggesting we should bring
Speaker 6: back labrador duck. Yeah, but I said I would get
Speaker 6: the first tag.
Speaker 7: Anyways.
Speaker 6: Okay, so we are we are gunning year's population crashes,
Speaker 6: and so what did folks do? There's two things that
Speaker 6: are occurring. So if you don't know this, east of
Speaker 6: the Mississippi River was boreal forest, right and the duck
Speaker 6: mallards were were vagrants, which means we're going.
Speaker 2: Back to the Mississippi. Wasn't boreal forest during the place
Speaker 2: to scene?
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're going there because we have we have a
Speaker 6: very good distinction here. The east of the Mississippi before
Speaker 6: humans started cutting things down was mostly boreal forests and
Speaker 6: the ecological replacement, which means the thing that is better
Speaker 6: than the other thing to the mallard in that area
Speaker 6: was the American black duck. That is the reason it
Speaker 6: is completely dark, both males and females, because you could
Speaker 6: think of boreal forest an aerial predator going overhead. The
Speaker 6: selection pressure isn't to look fancy to the female because
Speaker 6: you're getting picked off. So now males and females have
Speaker 6: to look the same, all right, So it's about your
Speaker 6: black ducks. Very few mallards. So mallards tended to go
Speaker 6: still go into the southeast Atlantic flyways to the eastern seaboard.
Speaker 6: But the northeast it was vagrant like a cinnamon teal right,
Speaker 6: So you didn't you didn't shoot mallards there. But of course,
Speaker 6: so now let's fast forward to nineteen twenty. Ish duck
Speaker 6: numbers are down. People are like, all right, what do
Speaker 6: we do about these numbers? But also that area was like,
Speaker 6: we want to shoot mallards.
Speaker 2: Too, all right, So cause mallard is king there.
Speaker 6: It is, big greenhead, big greenhead.
Speaker 7: Same thing.
Speaker 6: Did you know, do everybody see the story of the Hunter?
Speaker 6: I think she was a thousand years old in Nova Scotia.
Speaker 6: Last last meal mallard.
Speaker 2: Yep, yeah, chestnuts, chestnuts and mallard yea chestnut.
Speaker 6: The mad So we've been doing this for a while.
Speaker 6: Everybody loves mallards.
Speaker 2: She was what else had she had she been eating?
Speaker 6: Well, she also had a lot of diseases. I remember
Speaker 6: seeing all Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think her last they were saying her diet
Speaker 2: was I don't remember. I remember the chestnuts and Mallardy
Speaker 2: went out on a high.
Speaker 7: Yeah, pretty much anyway.
Speaker 6: So so, uh so, folks first tried to start breeding
Speaker 6: programs with our wild birds mallards and black ducks. They
Speaker 6: didn't take because it's their wild It takes time for
Speaker 6: them to be like, Okay, I'm going to not stress out,
Speaker 6: I'm going to make eggs, all these types of things.
Speaker 6: So that failed. But somebody must have known that the
Speaker 6: Europeans already got this right, you know.
Speaker 2: Can I let me ask you extra detail about this
Speaker 2: because you just said something that's interesting. They found the
Speaker 2: opposite with turkeys that which which one Well, when they
Speaker 2: started trying to repopulate turkeys.
Speaker 6: The out of Pa, those last turkeys.
Speaker 2: Well everywhere they I mean they recover turkey's are old
Speaker 2: damn place. But what they found initially they were trying
Speaker 2: to use captive bread yeah birds.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The captive bread birds wouldn't take. Yeah, And then they
Speaker 2: eventually came to the conclusion they had to use wild
Speaker 2: bread birds correct to distribute them around. So you saying
Speaker 2: that that they had an opposite experience with ducks.
Speaker 6: It's the no, because that the point of that was
Speaker 6: actually establishing populations. Currently they just want to make ducks, right,
Speaker 6: So those are two different h wants.
Speaker 2: Right, So, oh, they're recovering something, they're trying to get
Speaker 2: something going exactly, I got it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, so they went So someone must have
Speaker 6: known that the Europeans like figured this out and brought
Speaker 6: game farm mallards here and I'll explain how I figure
Speaker 6: that out. But so they started propagating them, and from
Speaker 6: about nineteen twenty nineteen sixty they released about half a
Speaker 6: million of these things just on the Eastern seaboard every year,
Speaker 6: and then nineteen sixty to today is about two hundred
Speaker 6: and fifty thousand to our best estimates, but my guess
Speaker 6: is way more than that.
Speaker 2: So these games getting released, still getting released, and still
Speaker 2: of the progeny of these European birds. Yep.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So so is this the state doing this or is
Speaker 11: this just like private currently?
Speaker 6: It's private. When it first started, it was state fed private.
Speaker 6: Everybody was trying to raise them. In fact, more game
Speaker 6: birds for America.
Speaker 7: Do you know who they became?
Speaker 2: Anybody du had no idea the trivia?
Speaker 6: Yeah, do you know who James Ford Bell started which
Speaker 6: other one Delta Waterfall. Yeah, so they both initially wanted
Speaker 6: to do game farm mallards too and hot Yeah, Delta
Speaker 6: Waterfowl had a hole their first thing in the Delta marshes.
Speaker 6: What year, what was nineteen thirty? They were still trying
Speaker 6: this nineteen anyway, So they but they showed that the
Speaker 6: that they but their premise was make ducks that actually
Speaker 6: make more ducks in the wild, and Delta saw that
Speaker 6: that was a failing venture because they didn't survive long enough,
Speaker 6: didn't make the same because they.
Speaker 2: Take these European ducks, these European mallards, cut them loose,
Speaker 2: and then the next year just no successful reproduction. Yeah
Speaker 2: you're going over again, correct. Yeah, they never took off.
Speaker 6: So the dogma since then of why we continue to
Speaker 6: release them is that they are some Oh the other
Speaker 6: fun fact is everybody tells me that, oh, well, they're
Speaker 6: born here, they can like smell their way here, and
Speaker 6: so they don't leave here. It's like their house no
Speaker 6: matter what. And if they do leave, they die, and
Speaker 6: if they don't die, they definitely don't breathe. That's the
Speaker 6: dogma that I was under, including when I was in
Speaker 6: school in uh UC Davis. I was I was learning
Speaker 6: about this.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me? Can you tell me that again?
Speaker 2: The dogma.
Speaker 6: The dogma was that it's okay to release these things
Speaker 6: sort of like pheasants, like look, winter's gonna come, the
Speaker 6: coyotes are going to get.
Speaker 7: Them, like nobody's gonna survive.
Speaker 6: Right, So the dogma was these things are trained quote
Speaker 6: unquote if you can't see them, uh, to to stay
Speaker 6: on the wetland that they're you know, made, and.
Speaker 2: That would so that would help, and that that posturing
Speaker 2: or that belief alleviated concerns that you're gonna let this
Speaker 2: sort of like global Pandora's box out by taking this
Speaker 2: animal and it flies and all around the world and
Speaker 2: spreads itself every correct. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So so that happened for one hundred years, and I
Speaker 6: was studying American black ducks and mallard So if you
Speaker 6: don't know this American black duck again very close relative
Speaker 6: sister species or relative to the to the mallard in
Speaker 6: fact off the Mallard tree. It was a mallard in
Speaker 6: North America and then evolved adapted to boreal forests and
Speaker 6: over the last half million years turned into what we
Speaker 6: now considered the American black.
Speaker 2: Can you tell uh us have such little experience of
Speaker 2: black dogs? Can can you tell the hens from the
Speaker 2: drakes by looking at them?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 2: It's tough fight. It's hard. No, greenhead obviously, No, it's
Speaker 2: you have to what is this? What are you looking at? Bill? Bill? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And only thing. That's the only thing.
Speaker 7: And can't you look at the speculum too?
Speaker 6: You can, But they're not supposed to have a white
Speaker 6: wing bar, so the white hybrid in between. Okay, that's
Speaker 6: that's what I know.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: No, and and your and your thought process was correct
Speaker 6: us fish and wildlife. So this is part of this study.
Speaker 6: We were saying, like, okay, so we're at this wing
Speaker 6: b where all these things, and you know, professionals are
Speaker 6: calling Mallard black duck hybrid. You know, based on those
Speaker 6: characteristics you have the amount of white on them and
Speaker 6: all this other stuff. So we did the genetics on them,
Speaker 6: and one of the things management and implication. They are
Speaker 6: only sixty percent accurate at calling hybrids from either parental
Speaker 6: the other percents where there should have been black ducks
Speaker 6: or mallards, and on the Mallard and black ducks side,
Speaker 6: twenty percent of those should have been on the hybrid.
Speaker 6: So those numbers are going into our models right, potentially
Speaker 6: causing issues and survival estimates for coundity estimates and so forth.
Speaker 2: You know, this is starting to sound like is when
Speaker 2: you show people the deer's teeth and they tell you
Speaker 2: how old it is. Yeah, work without cutting into it.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, it being.
Speaker 7: Like that's a maybe that's year old buff Yeah exactly.
Speaker 6: Anyway, So but within that study, I started picking up
Speaker 6: this genetic signature that didn't that wasn't black duck, and
Speaker 6: it wasn't Western Mallard. So west by Western Mallard, I
Speaker 6: mean west of the Mississippi River, west of the Mississippi River,
Speaker 6: they're all this one genetic cluster. And then as you
Speaker 6: go east, this secondary genetic cluster that is mixed with
Speaker 6: the western Genei cluster started to come in.
Speaker 7: Higher and higher abundance.
Speaker 6: And when we looked at black duck hybrids, they tended
Speaker 6: to backcross with this other genetic signature. So that was
Speaker 6: twenty nineteen. I knew the story of this game farm releases,
Speaker 6: and of course dogmatically I was like I shouldn't look
Speaker 6: at that, like that's that's not a thing.
Speaker 2: They don't go anywhere that I don't go anywhere.
Speaker 6: And I saw that, I'm like, no way. So but
Speaker 6: to you know, prove to the scientific community, and I
Speaker 6: had to go and get known game farm mallards. So
Speaker 6: I actually sent my wife to New Jersey and a
Speaker 6: couple other places and we collected we collected known game
Speaker 6: far mallage.
Speaker 7: From some of these preserves.
Speaker 2: How did she get them?
Speaker 7: She shot him.
Speaker 2: You sent her out as a client.
Speaker 3: Unreally undercover undercover client heard.
Speaker 7: These stories before I knew where this story was about
Speaker 7: to go.
Speaker 2: So you sent your wife to masquerade as a client
Speaker 2: to bring you the ducks.
Speaker 6: Well, on top of it, though, she was also giving
Speaker 6: me information of where these birds that she didn't didn't
Speaker 6: just come to the pond go And they all they
Speaker 6: all went to this location. And when I immediately in real
Speaker 6: time Google mapped where they were going, they're all going
Speaker 6: to a wildlife refuge.
Speaker 2: You're kidding me?
Speaker 6: So they know where they're going, gods.
Speaker 2: Like an undercover component. Yeah, yeah, this is dark. I
Speaker 2: like a jehan.
Speaker 6: Lecar So now those ys, So now we're back to Jersey,
Speaker 6: they're probably about.
Speaker 7: To go kill me.
Speaker 6: So so all right, So we had that, we had
Speaker 6: known game farm, right, and then on top of it,
Speaker 6: I'm like, well, there's park ducks everywhere. And the nice
Speaker 6: thing is we were banding Mexican ducks and alongside them
Speaker 6: there were there were Khaki Campbell's, which is a different
Speaker 6: variant of mallard. So we had those, so they are
Speaker 6: were our proxy other park duck domestic thing, right, So
Speaker 6: if this genetic signature was park duck, we would be
Speaker 6: able to tell that, or if it was game farm,
Speaker 6: we would be able to tell that. As we had that,
Speaker 6: But I also knew that people were gonna be like, well,
Speaker 6: maybe Eastern mallards were always genetically different. So that's when
Speaker 6: I went to the Smithsonian and picked up bird mallards
Speaker 6: harvested from eighteen sixty to nineteen fifteen, so before all
Speaker 6: those releases. So I want to thank all hunters now,
Speaker 6: from before and today that were depositing birds into museum collections.
Speaker 6: Natural hunting is conservation, and so we got genetics off
Speaker 6: of those birds, and so we compare everybody. First thing
Speaker 6: that other genetic signature game far mallard. I was like,
Speaker 6: all right, so we know that, but were they always
Speaker 6: like that?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 6: They were the genetic signature of a mallard one hundred
Speaker 6: and fifty year old mallard was that which you have
Speaker 6: here in Montana in the prairies, so for now, and
Speaker 6: this other genetic signature was causing that the eastern mala
Speaker 6: to be completely different than what is western mallard today
Speaker 6: and historically so are different. Well that's where we're gonna go. Okay,
Speaker 6: so our North American wild mallard has had that the
Speaker 6: premise of that twenty twenty paper was that the release
Speaker 6: of game farm mallards had foundationally transformed the genetic integrity over.
Speaker 7: A wild mallard.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 6: So then I was like, all right, let's look at
Speaker 6: how this occurs across the world. And for that we
Speaker 6: had to go to Europe and on top of it
Speaker 6: be like, okay, are our game farm mallards from Europe?
Speaker 2: You know, had to prove that, So you had to
Speaker 2: send your wife there.
Speaker 6: So I just I would have gone.
Speaker 7: No, I had colleagues in Europe.
Speaker 6: They sent me a whole bunch of DNA and blood
Speaker 6: and all this other stuff from Sweden. Almost what did
Speaker 6: we do? Twelve countries? It's in that paper right there.
Speaker 2: We back over one second. Your is she a duck
Speaker 2: hunor she is? Okay?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Did she bring friends?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 3: No, she's just solo clients.
Speaker 9: Strange a single woman shows up to the hunting club
Speaker 9: with her fowling piece and just like, let's go.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 6: We also requested that the dogs handle the birds, uh
Speaker 6: carefully because we were making a mount a mount.
Speaker 2: Oh that's good. Wow.
Speaker 3: I have a quick question backing up real quick, Khaki Campbell.
Speaker 3: I've never heard of this before, is it?
Speaker 12: No?
Speaker 3: I see it. I'm curious if that is commonly known
Speaker 3: as a blonde mallard.
Speaker 7: Maybe, so we're going to get it.
Speaker 3: I'm not trying to like deviate however, like this is
Speaker 3: this is this is very interesting to me.
Speaker 11: Yeah, because like the blonde Mallard was always like genetics
Speaker 11: and like it was just losing its color.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've always thought it was like it was like
Speaker 3: lousistic mallard. If that's even a real is.
Speaker 6: The domestic tree of life for fort first, for.
Speaker 3: Mallard, because a blonde Mallard is a prized piece for.
Speaker 7: For very years.
Speaker 2: You should hold fills cameras.
Speaker 3: Here's one right here.
Speaker 9: Focus there you go, Matt, I have a I have
Speaker 9: a quick question as well. So as you're talking about Ossippy,
Speaker 9: so many of these mallards have game farm bird genetics
Speaker 9: in them. Matt and I have a lot of friends
Speaker 9: east and south east of the Mississippian in the southern
Speaker 9: United States who claim that they know ducks better than
Speaker 9: anybody in the world. It's a culture that prides itself
Speaker 9: on being duck hunters. Would it be fair, in your
Speaker 9: scientific opinion, for us, when we are hunting with them
Speaker 9: to let them know that the birds that they so
Speaker 9: love and shoot are in fact, genetically inferior.
Speaker 2: I think that's what he's getting at to what we have.
Speaker 6: I'll let you make that conclusion, okay.
Speaker 2: But afterwards, your game farm ducks, the game farm ducks
Speaker 2: you guys got, can you write me a note after
Speaker 2: sign it? I walk through like I'm telling you.
Speaker 7: That doctor said this. Yeah, doctor Phil tells you.
Speaker 9: Because I want to have I would like to have
Speaker 9: some some bragging rights.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like, well, yeah, we're pure game park ducks, dude,
Speaker 2: and like, no, wonder you got him. I hope you
Speaker 2: got it. I hope you I'd hope you'd be able
Speaker 2: to get one. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you guys don't even need calls, you just go
Speaker 7: quack quack and yeah, okay, so we're going to talk
Speaker 7: more about that.
Speaker 6: Let's put white bread out. Actually, don't feel that that
Speaker 6: causes them.
Speaker 7: Uh, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 6: All right, all right, So so we were doing it.
Speaker 6: So where was that night, twenty twenty pav Yeah.
Speaker 2: You were global Global.
Speaker 6: So I also knew that they released game far mallards
Speaker 6: in New Zealand. They stopped in nineteen what was it,
Speaker 6: nineteen seventies or so, I think it's the date.
Speaker 2: So what was their duck with it?
Speaker 6: We record show both game farm mallards were bought from
Speaker 6: Europe and brought there. That was the first time.
Speaker 2: Did they have what native ducks they have? Oh? Did
Speaker 2: they have a Mallard light?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's called the New Zealand Gray Duck. It's part
Speaker 6: of the Pacific Black Duck group.
Speaker 2: But it's it's a it's a Mallard off.
Speaker 6: It's a Mallard off shoot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's totally different though.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, so we call this Mallard complex. It's
Speaker 6: like a Mallard complex. But actually the Mallard was not
Speaker 6: the source for all of these other ducks. It's it's
Speaker 6: an African species which was completely we probably extinct, but
Speaker 6: most likely part of like the African black duck, yellow
Speaker 6: bill duck group. We call it the Mallard complex because
Speaker 6: we have a complex with mallards and yeah, it's like mallard.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah. Anyway, So so so we I had done
Speaker 6: a scientific collecting trip in New Zealand where we collected
Speaker 6: four hundred birds all around the South Island north falling piece,
Speaker 6: fowling piece.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Did you do it out of season or in season?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 2: In season? Yeah, just straight up hunting.
Speaker 7: It's called scientific collective.
Speaker 2: I mean you guys are like scientists, decoy calling.
Speaker 6: Well, that's how you get them, inn yet I don't know.
Speaker 2: If you get some other things you're about, like you
Speaker 2: shoot them out of golf course ponds. I don't know.
Speaker 7: No, maybe in Mexico we did that.
Speaker 2: So you're like, like I would have looked, but like
Speaker 2: those guys are duck hunting, but in fact you were
Speaker 2: collecting specimens.
Speaker 6: Yeah okay, yeah, so we did this whole thing. So
Speaker 6: I had a bunch of mallards that are so so.
Speaker 6: Their population I think the last estimate was also three
Speaker 6: just about three million, so they're doing well. The question
Speaker 6: is where did they come from? Right, so we know
Speaker 6: that they had two efforts of bringing in mallards into
Speaker 6: New Zealand. One came out of Europe and another one
Speaker 6: they came to North America. And they bought mallards from
Speaker 6: North America.
Speaker 7: Really thinking of assuming they were different.
Speaker 2: Hey. Uh, when I was in New Zealand, I shot
Speaker 2: with my rifle a Canada goose, did you, yeah, which
Speaker 2: are like wide old the rifle. That's the same deal, right,
Speaker 2: I mean it is.
Speaker 6: Those Those were Canada geese that were probably I don't
Speaker 6: know where they brought were brought from, but I'm assuming
Speaker 6: from the States.
Speaker 2: They just brought like caught them loose, same thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know the moose that they brought there was
Speaker 6: I think new Fie.
Speaker 2: They think they're gone, yeah.
Speaker 7: But every so often they like pop up.
Speaker 2: It's become their Tasmanian.
Speaker 3: So Phil, I was in New Zealand and I did
Speaker 3: a duck hunt as well, and their prize duck is
Speaker 3: the mallard. Right, everybody wants to shoot the mallard down.
Speaker 2: There, and would you look and be like that's a mallard.
Speaker 3: Well, so here's my thing. So I wanted to shoot
Speaker 3: Perry's because Perry's are super cool. What's that duck? Paradise
Speaker 3: shell duck yep, so super fascinating native to their Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3: And it's fascinating that with the paradise shell duck. Not
Speaker 3: to get off subject, but the drake is actually black
Speaker 3: and the hen is all colored up. I gotta believe
Speaker 3: it has to do with no land predators. But so
Speaker 3: I was looking at the mallard there, Yeah, really cool duck.
Speaker 3: So the female is the one with the white head.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I was looking at the mallards there, and the
Speaker 3: mallards don't fly high. They fly really low to the ground, right,
Speaker 3: And so I was like, gosh, these mallards are kind
Speaker 3: of weird. They work a little bit funny over the
Speaker 3: decoys work to the call a little bit different. We
Speaker 3: get them in, and I was convinced that the legs
Speaker 3: of the mallard were further towards the head than of
Speaker 3: the ducks that we usually shoot. And the only thing
Speaker 3: that I could come up with was that maybe on
Speaker 3: the nesting site they don't because they don't have any
Speaker 3: land predators, they don't have to like stand straight up,
Speaker 3: so they're more adapt for, you know, hanging out on
Speaker 3: the ground and feeding and doing that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: But I could tell a very distinct difference between not
Speaker 3: only the way they acted, but the way they looked.
Speaker 6: In New Zealand specifically, I'm assuming you never saw one
Speaker 6: perfectly looking green head.
Speaker 3: I mean they all looked the same. Yeah, they looked different. Yeah,
Speaker 3: not like a farm duck, but like different.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 6: So New Zealand had their source was game farm mallards
Speaker 6: from Europe and from North America. Another one we went,
Speaker 6: I have a study looking at Hawaiian ducks and this
Speaker 6: issue with hybridization with domestic mallards there, so I had
Speaker 6: mallards from Hawaii as well. I thought those were going
Speaker 6: to be park ducks. So let's just like move forward
Speaker 6: into the into what we now know feral populations on
Speaker 6: Hawaii as well as New Zealand source population were game
Speaker 6: farm mallards. The interesting thing there is both of those
Speaker 6: locations had a stop on release, right, So for for
Speaker 6: fifty sixty years, formal stop a formal stop, right, So
Speaker 6: you weren't adding stuff into it. I know that New Zealand.
Speaker 6: New Zealand's like the best case situation to compare because
Speaker 6: it's at a larger scale. But they went with thirty
Speaker 6: thousand birds, they had a drop in population size and
Speaker 6: now have three million. So obviously there was enough genetic variation,
Speaker 6: enough situation where they were able to survive through the
Speaker 6: like oh, we have really bad genetics, and then come
Speaker 6: out the other end. Now, our work also suggests that
Speaker 6: they interbred with those New Zealand gray ducks and it
Speaker 6: looks like they got some of those functionally important genes
Speaker 6: from them, which is super cool.
Speaker 7: But the other part of it, there's no predators, right.
Speaker 6: That gives them time to be like, oh, we're really
Speaker 6: bad at life, but we'll survive long enough.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, feral cats are the only thing that kill them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and New Zealanders as if you guys have been there, man,
Speaker 6: they like to just shoot everything off like cats everything.
Speaker 6: You know, they're there to shoot stuff. So anyway, so
Speaker 6: Europe we were able to confirm is the game for
Speaker 6: the wild mallard from Europe is the ancestor of all
Speaker 6: mallards including in North America. Now we got birds. The
Speaker 6: only genetic difference was mallards out of Greenland. Don't know
Speaker 6: exactly what that's about, but it's most likely that a
Speaker 6: bunch of mallards went there and sort of like probably
Speaker 6: a long time ago, and turned into genetically changed for time.
Speaker 6: The important thing here is that game farm mallards from
Speaker 6: Europe are the thing that is here in Hawaii, New
Speaker 6: Zealand and elsewhere. So this single lineage, it wasn't it
Speaker 6: wasn't Khaki Campbell's or any any other All the genetics,
Speaker 6: this alternative non wild genetics came from game farm mallards.
Speaker 6: So their release across the world at this point has
Speaker 6: resulted not only in feral population but also just geographically
Speaker 6: widespread hybridization with local populations. And in our case, the
Speaker 6: wild mallard so coming to so because we had so
Speaker 6: that study was two thousand samples about nine hundred and
Speaker 6: sixteen samples worldwide, about thirteen hundred samples here in North America,
Speaker 6: mostly Atlantic Flyway Mississippi Flyway, and then we put about
Speaker 6: four hundred birds mostly from the Canadian provinces that go
Speaker 6: all the way to Alaska. Go all right, So what
Speaker 6: happens in North America is you have a decrease in
Speaker 6: this genetic signature east to west, right exactly where the
Speaker 6: releases are. So then if we zoom in where we
Speaker 6: had where we identified hot spots, so kind of like
Speaker 6: epicenters of hybridization this situation. Can anybody guess in North
Speaker 6: America where the epicenter is Chesabeake Bay Almost yeah, Jersey, ooh,
Speaker 6: Jersey looks like Trance genetically, it's there really every time,
Speaker 6: no matter what year I go, no matter what year
Speaker 6: I go, Jersey will always have Feral Mallardy feral game farm.
Speaker 6: Now I have to explain.
Speaker 2: Where are they coming from there?
Speaker 6: The really the some of the major release groups.
Speaker 2: Are there, so they got they got like the dark
Speaker 2: it's numbers, the stocking.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So so that location and now some of our newer
Speaker 6: studies in the Great Lakes region is starting to find
Speaker 6: that the Great Lakes region is starting to look like
Speaker 6: Jersey and France. And these are three locations that are
Speaker 6: not doing great in duck number, in Mallard numbers.
Speaker 2: This is going to bring back the whole freedom fry
Speaker 2: thing again.
Speaker 6: So so anyway, so it's sticking with the North America
Speaker 6: just to give you some numbers. The Atlantic Flyway. So
Speaker 6: we had hunting season, non hunting seasons, the summer, summer
Speaker 6: banding time, so like, what are we banding in the
Speaker 6: in the States, and we did it state. We have
Speaker 6: every single state.
Speaker 2: Because banding is always done in the summer.
Speaker 6: Correct, Yeah, there's winter banding as well now, but the
Speaker 6: majority of the banding is summer.
Speaker 2: Because when they're molting's easy to get them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you think that that represents your production of that state, right,
Speaker 6: So that's the production.
Speaker 7: So there's.
Speaker 6: All right, So Jersey, Massachusetts, and whether it's hunting or
Speaker 6: non hunting, I can't find.
Speaker 7: A wild mallard. It's like zero percent.
Speaker 6: What Yeah, Massachusetts, Jersey, Connecticut, I'm missing, But that.
Speaker 2: Whole little sit in the summer. In the summer, if
Speaker 2: you're in the summer, you go out to a state
Speaker 2: game refuge in New Jersey, you're handling either a feral
Speaker 2: thunkel mallard over the head. That's not a wild mallard.
Speaker 6: Yeah, genetically, you're funny. Yes, it's not a North American
Speaker 6: wild mallard anymore.
Speaker 7: So New York's a little bit better.
Speaker 6: I think they were like sixty sixty forty sixty percent
Speaker 6: mostly wild forty. But New York's an interesting piece because
Speaker 6: we now know that there is a substantial number of
Speaker 6: Canadian birds. Canadian birds Mallard's out of Canada moving in
Speaker 6: to those states when we didn't think they were. So
Speaker 6: they're adding to the production. And what I can tell
Speaker 6: you is that Canada is is more like Quebec is
Speaker 6: sixty forty sixty percent wild, forty percent hybrid feral.
Speaker 2: I did want to mention, so have they has Quebec?
Speaker 2: Does Quebec have a history of cutting birds loose?
Speaker 6: Not that we know of.
Speaker 2: No, it's it's it's it's okay. So they didn't create this,
Speaker 2: it's just happening to them.
Speaker 6: So that's the whole epicenter of what we find. So
Speaker 6: what a feral bird is is a bird that is
Speaker 6: in the wild. Right, they're not in the cage anymore.
Speaker 6: They're in the wild. I don't know if they're in
Speaker 6: the wild this year, last year, whatever, So I just
Speaker 6: have to call them feral, just like you would call
Speaker 6: a feral pig. Right if you let loose pigs and
Speaker 6: then you had no idea and you came out to
Speaker 6: some property in West Texas, you'd be like, oh, feral
Speaker 6: pigs because you had no idea.
Speaker 2: You don't know the individual's history, correct, He could be
Speaker 2: tenth generation in the wild, first generation but he's just feral, right.
Speaker 6: And so where you expect, So the epicenter would always
Speaker 6: have feral birds as well as things that are back
Speaker 6: crossing genetically interbreeding with these game farm lineages. So you
Speaker 6: have things that are moving like between wild and game farm,
Speaker 6: but more game farming. Yeah, and so that's an epicenter,
Speaker 6: and that's Jersey. What happens as you move away from
Speaker 6: Jersey is it sort of dissipates. So these genes are
Speaker 6: being perpetuated through the landscape, but then what they're doing
Speaker 6: is eventually back crossing into wild, so they're becoming more wild. Now,
Speaker 6: the problem with Atlantic Flyway in the US side is
Speaker 6: there's no more parental the average if you go out
Speaker 6: somewhere in the Atlantic Flyway, the average general average. Some
Speaker 6: states are better, obviously. You look at a mallard currently, well,
Speaker 6: at least in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 7: Yeah, currently twenty two.
Speaker 6: Uh, it's two percent wild wild. You gotta you drop
Speaker 6: a mallard out of the sky. In in the Atlantic Flyway,
Speaker 6: it's about two percent. Again, some states are better than like.
Speaker 2: The fake not fake. The feral ducks have effectively in
Speaker 2: these areas they have replaced wild mallards more or less. Yeah,
Speaker 2: let me hit you with the let me hit Let's
Speaker 2: say you're not interested. Let's say you don't care about
Speaker 2: endemism and use like the hunt docks, and you don't
Speaker 2: care about the genetics of the duck. Yeah, so let
Speaker 2: me hit you with the who cares? I mean, is
Speaker 2: New Jersey just kicking ass at duck recruitment? No, no, no,
Speaker 2: that's the problem.
Speaker 6: So the Atlantic Flyway has been declining two percent in
Speaker 6: its annual production over the last twenty years, just constantly
Speaker 6: ticking ticking, ticking ticking. In fact, they were down for
Speaker 6: a five hundred I think they somehow found.
Speaker 2: Like regardless of the gene background, we're just talking.
Speaker 6: Like ducks, No mallards.
Speaker 2: We're talking about I'm sorry, and the mallards like the mallards,
Speaker 2: regardless of what you're counting. If you're like, there are
Speaker 2: fewer and fewer mallards out there every year, regardless of
Speaker 2: whether you're dividing them into wild or well. We didn't
Speaker 2: know what was the cause. Yeah, but you know that
Speaker 2: they all have their heritage, is all. We now know
Speaker 2: that arm raised. Their numbers are going down.
Speaker 6: So the next question is obviously doesn't matter right, sure,
Speaker 6: all right, so it's about two percent there. But then
Speaker 6: as you go to the Mississippi Flyway, there's an interesting
Speaker 6: aspect and we uh uh some work between Brian Davis
Speaker 6: and Mississippi stay Rikaminski and others, Kevin Ringleman. We did
Speaker 6: a a sort of like Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, if
Speaker 6: you know that area, Georgia, Louisiana, parts of Missouri. We've
Speaker 6: got a bunch of birds there. And then I've partnered
Speaker 6: with Ben Lucanan out of Michigan State, got a whole
Speaker 6: bunch of hundreds of birds out of the Great Lakes.
Speaker 6: And there's this interesting dynamic. You go south of Tennessee,
Speaker 6: ninety four percent of those birds are wild, just wild,
Speaker 6: straight up wild. Go north of Tennessee towards the Great Lakes,
Speaker 6: it's increasingly becoming more and more game farming. So current
Speaker 6: estimates general again average seventy thirty seventy percent game farmy
Speaker 6: Faral versus the Great Lakes. Yeah, and the Great Lakes
Speaker 6: is the next place where those populations have been declining.
Speaker 6: They're exactly those locations. So again you could say, oh,
Speaker 6: you have no data for association of that sort sure,
Speaker 6: but my hypothesis is at least provide something is happening.
Speaker 6: So again, so what's so all right, so now everybody's
Speaker 6: on track.
Speaker 11: I get a question, Yeah, are you grabbing these ducks
Speaker 11: during the breeding season.
Speaker 7: From all these different states?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 7: So so that works.
Speaker 6: So they're they're breeding the two separate, separate types of sampling.
Speaker 6: So we do hunter harvest sampling. Hunters are just you know,
Speaker 6: during the hunting season, we get a bunch of samples.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: But then there's banding crews again. Ben Lucanan and his
Speaker 6: his crew out of the Great Lakes, Doug Osborne or
Speaker 6: of University of Arkansas, uh, Brad Cohen out of Tennessee Tech,
Speaker 6: and Brian Brian Davis out of Mississippi State. They are
Speaker 6: constantly catching, putting telemetry units and banding and.
Speaker 2: All that stuff up out of the wat.
Speaker 6: So then so then I partnered with them and be like,
Speaker 6: all right, just bleed them a little bit and get
Speaker 6: me that sample.
Speaker 7: Right, We're not killing those birds.
Speaker 6: So so uh so then we have those two comparisons.
Speaker 6: What are we banding during what summer? And then what
Speaker 6: are we harvesting? So we have those types of comparisons
Speaker 6: so we're building those data sets to answer how does
Speaker 6: the mixture between Canada raised mallards and US mallards occur
Speaker 6: across the hunting time span? Because if you go to
Speaker 6: folks in the Mississippi, they'd be like, all our ducks.
Speaker 7: Are stopping in the north.
Speaker 6: Yeah for sure, Yeah, because.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I was just thinking about migration and I'm like,
Speaker 11: how do you know where this exact duck came from?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Yeah, So so that was our question.
Speaker 6: All right, so we know this, so we we now
Speaker 6: we publish these papers and we know this like different
Speaker 6: population dynamics going on. We you know, so I partner
Speaker 6: with them and we've got telemetry units on them. Right,
Speaker 6: can anybody guess trivia where those birds in the lower
Speaker 6: Mississippi Alluvia Valley are from? Given their genetics of wild
Speaker 6: I made a hypothesis and thankfully I was right to.
Speaker 2: The west more Preci.
Speaker 7: Exactly Dakota.
Speaker 6: Every every bird that was that, I think, every bird
Speaker 6: maybe not maybe except for one that was a hybrid,
Speaker 6: went to the Great Lakes. And then really and then
Speaker 6: the Great Lakes birds do they do you think they have?
Speaker 6: So well, we have four years now of telemetry units
Speaker 6: tied with genetics, so we know what's happening. What do
Speaker 6: you think those birds are doing? Are they migrating? Are
Speaker 6: they what would you expected on which birds like Great
Speaker 6: Lakes birds given that I told you about this, like
Speaker 6: increasingly game farming situation.
Speaker 3: Should be holding they should be holding strong where somewhere
Speaker 3: up in the Great Lakes, somewhere up in that region
Speaker 3: because they're not going to migrate all the way south.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they do a random walk, a walk, it's called
Speaker 6: random walk. There isn't a straight path. Some birds go
Speaker 6: to the Atlantics. Some birds go south, but then there's
Speaker 6: this wall in Tennessee that they do not cross.
Speaker 7: Don't understand why, trying to figure that out. And they
Speaker 7: go straight back up. All of the birds with thirty percent.
Speaker 2: So they'll scatter off various directions.
Speaker 6: Just it's more random. Yeah, it's completely random. It's it's
Speaker 6: not significantly different from random. Right, So the birds in
Speaker 6: the lower Mississippi have this like straight patch.
Speaker 2: Well, have you been able to watch any of these
Speaker 2: ducks and see what he does? Is he doing this?
Speaker 2: Is he is an individual duck doing the same thing,
Speaker 2: or is an individual duck doing different directions all the time?
Speaker 6: Individual duck is doing random walks.
Speaker 2: Okay, so in twenty twenty one he does this. In
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two.
Speaker 6: They survive well. So it's these ones are all females.
Speaker 6: I wish we would put males because they're the males
Speaker 6: and waterfowl are the dispersing sex. So if you've got
Speaker 6: a game farmy male or a game farming female, it's
Speaker 6: the male that's most likely to move the gees. But
Speaker 6: nobody wants to put telemetry and it's on males. Apparently
Speaker 6: it's unfortunate because I was good shot. Yeah no, because
Speaker 6: then you can look at nest nesting, perpetual nesting and all,
Speaker 6: and that's like the next that's the main question that
Speaker 6: they're all asking, Like, you know, these populations are declining,
Speaker 6: so they're always just like, okay, what are the females doing?
Speaker 7: Like what is the problem.
Speaker 3: I have a timeline question because I'm just kind of
Speaker 3: tracking what you're saying. So boreal forests go way back.
Speaker 3: You had said that there was no mallards in the
Speaker 3: Northern Atlantic Northeast region. Yeah, anyways, that there was a
Speaker 3: bunch down south of Tennessee. Naturally, there was a bunch
Speaker 3: of while down there already there was none up in
Speaker 3: the New Jersey area, so they brought them in. We
Speaker 3: have the American black duck who's not getting messed with
Speaker 3: with you know what's going on here, And now all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, there's mallards again. It kind of goes
Speaker 3: back to the hooket, like, now all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: we have a bunch of mallards there that we didn't
Speaker 3: have before, and they weren't migrating in because they're staying
Speaker 3: in Canada or coming around the Great Lakes or whatever.
Speaker 3: So like that region there, there's a population that was
Speaker 3: never there before and now it is. And yes it's
Speaker 3: a game farm mallard. So is it more the wide
Speaker 3: spread of that that's the issue, or.
Speaker 6: Is it it's the spreading.
Speaker 3: It's the spreading that we don't like, because having a
Speaker 3: mallard in New Jersey is seems like it's a success story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but when you say that all the mallard, yeah,
Speaker 2: like all the mallards in New Jersey are game fire mallards.
Speaker 2: But was there ever a difference meaning they went from
Speaker 2: no mallards to just only game fire mallards?
Speaker 6: So I hope to answer that question soon with those
Speaker 6: eighteen hundreds, So we did we redid that study. We
Speaker 6: have eight hundred historical samples from eighteen hundred to today
Speaker 6: to answer that question, how did it happen? We know
Speaker 6: what we have now.
Speaker 2: But you know where the samples came from, and.
Speaker 6: We know exactly where the samples came from with the
Speaker 6: dates location.
Speaker 2: So there were mallards that got killed out of New
Speaker 2: Jersey the eighteen hundreds, yeah, okay, yeah, number.
Speaker 6: Some number, yeah yeah, yeah, I mean people shoot still
Speaker 6: shoot cinnamon teal in there every so often, right, so
Speaker 6: these things got collected. Is I'm sure at that time
Speaker 6: you shot a malley, you're like, oh, man, put this
Speaker 6: thing into the museum.
Speaker 2: It was you were surprised. Yeah, I see, I see
Speaker 2: some strays would go through that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So now we're seeing these migratory differences that are that
Speaker 6: at least to some extent, are genetically associated. Because we
Speaker 6: have this nice association of an individual that's and it's
Speaker 6: very weird. Don't know why yet, but thirty percent or
Speaker 6: more game farm makes them do weird things.
Speaker 7: All right, So now we've got so now we have
Speaker 7: sort of lists like situation.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 6: The other thing is is birds in the Atlantic Flyway
Speaker 6: had a connect connectivity to the Atlantic Flyway. There's birds
Speaker 6: that are interchanging. So the question is like, why is
Speaker 6: there increasing game farm in the Great Lakes.
Speaker 7: Is it people releasing them or is it just this.
Speaker 6: Like kind of ebb and flow between the Atlantic Flyway
Speaker 6: and the Great Lakes region kind of this natural, semi
Speaker 6: natural ebb and flow.
Speaker 7: That's the question that we hope to answer.
Speaker 2: Are there people releasing If they're releasing them, they're not
Speaker 2: supposed to be.
Speaker 7: That's a state that's a state by state kind of situation.
Speaker 2: We I mean, how would you not know if they're
Speaker 2: releasing them in the Great Lakes.
Speaker 7: Nobody's keeping track of that as far as I can tell.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, so someone could be I mean the Great Lakes,
Speaker 2: I don't know what it is, five or six states,
Speaker 2: whatever the hell. Yeah, So Michigan, are there there are
Speaker 2: not to your knowledge, there are not places in Michigan
Speaker 2: that like advertise that they're dumping mallards.
Speaker 7: Not to my knowledge. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So the genetic signatures that I see there make me
Speaker 6: believe that people are because because it looks like Jersey,
Speaker 6: it looks like France. Then the whole thing is like
Speaker 6: these things have a low survival, right, So a colleague
Speaker 6: of mine in Sweden kind of did a survival estimate.
Speaker 6: They said, like three percent, But look, three percent of
Speaker 6: half a million, two hundred and fifty thousand and a
Speaker 6: half a million or more throughout time is more than enough. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: And it's it isn't really that it's the trickle effect.
Speaker 7: It's the added every.
Speaker 6: Single year you're just you're continuing to move those genes
Speaker 6: into the population over and over and over. We can
Speaker 6: go back to rainbow trot. So the fisheries are are
Speaker 6: far ahead of what we do where we are because
Speaker 6: they've been studying this. It takes only three generations for
Speaker 6: for rainbow trout to be in a stock tank. Uh,
Speaker 6: for for fifty percent of the eggs to be in viable,
Speaker 6: because what happens in this in Italy. Yeah, and the
Speaker 6: same thing with quail. Only three or four generations of
Speaker 6: being in captivity, the viability decreases that much. And the
Speaker 6: reason for that is because everybody wins in a cage. Right,
Speaker 6: So you're perpetuating these genes that would have been lost
Speaker 6: every single year by natural processes in the wild. But
Speaker 6: now you're pushing the putting them into the wild.
Speaker 2: You know the unibomber got into this. Oh yeah, you
Speaker 2: read the manifesto.
Speaker 6: I know, I know the unise Yeah no, well I'll
Speaker 6: just give it to Oh my god, didn't I didn't
Speaker 6: see this coming.
Speaker 2: He rates levels of difficulty one to five and his manifesto,
Speaker 2: and he's like, one is I can't remember it was
Speaker 2: inverse or not, but let's say one is, Uh, try
Speaker 2: as hard as you can, you'll never succeed. Okay, Five
Speaker 2: is you don't even need to try, and you'll succeed.
Speaker 2: His deal is that technology that Human Survival used to
Speaker 2: hover like at the two three. Yeah, try pretty hard.
Speaker 2: He tried pretty hard, you'll be okay. Now you can
Speaker 2: do the opposite to try.
Speaker 7: You sit there and just be fine.
Speaker 2: And and that's part of his gripe with technology. Everybody
Speaker 2: wins in the cage.
Speaker 7: Everybody wins.
Speaker 2: See and then he tied that to all the neuro season.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean, there's nothing cleaning anything out anymore.
Speaker 2: Title well, we got away from we don't do a
Speaker 2: good title.
Speaker 10: This is the second podcast this month where Steve's made
Speaker 10: the guests uncomfortable by being kind of like prom.
Speaker 2: It's just springing it in. I'm not pro unibomber at all.
Speaker 2: I took a class in college called political rhetoric, and
Speaker 2: we read political rhetic everything from Doctor King, Camille Paglia,
Speaker 2: the Unibomber, Like, we read it all. And I think
Speaker 2: a lot of people know about the Unibomber, but not
Speaker 2: a lot of people had to read the Unibomber's manifesto. No,
Speaker 2: so you had to read the Unibomber's manifesto.
Speaker 7: Are you going to talk about Charlie Manson?
Speaker 2: Now, we didn't read anything abou Charlie. I'll have to
Speaker 2: write doctor Gillison note and tell him that he should
Speaker 2: have had some Charlie Manson writings in there. But no,
Speaker 2: not pro unibomber, but just he had a motive. He
Speaker 2: had he had like motivating thoughts.
Speaker 6: No, yeah, I mean in a cage, everybody wins. I
Speaker 6: mean I teach I teach similar things, right, is it
Speaker 6: not unibomber things I teach? You know, Like, look, humans,
Speaker 6: everybody's surprised always that the effective population size of humans
Speaker 6: is ten thousand people. That's how many people there should
Speaker 6: be and it hasn't changed. And everybody's like, well, why
Speaker 6: is that that's because genetic very genetic variation doesn't come
Speaker 6: come up that fast. Our populations exploded only in the
Speaker 6: last two hundred years, really, right, and so for a
Speaker 6: very very for ninety nine percent of our history, we
Speaker 6: were at an effective population size of ten thousand breeding pairs.
Speaker 6: And that's what the earth was more or less okay
Speaker 6: with and so and so there was a stability, There
Speaker 6: was a stability, and society, domestication, all of these things
Speaker 6: allowed that population to grow. But it's only that God,
Speaker 6: I got loss of where I was going with this,
Speaker 6: but but I'm going to it is because yeah, it through.
Speaker 7: Society. Society.
Speaker 6: Society is our cage, and it becomes you know, we
Speaker 6: we we go further and further further to the four
Speaker 6: or five. Well, earlier on, as long as you were
Speaker 6: kings and stuff like that, you were really out of five.
Speaker 6: Everybody else was still kind of at a two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, So what's the if the situation goes
Speaker 2: and continues to happen? Yeah, do you picture that? Do
Speaker 2: you picture that they'll continue to move westward?
Speaker 6: That's exactly, Souse.
Speaker 2: There's some amount astray, like exactly like when you look
Speaker 2: at that salm and a lot of salmon make a
Speaker 2: wrong turn, correct, and that's how they colonize new rivers. Correct,
Speaker 2: like they just go out the wrong river. Most of
Speaker 2: the time they do that. It doesn't work out now
Speaker 2: and then one does that and he's like, sweet, yep,
Speaker 2: that hold new salmon stream.
Speaker 6: No, no, absolutely, And that's exactly what's happening. It's we
Speaker 6: we ben Senator and I looked at banding data we
Speaker 6: recently published Internal of Wildlife Management, and we saw that
Speaker 6: there's a twenty five percent emigration rate, so leaving the
Speaker 6: Atlantic flywight on the US side into the Mississippi. So
Speaker 6: this is one way that things are moving west. And
Speaker 6: so most likely what's happening is those genetics are coming
Speaker 6: over their pair bonding with something that goes to the prairies,
Speaker 6: and they're moving it into the prairies. And that is
Speaker 6: exactly what we're seeing through time.
Speaker 2: And that'll Jon Rock Mountain, that'll jump.
Speaker 6: The unfortunate thing is uh so okay, So getting back
Speaker 6: to is this a bad thing? Let me let me
Speaker 6: prevince this. So study between Michael Schumer at Sunni SEF
Speaker 6: and his master student Susannah haligrand Brian Davis out Mississippi
Speaker 6: State Ariol Fournier with Forged Biological Station.
Speaker 2: This is very generous someone receiving an OSCAR.
Speaker 6: I want to thank everybody, as well as California Waterfowl
Speaker 6: Association with Caroline Brady and Brian Huber.
Speaker 7: All right, I got all those out. Uh, So we
Speaker 7: did a study.
Speaker 2: We want to We can't be like, well what I did, yeah,
Speaker 2: Ahi on this silver tower by myself.
Speaker 6: No, No, that's not how I work. I'm like, we
Speaker 6: got to get this, you know study. I almost said,
Speaker 6: you know, the stuff done, and I work by bringing
Speaker 6: in the people who know how to do it quickly.
Speaker 6: And that's what I do, you know.
Speaker 7: So anyways, so.
Speaker 6: We're like, okay, we need to get wild strain birds
Speaker 6: and game farm birds into captivity to test. Like the
Speaker 6: first thing that we started seeing is their bill and
Speaker 6: we're like, this bill on this game farm mallard sure
Speaker 6: looks like it's better at pecking than it is at straining.
Speaker 6: So we had a hypothesis that in captivity where you
Speaker 6: throw grains out, potentially over in the last four hundred years,
Speaker 6: we've been selecting for things that can a run over
Speaker 6: to that and be peck at it. And so We're like,
Speaker 6: all right, let's see what this looks like. So we
Speaker 6: got birds out of California. And this gets back to
Speaker 6: your comment about going west, and I'm like, oh, for
Speaker 6: sure those are wild birds, and lo and behold there's
Speaker 6: game far mallards there. Somebody's releasing them in California. Unfortunate.
Speaker 6: Really didn't see that coming.
Speaker 7: So I called up some friends and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 7: there's some people.
Speaker 6: I don't know who they really, So now I'm gonna
Speaker 6: have to send my wife back to California.
Speaker 7: Anyways, so we brought these in captivity.
Speaker 6: We genetically vetted everyone, meaning we did you know, ancestry
Speaker 6: dot com on everybody knew everybody, Okay, these are hybrids,
Speaker 6: these are wild these are the game farms. On top
Speaker 6: of it, we got game by doing this. We got
Speaker 6: game farms from like other states, everybody, same exact genetic signature,
Speaker 6: still old world Eurasian signature, right, still from over there.
Speaker 6: So we brought them in and what we were doing
Speaker 6: were these feeding trials. And what we would do is
Speaker 6: we would take the individual and we would we would
Speaker 6: give them a food wild seats, what they would actually
Speaker 6: eat in the wild, in a bowl, and we would
Speaker 6: force them to strain it right, and then we would
Speaker 6: see how much food was left over so much time.
Speaker 6: To the crux of it, we found that game f
Speaker 6: arm mallards are fifty percent inefficient in eating wild seeds
Speaker 6: straining wild seeds as a wild mallard, and the worst
Speaker 6: of them were female game farm mallards. So that means
Speaker 6: in the wild you can extrapolate this too, they need
Speaker 6: twice as much food and twice as much time to
Speaker 6: get the same calories on top of it. Anecdotally, because
Speaker 6: we were just watching this, you could go into a
Speaker 6: cage and be like, that's a game farm female, because
Speaker 6: what would happen is every day there'd just be eggs
Speaker 6: randomly placed places. At times she would make a nest,
Speaker 6: but it would be like half made right, So like
Speaker 6: she's not she has been transformed to be a chicken,
Speaker 6: because in domestic settings you don't want them to nest.
Speaker 6: You want them to just poop eggs out and you
Speaker 6: put them into your incubators. Wild bird, you knew exactly
Speaker 6: what it is. The nest is there. There's almost never
Speaker 6: an egg because they're stressed out right. So anyway, so
Speaker 6: now we have this this association of genetics, morphology, and
Speaker 6: now it's causing issues on their ability to feed. On
Speaker 6: top of all this, what we found out is what's
Speaker 6: happened is they actually have made these things flightier. So
Speaker 6: you have a a mallard about the same length, but
Speaker 6: the wings are shorter, the legs are longer, so they
Speaker 6: run faster. Or that's that when you see the tarsis
Speaker 6: get longer. It's it's what you see in island species
Speaker 6: where they're become more terrestrial, more time on the ground exactly,
Speaker 6: and so but the wings are shorter. That was an
Speaker 6: interesting one because I had to go to our aeronautics team.
Speaker 7: I was like, what does this do?
Speaker 6: And they're like, oh, you took a jumbo jet and
Speaker 6: you put fighter wings on it. You created you made
Speaker 6: it flightier. So these things can maneuver at faster rates.
Speaker 6: But here's the kicker. When we finished our feeding trials,
Speaker 6: we put them back on purina chow to get them fat,
Speaker 6: and the hybrids puriana child so a high protein diet
Speaker 6: to get them back to fat because we wanted to
Speaker 6: know what they would what they would do, and anything
Speaker 6: that had thirty percent more game farm or just straight
Speaker 6: up game farm almost never put fat on. They just
Speaker 6: stayed the same. So they're like a seven nine hundred
Speaker 6: grand bird, whereas a wild mallard at full fat, you're
Speaker 6: looking at nine hundred to twelve hundred grand.
Speaker 2: They're not getting properly geared up for.
Speaker 6: It, and that's physiologically. They do not put fat on.
Speaker 6: It seems again anecdotally just because of what we've done
Speaker 6: game wild mallards. You put them on Purian chown in
Speaker 6: four days, they're like twelve hundred grands. Right, they're putting
Speaker 6: that fat on just as you would expect. So now
Speaker 6: let's put all this into a winter situation in Michigan.
Speaker 6: A freak storm comes in. You got a bird with
Speaker 6: no fuel, shorter wings, that can fly fast, but can't
Speaker 6: migrate far and would have to refuel almost every stop. Right,
Speaker 6: that's a bad thing. So now going back to the
Speaker 6: telemetry units, what did they actually tell us that? So
Speaker 6: not only are these females we've had females with thirty
Speaker 6: percent or more game farm in them, they had a
Speaker 6: statistically significant I'm pretty sure I'm saying this, okay, statistically
Speaker 6: significant abandonment of nest, statistically significant tied to urbanization, and
Speaker 6: they were the ones that are doing the random walk.
Speaker 6: And that's and when we looked at stopover rates, they
Speaker 6: had statistically significantly higher rates of stopover. These things are
Speaker 6: burning fuel and as they hop scotch across the country,
Speaker 6: so they can't go very far.
Speaker 7: So the city almost that's that's the random walk.
Speaker 2: That's why they come back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're like, oh, I gotta go back to bread.
Speaker 6: Bread lady, you know, like refuel except bread gives ducks
Speaker 6: angel wings, So don't give them bread. They actually are
Speaker 6: killing them by giving them bread.
Speaker 2: Really. Yeah, so if they had just done one of
Speaker 2: these introductions fifty years ago.
Speaker 6: It would have been swamped out by the wild.
Speaker 2: Because of all these problems. Yeah, what's the fact that
Speaker 2: you're just doing it and doing it and doing it
Speaker 2: and doing it, and once it's in there, it doesn't
Speaker 2: go away.
Speaker 6: That's that's the New Zealand situation, where you had inundation,
Speaker 6: you put these things out there and then you like, let's.
Speaker 7: See what mother nature basically would do.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and obviously they but again an interesting situation. It's
Speaker 6: an islands island ecosystem. There are there there aren't needs
Speaker 6: for migration because you know, seasonality isn't the same, no predators,
Speaker 6: all these It's it's sort of like a perfect situation.
Speaker 2: It's not this like complex web of all these correct
Speaker 2: intercontinental migration parallel migration paths, you know.
Speaker 6: Exactly and so so yeah, So what we know now
Speaker 6: is that at minimum there are physiological morphological which means
Speaker 6: like their bill, their body, all this stuff, and they're physiological.
Speaker 3: I forgot.
Speaker 6: So when we started seeing some of this uh this
Speaker 6: uh changes in migration. We I have a master student
Speaker 6: uh uh Nico who's working on getting muscle fibers off
Speaker 6: of the ducks of these different genetic heritage. Looking at
Speaker 6: I might get this wrongick quick twitch or slow twitch
Speaker 6: muscle fibers, So you would want quick twitch for faster movement,
Speaker 6: slow twitch for that elongated migration pattern is the hypothesis,
Speaker 6: and we're seeing exactly that that these birds have higher
Speaker 6: proportions of quick twitch as compared to or fast twitch
Speaker 6: versus slow twitch. That's it more slow twitch or sorry,
Speaker 6: more fast twitch in the game for our mallards as
Speaker 6: compared to the slow twitch in wild Mallards are doing
Speaker 6: these my long distance migration and able to make these
Speaker 6: long distances.
Speaker 7: So basically what this game farm mallard.
Speaker 6: Is is a fighter jet that goes really fast short bursts. Uh,
Speaker 6: and that's about it.
Speaker 7: That's but that's what we bredd it for, right.
Speaker 6: That, unintentionally or intentionally, we got what we wanted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a question for you.
Speaker 9: So when I hear this, this is from my perspective,
Speaker 9: it sounds a little doom and gloom, right, like we're screwed.
Speaker 9: My question is, with all of this data that you
Speaker 9: have right now, is there legislation in place or being
Speaker 9: pushed to stop game farm releases? And even if they did,
Speaker 9: let's just say, you know, you're king of the world.
Speaker 9: You waved one. There's not another game farm bird released
Speaker 9: in North America today?
Speaker 2: Are we screwed? Like?
Speaker 9: Is this going to eventually be fully bled out as
Speaker 9: it gets into the West and other regions of the country.
Speaker 2: I got a solution, good, it's Brady's point. If it was,
Speaker 2: if the new ones were to end, I mean, can
Speaker 2: you start bringing ones from the West and yeah, cutting
Speaker 2: them back loose.
Speaker 9: Right, I mean, that's that's what it looks like, right
Speaker 9: if they're eventually if they're so weak that they're not
Speaker 9: going to be able to withstand the winters and they're
Speaker 9: not putting on the fat et cetera. I'm just curious,
Speaker 9: like forward face, forward looking, what's the play here?
Speaker 7: That's a great question. More data.
Speaker 2: He's not policy guys.
Speaker 6: That's right, those kinds of questions.
Speaker 2: What are the policy guys think about it? Are interested?
Speaker 6: I am not allowed to come, so I do not comment.
Speaker 6: I don't know about the Atlantic FLA.
Speaker 2: I don't give me the you don't comment on.
Speaker 6: The Mississippi Flyway has reached out. They are they are
Speaker 6: supposed to be putting a comment out being like we
Speaker 6: do not support this, I believe.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I don't know what about the U, S.
Speaker 4: G S.
Speaker 7: I feel like you're pleading the fifth right now? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 7: it definitely is.
Speaker 2: Okay. Let's say you had let's say you said no,
Speaker 2: no on it. Uh, let's say you said exactly what
Speaker 2: you think? What would what bad? What would happen to you?
Speaker 2: It was bad? All right?
Speaker 7: So like everybody.
Speaker 6: The question, Yeah, the Flyways asked me if if this
Speaker 6: is going to be like, how do you know if
Speaker 6: it's going to be bad? I won't know until it happens,
Speaker 6: but we can easily go back and ask, well, what
Speaker 6: happened with all the fisheries and u quail releases and
Speaker 6: pheasants and anything else we've tried to release with captive
Speaker 6: bread birds that have been domesticated for a while.
Speaker 2: Like the track record's not great, not great.
Speaker 6: Not great, And all of those signatures are popping up,
Speaker 6: not just here, but like we can just look at
Speaker 6: what's happening in Europe, right, So, so France is releasing
Speaker 6: a few million birds just to have a fall flight.
Speaker 7: You know that.
Speaker 6: That's and they have complex ecologies, right, they have my
Speaker 6: needs for migration. They have seasonality very similar to us.
Speaker 6: So given the situation there and the constant inundation, the
Speaker 6: probability of the same situation happening is high.
Speaker 8: Really close to beyond at a time.
Speaker 11: All right, sorry, I feel like we could talk about
Speaker 11: this for five more hours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who you worked for the university? I did? Okay.
Speaker 2: We had a USGS guy on a long time ago
Speaker 2: about grizzly bear. His job was to count. His job
Speaker 2: was to tell people how many bears are there. But
Speaker 2: he's like, my job is not to tell you what
Speaker 2: to do about it. I'll tell you how many I
Speaker 2: think are there, but what you do with that is
Speaker 2: your business. You're not held by that. You're a university guy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but I work with every state and federal agency
Speaker 6: in this country and in Canada, and you know, I
Speaker 6: leave it to them. I provide data and they do
Speaker 6: what they.
Speaker 7: Want with I am.
Speaker 6: I am.
Speaker 2: Oh, then let's let's hear it. What do you really think?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 7: So, so people, we gotta right we trivia Pete.
Speaker 6: I've already done trivia with you guys, like right here,
Speaker 6: you did. I asked you a questions, a couple of questions.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, okay, I think, yeah, what do you do?
Speaker 6: So we have a project in Hawaii. I'll wrap it
Speaker 6: up quickly. Like where we're testing this, can you artificially
Speaker 6: move back a hybrid population towards something different?
Speaker 2: That's what I want to hear.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so in Hawaii, can you were We just got funding,
Speaker 6: although we're two hundred and fifty thousand dollars short. If
Speaker 6: there are any donors on this podcast, please contact me
Speaker 6: at Peele Rescue at utub dot eu. Anyways, so we
Speaker 6: are actually going to try we know exactly the population.
Speaker 6: It's on Awahu. We're going to try to move pure
Speaker 6: Hawaiian ducks into this hybrid population and see generationally, how
Speaker 6: many generations does it take for us to get Hawaiian
Speaker 6: ducks again? So it's kind of like a genetic pseudo
Speaker 6: genetic rescue thing. Our models suggest it's only three or
Speaker 6: four generations, So that's three four breeding events and we'll
Speaker 6: have Hawaiian pure Hawaiian ducks again. If that works, Like
Speaker 6: that's a closed system, right, we control we can control
Speaker 6: so much of that. If that works, then we can
Speaker 6: extrapolate what would we have to do in North America
Speaker 6: to turn the tide. Now, the prey, the significant size
Speaker 6: of the prey pothole population is what is stopping this
Speaker 6: thing from just constantly moving west because it's it's essentially.
Speaker 2: Because you're in a Mallard stronghold.
Speaker 6: Exactly what happened in the East hypothesis Now hopefully i'll
Speaker 6: have data with all the historical stuff, is that there
Speaker 6: weren't that many to begin with, and whatever was there
Speaker 6: you essentially bred out right, and so now it's just
Speaker 6: these hybrid thingies and so, and you're constantly putting it
Speaker 6: in where mother nature can't just be like, all right,
Speaker 6: let's just keep some of this wild in there, yep,
Speaker 6: because you're just constantly pushing it in and so again,
Speaker 6: I don't think it's good in doom the Atlantic Flyway,
Speaker 6: I'm not. You're right, like there's no parental population there.
Speaker 6: You would have to create one, create one.
Speaker 9: I lived in that flyway for a couple of years.
Speaker 9: It felt like doom and gloom when I was there.
Speaker 2: So they're glad to be here now.
Speaker 6: Now you were mentioning the Chesapeake Bay and that those
Speaker 6: ducks are funny.
Speaker 7: Now you know that they are funny there.
Speaker 6: Their behavior, everything about them is just you know, it
Speaker 6: looks like a mallard, but it's a chuaha a dog.
Speaker 2: We're going to close with a role play. We're in
Speaker 2: a hotel bar. I don't know anything about you, yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: and I got no way of finding out about you.
Speaker 2: And I'm just thinking out loud in this hotel bar,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, man, I live in New Jersey. I'm
Speaker 2: thinking about getting into this whole deal of turning game
Speaker 2: farm mallards out. So I like to hunt ducks. You're
Speaker 2: just a stranger. What do you think I ought to do?
Speaker 2: Don't do it, that's what you'd say.
Speaker 7: Yeah, doctor Phil says, don't do it.
Speaker 2: Oh, doctor Phil says, I was giving you anonymity as
Speaker 2: a dude. That yeah, I mean I caught you in
Speaker 2: the traps. Oh god, yeah, I mean here's the thing.
Speaker 6: It's now sort of a pastime right in a lot
Speaker 6: of part of this country. I'm not going to say like, oh,
Speaker 6: let's shut it all down. But what I can say is,
Speaker 6: our maps are our data flow are so at nice
Speaker 6: fine scales that there are management actions that we can have, Like,
Speaker 6: for example, you have a place that is releasing, and
Speaker 6: we can find these hot spots for any state and
Speaker 6: be like, Okay, we're gonna have special seasons in September.
Speaker 6: We're going to allow you to shoot ten Mallards or.
Speaker 7: Whatever it is.
Speaker 6: When you're there, you're just basically trying to push that
Speaker 6: three four percent survival rate to zero of Mallard's coming
Speaker 6: out of there.
Speaker 7: That's what I would suggest.
Speaker 6: You're not going to shut this thing down like it's
Speaker 6: a money maker, Like are you going to really know?
Speaker 6: But there are things that we can do. I think,
Speaker 6: And I think that segues to can we segue to
Speaker 6: duck DNA?
Speaker 8: Now I was gonna.
Speaker 4: Know that's that's the done, But it's an action item
Speaker 4: for duck DNA. Like one minute and then we need it,
Speaker 4: We're gonna still is gonna pull the plug?
Speaker 9: So literally, where's the rights twitch?
Speaker 6: So so yeah, So this is a citizen science project
Speaker 6: that has been in my mind for almost a decade.
Speaker 6: Mike Brazier, uh and I have been talking who's with
Speaker 6: Ducks Unlimited over the last couple of years, and then
Speaker 6: we went forward with this thing called Duck DNA.
Speaker 7: Go to www dot duck dna dot com.
Speaker 2: You got the u r L doug DNA Duck DNA. Congratulations, Yeah,
Speaker 2: well to do you?
Speaker 6: So do you I have to thank Ashley Tunstall, Uh
Speaker 6: Kai Victor do you Communications department, it department and development.
Speaker 2: This is where I play.
Speaker 6: And my crew, Virgie Muncie, Lauren McFarland's Sara Gonzale. They're
Speaker 6: all working right now as we speak to get this
Speaker 6: thing going.
Speaker 7: So this is a everybody.
Speaker 6: Go to duck dna dot com and sign up today
Speaker 6: and you will get a kit with five vials and
Speaker 6: you could put a tongue in that vial and we
Speaker 6: will tell you the ancestry of that duck. We will
Speaker 6: be using it for research purposes, but you will get
Speaker 6: a certificate because congratulations I did. Yeah, we were supposed
Speaker 6: to do it on air.
Speaker 7: I was going to do a show.
Speaker 6: How I even had to take latex gloves out of
Speaker 6: my kill kit, uh because I forgot others. But like, uh,
Speaker 6: so you just put the tongue in there of your
Speaker 6: favorite duck. If you're you know, a little Jimmy, little
Speaker 6: Susie shot their first duck, we can give you the
Speaker 6: ancestry of that. Right now, it's only ducks. Soon we'll
Speaker 6: do all the geese because we're building the data set,
Speaker 6: the reference DATUS, after all those eleven Canada geese and
Speaker 6: all the snow geese and rosses and everybody else. But
Speaker 6: right now it's ducks and primarily mallards, which we're asking
Speaker 6: the hunters out there to become hunter scientists and provide
Speaker 6: their data give us the opportunity to make waterfowl at
Speaker 6: the forefront of wildlife conservation. Nobody's ever tried something like this.
Speaker 6: There's duck hunters all over. I know we're at like
Speaker 6: nine hundred and fifty thousand, but if everybody signs up,
Speaker 6: there's only three hundred. And I want to thank all
Speaker 6: the donors to do you that made this possible free
Speaker 6: this year to sign up free to get your kit.
Speaker 6: Hopefully we have a mass amount of people and interest
Speaker 6: and we will make this hopefully viable into the future.
Speaker 6: But I'm just super excited about it because this has
Speaker 6: been a dream, right, a mass a mass all the
Speaker 6: duck hunters to provide at landscape, landscape and time intervals
Speaker 6: that would be impossible for any researcher to do.
Speaker 7: Right, we would be able to study.
Speaker 6: We are there hotspots of hybridization, you know, pintail, mallard pin,
Speaker 6: you know these types of things as well as obviously
Speaker 6: my interest right now where this came about is adding
Speaker 6: a countrywide sampling of mallards, uh to to get get
Speaker 6: after and get ahead of this question with this whole
Speaker 6: game farm release and what it means to our wild
Speaker 6: North American mallards DNA dot com.
Speaker 2: That's cool.
Speaker 8: Curtain close.
Speaker 2: Thank you to doctor Phil. Thank you to the flying
Speaker 2: be guys. Don't leave it out your vials.
Speaker 7: Oh I'm govern ten of them.
Speaker 6: It takes ten seventy one sign up.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I signed up last night.
Speaker 2: Thank you, doctor Phil.
Speaker 6: Thanks, thank you all.
Speaker 1: Right on.
Speaker 2: Seal Gray shine like silver in the sun right right alone, sweetheart.
Speaker 12: We don't beat this, damn of course, taking a new
Speaker 12: one and ride away. We're done beat this damn Parsiday,
Speaker 12: so take a new one and ride on.
Speaker 5: H