Speaker 1: M my dad. He thought he was unique, even at
Speaker 1: that time to have a camouflage boat and a black
Speaker 1: dog in south central Kansas. And you know then he
Speaker 1: comes out here to visit me and hunt here, and
Speaker 1: it's it's nothing exceptional at all. I mean, there's there's
Speaker 1: a there's a camouflage boat and a black dog at
Speaker 1: every other house, it seems. On this episode of The
Speaker 1: Burglaries podcast will be exploring the ancient migration of Mallard
Speaker 1: ducks and how a place they chose as a primary
Speaker 1: wintering ground is called the duck hunting capital of the world.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about my home state of Arkansas, and I
Speaker 1: want to understand why this reputation has lasted the test
Speaker 1: of time. I like the boldness and passion of such labels.
Speaker 1: We'll talk with the lead waterfowl biologist of the Arkansas
Speaker 1: Game and Fish Commission and the new director of the agency.
Speaker 1: We'll go into a flooded timber and hunt with the
Speaker 1: world champion duck caller, jimbo ron Quest, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: with ornithologist and author Scott Widensaul about the mystery of
Speaker 1: the migration. Well even here from Sean Weaver of meat
Speaker 1: Eater the lineup is stacked, the knowledge drop will be
Speaker 1: thick and we'll use this info in part two of
Speaker 1: the podcast. YEP already talking about Part two to learn
Speaker 1: how the Green Tree reservoirs, the flood prone hardwood bottoms
Speaker 1: of Arkansas are in jeopardy and what the plan is
Speaker 1: to save them. It would not be possible for you
Speaker 1: to intentionally want to miss this one. Duck Hunting in
Speaker 1: Arkansas was something I was obsessed with as a kid
Speaker 1: because there was a romance that all duck hunters had,
Speaker 1: like across the country. No matter what, you look to
Speaker 1: Arkansas and you're envious of them shooting green heads come
Speaker 1: through the trees. My name is Clay Nukelem and this
Speaker 1: is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten
Speaker 1: but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where
Speaker 1: we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives
Speaker 1: close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear, American Maid,
Speaker 1: purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be
Speaker 1: as rugged as the places we explore. What's this dog's name?
Speaker 1: His name is Tiny Tinie. How old is it? Nye's
Speaker 1: Night Team Months, High Team Months that'll retrieved up. He'll
Speaker 1: fant you up. I promise you he will fet you up.
Speaker 1: Let's go. I want to see him do it. Let's
Speaker 1: keep this thing off kind of you or push off
Speaker 1: my It's dark, but a large led light on the
Speaker 1: front of the boat illuminates the dark water and the
Speaker 1: skeletal shapes of timber in front of us. We're in
Speaker 1: a sixteen foot John boat with two black labs driving.
Speaker 1: The boat is Jumbo ron Quest. We're in Arkansas, cruising
Speaker 1: through a giant stand of oak timber and about two
Speaker 1: ft of water. Now, where are we going this morning?
Speaker 1: We're going to the hole called twin Willows. There's two
Speaker 1: big willows on each side of it frames it up
Speaker 1: like a goal post for south wind. They break between
Speaker 1: them two big willow trees and it's beautiful when they
Speaker 1: fall in there. Hopefully we'll get that opportunity this morning.
Speaker 1: It's this is part of it that you wouldn't understand
Speaker 1: unless you're hair. You can't. You can't describe this to somebody,
Speaker 1: can you. You can't. This is Mr Bobby Martin, and
Speaker 1: you know this morning we've got a full moon. This
Speaker 1: is about our third day of having a full moon
Speaker 1: and you know, really, even if I killed the light,
Speaker 1: you can just kind of see and feel again this
Speaker 1: this moonlight coming across the type of those trees, and
Speaker 1: it's the site every one of us always enjoy enjoy seeing.
Speaker 1: Mr Bobby. Our duck hunters just like everybody else, and
Speaker 1: they make big excuses when there's a full moon. You know, uh,
Speaker 1: there's something that happens that Mother Nature franked in there.
Speaker 1: I knew it, I knew it. This is this is
Speaker 1: this is our excuse. You have something leaning on. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like that big beast that got away. We
Speaker 1: get to the Twin Oaks hole and put out our decoys.
Speaker 1: I'm instructed to tuck in tight at the base of
Speaker 1: a tree. We're standing in knee deep water in the
Speaker 1: flooded timber Zarre. First calling sequence just almost legal shooting line.
Speaker 1: One minute until illegal shooting line. Yeah, they don't want
Speaker 1: to drop in here, dude, boy shot boys, good job.
Speaker 1: A degree angle coming down. Arkansas has long been known
Speaker 1: as the duck hunting capital of the world. Have you
Speaker 1: heard that before? On this episode, we're gonna learn if
Speaker 1: the label is fitting and if so, why. Secondly, we're
Speaker 1: gonna learn about green Tree reservoirs and why the ones
Speaker 1: in Arkansas are critical. If you'll just buckle in and
Speaker 1: be patient, over the next two episodes, I'm going to
Speaker 1: introduce you to some experts that are going to paint
Speaker 1: for us a grand story, an old story involving man
Speaker 1: and beast, and as you know, with great pride. I've
Speaker 1: often proclaimed that I'm a seventh generation Arkansan, but I've
Speaker 1: rarely hunted ducks. I grew up in the highlands of Arkansas,
Speaker 1: in the mountains, a long way from any major waterfowl flyway.
Speaker 1: You see. Arkansas is geographically divided into the highlands and
Speaker 1: Delta regions. If you envisioned Arkansas as a square and
Speaker 1: drew a line diagonally from the upper right hand corner
Speaker 1: of the square to the lower left hand corner of
Speaker 1: the square, you would divide the state into two sections.
Speaker 1: And for the general purposes of this analogy, the upper
Speaker 1: left section would be mountainous, including the Ozark and Washingta Mountains,
Speaker 1: and the lower right section, beside hugging the Mississippi River,
Speaker 1: would be the lowland Delta regions of Arkansas. It's flat,
Speaker 1: agricultural land with timbered rivers and pockets of contiguous hardwoods.
Speaker 1: The Delta regions of Arkansas are the bread and butter
Speaker 1: of the great and ancient Mississippi Waterfowl Flyway, also known
Speaker 1: as the flyway of the mallard, which is the most
Speaker 1: sought after of all waterfowl. Arkansas is special, and I
Speaker 1: want to understand why. As non looker, it's clear that
Speaker 1: the mystical migrations of these birds moves people's souls in
Speaker 1: strange ways. People talk about ducks flying into a set
Speaker 1: of decoys as if they're recounting a spiritual experience. Their
Speaker 1: eyes twinkle, their voices change, and then the right context,
Speaker 1: around the right fire, with the right people, a tear
Speaker 1: might even be shed. When the cupping of mallard wings
Speaker 1: is spoken of. It's clear that this is sacred territory,
Speaker 1: and I'm interested in understanding why the second objective of
Speaker 1: looking into the waterfowl world is of more importance than
Speaker 1: the first. There's a significant sector of critical winter ground
Speaker 1: waterfowl habitat that's in peril, and that peril is man induced.
Speaker 1: By the time we're done with this series will be
Speaker 1: experts on green tree reservoirs for g t r s
Speaker 1: as they're called they're flooded hardwood bottoms. Luke Naylor is
Speaker 1: the lead waterfowl biologist for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
Speaker 1: He's one of those guys that when you shake his hand,
Speaker 1: you're convinced of his authenticity. His confidence coupled with his
Speaker 1: down to earth demeanor, lets you know that you're dealing
Speaker 1: with the professional. I'm interested in gleaning from the passion
Speaker 1: and sight of these hardcore waterfowl guys. I'm hoping that
Speaker 1: Luke can help. So you're the statewide waterfowl program coordinator.
Speaker 1: That's right, waterfowl biologist, duck biologist. And how long have
Speaker 1: you been with gaming fish? Fifteen years now? So I
Speaker 1: got here at early summer of two thousand six. That's
Speaker 1: pretty cool, man, it is. I mean, so that kind
Speaker 1: of like playing for like the Golden State Warriors championship team. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if I can shoot like Steph Curry, I guess you
Speaker 1: know what it it is. And and talked to a
Speaker 1: lot of people before I got this job. In the
Speaker 1: situation you come into when you work as the Arkansas
Speaker 1: waterfowl biologist, and there's a whole lot of positives. There's
Speaker 1: a few things some people might view as negatives, But
Speaker 1: you know, if you just kind of roll with it,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of a lot of interest, a lot
Speaker 1: of intensity here, and so sometimes that can be can
Speaker 1: be a lot to deal with. I'd rather have folks
Speaker 1: that are really passionate about the resource and passionate about
Speaker 1: the pastime of duck hunting and the culture of duck hunting.
Speaker 1: I'd much rather have folks who are on the on
Speaker 1: the extremely passionate side of the spectrum versus apathetic. You know,
Speaker 1: So you've come here and and it's definitely the truth
Speaker 1: in Arkansas. There's just lots of people care about it.
Speaker 1: But that passion that people have here makes a job
Speaker 1: both really rewarding frustrating at times. But you can work
Speaker 1: through that and there's always something new to be done,
Speaker 1: you know, there's always some new issue. Yeah, there's always
Speaker 1: because of that passion, because of the great water, our
Speaker 1: resource we have, there's just always something else to work on.
Speaker 1: I want to understand the duck hunting culture of this
Speaker 1: place that's been dubbed as its capital. I'm well aware
Speaker 1: of the reputation of Arkansas duck hunting, but being raised
Speaker 1: in a region absence of a major flyway, I have
Speaker 1: missed out, and if I'm being honest, we're probably a
Speaker 1: little jealous and tried to convince ourselves that our squirrels
Speaker 1: and coons were a more noble quarry. But that's currently
Speaker 1: under reconsideration. I've asked Slute to describe Arkansas duck hunting culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the culture of of duck hunting here is everywhere. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: There's other places, of course, that have really strong claims
Speaker 1: to a waterfowl hunting culture. I never want to forget that, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, most of modern waterfowl hunting is an East
Speaker 1: Coast Great Lakes type affair, right, Folks maybe here in
Speaker 1: the South don't want to hear that sometimes, but but
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, but it's a matter of where.
Speaker 1: You know, European settlement started in just that progression of things, right,
Speaker 1: So the culture of duck hunting here is and is
Speaker 1: just intense. You know. I grew up in south central
Speaker 1: Kansas and moved here um in oh six And I'll
Speaker 1: never forget my dad coming and he thought he was
Speaker 1: it kind of is. It was unique even at that
Speaker 1: time to have a camouflage boat and a black dog
Speaker 1: in south central Kansas, and you know, then he comes
Speaker 1: out here to visit me and hunt here, and it's
Speaker 1: it's nothing exceptional at all. I mean, there's there's a
Speaker 1: there's a camouflage boat and a black dog on it
Speaker 1: every other house, it seems, and so it's just deeply
Speaker 1: culturally embedded here. Sean Weaver is an addict. He's a
Speaker 1: waterfowl at it. He's the kind of guy that earns
Speaker 1: your respect quickly as you see the honesty of his passion.
Speaker 1: And he's meat eaters, waterfowl guru, and the host of
Speaker 1: our new show called Duck Lauren, which is coming out soon.
Speaker 1: Sean talks about the waterfowl prospects of the different regions
Speaker 1: of the country like an art dealer talks about art,
Speaker 1: or like Brent Reeves talks about corn bread. Sean lives
Speaker 1: in out Dakota, so I wanted to see what he
Speaker 1: said about Arkansas duck hunting culture. Arkansas duck hunting culture
Speaker 1: and just duck hunting in Arkansas was something I was
Speaker 1: obsessed with as a kid because there was a romance
Speaker 1: that all duck hunters had, like across the country, no
Speaker 1: matter what you looked to Arkansas and you were envious
Speaker 1: of them. Shooting green heads coming through the trees. So
Speaker 1: I just became eight up with Arkansas duck hunting culture,
Speaker 1: and you really looked at the guys in Arkansas as
Speaker 1: the best and that they got, you know, they got
Speaker 1: all the ducks, but they also were the best at
Speaker 1: hunting ducks and they had the most experience, right, And
Speaker 1: it's reflected in a bunch of ways. You have companies
Speaker 1: that were based around Arkansas duck hunting. All the call
Speaker 1: companies were based in Arkansas, or the vast majority of them.
Speaker 1: For a long time, you had world champion callers and
Speaker 1: the world champion duck calling contests based in Arkansas. So
Speaker 1: really it is undeniable that it was the epicenter of
Speaker 1: duck hunting, and no one could argue it otherwise. Let
Speaker 1: me ask you a question, how much of that was
Speaker 1: marketing and hype and how much of it was reality?
Speaker 1: I think that and that's that is not a slight
Speaker 1: to Arkansas. I mean, I I am deeply deeply biased
Speaker 1: towards Arkansas. So I want you to say, Clay, every
Speaker 1: word of it was true. But I just know that
Speaker 1: they're epicenters for things that that produced culture. But they're
Speaker 1: not always they're not always the best, they're not always everything.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the first duck hunt I had where I
Speaker 1: came to hunt in Arkansas wasn't what I was watching.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the same. It wasn't eight man limits of
Speaker 1: green heads coming down in the flooded timber. Some of it,
Speaker 1: for sure, was just like a lot of video content.
Speaker 1: You're watching the cream off the top, you're watching the best.
Speaker 1: You're watching you can going to Iowa and sitting the
Speaker 1: best farm in the world and not kill exactly, and
Speaker 1: you are undeniably watching stuff that's either one real special
Speaker 1: day or private duck club that you know, someone like
Speaker 1: myself might never have access to. That being said, even
Speaker 1: though my first duck hunting trip to Arkansas wasn't that
Speaker 1: great and wasn't that successful, I still loved it because
Speaker 1: the culture surrounding it. You know, a way I've described
Speaker 1: the Delta of Arkansas to a lot of people that
Speaker 1: have never seen it is there's a thirty dollar duck
Speaker 1: boat parked in front of like a five thousand dollar
Speaker 1: pick up a lot of places. I mean, there is
Speaker 1: a duck boat around every corner, in every driveway. It's
Speaker 1: it just runs thick and I love that. I just
Speaker 1: love it. Here's Luke continuing to build the story of
Speaker 1: Arkansas duck hunting. You know, it goes back all the
Speaker 1: way to I think the importance overall of Arkansas duck
Speaker 1: hunting ties back to it's important to ducks, obviously, and
Speaker 1: and that's really a question of geography and geology of
Speaker 1: how this whole landscape to tell me about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just funnels ducks here. I mean you just kind
Speaker 1: of take a step back out to feet and look
Speaker 1: at the whole landscape, and you just see this. You
Speaker 1: see all these rivers just kind of draining throughout most
Speaker 1: of the mid continent US and ending up funneling together
Speaker 1: right here in the delta of Arkansas. So you could have,
Speaker 1: if you weren't from here, but you knew about waterfowl biology,
Speaker 1: you would you would look at a map and you
Speaker 1: would go that region is gonna be special. Yeah. You
Speaker 1: look back at the early maps of migratory corridors for ducks,
Speaker 1: the early flyway maps, And I always gotta be real
Speaker 1: careful about at the term flyway gets gets thrown around
Speaker 1: a lot these days with duck hunters talking about a
Speaker 1: flyway here and a Flyway there, and that's not how
Speaker 1: we talk about flyways. When you talk about continental waterfowl management,
Speaker 1: we talk about these major flyways within which we manage resources.
Speaker 1: You know, the four major flyways across the continent. So
Speaker 1: there are four major waterfowl flyways in North America from
Speaker 1: east to west. It's the Atlantic Flyway, the Mississippi Flyway,
Speaker 1: the Central Flyway, and the Pacific Flyway. The Atlantic Flyway
Speaker 1: starts in the eastern Arctic tundra of Canada, travels down
Speaker 1: the Atlantic Coast, goes into the Caribbean, covering more than
Speaker 1: three thousand linear miles. The Central Flyway spans from central
Speaker 1: Canada all the way to the Texas Gulf Coast. The
Speaker 1: Pacific Flyway stretches four thousand miles, starting in Alaska, it
Speaker 1: goes to Mexico. We've gone out of order because I
Speaker 1: wanted to be dramatic. The Mississippi Flyway is the progeny
Speaker 1: of what the Algonquin tribe called the Father of Waters
Speaker 1: or the big River, the Mighty Mississippi. The name Mississippi
Speaker 1: is a transliteration of an Algonquin language word mississie b,
Speaker 1: and the French called it Mississippi and later it turned
Speaker 1: into the modern pronunciation. Turns out Hernando de Soto called
Speaker 1: it the River of the Holy Spirit, but that didn't stick.
Speaker 1: I'm very happy the river wasn't named after some chump
Speaker 1: or a politician's girlfriend. This river drains of the continental
Speaker 1: United States. It's the third largest river watershed in the world,
Speaker 1: behind the Amazon and Nile rivers. The flyway is twenty
Speaker 1: miles long and has a watershed of over one point
Speaker 1: five million square miles, and it's the most heavily used
Speaker 1: migration corridor for waterfowl on the continent. Wild stuff. Those
Speaker 1: were described really early on by guys like Frank Belros
Speaker 1: where they looked at did some really just cool observations
Speaker 1: of ducks during migration, and looked at early band recovery
Speaker 1: information and develop these maps. And if you go back
Speaker 1: decades to look at these maps, it just highlights all
Speaker 1: of these little corridors, major areas of band recovery. Just
Speaker 1: follow these lines of these major rivers and they all
Speaker 1: come to a confluence in Arkansas. So it just makes
Speaker 1: sense that this fun literally does funnel funnels them right now.
Speaker 1: Once I started dabbling in the Arkansas waterfowl world, Jim
Speaker 1: Ron quest name came up over and over. They call
Speaker 1: him Jimbo. I quickly learned he's very well respected in
Speaker 1: the waterfowl industry as a caller, hunter, conservation advocate, and
Speaker 1: just a general good man. He's a call maker and
Speaker 1: was the World's duck calling Champion in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: But more important than titles, he is a Jedi master
Speaker 1: in the duckwoods. I asked Jimbo why Arkansas is special
Speaker 1: when it comes to ducks. Geographical location. So, if you
Speaker 1: think of the Mississippi Flyway and to some extent, the
Speaker 1: Central fly Away, and you and you look at a
Speaker 1: big map of the USA, and you think of water drainages, watersheds,
Speaker 1: what's the Ohio River do? The Ohio River comes from
Speaker 1: the northeast with the southwesterly flow, meets up with the
Speaker 1: Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois. Then above it you got
Speaker 1: the Missouri River coming out of the northern plains and
Speaker 1: the Dakotas in the in the Montana and it dumps
Speaker 1: into the Mississippi River just above St. Louis. Then as
Speaker 1: you come down, you got the Arkansas River that starts
Speaker 1: in Colorado, comes across the Central plains, with a southeasterly
Speaker 1: flow and dumps into the Mississippi River just below stuck guard.
Speaker 1: But when you start looking at all those confluences of
Speaker 1: watersheds and you think of ducks traveling those watersheds as
Speaker 1: arteries art maybe people would relate to it better as
Speaker 1: interstate highways or roads or highways if you start looking
Speaker 1: at it. We're in the eye of the funnel. But
Speaker 1: the geographic location and where we are is what set
Speaker 1: us up to be the matter capital the world. It's
Speaker 1: just where ducks want to be. Continental geography on a
Speaker 1: massive scale plays a vital role when you're dealing with
Speaker 1: an animal that has a home range encompassing thousands of
Speaker 1: linear miles. To understand why ducks come down this funnel
Speaker 1: in the winter, we've got to understand flooded timber or
Speaker 1: g trs. We'll be talking a lot about this stuff.
Speaker 1: And if you're a duck hunter, you may have just
Speaker 1: gotten cold chills. Austin Booth is a born and bread
Speaker 1: are Kanson, a former marine, a lawyer, a public land
Speaker 1: duck hunter, and he's the new director of the Arkansas
Speaker 1: Game and Fish Commission. We're gonna hear more from Austin
Speaker 1: in part two of this podcast hashtag foreshadow, But I
Speaker 1: wanted to here's thoughts on Arkansas being the d h
Speaker 1: c W, the duck hunting capital of the world. We're
Speaker 1: known as the duck hunting capital world because about fifty
Speaker 1: to sixty years ago the public discovered what the ducks
Speaker 1: discovered a long time ago, and that was green tree reservoirs.
Speaker 1: Do we have plenty of other kinds of duck hunting opportunities, Sure,
Speaker 1: we got fantastic moist soil habitat, we got fantastic grain
Speaker 1: rice mostly habitat. But it's really the green tree reservoirs
Speaker 1: smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi Flyway that
Speaker 1: put us on the map. When I worded it that way,
Speaker 1: saying that the public discovered what the ducks discovered long ago,
Speaker 1: I meant that. I mean that this flyway in Arkansas,
Speaker 1: eastern central Arkansas, northeast Arkansas has been a duck magnet
Speaker 1: for a very very long time, and when we started
Speaker 1: to rest, I mean it has nothing to do with man,
Speaker 1: it has nothing. I mean the initial, yes, the the
Speaker 1: ancient natural migration patterns of these these ducks and geese
Speaker 1: is coming down the Mississippi drainage, and they'll and they'll
Speaker 1: shoot off one of the best duck hunting offshoots of
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River as the White River and the Cache
Speaker 1: River and the Black River and St. Francis, and it's
Speaker 1: the whole flyway. We recognize that that these ducks were
Speaker 1: attracted in a special way to green tree reservoirs, to
Speaker 1: bottom one hardwoods, and so fifty sixty years ago we
Speaker 1: started putting up infrastructure to try to hold water on
Speaker 1: these green tree reservoirs for the purpose of attracting more ducks.
Speaker 1: One but to making the green tree reservoir hunting more
Speaker 1: predictable and more stable, rather than relying on mother nature
Speaker 1: to flood and drop down and flood and drop down.
Speaker 1: We need to understand the original design of green tree
Speaker 1: reservoirs or flooded hard would timber inside of natural systems.
Speaker 1: Here's Luke. I think it's pretty fascinating to think about
Speaker 1: pre European settlement animal movements and what and what was
Speaker 1: here to think about This flyway is ancient. It is
Speaker 1: as long as there have been ducks, Mallard ducks and
Speaker 1: all these ducks that have flown in the air. They
Speaker 1: have been doing this thing, and they've been coming through
Speaker 1: this area. Talk to me about the flooded timber of
Speaker 1: Arkansas and how that's unique because I would have thought
Speaker 1: that there was this flooded timber thing would have been
Speaker 1: kind of all over widespread. But tell me about yet,
Speaker 1: it's it's not as much as as what you might think.
Speaker 1: Now there's there's pockets of this sort of habitat really
Speaker 1: all across the US, and just a lot smaller scale.
Speaker 1: So it makes sense. You know, even in my home
Speaker 1: state of Kansas. You know, there's some areas in eastern
Speaker 1: Kansas and there's some of these old river bottoms that
Speaker 1: would have flooded up that would have seasonally flooded and
Speaker 1: surely provided habitat for ducks. But the vast majority of
Speaker 1: it was here in the Mississippi Louivial Valley where we're talking.
Speaker 1: You know, well over twenty million acres of of bottom
Speaker 1: and hardwood forest in the delta of Arkansas acres over
Speaker 1: twenty million, and a bunch of other states, right you
Speaker 1: would have Mississippi, Western Mississippi, You even would have had
Speaker 1: the Boothole of Missouri, Western Kentucky, Western Tennessee and Northeast
Speaker 1: Louisiana all would have contributed to this massive block of
Speaker 1: bottom and hardwood forest. Now it would have been constantly
Speaker 1: in a state of flux. This landscape would have been
Speaker 1: constantly changing. It would have been bottom in hardwood forest
Speaker 1: in some stage of succession. In a really good colleague
Speaker 1: and friend of mine said years ago, you know it
Speaker 1: really the Mallard. If you really kind of think about
Speaker 1: the continental landscape, it kind of transitions from a prairie
Speaker 1: species to a forest species, probably about St. Louis latitude.
Speaker 1: If you go back and look at historic land cover maps,
Speaker 1: you can start looking at the at the delta becoming
Speaker 1: this forested landscape. Maybe you know about that St. Louis
Speaker 1: lad to following those river corridor south. So that's what
Speaker 1: these ducks were adapted to come find prairie wetlands throughout
Speaker 1: most of the year and then several months of the
Speaker 1: year finding the resources they need in these In these
Speaker 1: forests and wetlands, forested wetlands, flooded timber or green tree
Speaker 1: reservoirs are all the same thing. It's odd to think
Speaker 1: of ducks landing in a forest, but it's what makes
Speaker 1: the lower Mississippi Flyway special I'm pretty sure that any
Speaker 1: part of a water fowler's body that comes in pairs,
Speaker 1: they'd be willing to give their left one to hunt
Speaker 1: flooded hardwoods. But let's get back to Luke talking about
Speaker 1: flooded timber and how ducks use it, and that provided
Speaker 1: ducks a whole bunch of different resources. You had had
Speaker 1: acorn production from mass producing red oak trees throughout that,
Speaker 1: you would have leaflet or that produces a ton of
Speaker 1: invertebrates which are critically important for ducks during the wintering period.
Speaker 1: All of those resources would have been available at least
Speaker 1: at different times of the year when those areas flooded.
Speaker 1: Flooding is the catalyst for these areas to produce food
Speaker 1: for waterfowl because they gotta have water to swimming. It's
Speaker 1: all tied back to hydrology, you know. So being from
Speaker 1: the highlands of Arkansas coming down to the Delta is
Speaker 1: so bizarre to me because of the water. The levee systems,
Speaker 1: the water containment systems just kind of blow my mind
Speaker 1: that this place is so flat that to make much
Speaker 1: of it usable you had to put up levees and
Speaker 1: do all this stuff. I mean, it's a pretty wild
Speaker 1: system of regulation. And and I guess really what we're
Speaker 1: trying to do with all that is this place all
Speaker 1: used to would have flooded. And is that is that about? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: At some level we think most of it would have
Speaker 1: gone underwater at some point. I mean, think about like
Speaker 1: a third of Arkansas would have been underwater at any
Speaker 1: given point in a year. And naturally and some some
Speaker 1: you know, smart folks who kind of study this the
Speaker 1: geological aspects of it and study historical flood patterns, they
Speaker 1: can kind of map out like, Okay, historically these areas
Speaker 1: would have flooded once every twenty years, and then step
Speaker 1: it on down right, once every seven, once every five,
Speaker 1: and these areas probably flooded every year, right see, would
Speaker 1: have had this whole gradient elevation based on elevation, Gosh,
Speaker 1: what we're pushing a hundred of years now of such
Speaker 1: an altered landscape. Seven right, the big Mississippi River flood
Speaker 1: that prompted the building of the major levee system along
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River itself, And so that goes way back
Speaker 1: to think read old accounts of how extensive the flooding
Speaker 1: was after that major flood and how those levees were
Speaker 1: then built to prevent that from happening in the future.
Speaker 1: It's it's luke that makes a guy from the mountains
Speaker 1: kind of nervous to be down here. Man, I'm afraid
Speaker 1: we're gonna get flooded out. Yeah, LEVI breaks, you never know, right,
Speaker 1: It's we talk about uh, you know, you talk about
Speaker 1: contours and elevation and hills when you get down here
Speaker 1: and people use those terms down here, and if you're
Speaker 1: from the mountains at all, you kind of look at
Speaker 1: them crazy. I just a do you a minute ago
Speaker 1: talking about a one foot change in elevation being like
Speaker 1: really significant for water levels and changes, and that kind
Speaker 1: of blew my mind. A one foot elevation change being significant.
Speaker 1: It is hard to comprehend, but here a one foot
Speaker 1: change can be the difference in thousands and thousands of
Speaker 1: acres flooding. Let's stop and recap what we've just heard.
Speaker 1: It took me a long time to understand the geology
Speaker 1: and flood prone wetland regions of the South. Basically, much
Speaker 1: of it naturally flooded, making it risky to live in
Speaker 1: farm here until the levee systems were built. Which was
Speaker 1: after the turn of the twentieth century. Heck, I didn't
Speaker 1: even know what a levy was until I was an adult.
Speaker 1: It's an earthen dam that runs on both sides of
Speaker 1: a river that keeps it from flooding out of its banks.
Speaker 1: The levies on these major rivers are truly incredible engineering feats.
Speaker 1: But I want to key in on one phrase that
Speaker 1: Luke said. We've been living in an altar the environment
Speaker 1: for about one hundred years. Changing the flooding regimes of
Speaker 1: rivers is a major ecological alteration. The only other creator
Speaker 1: that does this besides humans is fevers, and we know
Speaker 1: what a nuisance they can be. However, as you've heard,
Speaker 1: basically one third of Arkansas would be almost uninhabitable if
Speaker 1: it weren't for these levies. Austin mentioned how we've artificially
Speaker 1: flooded timber to create duck habitat. But to understand the
Speaker 1: full picture of Arkansas duck hunting, we need to understand
Speaker 1: the agricultural component. I now understand the historic picture of
Speaker 1: these flooded bottom land hardwoods. What happened and what was
Speaker 1: the time period that we came in and started clearing
Speaker 1: this timber plant and rice and soybeans and everything. When
Speaker 1: did we get here and how did that change duck hunting?
Speaker 1: And I'm still trying to have an understanding of why
Speaker 1: Arkansas has become a known as the duck hunting capital
Speaker 1: of the world. We went way through that process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's again coming from the Plain States, when a
Speaker 1: lot of habitat conversion happened relatively speaking, quite a bit
Speaker 1: earlier than what happened here. You know, you have major accounts.
Speaker 1: You have people still living and farming in the Delta
Speaker 1: who were alive and farming or at least witnessed major
Speaker 1: land clearing of the fifties and sixties. For example, a
Speaker 1: lot of forests were taken out in Arkansas as recent
Speaker 1: as the nineteen fifties and sixties and some another big
Speaker 1: effort in land clearing. You know, it's probably you know,
Speaker 1: right around that hundred year mark. Really we started as
Speaker 1: an agency and as hunters started noticing the loss of
Speaker 1: these forests of wetlands, likely in the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties,
Speaker 1: and that would have been initial land clearing going on.
Speaker 1: Folks starting to realize that, wow, we're losing some of
Speaker 1: this habitat on the landscape. And the other side of
Speaker 1: that is that these were people that were just trying
Speaker 1: to make a living off the ground. Yeah, they're trying
Speaker 1: to Yeah, the these people would have felt like they
Speaker 1: were taken some worthless country and turning it into something
Speaker 1: really valuable, which they were. It's a desolate swamp, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's full of mosquitoes, and it's just in
Speaker 1: the way and appeared like an endless resource. Right if
Speaker 1: you've got twenty some million acres of forest at Wetlands,
Speaker 1: and can you imagine coming across here in the seventeen
Speaker 1: hundreds and looking at just this whole landscape being nothing
Speaker 1: but one massive, almost contiguous forest. It's almost just crazy
Speaker 1: to imagine at this point. But yeah, people were clearing
Speaker 1: the land. And one thing that really benefited are surely
Speaker 1: benefited Arkansas and ducks and duck hunting was the fact
Speaker 1: that a lot of this land conversion happened. The land
Speaker 1: was converted to what we know is a very wildlife
Speaker 1: friendly type of agriculture, which is rice. So a lot
Speaker 1: of these changes were happening at similar times. I forget
Speaker 1: the date exactly when the first folks started trying to
Speaker 1: plant rice, here in the Grand Prairie, not far from
Speaker 1: where we're sitting right, it would have been I mean,
Speaker 1: unless hundred fifty, but I think the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and folks were experien remating with rice here and really
Speaker 1: took off in that nineties thirties forties time frame. So
Speaker 1: people were growing rice, and we know that ducks love rice.
Speaker 1: We we talk about it as kind of a surrogate
Speaker 1: wetland when managed properly, because it's a it's a wetland plant.
Speaker 1: It grows in wet soils throughout much of the years,
Speaker 1: produces a grain, can tolerate lots of water. I mean
Speaker 1: it grows in water in the summer, of course. And
Speaker 1: so it was this natural connection that well, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're losing habitat. Ducks are losing some of what they
Speaker 1: have historically come to Arkansas for, but it's mostly being
Speaker 1: replaced by something that's also really beneficial to ducks. You
Speaker 1: end up with a situation where here, you know the
Speaker 1: old stories about people older agricultural methods of shocking grain,
Speaker 1: and you know, you cut it and you shock it
Speaker 1: to let it dry, and people, you know, just almost endless.
Speaker 1: Some numbers of ducks coming in and trying to eat
Speaker 1: that shocked rice and people having to shoot them off
Speaker 1: to to save their crop. Always have to rib people
Speaker 1: little bit when you get around. You know this part
Speaker 1: of Arkansas and big rice country of course, biggest rice
Speaker 1: producer in the country. And they're proud of it, which
Speaker 1: they should be. And it's funny and your ducks come
Speaker 1: to Arkansas eat eat rice. It's like, well, lots of
Speaker 1: ducks are coming here before the first color of Colonel Rice.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily a cause and effect. Every year, Arkansas
Speaker 1: farmers plant on average one point three million acres in
Speaker 1: rice on over eighteen hundred private farms. Did you know
Speaker 1: that Bill Gates is the largest private landowner in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: I'm just glad they didn't give him the right to
Speaker 1: name this place. Arkansas produces about nine billion pounds of
Speaker 1: rice per year, which is close to half of the
Speaker 1: production of the United States. Rice is a nutrient dense
Speaker 1: complex carbohydrate with fifteen essential vitamins and nutrients u the
Speaker 1: Arkansas rice commercial ducks and humans love the stuff anyway.
Speaker 1: Arkansas has known for its public land waterfowl, honey, and
Speaker 1: these large tracts of bottom land hardwoods now frame up
Speaker 1: a remnant GTR system that is vital to waterfowl. I
Speaker 1: want to understand how that land, once thought to be unusable,
Speaker 1: became public as this habitat base of force of wetlands dwindled,
Speaker 1: rice expanded on the landscape, that's when agencies came on
Speaker 1: board and started purchasing some of these remaining bottom and
Speaker 1: hardwood forest tracks. So right around the same this all
Speaker 1: happened around the same time that the Pittman Robertson Act
Speaker 1: was passing Congress. Right, so the first dedicated so the
Speaker 1: first dedicated funding stream for state wildlife agencies, and a
Speaker 1: lot of the initial work of many state wildlife agencies,
Speaker 1: including the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, was to purchase land.
Speaker 1: And we're very thankful these days that that those folks
Speaker 1: had the foresight to do that, to go buy land
Speaker 1: for just I mean just pennies really, And by that
Speaker 1: time were they not kind of getting And when I
Speaker 1: say the scraps, I don't mean that in a derogatory way,
Speaker 1: but I mean that in like a literal they were. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were getting the stuff that as land clearing was progressing,
Speaker 1: we Game and Fish bought the areas that were too
Speaker 1: low there they were the biggest pain to the places
Speaker 1: that people didn't want to buy or had tried to
Speaker 1: find a way to use it and couldn't. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: they couldn't get over that financial hump that it was
Speaker 1: worth it. So would you say that the state lands
Speaker 1: that we do have are I know today they're critical
Speaker 1: because they're the biggest blocks of this bottom land hardwood
Speaker 1: that we have left. So they've now become massively critical.
Speaker 1: But these spots wouldn't have necessarily been anything special when
Speaker 1: this place was totally wooded or wouldn't No, not necessarily,
Speaker 1: I mean they wouldn't they back to geology, I mean
Speaker 1: they kind of lay in areas that they may have
Speaker 1: been at the bottom of the funnel more smaller scale,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense, not the continental scale, but on
Speaker 1: a smaller scale, are kind of at the bottom of
Speaker 1: a funnel within this region of Arkansas. What's interesting about
Speaker 1: most public land is that it's the stuff that nobody wanted.
Speaker 1: Arkansas became a state in eighteen thirty six, and in
Speaker 1: that time of settlement, they were almost given away land
Speaker 1: trying to get people to civilize this wild place. Our
Speaker 1: public lands are the places people didn't want or later
Speaker 1: got drove out of because they couldn't make a living there.
Speaker 1: That's why national forests, not just in Arkansas but everywhere,
Speaker 1: are always the steepest roughest regions of the states, or
Speaker 1: in the case of lowland states, the public ground is
Speaker 1: the swampiest and most uninhabitable land in the region. It
Speaker 1: wasn't that we wanted to preserve the beauty of the
Speaker 1: rugged places. However, it eventually became that, like so many
Speaker 1: things in life, our value system changed with the economy
Speaker 1: and social factors of the country. Today, you couldn't put
Speaker 1: a price tag on the bottom land hardwoods of Arkansas.
Speaker 1: It's clear to me that Arkansas got its reputation with
Speaker 1: the ducks. Honestly, it's just where they wanted to be
Speaker 1: and has been for thousands of years. But I'm still
Speaker 1: interested in the human component of how we so unabashedly
Speaker 1: proclaimed and it's been accepted that Arkansas is the duck
Speaker 1: hunting capital of the world. So when we brought in
Speaker 1: rice and started farming, we replaced this timber standing timber
Speaker 1: with agricultural land. You know, prime production or rice would
Speaker 1: have been probably from the nineteen twenties on did that
Speaker 1: draw more ducks or were the same amount of ducks
Speaker 1: coming here? They were just doing different stuff when they
Speaker 1: got here. You know, it's interesting to think about. We
Speaker 1: don't have any records going back to tell us whether
Speaker 1: it increased. It's probably a cave somewhere in the Ozarks
Speaker 1: because they couldn't have lived down here because it would
Speaker 1: have flooded, so they would have retreated back to the Ozarks.
Speaker 1: Probably a cave in the Ozarks that shows the flyways.
Speaker 1: This is a joke. Was looking at me like, I'm serious.
Speaker 1: If we just would have had a good count back then,
Speaker 1: it'd be fantastic. But I can imagine people looking out
Speaker 1: there at the landscape, and once you open stuff up,
Speaker 1: ducks become more visible, and they would have been highly
Speaker 1: visible on this rice that all of a sudden is
Speaker 1: on the landscape. And so I bet people have the
Speaker 1: perception that duck numbers just skyrocketed and that would have
Speaker 1: influenced marketing. Oh yeah, big time. When I and and
Speaker 1: I'm I'm still trying to understand how Arkansas is known
Speaker 1: as the duck hunting capital of the world and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, we've removed a bunch of this timber.
Speaker 1: We could see these ducks. You know, you have these
Speaker 1: different eras where sport hunting if you just kind of
Speaker 1: read back on sports hunting in general and and how
Speaker 1: you have these kind of peaks where people had time
Speaker 1: or disposable income or whatever it might be post war,
Speaker 1: especially in the fifties and sixties. Uh. It's one of
Speaker 1: the remarkable feats of marketing, uh that that folks in
Speaker 1: Arkansas have done for years. But it's not based on
Speaker 1: on nothing. It's brilliant marketing to to proclaim the duck,
Speaker 1: you know, stuck guarding the rising duck capital of the world.
Speaker 1: They come here over the years and they realized like, wow,
Speaker 1: that is true, that this is the rising duck capital
Speaker 1: of the world. Whoa that was? That was the closet one.
Speaker 1: I thought we were going to get to the end
Speaker 1: of this rabbit hole and find out that this was
Speaker 1: just a well laid tourist trap. Well, actually it wasn't
Speaker 1: close at all. The Mallard Duck made this place their capital,
Speaker 1: and the people here just proclaimed what the ducks told them.
Speaker 1: Here's Jimbo helping us turn our rudder towards the most
Speaker 1: fascinating thing about ducks and this will get us into
Speaker 1: a biological discussion of one of nature's most spectacular displays
Speaker 1: of brilliance. Migration. The mystery of migration, and I think
Speaker 1: is what drives a lot of is to chase waterfowl.
Speaker 1: And when you and you shoot a big pretty matter
Speaker 1: drag or mattered hen or whatever, you're holding that duck
Speaker 1: in your hand and you gotta look at it one er. Okay,
Speaker 1: where did this sucker come from? It's what makes banding
Speaker 1: and bands so cool is there's a story. This duck
Speaker 1: has a story, and what is his story? Here at
Speaker 1: this place? A couple of years ago, killed the duck,
Speaker 1: banded duck. I wound up with the band, I turned
Speaker 1: it in and that duck was banded in the Finger
Speaker 1: Lakes region of New York two years prior. And we
Speaker 1: just had a really big cold front that hit the northeast,
Speaker 1: and that duck wound up here. It's been interesting over
Speaker 1: that duck bread at, you know, and and where it
Speaker 1: normally wintered. But that sucker come from way to the northeast.
Speaker 1: If right now you and I were Mallards and we
Speaker 1: were flying south, we'd be making a slight turn in
Speaker 1: our story. I want to talk about migration in the
Speaker 1: world of ornithology. The guy that we're about to talk
Speaker 1: to needs no introduction. Scott widen Saw is a Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: based naturalist and author, has given ted talks on bird
Speaker 1: migrations and authors nine books, many about birds. I want
Speaker 1: to unravel as much of the mystery as we can
Speaker 1: about migration. Here's Scott, Scott. I'm trying to understand how
Speaker 1: animals navigate, and I know that's a massive question that
Speaker 1: is extremely complex, But in general, how do how do
Speaker 1: birds navigate and find their way? Well? And as you're right,
Speaker 1: that's a really big question, Clay, and you know, to
Speaker 1: an extent, science is still trying to get a ted
Speaker 1: around this. Um. You know, we've made some really amazing discoveries,
Speaker 1: especially in recent years, but there's still a lot we
Speaker 1: don't know about how birds orient and navigate. And those
Speaker 1: are two different, two different tasks a bird has to do.
Speaker 1: It has to orient itself in the landscape and figure
Speaker 1: out north, southeast, and west, and it also has to navigate,
Speaker 1: which is it has to find its way across the
Speaker 1: landscape with all kinds of outside pressures like cross winds
Speaker 1: and you know, bad weather and things like that, And
Speaker 1: we have a pretty good sense of how birds orient themselves,
Speaker 1: and they use a whole bunch of different They have
Speaker 1: a bunch of different fallbacks. Most birds, even birds that
Speaker 1: are normally active in the daytime, migrate after dark. So
Speaker 1: celestial orientation is a big deal for them. You know,
Speaker 1: they're using the night sky now, they're not using the
Speaker 1: pattern of the stars the way the mariners did. What
Speaker 1: they're doing is they're aware of the part of the
Speaker 1: night sky around Polaris that does not appear to move.
Speaker 1: You know, the stars look like they rotate because of
Speaker 1: course the Earth is spinning, and the part of the
Speaker 1: night sky that doesn't move is gives them their their
Speaker 1: compass directions. That shows when the north, southeast, and west
Speaker 1: are But of course some nights it's cloudy and they
Speaker 1: can't see the night sky. And well, for example, seabirds
Speaker 1: can can smell their way across thousands of miles of
Speaker 1: ocean back to their particular nest burrow, among millions of
Speaker 1: other nest burrows on a on a on a lonely
Speaker 1: island out in the middle of the ocean. We know
Speaker 1: that birds like swallows and some hawks and falcons that
Speaker 1: migrate mostly in the daytime, use the position and movement
Speaker 1: of the sun across the sky. They use the position
Speaker 1: and movement of a band of polarized light that they
Speaker 1: can see that we can't. We know that birds can
Speaker 1: hear infrasound, extremely low frequency sound waves that are generated
Speaker 1: by ocean surf and wind and high mountain passes and
Speaker 1: tectonic activity, seismic activity from like volcanoes and earthquakes. So
Speaker 1: you know, you can literally have a duck or a
Speaker 1: goose that's flying down the middle of North America listening
Speaker 1: to the sound of the Pacific Ocean in one ear
Speaker 1: in the Atlantic Ocean and the other and the rumble
Speaker 1: of volcanoes and the trans Volcanic Mountain Belt in Mexico
Speaker 1: dead ahead of it, watching the movement of the sun
Speaker 1: across the sky and this band of polarized light. One
Speaker 1: of the most important orientation cues for birds, and that
Speaker 1: one that's always been the most mysterious is birds have
Speaker 1: a magnetic sense. And not just most most organisms have
Speaker 1: a magnetic sense. Bacteria have a magnetic sense, newts and
Speaker 1: bumble bees have a magnetic sense. And you know, when
Speaker 1: I was in college in the nineteen seventies, I took
Speaker 1: a course in ornithology and we were taught that birds
Speaker 1: had little deposits of magnetic iron crystals called magnetite, either
Speaker 1: in their brain or at the base of their beak.
Speaker 1: And the idea was kind of functioned like a like
Speaker 1: a little compass, you know, kind of pulled their nose
Speaker 1: to the north. Except that scientists also realized that there
Speaker 1: was there was some sort of visual component to this
Speaker 1: because if you if you exposed these birds two wavelengths
Speaker 1: of yellow light or especially red light, they lost their
Speaker 1: ability to orient magnetically. There was something going on with
Speaker 1: the eye and nobody could figure out for the longest
Speaker 1: time what this was. Now, back in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: there was a physicist, a German born physicist named Claus Schulton,
Speaker 1: who came up with that this crackpot idea, that it
Speaker 1: involved photo sensitive molecules in the eyes of birds, But
Speaker 1: nobody knew whether those kind of molecules even existed. And
Speaker 1: when Dr Sholton submitted that paper to a physics journal,
Speaker 1: he was told it was better suited to the wat
Speaker 1: can than publication. Well, he did finally get it published,
Speaker 1: and um, he just died a few years ago, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: but he lived long enough to see that that theory
Speaker 1: proven to be that hypothesis proven to be right. That
Speaker 1: it turns out birds are using a form of quantum physics,
Speaker 1: something known as quantum entanglement. That you know, that's that's
Speaker 1: a that's an aspect of quantum physics that was so
Speaker 1: weird that even Albert Albert Einstein kind of disowned it,
Speaker 1: even though it grew out of his own his own equations.
Speaker 1: But they're they're essentially able to see the Earth's magnetic
Speaker 1: field as they're migrating through the night sky because of
Speaker 1: these these photosensitive, magnetically sensitive pigment molecules in their eye.
Speaker 1: So birds are using a whole host of of you know,
Speaker 1: ways of of orienting and navigating that we're blind, deaf,
Speaker 1: and dumb too. I read that often inside of our
Speaker 1: efforts to understand how a bird would navigator, animals would navigate,
Speaker 1: we anthropomorphize these animals and assume that they have the
Speaker 1: same senses as us, which which humans are quite visual,
Speaker 1: and we think about flying across miles across the continent
Speaker 1: and looking and seeing things. And but what I'm hearing
Speaker 1: you describe is that the birds perceive the earth in
Speaker 1: a radically different way than we do, yes, without without doubt.
Speaker 1: Now they are also using the kinds of the kind
Speaker 1: of techniques and approaches that we would use. I mean,
Speaker 1: birds use what are known as leading lines on the
Speaker 1: landscape and these can be river valleys, um, they can
Speaker 1: be mountain ridges on you know, birds will use coastline,
Speaker 1: so you know they're they're they're using all of these techniques.
Speaker 1: They're using all the things that we would use if
Speaker 1: we were getting from point A to point B. And
Speaker 1: then they're tapping into these other spheres of you know,
Speaker 1: of orientation and navigation that we that we can't that
Speaker 1: we can't use. Mind blowing. Animal navigation isn't a magic show,
Speaker 1: but it's probably as close as you'll get to one.
Speaker 1: On this side of Las Vegas. Birds perceive an entirely
Speaker 1: different set of cues than we do as humans and
Speaker 1: make navigation look easy because they're operating off of cues
Speaker 1: that are invisible to us. There are two components of migration.
Speaker 1: One involves navigation how do they get to where they
Speaker 1: want to go, But the second has to do with timing,
Speaker 1: knowing when to leave, leaving too early or late can
Speaker 1: have catastrophic consequences, so they've got to get it right.
Speaker 1: I asked Scott how birds know when to leave. Well,
Speaker 1: they're using a couple of things. Um, you know, all
Speaker 1: all organisms have internal circadian rhythms, they have an internal clock.
Speaker 1: Birds haven't an internal clock, just like we do. They're
Speaker 1: also keenly aware of the photo period. That's the changing
Speaker 1: the seasonally changing ratio of daylight and darkness. The long
Speaker 1: scale trigger for migration for a bird is the photo period. Now,
Speaker 1: whether the bird leads today or tomorrow or the day
Speaker 1: after is going to depend on the bird's physical condition.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's not going to take off until
Speaker 1: its body tells it it has enough fat to make
Speaker 1: in some cases thousands of miles of NonStop flight. And
Speaker 1: it's also going to be keenly aware of the local
Speaker 1: weather conditions because you know, bird migration has a lot
Speaker 1: to do. You know, as any duck hunter knows. In
Speaker 1: the fall, you know, you get the big you get
Speaker 1: the big flights out of the north after you've had
Speaker 1: a coal front that's pushing the bird south. In the springtime,
Speaker 1: the major migration occurs when you have strong south winds
Speaker 1: pushing these birds up out of the tropics. They're not fools.
Speaker 1: They want to they want to save as much energy
Speaker 1: as possible, so you can to find the weather conditions
Speaker 1: that are most conducive to to flying easily and quickly
Speaker 1: at that time of the year. You know, so they're
Speaker 1: they're aware of that timing, and you're right if that
Speaker 1: if they get that timing wrong, it can be calamitous
Speaker 1: for them. Animals have an uncanny ability to key in
Speaker 1: on food sources, and with birds, sometimes the knowledge of
Speaker 1: food availability great distances away almost seems supernatural. I've got
Speaker 1: a pointed question that most duck hunters might have asked before. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got a specific question. I hear these duck hunters
Speaker 1: talk about how they'll have ducks in a certain area
Speaker 1: and a river thirty fifty miles away well flood and
Speaker 1: they say it's almost magical how the ducks will leave
Speaker 1: to go to flooded timber. And the question is, how
Speaker 1: do they know where water is? You know how, I said,
Speaker 1: there's a lot we don't know, we don't know. Um,
Speaker 1: there's Those are the kind of questions that just fascinate me.
Speaker 1: I one of the one of the species I study
Speaker 1: are snowy owls which breed in the Arctic, and they
Speaker 1: and they only breed successfully in places where there are
Speaker 1: huge numbers of lemmings, and the lemming population rises and
Speaker 1: falls in unpredictable cycles. Somehow snowy owls from across the
Speaker 1: Canadian Arctic will figure out that, like, hey, this year,
Speaker 1: there's a lemming peak in the northern non Goava Peninsula
Speaker 1: in northern Quebec, and they'll gather there. They'll move, in
Speaker 1: some cases thousands of miles from where they were breeding
Speaker 1: the previous year. How do they know that? We have
Speaker 1: the foggiest idea. One of my colleagues says, they must
Speaker 1: smell them on the wind, and I'm I'm prepared to
Speaker 1: believe that. We always thought that birds didn't have a
Speaker 1: good sense of smell. It turns out that's not true.
Speaker 1: There's also the chance maybe the I can hear that
Speaker 1: river flooding that sounds that sounds ridiculous. We're talking about
Speaker 1: something twenty or thirty miles away. One of my former
Speaker 1: research technicians, when he was working on his PhD, was
Speaker 1: studying golden winged warblers in the southern Appalachians. He had
Speaker 1: a little, tiny tracking devices on these birds. And when
Speaker 1: he looked at the data from the tracking devices, he
Speaker 1: realized that these birds a day or two before this
Speaker 1: massive line of thunderstorms that spawned dozens of tornadoes swept
Speaker 1: through Tennessee and North Carolina, these birds up and flew
Speaker 1: as far away as Florida or Cuba for just a
Speaker 1: couple of days, and then turned around and came right
Speaker 1: back again after that storm passed. How did they know
Speaker 1: that that storm was coming through? They sensed something? So again,
Speaker 1: I mean birds, Birds are able to sense things that
Speaker 1: we can't. Cracking the door open on the mechanics of
Speaker 1: animal migration opens a wide world of possibility I never
Speaker 1: dreamed of and highlights a word that Jimbo used, mystery.
Speaker 1: The word mystery starts with the letter M. And if
Speaker 1: we're talking about ms, let's turn the flock and talk
Speaker 1: about mallards. There's something peculiar about the way water Fowler's
Speaker 1: treat and talk about this emerald green headed duck. They
Speaker 1: act like they're talking about the king of all ducks?
Speaker 1: Is there a duck king? Why is it a mallard?
Speaker 1: Here's Luke talking about them. So to somebody that hasn't
Speaker 1: had a lifetime of duck hunting. You would look at
Speaker 1: all these you know, dozen or so species of ducks
Speaker 1: that we hunt, and you would just if you just
Speaker 1: looked at them in the line, you would go, man,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty duck. That's a neat looking duck. And
Speaker 1: I don't know that you would pick out a mallard
Speaker 1: and say, now that duck is special. But that is
Speaker 1: exactly what has happened, just on its own. It's not
Speaker 1: because of anything other than just the merit that this
Speaker 1: duck has earned. But the mallard duck is like the
Speaker 1: duck to kill. Why the heck is a mallard so special? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you said I kind of had to back away for
Speaker 1: a second when you said that. I thought lightning may
Speaker 1: strike there we are. If you say something this is harrisson. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you say something bad about a mallard where we're
Speaker 1: setting now, I think a couple of things. It's the
Speaker 1: most abundant duck species in North America, so it's just
Speaker 1: abundant available, and it is everywhere. So typically mallards are
Speaker 1: have been available in a lot of locations across the country.
Speaker 1: So there's this connection to mallard's being everywhere and being abundant.
Speaker 1: Think in Arkansas they are a duck that really responds
Speaker 1: to calling, and and it's a huntable duck because you
Speaker 1: can have this. You can call lots of different ducks.
Speaker 1: But mallards are what people buy duck calls for, right,
Speaker 1: So the duck call that you go buy at the
Speaker 1: store is gonna be tuned to sound like a Mallard duck.
Speaker 1: It's a Mallard hen Man. You can go all the
Speaker 1: way back to the mallard being a forest adapted duck
Speaker 1: south of St. Louis, and you think about the history
Speaker 1: of duck calling and a whole bunch of it being
Speaker 1: the Illinois River Valley actually, which again a sort of
Speaker 1: heresy talking about it around here. You gotta be careful.
Speaker 1: But you think about a duck of open habitats north
Speaker 1: and west of there, and how open habitats would diminish
Speaker 1: the value of calling. We get to forest in wetlands,
Speaker 1: ducks seem to be Mallards seem to be much more
Speaker 1: looking at audio cues because they can't necessarily see every
Speaker 1: duck down in the wetlands, so they're talking. They're communicating
Speaker 1: with their voices way more than just visually looking across
Speaker 1: a section of a prairie in South Dakota and seeing
Speaker 1: ducks on a on apostle wetlands to be going to
Speaker 1: them down here, they're listening for other mallards to be
Speaker 1: talking down there in the woods there. So that just
Speaker 1: builds this importance in this whole other cultural aspect of
Speaker 1: of duck hunting, of of the call. Here's Jimbo talking
Speaker 1: about why mallards are king for the most part, when
Speaker 1: you talk duck hunting in this part of the world,
Speaker 1: it's matter duck hunting, and a lot of it all
Speaker 1: comes back to the colon and they're very collable, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of what we're the most vocal duck. Yes,
Speaker 1: they respond well to calls for the most part. That
Speaker 1: and you go back to to uh, the old market
Speaker 1: hunting days. You know, matters fetch the higher price than
Speaker 1: other ducks. So the cavusbacks fetched even higher price over
Speaker 1: on the East coast. But they were good table, fair,
Speaker 1: pretty good size, you know, big fat matter drake probably
Speaker 1: ways three pounds three and a half pounds. So I
Speaker 1: think that's why I think I think they have bigger
Speaker 1: duck than most of the ducks we got around here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, So they're big duck. Yeah, yeah, I'm still
Speaker 1: not satisfied. Sean's not from Arkansas. Let's see if he'll
Speaker 1: talk some smack about mallards. I think, first and foremost,
Speaker 1: uh most places, pretty much everywhere you go in the
Speaker 1: United States is gonna have mallards, right, and so everyone
Speaker 1: can relate to hunters success on mallards. A guy in
Speaker 1: so other ducks would be more regionally specific, right, a
Speaker 1: guy in North Carolina isn't going to shoot that many
Speaker 1: region whereas in Washington they're like fleas. On top of that,
Speaker 1: they're not the easiest duck to hunt. They do take
Speaker 1: some knowledge and some skill to be successful. I think
Speaker 1: maybe a good example of why mallards are so revered
Speaker 1: is an example of a duck that's not the shoveler.
Speaker 1: Shoveler takes all sorts of flak. Everyone talks smack on
Speaker 1: the shoveler, and I think, you know, the big old
Speaker 1: bill doesn't exactly help. But on top of that, they're
Speaker 1: easy to decoy, and they're not that so if they're easy,
Speaker 1: we don't like them. Yeah, that's probably a little messed up,
Speaker 1: But you know, I think duck hunters like the challenge,
Speaker 1: and nationwide guys can relate to if you're standing there
Speaker 1: holding a strap full of green heads, whether you're in
Speaker 1: Washington or New York, or Louisiana or North Coda, you
Speaker 1: accomplish something. Okay, Sean, I want to understand the way
Speaker 1: that a duck hunter thinks. So let's say you and
Speaker 1: a buddy go out and you could kill two limits
Speaker 1: of green wing teal, which has understand would be twelve birds,
Speaker 1: or you could kill two mallards. What would it be?
Speaker 1: See because I okay, okay, now, see twelve teal is
Speaker 1: worth two mallards? This is worth more? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: how about six mallards versus twelve green wing teal? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd take the six mallards. Okay. So a mallard duck
Speaker 1: is worth two green wing teal? Yeah? Probably? Okay? How many?
Speaker 1: How many widgeons is a mallard duck worth? I'll see,
Speaker 1: I really like wigen So it's maybe like a one
Speaker 1: to one and a half or maybe even a one
Speaker 1: to one. But but a lot of guys you better
Speaker 1: not say that in Arkansas. That's true, man, A lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of guys are mallard peers. You know,
Speaker 1: I have a an old man friend of mine that
Speaker 1: just refuses to shoot anything other than Hollard. A lot
Speaker 1: of times when we hunt together, I'll be done with
Speaker 1: my limit, sitting there waiting for him to even shoot
Speaker 1: a bird because I've been shooting pin tails or widgeon
Speaker 1: or whatever else is coming in. You know, he's got
Speaker 1: that that mallard purist bug. There's a lot of guys
Speaker 1: that all they care about his mallards. Well, when I
Speaker 1: hunted in Arkansas, I noted in the photographs after the hunt,
Speaker 1: they're putting all these mallards up front. They're putting other
Speaker 1: ducks in the back. I mean, it was very clear
Speaker 1: that they were interested in mallards. Yep. You can go
Speaker 1: out and kind of get lucky and shoot a limited
Speaker 1: green wing teal or a limited widgeon or limited god
Speaker 1: wall if you're in the right places. It's hard to
Speaker 1: get lucky and be shooting limits of green heads. And
Speaker 1: that's I think that's why so many duck hunters see
Speaker 1: the mallard as kind of this the gold standard, the
Speaker 1: Gold's the king of ducks. Here's Luke going on and
Speaker 1: on and on about Mallard. There's something. There's gotta be
Speaker 1: something to the whole sexual dimorphism, right, that there's a
Speaker 1: male in the female. All right, you can look at
Speaker 1: the drake in the heads and most hunters can readily
Speaker 1: distinguish it too dramatically different, and people select for drake's.
Speaker 1: Is that not normal with the other species of ducks
Speaker 1: we hunt. It's harder, it's hardy made something. It's always interesting.
Speaker 1: This is the only duck that we have sex specific
Speaker 1: regulations for. So if you think back, you know, Gadwall,
Speaker 1: they're they're tougher to tell apart. It can be done
Speaker 1: in the air tell drakes from hens wood ducks, but hunters,
Speaker 1: hunters really seem to select for drake Mallard. I guarantee
Speaker 1: you if there's a hen shot, it's put on the
Speaker 1: pay kind of to the kind of behind it means, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you'd be moved behind the greenheads. Man. It's
Speaker 1: it's great, And so people want to talk about how
Speaker 1: many how many green heads they shot? Sure seems like
Speaker 1: allards are the undisputed king of ducks. I like the
Speaker 1: passion of that proclamation, and I also love the boldness
Speaker 1: of a region being deemed the duck hunting capital of
Speaker 1: the world. I've found it was a cause and effects situation.
Speaker 1: The astounding navigation systems of ancient ducks led them here
Speaker 1: and their progeny has since followed, creating the Mississippi Flyway.
Speaker 1: The ducks chose their own capital, and the hunters just
Speaker 1: found out where it was. If you're a wild beast,
Speaker 1: it's a good thing when North American hunters covet your meat, feathers,
Speaker 1: and fur, because these hunters will spend life, limb, and
Speaker 1: money to preserve your habitat and make sure they're offspring.
Speaker 1: The hunter's offspring will have a chance to engage wild
Speaker 1: places while in pursuit of that game. I want to
Speaker 1: say that all the people I interviewed were quick to
Speaker 1: mention the Great Water Fouling and other regions of the country,
Speaker 1: and to mention the recent changes in duck movement that
Speaker 1: have impacted how many green heads are coming to Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Things are changing. The ancient system is in a state
Speaker 1: of flux, weather patterns and other complex ecological factors are
Speaker 1: making them do weird stuff. In Part two of this podcast,
Speaker 1: we're going to dive in deep into the conservation of
Speaker 1: duck habitat. We'll be talking about how green tree reservoirs
Speaker 1: are in peril and what is going to be done
Speaker 1: to save them. I can't thank you guys enough for
Speaker 1: listening to Bear Greefs. Please leave us a review on
Speaker 1: iTunes and share this podcast with your friends. Long live
Speaker 1: the King of the Ducks. The Mallard m Here you John,