Ducks Unlimited Podcast

00:00 Mike Brasher Hey everyone, welcome back. I'm going to be your host today, Mike Brasher, and we have another opportunity to visit with a graduate student out there across North America that's helping us conduct some important research affecting our waterfowl conservation, our waterfowl management. Today's guest is Maddie Lohman, a PhD student from the University of Nevada, Reno, and I had the great fortune of spending some time with Maddie earlier this summer up on the Yukon, I'm not going to get this right, Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, right there on the edge of the Bering Sea. Maddie is rejoining us remotely here, and so Maddie, welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. It's great to catch up with you again. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm so excited. We're going to get to a little bit of a discussion on our just unforgettable experience there on the YK Delta later on, but right now I just want to visit a bit about who you are and how we met and when we first met and get you to talk about some of us and how you came to do research on waterfowl because you're like many of the students that it seems like we have out there now, you are incredibly smart, you are highly quantitatively inclined, you describe yourself as a quantitative ecologist, not necessarily a duck biologist, but you're a quantitative ecologist that's doing duck research and so in my eyes and mind, you're a duck researcher. I hope you're okay with that. Oh definitely. But I want to talk a little bit about that. So in terms of your background, I will say the first time that I met you, you were one of the most impressive undergraduates that I'd ever come across and that was at the North American Duck Symposium in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Was that 2019? I think so, yeah. It was the summer right before I started grad school, so I think yeah 2019. Yeah, I think it was that, yeah it was right before the whole global pandemic and all that kind of stuff and so you were an undergraduate that was delivering a plenary, you know, one of the introductory presentations in front of all the participants, all the attendees and you just knocked it completely out of the park so much so that I came up to you afterwards, had to find you and just compliment you on the wonderful job that

02:14 Maddie Lohman you did. How did you get roped into that? Oh geez, well thank you so much for being so nice about it. I was shaken in my shoes. I was so scared. I got roped into it from a former and current mentor of mine, Thomas Rickey, who put together the plenary session. He knew I was very interested in especially spatial ecology, looking at things like how do populations vary across really broad landscapes and he was putting together this plenary about changing demographic rates and how harvest kind of factors into that and he felt like it'd be a really good start to my graduate career to come up and do that. I was not told what a plenary was. And he certainly didn't explain that to you at the time, right? Oh no and like you know we practiced for like weeks and weeks and weeks but I never caught on like this was more than just like a conference talk but yeah just a mentor wrote me in and it was kind of the research that would start off my graduate research so it was really

03:25 Mike Brasher exciting. Well that's awesome and I'm glad Thomas did that. Thomas was actually there with us on the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge and it was great to spend some time with him as well and I learned that's when I learned that all this time I had been mispronouncing his last name. Thomas Ricky and he said as in Ricky Bobby and so I can remember that and so hopefully everybody listening to this now if they're in the scientific profession, the waterfowl profession, it's Thomas Ricky. I was for whatever reason I was calling him Ricky so he said he gets that a lot but that's okay. But I do want to kind of talk about your path I guess to this to your PhD which is studying studying waterfowl population dynamics kind of for lack of a more specific description. I will say that the title and the proposal that you shared with me is Spatio-Temporal Variation and Dabbling Duck Demographic Rates Across the Prairie Pothole Region. We're going to try to simplify some of that language as we go through this but how did you so your PhD student currently at the University of Nevada, Reno so tell us about your path to to be I guess becoming a or wanting to become a quantitative ecologist as you were growing up and now you are one and you're studying duck ecology with some pretty massive data sets. What did that path look like to you and

04:49 Maddie Lohman what intrigued you? I mean why quantitative ecology? Yeah that's actually a question I get a lot and it's always very interesting to answer because it's completely not what anyone throughout my childhood education would have expected from me actually. I'm dyslexic, I struggle with numbers, mixing them up things like fractions are very difficult. I mix up my numerator denominator, things like that and so I actually was very scared of math including statistics for most of my life until Dr. Thomas Rikki who I just mentioned actually I started working for him and we started working on research and I was shown how especially quantitative ecology really incorporates these kind of two things I really enjoy which is wildlife and ecology and that puzzle of the natural world but also this puzzle of seeking patterns and seeking to I guess not generalize what's going on but provide broader descriptors of things like a population right. We're not describing every individual but these broader trends and so just working with him and going through this research I just really fell in love with this kind of I guess puzzle that is quantitative ecology and especially with waterfowl biology like geez no one would have expected that. Like I grew up in the middle of Las Vegas. I really like snakes and like desert tortoises and rattlesnakes that's what got me into wildlife but I needed a job my sophomore year of undergrad. I emailed around and Dr. Jim Settinger who runs the Black Brant Project on the YK Delta or ran it you know let me enter some data. I thought it was a temporary position and then I stayed in that

06:46 Mike Brasher lab for two years and started a PhD. Yeah those professors are pretty good about identifying folks that have skill sets that are going to be useful to this profession. I mean that's they've kind of made their living identifying high quality candidates, high quality students and you're obviously one of those and I'm glad they made that connection. I'm glad that they brought you into the field of waterfowl research. So you said tortoises and snakes in Las Vegas in the desert of Nevada. Did you have was there sort of a mentor a family connection or somebody

07:22 Maddie Lohman that helped you make that connection appreciation for the outdoors? Oh yeah absolutely. My parents like it was just a really big thing. We'd skip church on Sunday most of the time and just go hiking. Yeah your church was the out of doors. Exactly it's and my mom especially really emphasized that to me growing up. This is a spiritual experience like we are like look at all of this that exists. Let's look under a rock and like oh my gosh how much is just under one rock. But yeah just constantly being outside with my parents, my sister. It really made me fall in love with being outside and just wanting to know what's out there and how does it work and all fit

08:06 Mike Brasher together. I wanted to I'll take this opportunity to kind of ask you as as sort of a junior and senior undergraduate did you know at that time that you wanted to go on to graduate school? Because I get that occasionally people will ask what my career path was like. How did I know when I that I wanted to go on to graduate school? When did I know that? What was that like for you? Were you did you have your sights set on graduate school and was there a particular taxonomic group that you thought you were going to work on before you were discovered by Dr. Sedenger?

08:42 Maddie Lohman How do I put this? I had been told very early on especially in the like ecology wildlife fields probably a good idea to get a graduate degree. So I think about my sophomore year which is also incidentally when I started doing some actual research I was pretty like okay this is what I need to do in order to continue doing research. This thing I really enjoy and love that just makes me happy to do it. So I don't think immediately I knew I wanted to go to graduate school but pretty quickly I did and I don't think I ever thought like oh there's a specific taxa or system I want to work on. I'm a big believer in take the most interesting opportunity that's available to you at the time and it turned out ducks were absolutely the most interesting opportunity

09:35 Mike Brasher available when I graduated. Yeah well there's a good reason for that there is a ton of data collected across large spatial scales large sections of North America over very long time periods and whenever you combine all of those different characteristics you get a data set that is super rich for answering questions about why populations change or how they change and why they change and so forth and that kind of is a bit of a transition I guess to talk about your research. One of the reasons we wanted to we kind of identified you as a person we wanted to talk with because there are lots of graduate students out there across North America and we simply do not have enough spaces on our podcast episode schedule to accommodate all of the graduate students doing important work on waterfowl and wetland conservation. I wish we did but we don't but the reason that you kind of stand out as among that group of graduate students is because you are a multi-year recipient of the Ducks Unlimited Bonnie Castle Fellowship in Wetland and Waterfowl Biology. Ducks Unlimited Canada, Ducks Unlimited Incorporated here in the states each year collaborate to hand out eight research fellowships to graduate students conducting work on wetlands and waterfowl in various parts of North America and you were the two-time recipient of that so we want to highlight your research and so this is where I turn it over to you and ask you again like this those rich data sets as a quantitative ecologist how exciting was that to learn about the massive scale and space and time at which all these data were collected?

11:11 Maddie Lohman Oh my gosh like I when I found out about it like I nearly jumped out of my feet it was just like oh my gosh look at all these a questions we can answer but also all these modeling techniques we could potentially apply and have the modeling techniques kind of work because just with a lot of statistical models not having a big enough sample size even if all the math's correct you might not really get an answer to your question just because small sample size you probably have a lot of uncertainty around the estimates of whatever we call them parameters that we're trying to estimate so for me it's like a survival rate or harvest mortality and so just knowing that this intensely rich multi-species multi-year just landscape continental level scale of a data set existed was just insane and the first thing I did was think of a million

12:13 Mike Brasher and one questions that I have not gotten to yet. Yeah and I think the thing that's really cool is that some of the data that you use is provided by hunters like in terms of band recoveries those types of things the other thing is that these other data sets like the the population data from the waterfowl breeding population and habitat survey the BPOP survey is it's it's in some cases known that's a data set produced every year and that is of great interest to waterfowl hunters we at Ducks Unlimited make a big deal out of that and it's going to be released in August of this year and we're going to be publicizing it and we're going to be covering it and hunters look forward to that number they look forward to an understanding or a description of habitat conditions all of the things that excite waterfowl hunters sort of on the surface about these things these pieces of data are the exact same things that you go in depth with to answer some of these questions about

13:09 Maddie Lohman what's happening with waterfowl populations right I mean that's what connects us all oh absolutely and I do really yeah you said it perfectly Mike hunters contribute so much to these enormously rich important data sets so I always try and really shout out like this is one of the

13:26 Mike Brasher largest public science data sets in the world that exists and it's so stinkin cool like yeah yeah so many other avian ecologists are really jealous of the the wealth of data that we have in in waterfowl and we can continue to be thankful for that that we have access to it helps us helps us learn a lot you know the other thing that that kind of stood out to me I was recalling whenever we were in Alaska we found I don't remember I guess it was a white front nest you and Thomas and I were walking along the first day that we got there and we encountered a white front a nesting white front and she got off the nest and we went over and looked at the eggs and two were brown or sort of brownish red and the other was was white or maybe it was it was two in one of one or the other kind of situation but your mind you started asking Thomas about why that is and then he was providing the description and I have a video of this and I'll see if I can we're going to try to post some of this at some point but I remember your mind almost immediately went to like trying to explain that like we could probably model can we model the uncertainty in sort of the the laying sequence of those and so that was the that was the moment that I realized wow

14:36 Maddie Lohman Maddie is like she her mind is quantitatively wired I mean what I'd say is I am fortunate and after I've received an immense statistical education at this point but I mean I think those are really interesting and important questions in terms of okay so we can maybe figure out something like laying order by looking at how much staining is on the egg but it's it's nature it's ecology there's a lot of messiness that goes on and it's just fascinating to try and figure out

15:11 Mike Brasher how correct are we about something some assumption you know yeah and the other really neat thing about it is I guarantee you you could take every waterfowl hunter in North America and plop them there on the tundra with us and show them that that same thing we were observing and they would be fascinated by it they would say oh my gosh that is so cool now they may not immediately go to trying to figure out how to model the uncertainty around our assignment of laying sequence but just the ecology of these birds what they go through the migrations they make and how we marvel at them waterfowl hunters just are just like us in in being fascinated by what these birds are doing and the things that show up and and you know how we try to understand them so I guess I will I'll move on here Maddie to to talk a bit about your your research I described the title mentioned the title earlier spatiotemporal variation in dabbling duck demographic rates across the prairie pothole region so hopefully everybody in the audience will know what the prairie pothole region is but I'm going to ask you to I'm going to ask you to kind of decipher that the the first part of that when you say spatiotemporal variation in demographic rates translate all that for us what is what's the basic question or set

16:26 Maddie Lohman of questions that you're answering with your research yeah so demographic rates are things like especially for dabbling ducks things like survival or harvest mortality or reproductive rates all I'm interested in is looking at how do those rates change across space and change across time in conjunction so is one site in the northwest of the PPR doing a whole lot better than some site in the southeast and do those sites change in the same way over years or differently for instance does that site in the northwest maybe the survival increases over the years it started maybe pretty high and it just kept getting higher and then in the south southeast did that survival rate maybe it started really high but the trend is different maybe there's a slight decrease over time and so it's questions like that just how does it these rates vary across both space and time and do they

17:37 Mike Brasher all do the same thing do they do different things and why maddie I want to try to describe my understanding of kind of how you're using some of this data we look across the prairie and you tell me if I'm wrong I probably will be wrong in some way and that's okay but when we look across the prairie pothole region it's as you described it differs based on wetland density based on land use in some areas agricultural intensification is is greater some areas have more grassland intact and so forth so it's not a uniform landscape right and we can look to the breeding population survey that's conducted every year and if we if you go to that report you can look and you can see that that PPR that region is is split up into different strata what we call basically different different subsets subsections sub regions and that kind of follows duct densities and densities of wetlands and a few other things the way they divide that up the data sets that you're using to kind of measure some of those rates whether it be a change in in quote population it is it coming from that breeding from that strata level or is it even finer than that data from the breeding population survey that's a really good question and we don't have to get too detailed but that was my understanding that's kind of like when we're talking about population change well I guess you're just talking about variation in some of those survival rates or harvest rates right

19:03 Maddie Lohman yeah exactly just how do these things change over space and time but you bring up a really good question and something I've always thought a lot about but especially right now I'm thinking a tremendous amount about is how do we divide up this region these strata that the what is it the WBPHS waterfowl breeding habitat and pond survey gosh that's a tongue twister how they divide it up is great but sometimes I know I struggle with certain things have more of what we would call a local effect than others so they affect ducks on a smaller spatial scale so you can think of it a duck lives by a pond right so if I'm scaling up am I going into too much detail no I'm sorry to

19:55 Mike Brasher break no no it's all it's all good let's go continue on with that example about a duck at a pond I mean I think that's one of the neat things and I kind of resist the urge to go into it's difficult for me to resist this urge to go into more detail on this because whenever you were talking about reproductive rates there's a whole series of finer scale rates that go into that right nest success brood survival re nesting rate and that those are going to be terms that a lot of our hunters and audience members are going to be familiar with as well but you're not even your research isn't even getting down to that level right you're just looking at higher level measures of that productivity you know like how many young and productivity I guess we should maybe define here is it can be indexed by the number of young produced per adults right sort of an age ratio thing some of our folks are going to be familiar with that I think the fact that we a couple of scientists accidentally stumble into a bit more detail is completely understandable so continue on

20:54 Maddie Lohman with that example of of the duck at the edge of a pond well yeah thank you for clarifying like that's so helpful but yeah exactly especially if we think about age ratios local ducklings right when they're small they can't fly the number of ponds in a certain strata if those ponds are five miles away they don't matter to that tiny little duckling so that's actually something I think about quite a bit is how do you aggregate this data so essentially I'm taking ducklings from maybe 10 miles away from each other do these conditions you know that far away really matter for these two different we can call them like subpopulations of reproducing ducks and if we put them all together are we going to kind of lose this what we would call a signal so if ponds have

21:50 Mike Brasher an effect on reproduction do we lose that signal when we scale up spatially yeah yeah there's a whole bunch of questions there I'll I'll do my best to try to pull us out a little bit here because you and I could go on and on about about some of that and talk about the different data sources and that but we don't want to do that we don't do that I'm going to ask you a question about like why is this important we you've just kind of given us given well you and I have both sort of talked about the different scales at which we can ask these questions about why is there variation in some of these different vital rates but why is that important for us from a management perspective let's talk about that why are these questions important either from an ecological just basic ecology or but maybe more more important from a conservation perspective why is important

22:44 Maddie Lohman for management yeah absolutely I mean for management we can think or at least I think one of the biggest helps in trying to understand variation is this kind of idea of forecasting just predicting if we have a really bad year there's no ponds on the landscape this year what will our duck populations do next year and how might that differ across this really big landscape so it's important in that sense it's also really important to know maybe our kind of you know quote-unquote subpopulations of ducks again across a really broad landscape do they react differently to environmental conditions when they change so say we have a uniform across the landscape ponds decrease all the same amount do ducks in say one area do better than others they produce we could say more babies one than this other population even though ponds decrease the same amount at both sites so knowing that is really important for management and just having this kind of I guess more specific understanding of how the population works in this specific area and to get at this kind of more pure ecology question something I'm really interested in is concepts of life history which is a big fancy ecology term but you know just to vaguely describe it it's things like how long will a duck live how many babies will it have how often does it reproduce does it reproduce every year or every other year things like that even migratory behavior and habitat use can factor into life histories and I'm really interested in it because it gives us a way to generalize certain things to species we might not have as much data for and just don't know as much about and so I guess when looking at the spatiotemporal variation we can also look at this variation for different species and say okay we know these two different species have different life histories can we predict out to species we have less data for less knowledge about

25:04 Mike Brasher and then manage those species better that's a great segue to a break because we're going to take a break here and then when we come back I want to ask you a little bit more about that you're studying different species in your research and then I think we'll close out the discussion about your research and then we'll get to you and I reflecting on the experience we had on the at the YK Delta so stay with us everyone we'll be right back Welcome back everyone I am here with Maddie Lohman a PhD student at the University of Nevada, Reno. We are discussing her research studying duck ecology broadly stated specifically trying to help us figure out why duck populations why that like their survival rates their harvest rates sort of change and whether they change at different rates across the landscape of the prairie pothole region and now Maddie you were telling me about this idea of life history and how that life those life history traits survival rates age at first breeding migratory strategies those types of things can vary among species and I know that you are studying different species in this in this research

26:46 Maddie Lohman so tell us about that and why those species yeah so I study blue winged teal mallards and northern pintail and in addition to just I think they're very charismatic species they're really helpful for my research because they form this kind of life history gradient of dabbling ducks and what I mean by that is this kind of concept of we have faster and slower life histories blue winged teal don't tend to live super long they reproduce with a lot of eggs every single year until they die in general and then we go over to say northern pintails and they're surviving a little bit longer they might not even breed every year and they're producing fewer eggs than say a teal at every reproductive attempt and then mallards fall somewhere in the middle and while this gradient isn't maybe as dramatic as say a mouse versus an elephant in terms of this kind of fast to slow continuum we are able within this kind of grouping of species dabbling ducks to look at this gradient and say how does variation in demographic rates and responses to the environment differ between these species and how might these species different life histories play into that

28:10 Mike Brasher and that's important as you were kind of talking about in helping us figure out if there are if there's one species or maybe several species that can serve can serve as sort of a useful substitute or proxy for others for ones for which we may not have a lot of data in some cases trying to figure out if there's like if yeah if we can how how uniform our the returns or the benefits of our management actions or conservation actions or harvest management might be across

28:40 Maddie Lohman different species is that is that about right like from an irrelevant standpoint yeah exactly you know unfortunately we can't collect a ton of data all the time on every different species some are harder than others and yeah it's not 100 perfect but it allows us to manage these species

29:00 Mike Brasher without data a lot better and gauge whether it works or not so much better yeah you know Maddie we've already talked about some of the key data sets that you're using how about tell us where you are in this research like in terms of completing your degree how much longer do you have to go are there any preliminary fine well let's just i'm really bad about asking a lot of questions at

29:23 Maddie Lohman once so how far along are you and how much longer do you have i have completed four years with my phd i have two years left i'm really fortunate to have received a few different fellowships to fund that and i'm also working on a master's degree in statistics concurrently so i'm i'm really taking

29:44 Mike Brasher my time with completing the degree and and in terms of the research any anything that has stood out i don't want to ask you to to reveal a whole lot of preliminary information preliminary results because as we've said on previous episodes we kind of like to stay true to the peer review process and make sure the information that we're sharing at any specific level is has gone through that vetting but any interesting tidbits or things that you have found particularly i don't know

30:17 Maddie Lohman exciting so far so many things but again i'm trying to think of how to generalize this because peer review is very important to me i'd say one really cool thing is that we do for all these species actually do you find spatial variation particularly in survival rates and it's very interesting because i also break up each species into age and sex class so adult males adult females and then juvenile males juvenile females and it's really interesting to see especially how these spatial patterns differ for all these different age and sex classes i'd also say there's a tremendous amount of variation in all the demographic rates i study across time which is really interesting to see what periods are particularly good for these populations and where are they not doing as well and then trying to compare say are males doing a lot better in this time period but females are maybe struggling and why is that and that also kind of brings me to another interesting preliminary result i've been working on quite a bit lately is that we find that males and females well like kind of broadly demographic rates kind of align in terms of they'll go up you know around the same time and then they'll decline around the same time we do see differences in both space and time when how do i put it the variation between males and females is not quite the same it's not one-to-one and trying to understand why that is and what the

31:58 Mike Brasher ecological dynamics are to generate those patterns is really interesting well i look forward to seeing the rest of your research the results of your of your research i do imagine you will be presenting one or more talks at the the duck symposium ducks nine to be held in portland in february of next year 2024 so i will definitely look forward to to attending those i don't know if you've been lined up for a plenary yet or not well i have to kind of wait and see on that but but i know you will be you'll have some presentations i'll catch up with you there and we'll closely follow the results of your of your research and and i know that all the other everybody else in the waterfowl management community is is looking forward to that as well as they are for all the other students that are doing important work out there and so continue on with that we were super excited to have supported your research as a ducks unlimited fellows fellow we were honored to have you sort of represent our organization so thank you for that thank you guys oh yeah oh yeah is that is that we're happy to have the opportunity to do that and we're it's just one small way in in which in which we can continue to contribute to waterfowl research and help help support the next generation of waterfowl scientists i sort of in that vein i wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about our fun adventure in the uconn delta because that was another one of these it's a long-term research project up there right out on the edge of the Bering Sea on the the shores of the tataco river and you and i and others were there it was part of a little research group that the research there's like a research core research team that had been there for 30 or 40 days before we got there and and we're going to try to get that that like core research team together on a future episode i was talking with one of the members of that that team by text i guess a few weeks ago and floated the idea and it was caroline caroline blommel and and she said absolutely would love to do that so i think i guess the rest of that crew is still up there as of right now this is late july they're still there it's a long-term blackbrant research site and it was my first time to have ever been there i think maddie it was your first time to have kind of ever been out on a waterfowl research site right you had told me that you had done a lot of work or work in the desert in sort of drier environments

34:36 Maddie Lohman but in terms sort of a wetland landscape was that the first major experience of yours i'd say major one yeah i've definitely gone you know duck banding and things like that but not for as long as a period and not i think very few sites can replicate how intense that those field conditions are but yeah it was my first like big trip to go work with the geese and the waterfowl it was very

35:03 Mike Brasher exciting and you and i and thomas met one another at the anchorage airport and from there we went to bethel and from bethel we went to chivac from chivac we took a four hour well actually it was more like a seven or eight hour boat ride from chivac out to the field site and we almost got stuck one time and it was that was that was an experience in itself there you know it's a bit of anxiety um getting there and having to because we were the first ones to get the boats get the boat and fire up the motor and i was shocked that the boat or that the motor started as easily as it did especially after we realized that the little dipstick had been pulled out and it was low on oil and you know those types of remote situations remote field camps always bring with them an incredible amount of logistical challenges and so there we were the first ones to get to to use the motor in a year and i'll be honest i was i was surprised that it started up as easily as it did but it did we eventually got there um i had a wonderful time share with the the audience some of your favorite memories some of the most remarkable observations things you didn't

36:15 Maddie Lohman expect or or just what was that like for you oh my gosh big question i know yeah a huge question just everything was absolutely remarkable um i guess just you know that kind of coming in like seven hours on a river on a small boat to get to camp it was like nine p.m just exhausted and then just this absolutely gorgeous and completely to me at least novel landscape that i've never seen anything like this coastal tundra my god like it was just amazing and jaw-dropping how big these rivers are you know i'm from i'm definitely from nevada you know the trekkie's pretty big to me and then i see these rivers and it's like oh my gosh i've never seen a river this big and then i guess just like the diversity especially of like avian life right there was just i've never seen so many like sandhill cranes in one place before just like you know 15 hanging out all together mike just so cool and then i don't know i'm trying to think of all the interesting memories

37:25 Mike Brasher but there's so many yeah because you were up there you and thomas were there for like two weeks two or was it closer to three weeks i was there for about eight days i think i think it was just over two weeks we were at camp and i remember emailing thomas afterwards and he said his feet were still recovering several days after he had gotten back i don't know did his feet get in pretty

37:46 Maddie Lohman bad shape by the time things were over not that he told me but i imagine just wet feet yeah all day every day that's that probably is a little bit rough yeah walking around in waiter yeah just waiters and waiter boots all day is also probably not you know there's not a lot of arch support

38:06 Mike Brasher there yeah yeah for sure so what was the coolest bird for you like we saw everything from emperor geese to spectacled eiders common eiders somebody had somebody saw a king eider i don't know if you saw that if you were part of that group you saw the king eider oh well okay i so i have the answer then probably yeah no i was about to say the eiders were definitely the yeah oh my gosh i love eiders they're like just gorgeous and then the king oh my gosh so all right so outside of the king eider what was your favorite bird species or the most surprising or the the one that you

38:39 Maddie Lohman remember most outside of the king honestly maybe it's a little bit of a silly answer but the black brand just because i had worked on the project remotely for a number of years and then just being able to actually go there and go up and see them and work with them was just amazing they also really are good parents and get very upset with you when you go near their nest so the amount of just getting beat on the head and back with wings you know that really reinforces that

39:11 Mike Brasher bird in my memory did you have an opportunity to look at the photos and videos that i shared with y'all yeah they were amazing and so great photographer well so i don't know about that but my point in saying that was that that we're going to try to get those out on some of our social social media platforms here in a little while i don't know when this episode is going to air but sometime this fall we're going to try to get some of that footage out there and some of those photos for people but they are they're just incredibly remarkable birds and i would share that with you that that yeah just i was stunned at how approachable those birds were on the nest i mean that we have some video of the researchers having to kind of forcibly move the hens off the nest to get to the eggs and collect the measurements from the eggs and just wonderful video demonstrating the parenting that you talked about but that entire landscape and i don't know it's the the birds that were nesting there there's some there's some differences from one bird to the next but there's a large number of birds there that just didn't seem to mind being very close to you i had a hen pintail nesting 15 feet from my tent in camp i'd wake up in the morning and we'd have a pair of cackling geese walking through the camp we had a hen longtail duck nesting 30 meters from a tent we had what were the western sandpipers we had dunlons we had of course the arctic terns can't forget about them right i was about to mention they attacked you every time you went to your tent mike yeah yeah i know we kind of had a running had a thing as soon as i was head in that direction here he comes he or she whichever would get up off the nest come right towards me and just like kind of made a game of it by the end of it or made sort of a friendship of it i guess i should say but it was it is was it is a wonderful landscape was a wonderful experience for me i know it was you as well you actually as i said stuck around a little bit longer and were able

41:11 Maddie Lohman to spend some more time with the with the goslings talk about that how cool was that oh my gosh you know it's always fun to have like baby birds in hand but like these goslings were just the cutest fluffballs i would say though the parents got more aggressive as it got closer to hatch and then especially once they had goslings they were very rightfully so i'll put that out there rightfully so but very unhappy with me so just trying to yeah manage these goslings trying to scramble out from under my clipboard i put on top of the nest while i have one in hand dad's coming from the air mom's coming from the ground at one point i had a turn come and pack my head at the

41:55 Mike Brasher same time it was a phenomenal experience but definitely i got good at managing multiple things that was full-on attack mode yeah and and i guess just to provide some background to folks what y'all were doing is web tagging the the goslings at that point and the the thing that i will say i think i would hope people understand this to be the case for any research that we talk about if it's conducted well that is conducted by the by university state or federal researchers it's all done under the guidance of approved research permits animal care and use permits and so this is not just a group of people willy-nilly going out there and playing around with duck nests there's a god or goose nest there's a very rigorous sort of permitting and and and use and research review protocols that all these things have to go through and so you in particular as you were talking about were were attaching web tags to the goslings as they hatched and and the hatching in gauze in geese is very synchronous it happens much more so than than ducks because of that compressed breeding season how like how fast pace was that week because the day that i left that carolyn and i and i left was the first hatched nest that was being monitored but i imagine over the next two three five days

43:18 Maddie Lohman things that the number of nests that started hatching just exploded oh yeah there was definitely it was a quick build up there were a lot of long hours pulled a lot of miles walked a lot of nest visited to just make sure at the very least we could say this nest is hatched and here's the date it hatched if not you know the primary goal being trying to get those web tags on goslings so we can you know track them to uh you know becoming juveniles and then banding them but uh

43:50 Mike Brasher yeah it was so quick and exhausting we'll talk more about that research if we get jordan and caroline and uh and others on on an episode here later this fall uh did the just sort of a side question here did the waiters continue the new waiters that you were left with by caroline when she had to leave did they continue to perform as good for the rest of your time as it sounded like they were going to whenever you first tried those things on oh i think it absolutely was amazing i was i was cruising across the colony it was wonderful yeah it's kind of the backstory there is that you had a pair of waiters that didn't fit you all that well they were the the molded boot uh ideally in those kind of situations you want the stocking foot waiters with a good hiking boot or fishing boot or something to go over it so that your foot is not pulling out of the boot whenever you get stuck in the mud because it is some in some places some very deep you know deltaic mud like we're talking up to the up to the knee in some places uh and if you it yeah you had a couple of instances where you got stuck in the mud like i was telling you anybody that spends enough time in the marsh is going to find themselves in that situation but with as much walking as we all had to do yeah that became that became a huge pain for you and then when you were able to finally try on those waiters of caroline's and they fit i have video of that also and that's one of my favorite videos of your reaction and your excitement and so that was awesome i'm glad it worked out yeah it was perfect uh it was sorry i cannot stop going on about it it was amazing to have waiters that fit me yeah it's very important very important takeaway well let's say anything else before we wrap up anything else to share like memory wise from our trip to the to the uconn delta

45:43 Maddie Lohman trying to think there's so many memories but i think especially just sitting in the weather port with everyone you know and you were gonna say that yeah absolutely everyone there is just so phenomenally intelligent and kind and just charismatic and it was just so fun to you know play cards and drink hot chocolate or talk about an extremely silly book or things like that with

46:10 Mike Brasher people who are just fun to talk with yeah i'll give a quick shout out my first name only because i don't have all their last name last names here with me but uh jordan caroline laura jacob lydia and of course thomas was there as well you were there i got everybody right yeah i think so okay and and so everybody except you and thomas are the ones that we're going to try to get on a subsequent episode talk about some stories they're going to have some oh i know what i wanted to ask you the sauna you know this there's a whole backstory on the sauna as well we'll explain that in subsequent episode but did y'all make much progress in rebuilding the sauna before y'all left

46:46 Maddie Lohman they were almost done but i think there was i wasn't quite sure but there was a plywood shortage by the time we left yeah but they were it was very very close i think they probably have a sauna now

46:59 Mike Brasher okay yeah and so the story on the just i feel like i probably need to clarify that the reason for a sauna is because there's no running water there's no uh you know no indoor toilet or anything of that nature folks are out there for well all summer without running water they have to bring in their their potable water drinkable water by boat and the sauna in my understanding is sort of the the way the closest thing to sort of a of a of a shower that folks can get where you go into the sauna you get all hot and then you jump into the river and then kind of wash off there and then get back in the sauna and and warm back up that was my understanding of the protocol and what and they had for the longest time had a sauna that they would construct or rebuild every summer and that would be one of the little quote luxuries if you can call it that given the primitive nature of what that sauna was that that they would have and because there was no shower they people were not able you're not able to shower there and last year the tropical well not a tropical storm but a typhoon that came through in september washed away all of the all the plywood and all of the all the stuff that that they used for that that sauna in past year so they were in a rebuilding mode did i get all that right i think so that sounds correct we'll talk about that some more with the group but anyway that was a one another one of the things that you have to deal with in those remote locations maddie i think that's probably oh that's what i one last thing to do is to give you an opportunity to acknowledge your research partners and and the folks that kind

48:37 Maddie Lohman of make all this possible for you and then we'll they will wrap up oh yeah so i mean obviously ducks unlimited and then i'm also fortunately like extremely grateful to be a recipient of nss uh graduate research fellowship programs fellowships that they give out and those are my primary funders uh but also you know my advisor dr perry williams uh dr paul hurtado dr thomas

49:05 Mike Brasher ricky dr jim savanger i'd be remiss to not mention them yeah and then i always like to um say a thanks to everybody that has collected the data that you've used i know you also echo that we're talking about everybody from the fish and wildlife service canadian wildlife service state agency folks provincial agency folks that contribute to those surveys waterfowl hunters waterfowl banders anybody involved in those data sets they always get a big shout out for for their participation for making all of this possible yeah it's a phenomenal phenomenal effort and the results are absolutely stunning yeah thank you mike for mentioning that yeah maddie it's been great having you on here appreciate as i said before you being a wonderful ambassador of ducks unlimited science and of science for north american waterfowl i thoroughly enjoyed getting to spend a week plus with you and and that was um yeah i'm glad i had that opportunity and we'll look forward to catching up with you i guess early next year yeah me as well yeah so thanks for being here with us thank you a very special thanks to our guest on today's episode maddie loman a phd student at the university of nevada reno studying duck demographics and how they vary across that very important landscape of the prairie pothole region as always we thank our producer chris isaac who does a fantastic job with these episodes and we thank you the listener for your time and support of the podcast and we thank you for your commitment to wetlands conservation and waterfowl science