Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Chris Jennings: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host, Chris Jennings. Joining me in studio today is my co-host, Dr. Mike Brasher. Mike, how are you?
Mike Brasher: I'm doing great, Chris. I'm full from Thanksgiving. Good. Ate too much.

Chris Jennings: Duck season opened, everyone's excited. It did. That's awesome. Also joining us on today's podcast is Dr. Scott Stevens from Ducks Unlimited Canada. Scott, welcome back. There we go. Thanks. Always good to join you guys. And the theme music continues.

Mike Brasher: The wrong was righted. You didn't, he didn't have his, his theme music last time he was on the, on the episode on the podcast.

Chris Jennings: I know. Cause it was just Scott and I, and I said, Hey Scott, I'm not going to play your theme music. And he's like, thank you.

Mike Brasher: No. Did he say thank you? I said, that's okay. He said, that's okay. That's what I figured your response would have been. Of course he's going to say that. That's right.

Scott Stephens: I think we had a discussion about of an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure was actually,

Mike Brasher: We had that conversation. I don't remember that. But you must not have been recording when you had that.

Chris Jennings: Well, we've got Dr. Stephens on the show today. Moving right along.

Mike Brasher: Moving on.

Chris Jennings: Moving on. We've got Stephens on the show today because we, Mike and I and Scott, are going to be doing a species profile. We haven't done one of these in quite some time, really. I think it's been the last season, Mike, last year even. Yeah.

Mike Brasher: And I guess Chris decided that I don't know enough about ducks, so he had to bring in the relief, which I agree with.

Chris Jennings: But I think it's important to have the heavy hitters on this particular episode, especially with this species profile, because it is the northern pintail. Super popular species. Mike, if you want to go ahead and get started with this, where we just kind of, you know, I think we originally started out these with you know, taxonomy, you know, really, you know, what is this bird, you know, just the introduction to the northern pintail.

Mike Brasher: Yep, for sure. And again, just to kind of reiterate, we have done a number of these in the past and we worked through some of these. A pintail is one that's been on our list for obvious reasons. It is one of the most highly prized birds out there. It's one of the most beautiful birds out there. They're not as common, they're not as ubiquitous as mallards or some of the teal are, and so it's just a really cool bird. They also have been the focus of a lot of scientific research over the past 40 years or more, and part of that relates to their population status and long-term decline in that population, and so it's a species around which we can tell a pretty interesting, although in some cases it's sort of a a depressing story about what has kind of led to those declines. But then we can also talk about a lot of the conservation programs that Ducks Unlimited and others have put into place or tried to put into place to help reverse some of those long-term population declines. So, a lot of information on this. And I guess, full confession, I was the one that said, let's bring Scott Stevens on because I know he has spent way more time thinking about this bird and actually studying it up there on the prairies. than I have, and he's going to be able to speak firsthand to a lot of this information. So, with that kind of backdrop, we'll get right into this, as you said, Chris, and we're going to breeze through some of this because we want to get to the heavy conversation about what's going on with the population, what can be done, what are we trying to do, that type of information will be pretty unique among some of the others that we've talked about. So, from a taxonomy standpoint, like, which bird is this? What is it most related to? The scientific name is Annus acuta. It's in the same genus as most other dabbling ducks. There have been some taxonomy changes here the past few years, but it's in the same genus as most other dabbling ducks. It has taxonomic relatives, including, I think, Eaton's pintail, yellow-billed pintail. I forget what one of the other worldwide species… White-cheeked. White-cheeked. Yeah, what was the first one I said? The second one I said? You said Eaton's or something. Yeah, Eaton's. And what's the other one I said? Yellowbill. Yellowbill. Okay, yeah, yeah. Alright, so I was thinking white-cheeked and I said Yellowbill, so I got him. And so the white-cheeked is actually in sort of the western hemisphere in Puerto Rico and some of those, some of the Caribbean areas. So, I've actually seen white-cheeked pintails. Have you, Steven?

Scott Stephens: I've harvested a few this past summer in Argentina. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, cool bird. Yeah. But, you know, you would recognize them as pintails.

Mike Brasher: I didn't realize, it shows what I know about sort of their worldwide distribution of some of these species. I didn't realize that the white-cheeked pintail was all the way, made it all the way into Argentina. Yeah. All right.

Scott Stephens: Learn something every day. There we go. Shot yellow bill there too.

Mike Brasher: Oh, okay. Even more cool. Yeah. All right, so in terms of, let's see, any other relatedness over the species, we'll move right along here. The appearance, one of the most recognizable species, certainly when you're talking about the drake, they tend to have a longer neck than most other dabbling duck species. They have, especially when they're in full plumage, the drake is unmistakable. That chocolate colored head with the white stripe going up the neck, very long. The pin feather, the pin tail, and let's see, what else? The herringbone color on the side. So, just, I would imagine most folks here know what a pin tail looks like.

Chris Jennings: Yeah, and I think they're one of the easiest to identify for hunters, too, because even silhouetted, you can see that pin tail, the long neck kind of makes it a little more visible. I think hunters can pick those out a little better than other species. However, the female tends to be mistaken for a gadwall on occasion, has happened before, so.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, they're kind of, if you're trying to shoot drakes, they're kind of tough to sort out early in the season if you're in the north.

Chris Jennings: I was going to say, I saw you kind of shaking your head a little bit there. In the north, it's not as easy. I'm basing it on where I'm hunting.

Mike Brasher: Let's see, about the size of some of the other dabbling ducks that we have. Probably, I didn't actually check on the weight here, but it's going to be in the neighborhood of a gadwall, I would guess, a little bit smaller than a mallard. And Scott, feel free to chime in here if I forget any of this stuff.

Scott Stephens: I would just say, you know, when I think about pintails or how I would try and describe them to somebody who hasn't seen them is they're you know, kind of long and slender and the wings are also kind of streamlined, you would say. You know, actually, when they're flying and courting in the springtime, they remind me of shorebirds, you know, the kind of wing shape and they do all this darting and dancing. So, yeah, kind of unique in their in their flight and a bunch of features of them.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, they are very well known for their aerial pursuits where you'll have six or eight or twelve drakes chasing and courting a single or two, two or three females. Very, very characteristic. Tons of photos out there of that acrobatic display. And all ducks will do that, but pintails just, I think, because of the combination of what Scott talked about, just their appearance, their shape, and some of the movement, they really stand out as some of those more charismatic species during those courtship flights. Let's see, I guess we'll do the call for folks that want to know what this bird sounds like. Most folks that have been hunting for a while will recognize the distinctive sort of whistle, as we call it, of the drake. It's actually listed here in this app as the male buzz peep. So here it goes. That's a new term for me. We'll continue to call it the whistle though. Yeah, there you go. And I would imagine most of us have a whistle on our lanyard to try to imitate the call of a pintail. Have you ever found those pretty effective, Scott? No. No?

Scott Stephens: No. No. Save your money. No. Like, I have one on my lanyard. When pintail's around, I'm blowing that, but it's far more effective to blow the mallard hen call.

Mike Brasher: Speaking of the mallard hen call, we have also in this app here the female flight quacks. And Chris, you and I were commenting that it's very rare that we've ever known that we've heard a female pintail quacking. Scott?

Scott Stephens: Yeah. No, I haven't heard a ton of them either. Like, I don't think they're nearly… Sure they do.

Mike Brasher: I don't think they're nearly as vocal as mallards. So, let's see. In terms of distribution, they are pretty cool in that regard as well. They are circumpolar. They're found throughout the northern hemisphere globally. sizable populations, I don't know what the numbers are, but sizable populations in Europe breeding over there in Siberia and wintering in various locations such as Western Europe or portions of Africa and India and Asia. And we hear a lot of folks talking about some pintail research that occurs in Japan as well. some fairly well-documented exchange of band recoveries in the US, of birds banded in Japan, and then vice versa. So we know that type of distribution occurs, and not all species that we have here in North America have that sort of circumpolar, that northern hemisphere, global northern hemisphere distribution.

Scott Stephens: But in North America, I would argue they're mostly a Western bird.

Mike Brasher: It depends on how you define Western. Yeah. But I would argue most of the… Mississippi Flyway Western.

Scott Stephens: Yeah. Most of the population. I was going to say most of the breeding population would be in the prairies and a significant number up into Alaska. Yes. I mean, there are pintails that breed in Eastern Canada, but not nearly as many. So, yes, they end up in Atlantic Flyway, not nearly the numbers that we see in Pacific and Central and Mississippi.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. I really don't have a good handle on the breeding population estimates from, let's say, Hudson Bay, Hudson Bay Lowlands, any other portions, breeding regions of Eastern Canada.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, well, the other factor that's at play, right, is just the breeding survey is not set up to count pintails wherever pintails occur. It's designed to count mallards, and we count pintails where they occur, but yeah, some of those areas are not well served.

Mike Brasher: Also, to your point there, Scott, with this being sort of a, quote, more Western bird, their wintering distribution also kind of mirrors that. Probably, I don't know what the actual number is, but I'm gonna guess close to half of the population is gonna winter in the Pacific Flyway. Yeah, that sounds about right. Pretty close to another half will be in, just short of the other half will be in the Central and Mississippi combined. And then there'll be 5-10% in the Atlantic flyway. That's probably going to be pretty generous. If we're looking at the distribution of harvest as an index of that distribution of the population size, that's kind of where it would fall off.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I wondered how many halves you were going to have there to start with. That's a lot of hats.

Mike Brasher: The third half would be, uh, no.

Chris Jennings: That's why I had to say close to a half, close to another half. I think one of the most impressive things for me and something that I learned when I started working in production because I never really put it together. I mean, some of our listeners might find it interesting is that these, these birds, not, not the majority by any means, but you know, there's a lot of pintails that breed in the Arctic. Um, and Scott, you kind of hit it on that where, you know, up in Alaska, Western Alaska, Northern Western Alaska, some of those areas up around the Arctic, really where you find a lot of snow goose colonies, breeding colonies. There are pintails up there as well.

Scott Stephens: Well, yeah, you'll have to indulge me, but can I tell a story about that? Like, I have a theory, Chris, as to why this occurs. Like, based on my experience, with pintails on breeding areas in the prairies, they're really well adapted to be a species to take advantage of low nesting cover. And I would cite things like they've got that super long neck, and if the hen is sitting on a nest, she can see forever. So tundra areas kind of meet the same standard as really short grass prairie. And For me, what was always cool is if you had a pintail nest you were going to monitor, you almost never flush the hen off of the nest because she would see you coming, she would sneak off in the grass, and she would flush somewhere away from the nest. So when I think about the kinds of habitats that pintails nest in the prairies, it's like, yeah, on the top of a hill, really short grass, could be a long ways from water. And then I think about Tundra areas, it's like, yeah, those would be the same kind of places where I think, at least my theory would be their defense for predation is, hey, I'm gonna be in a good vantage point and I'm gonna see anything coming and it might get my nest, but it's not gonna get me.

Chris Jennings: That's a pretty interesting theory.

Mike Brasher: That's awesome. So, I had some nesting within 15 yards of, maybe it was actually less than that, 10 yards of the tent that I was staying in on the YK Delta. I was really impressed at the number of pintails nesting up there. Of course, it's well known that that is another… another very, very important breeding region for that species and a lot of others as well.

Scott Stephens: Yeah. But did it have that kind of short, short grass?

Mike Brasher: Absolutely. Absolutely. Super short graze. There was a little… It was hiding in amongst a little tuft of grass. Yeah. But yeah, very, very short, short grass conditions there.

Scott Stephens: And could they see you coming? Would they sneak off if you went to…

Mike Brasher: No, I think she had become habituated to kind of our presence there because she's never snuck off. I actually was able to get within about five yards of her and take some pretty cool photos. But that was, yeah, after multiple days of just kind of figuring out that, okay, these people are here all the time. They haven't tried to eat me yet. You didn't tell her who you were. It's fine. It's fine. Actually, I probably did. I probably did. It talks awfully to her. It's going to be okay. I'm just going to take a photo. Don't get off.

Scott Stephens: So, the other thing that I think is cool to think about them and thinking about, once again, I'll show my bias, breeding areas, is you think about traditional areas that maybe used to have lots of pintails and maybe habitat alteration has changed that. They're also well adapted to get in and take advantage of very shallow water that may only be there for a short amount of time. Mike, I know we'll probably talk about, they have a lower clutch size, shorter incubation period. On the breeding areas, they are set up to get in, get it done, get ducklings fledged. Ducklings fledged sooner than mallards do in less days. So they're really set up to deal with those ephemeral water areas that the water may not be around for long.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, and you know that affinity for large, for short, for landscapes that have short vegetation where they can see a long way, that also extends to their breeding, to some of the habitats that they use during winter. When you think about their prominent use of rice fields and other flooded agricultural fields, real short vegetation. You have to think that's also sort of an adaptation why they're so inclined to use those related to those same things. They'd like to be able to see, like to be able to see a long way. So, yeah, in that regard, what about the boreal forest, Scott? How much do we see them nesting there? They're going to be primarily the prairies and Alaska. There's going to be some breeding populations or a small number of breeding birds in California and the Intermountain West, interior British Columbia. But how much do we think they occupy and breed in the boreal forest?

Scott Stephens: I would say some, not a ton. We definitely see more numbers in the boreal forest when we have the prairies go dry. There's that latitudinal movement. From a harvest management standpoint, they talk about the the median latitude of the breeding population. And so they will occur in there. I would argue it's not the primary breeding location. We've talked about those. The prairies, when they're wet, are a prime breeding location. And there are some key areas in Alaska that birds go to. And those populations have been more stable than the historic populations in the prairies.

Mike Brasher: And then also from a wintering standpoint, just kind of going back, when you think about their distribution and what I said about them being so closely tied to rice and other flooded agricultural landscapes, it should thus be no surprise that the three most important regions for pintail during winter, California Central Valley, the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana and the Mississippi Alluvial Valley. And those areas correspond to the major rice-producing regions in the U.S. And it's not to say they don't eat other grains, but the one thing that's really key about rice agriculture and being so beneficial for waterfowl is that it includes the infrastructure necessary to hold water on those fields during the winter, and that creates ideal habitat for pintails and other ducks, assuming we've got food in there. So, that's what we see in terms of winter distribution. That's not to say that you don't find them in other places. You'll see them using a diversity of habitats, but if you want to see large concentrations of pintails, you go look for some of those large flooded agricultural fields in those areas.

Chris Jennings: That hint, and this is just kind of a wintering distribution question for you two, what's the attraction to the coast? You know, you've got not, not necessarily the rice fields that are along, you know, Texas coast and even Louisiana a little bit, but you know, you see a lot of pintails, you know, if you're hunting down, you know, the Texas coast or even Louisiana. I mean, I was fishing in Louisiana last week and saw a ton of pintails down there. You know, what's that attraction there? Is that, you know, habitat availability maybe? Or is that a historical significance? Kind of like snow geese used to always go to the coast, but pintails have just not really changed. They still go to the coast. Something like that?

Mike Brasher: I think it's, yeah, I think it's a combination of both. It's that sort of that historical, that tradition, but it's also It's a relatively reliable landscape in terms of waterfowl habitat. This year is an exception because it's like super dry all across the Gulf Coast. But yes, it's very consistent. Pintails are one of the more kind of phylopatric. They show higher fidelity. to areas than do some other species, and that includes some of their wintering geographies. So maybe it has to do with that. And I mean, the condition of those coastal marshes, when they're in good shape, they're going to be shallow, and they're going to provide the resources that the birds need. That's kind of my off-the-cuff explanation, Scott.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I agree with that. I think diverse coastal marshes provide a diversity of foods. I was thinking back, I shot three pintails this year in a spot where I was hunting canvasbacks because I had really good Sago pondweed in there. So, they're taking advantage of submerged aquatics where it's abundant too, and that would definitely be the case along the Gulf Coast also. Mike, you talked about a bit of phylopatry too. I recall from my days in the Mississippi Delta, just the cool things that you would see of how in tune with the change in conditions they were. And you would get a big rain in the Mississippi Delta and there would be pintails show up from the Gulf Coast, flying low over shallowly flooded ag fields and moist soil and all those kinds of things. But overnight, if you got a three inch rain, there would be pintails and green-winged teal would show up in the Mississippi Valley that were not there the night before.

Mike Brasher: The other thing that I'll say is, going back to the Gulf Coast, Texas specifically, pintails are known to… Some subset of the pintails wintering on the Texas coast are known to use the shoalgrass beds in the Laguna Madre. They'll forage on the rhizomes of shoalgrass. In some cases, 80, 90% of their of their esophageal contents would be shoal grass rhizomes based on some of the studies that have been conducted down there. Whether those pintails belong to some other cohort of pintails, I don't know. I'm not really sure why some would choose to do that and I don't know What we've learned from more recent research about how, you know, are pintails that you find using showgrass beds in that hypersaline lagoon system always going to be using that? Or do you see them go into the flooded ag landscape? I'm sure you do. Matter of fact, as I hear myself saying that, we've seen that before. We've seen that out there on the Texas coast. where we'd be out on Matagorda Island, a lot of birds using the laguna and then using the freshwater ponds on the island, then all of a sudden we get a big rain and there's no more pintails around on the island. They've all gone inland. There are, the other thing, this is a good opportunity for me to say that there are a lot of other people studying, there are a lot of people studying pintails right now using some of these, some of the latest GPS tracking devices and we spoke with one of the I'm trying to think if Jayvon Bank is actually doing any pintail work right now. I think he's done some pintail work and so there are other folks there. Bart Ballard has a student doing some pintail work and so we'll bring them on at some later date to talk about some of the specifics of their research related to movements and addressing some of these questions.

Chris Jennings: Yeah, I think one of the fascinating questions that we get here, I get quite a bit and I can pretty much say I don't know to just about any question that I get, but I have the luxury of doing that. And most of the times, you're right. Yeah, that's right. I'm always right. Scott, it's been a while since you've lived in Memphis. Yeah. But there's a field, and if anybody's listening to this who drives Highway 40, or Interstate 40, coming out of Memphis, crossing the bridge, going into Arkansas, just when you get past West Memphis, there's a field there. And most, at least the guys that I talk to all the time, just call it Pintail Field. And it will, like, late December, early January, Um, we'll get a 70 degree day and a huge rainstorm and you drive down 40 and like my phone's blowing up and they're like, the Pentails are there. And this field loads up, loads up. I mean, it could be some days it's 5,000, some days it looks like 20,000. I mean, this is just buzzing with Pentails and everybody around here knows what that field is. Like there are people probably listening like, oh yeah, I know exactly what that is. But the question that I always get, or even the guys that I hunt with, they're like, the ducks just got here. The pintails just got here. I'm like, no man, like, those just came from South Louisiana and Texas. Like, they're coming north. They're shifting north with this new available habitat. And the cool part about it is a lot of these birds, you look out across the field, and if you're not going 95 miles an hour down 40 to keep up with traffic, and you slow down a little bit, you can look out there and those things are covered with that rust color on their chest, and that's a good indication of them, you know, feeding in a marsh, something like that. It's like, but that's the question that I get all the time, and is that something that's A lot of people think that's unique to pintails, or is it unique to pintails? Or is that something that, you know, you see with a lot of other species where they'll travel, I mean, it's 400 miles from, you know, probably 350 from the coast to this field on highway 40, uh, or interstate 40. They'll make that jump. And then like you said, you walk out there the next day and there's not a duck in that field, you know, they're gone. So that's an interesting distribution.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, it's getting to the point you ask, is that, do other species do that the same way pintails do? It's getting to the point where, I mean, like for white fronts and for snow geese, there's data coming out showing those birds are making long movements. But there's also data on mallards in West Tennessee which show those things are pretty sedentary. Now, a lot of this I would wager that a lot of this is going to be landscape and context specific. And context can also include the species that we're talking about, but not all landscapes are the same. They're not all the same in terms of the type of resources they provide, the type of disturbance that birds are receiving, the amount of habitat that's available, and so forth. It's getting to the point where previously I would think that, yeah, all ducks do that, make these large movements during the winter, east, west, north, south, as habitat conditions or disturbance regimes change. But we're seeing some data that suggests that's not necessarily uniformly the case, and that makes it pretty interesting right now. Some do, but there are probably others that, or there are others that aren't doing so much.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, and I think you're bang on when you say it's context-specific. So, what you were describing, Chris, there, especially if that's happening in January, it's like, yeah, all bad money, that's birds moving up from the coast, and they are ready to head north, right? Oh, there's courtship fly. Yeah, like those birds are thinking about, hey, when are the prairies going to open up at that time of the year? So, they're pushing north up against ice lines and that sort of thing. But, you know, they're also driven by the need to get the energy that they need to make those jumps and fuel that migration and put on the reserves that they need to do that. They'll get most of the protein that they need once they arrive on breeding areas, but fueling that carbohydrates and fat to fuel migration happens in those areas. So yeah, context-specific. But it is something that we've discovered about pintails in almost all the studies that we've done like that, Mike, right? Like, I mean, I think back to Bobby Cox's work along the coast, and it was like, yeah, he could tell when it rained in the MAV, because overnight, his birds would show up there, so.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. Yeah, and that was before GPS tracking devices were available, and that guy, crazy guy, got in planes and would fly all over the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, and… How was he marking the birds? Just with the VHF transmitters, the ones that you had to detect by way of a handheld antenna or a strut-mounted, in the case of an airplane, strut-mounted antenna. Yeah. But again, so pintails may be a little bit easier to find them whenever they make those long-distance movements because of what I talked about earlier. We have such a good understanding of their affinity for those specific landscapes, right? And so it's not like he had to go to—he wouldn't be spending his time traveling to Alabama or East Texas looking for pintails. he was highly suspicious that if I can't find these birds in southwestern Louisiana, they're either going to be in the Texas coast or they're going to be in the Mississippi, the Mississippi alluvial valley, northern Louisiana, western Mississippi, or Arkansas. So, it made it a little bit easier, I think, just to try to locate them in that case.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I think every time we get data like that, we're always a bit amazed about the movements, but, you know, I do stop and think it's like, you know, we're, we're fortunate that they have wings and they're as mobile as they are because, you know, if things go dry, you know, we kind of freak out like, oh my gosh, the Gulf coast is super dry. It's like, guess what? They will find an area where it's not dry.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, especially in a year like this, so, so dry.

Scott Stephens: They will not hang around and I would venture to guess starve to death, Brasier. That ain't gonna happen.

Mike Brasher: Not gonna happen. Just hope they can find some water before they do run out of fuel in all their travels. So, let's move on here. We've covered a lot of information here. already, but I think one of the things that y'all mentioned kind of leads nicely to this next sort of timing of things, pair formation. They're a species that does develop pair bonds a little bit earlier than some species. They're probably in that same range as mallards. They'll start forming pair bonds in late fall, early winter. I looked up some statistics here. from some past studies in the Central Valley of California, and these are going to differ a little bit from year to year and from region to region, but this will give you an idea. In the Central Valley, there's one study that documented about 50% of the females that they were observing were paired by November, let's say mid-November. But then once it got into December and January, that's when the courtship and the pair bonding really started such that by January, 90% of the females had established pair bonds. And that same trend is generally going to apply in other areas. But by December, January, the vast majority of those pintails are going to have formed pair bonds because they're one of the earliest birds to migrate north and begin nesting along with mallards in the mid-continent and black ducks, I guess, as well. They'll start heading north a little bit early, too. So, yeah. Anything to add, Scott?

Scott Stephens: No, I just have vivid memories in January of pintails doing those courtship flights in the Mississippi Delta. like when I was in grad school. I wasn't very successful in getting in the right spot to harvest many of them, but you could see them out there and it was cool to watch.

Mike Brasher: Your decoys on the water were not what was on their mind. No. What was on their mind was that one female that those 15 drakes were chasing and they were all intensely competing for that one female. That's right. Because they knew their opportunity and their time was running out. Yeah. And that is one of the reasons why, and we hear this a lot, people talk about, And we'll get to the sex ratio here in a minute. It is male bias. There is a stronger tendency. I guess I'll get to it right now. There is a tendency… Skip right to it. Pentales have a male bias sex ratio like most, if not all, duck populations. And I always hate saying all because, you know, it's like there's always going to be an exception. But let's just say most duck populations. Male by sex ratio a bit higher of a male percentage than females and there's a whole conversation and line of research happening right now in the waterfowl science community about some shifts in those sex ratios with them becoming increasingly male dominated. And people oftentimes will talk about how they're seeing 20 and 15 drakes to one pintail late in the season. Part of that is going to be simple mathematics. If by December and January, 80 to 90% of the females are paired, you're not really going to be seeing those females up and around quite as much as you would the others. It's gonna be, I would imagine, a bit of an observation bias. You're more likely to see those large groups of birds. Now, we'll probably have people call in or write in and say, you're crazy, but… Yeah, we'll give them your email, Mike. Yeah, we'll give them your email. But I would imagine that is some of it, is because what I was saying, in January, most of the females are paired. And so, you're gonna have a lot of those unpaired males chasing a small number of females that are still out there.

Chris Jennings: You know, and not to backtrack back to kind of the courtship behavior, but it is something that's very obvious that, you know, a lot of our listeners out there have seen. But if you're, if the birds are paired up in November, December, getting into January, you know, I've been up to the Rainwater Basin in March. where you can sit there and look at these 10-acre wetlands, these waterfowl production areas, that are just loaded with like 5,000 to 10,000 pintails. I mean, they're just packed into these things. And there is just a continuous cycle of courtship flights. So if these birds are… And that's the first week of March. So if these birds are majority paired up early, what are these ducks doing in March in the Rainwater Basin where you're seeing these courtship flights? Are there still additional courtship flights? Are they still competing for that hen by the time you get to March?

Mike Brasher: Well, so my contention is that for those courtship flights, that's And I don't know this, but I'm gonna guess that's still an unpaired female, and she could be a young female, and I don't know enough about how a female signals when she's ready to be paired and why this would, or if these are males that are trying to sort of usurp that female from the bird that she had been paired with. I don't know enough about all that. What do you know enough about? I don't know, we'll get there eventually. But I also want to say that with my earlier comment about sort of an observation bias on what people are seeing and talking about, I don't for a second mean to suggest that there hasn't been a shift in the sex ratio in in any duck populations or in pintails in specific. I mean, I think there is pretty good evidence from some of the data that I've seen that we are seeing an increasingly male-biased sex ratio in pintails and a few other duck species. There's going to be an entire special session at the upcoming duck symposium talking about sex ratios in ducks and kind of what's going on there. So, it's a very research-rich topic right now.

Scott Stephens: I'm not, I'm not sure that the ones that are paired, you know, I'm not sure how they signal that either. Like I, makes me wonder. It's like, okay, does the one that's paired get up and like 14 Drake show up and like, Hey, how are you doing? Right.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. We see it often in, in, in Mallards where the female will incite this kind of incite her, her mate. to kind of, at least that's the way my, my understanding of what she's trying to do. She's inciting her mate to kind of chase off all these intruders, but you see it on the water. And, but I don't, but I don't know what the pintails are doing in that regard.

Scott Stephens: Well, I would argue most of that pintail courtship happens in the air.

Chris Jennings: So it's like, how are you, you know, that's what I was thinking there. Sorry to backtrack you there, but I was just curious. I mean, once they get to the Rainwater Basin, they're just a hop away from, you know, the U.S. prairies and even the Canadian prairies, that's a pretty easy jump for pintails. So, they're close, you know, that's a different game.

Mike Brasher: The timing of spring migration, what do you know about that, Scott?

Scott Stephens: Well, like I would argue, pintails, many of the pintails are always pushing the ice line, right? Because as we talked about, they're nesting in April, you know, they're the first birds that show up, you know, when we've got one puddle of water that's open, You know, that's shallow water that's opened up on the prairies. It's like a pair of pintails will be the first birds that you see. So they're, you know, as weather dictates, they're pushing that ice line. And, you know, crisp places like the Rainwater Basin, you're right, like they'll get hung up there if That area is open water and the US prairies in South Dakota are still frozen. That's when they set in the basins, but they're always checking. You can be sure there's always some that are scouting saying, is it open yet? Nope, not yet, back to the basins. But there are some years too when it opens up and when the Rainwater Basin would be open, might be open all the way through North Dakota at the same time.

Mike Brasher: With that said, there is variation in the timing of this migration with some birds not departing the Texas coast until April or late March, let's say. And so some of the research that I was talking about earlier with Bart Ballard and one of his students, and others are partnering on that research as well, is trying to answer that question, like what are the reproductive consequences of these different migratory strategies, whether it be the route that they take or the timing that these birds take it, there is variation. And so, there's another interesting question that we'll be able to bring some data to, hopefully, eventually, on the podcast with some of those folks.

Scott Stephens: Yeah. No, I remember being in discussions about those kind of things too, Mike, because one of the methods that we used to use was we'd… we'd harvest birds in those areas and look at their body condition, right? And my question was always, well, you know, are the ones that are left behind in those areas later, are those the ones that, you know, have not gotten to the body condition that they need to get to to migrate further north? So, you know, do you have sort of a sampling bias like you talked about earlier?

Chris Jennings: And what about those birds crossing the border? How many, or what's the idea of how many of these birds are crossing into Mexico and going further south? You know, there is, I've heard people discussing that, that, you know, that there's a pretty hefty population of wintering northern pintails in Mexico. Could those, those later migrants just be making their way north from further south? That's why they're there. Or is that something that's documented as those birds have wintered there all season?

Mike Brasher: Yeah, I guess I forgot to account for that half of the pintails, so we need to add another half. We're adding a half. The other half. Back up to about three halves. The sixth half. Three and a half halves.

Scott Stephens: Yeah. I think, Chris, I think that's context dependent, too. Years like this where it's like, hey, if the Gulf Coast is dry, then I would expect there to be more pintails pushing further south into places like Mexico. And the numbers may be up in some of those wintering areas, but there are traditional wintering areas down there too that hold birds. Yes, Western Mexico, yeah, for sure. But like many areas that pintail use, they can be wet and be awesome, and they can go dry and be like, yep, you don't look for pintails there because it's bone dry. Kind of the same thing on breeding areas. You know, we have some of those that go dry and it's like, yep, don't look for pintails there this year, but when it gets wet, they will be there like crazy.

Mike Brasher: So. I am glad you brought that up, Chris, because we would have been remiss if we did not mention the importance of Mexico to pintails. I think they're probably, when I think about the four most abundant duck species that breed in North America, but then winter in In Mexico, I'm thinking about Blue Wings, I'm thinking about Pintails, Wigeon, and Shovelers. I mean, so Pintails may… Pintails are going to be in the top four in terms of the number of ducks that are traveling there from the U.S. and Canada into Mexico. So definitely very important. West coast of Mexico is pretty important. The east coast of Mexico, they're on the Gulf Coast, is also pretty important. But I think Sinaloa, the state of Sinaloa and some of those historic Estuaries there were super important. There was some rice production over there as well back in the day. I don't know how much of that is still occurring. I think a lot of it's being converted to shrimp farming. The other thing, let me back up a little bit and talk about distribution because I said rice and it reminded me that the Atlantic Flyway, not to totally forget about them and distribution of pintails there. We did talk about how there is a breeding population. There are some breeding pintails in Eastern Canada. Some do come from the prairies over there. But South Carolina, with their historical rice culture, would have been a traditional sort of stronghold, I would imagine, for pintails on the Atlantic Flyway. I don't have a good handle on, let's say, winter numbers, wintering numbers in the Atlantic Flyway right now. I have some harvest estimates a little bit later on, but, you know, they're just a fraction of what we see in the other flyways. So probably ought to do a break here. We're not going to be able to get through all this on the timeframe that we've got.

Chris Jennings: All right. Well, let's take a break. We'll come right back. Hey everybody, we're back and I've got Dr. Mike Brasher and Dr. Scott Stevens. Doctor? Doctor? Doctor? And we are talking about the northern pintail. This is our profile, our species profile on the northern pintail and we are back. Mike, do you want to go ahead and restart this conversation? We can talk about, you know, we were kind of getting into winter distribution. We talked about that pretty thoroughly. I feel like we covered that quite a bit and we wanted to move into maybe some feeding habits. You know, one thing we hadn't talked about, I don't know if it's on your list, But, you know, we didn't really talk about clutch size, we didn't talk about breeding. Breeding ecology, that comes next. Okay, let's talk about food habits.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, we'll try to be quick on this. They're a pretty generalist forager. They'll eat seeds, they'll eat invertebrates of all different types, kind of depending on where they are. We've already referenced how closely tied to rice fields they are. Obviously, they're going to be a big grain eater in those kind of situations. They love moist soil vegetation or the seeds from moist soil plants. They'll eat seeds from various coastal marsh plants. They'll eat rhizomes from showgrass in the Laguna Madre. In those situations, they're pretty diverse forager. I don't know them to eat a whole lot of acorns or things like that. I mean, that's why you don't see a lot of them in flooded forest and forested wetlands. You just don't see very many of them there, and so I don't know, Scott, if you have any experience with them. I'm sure somebody out there listening has said they've killed a pintail and it had acorns in its crop, and I wouldn't doubt that, but it's not something that you expect to see.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I'd be surprised by that, too. It would have to be small acorns because… you know, like just looking at the size of their bill. And, you know, I think of them as feeding on, you know, small seeds, those kinds of things. You know, I would point out, do you guys have a Southern bias when you think about what pintails feed on? I was thinking, yep. And they're like peas and, you know, they don't need to be wet up here when they're feeding on stuff. So barley and wheat and, you know, they're walking around. in waste grain fields up here. But yeah, it tends to be smaller seeds. When I think about peas, that these are dry peas grown in fields up here in Canada, that's a pretty good chunk to find in their crop. An acorn is two or three times that size. I don't see that happening much.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, and that is a good point about them feeding, being a dry field feeder. Not all ducks will do that. Some are much better at it than others. Pintails are right up there with Mallards, and I guess it would be Pintails and Mallards are probably the number one and two, right? Wigeon will do it too. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, they will do that. And let's see, of course, they go through the same type of dietary shift as we get closer to the breeding season where proteins become more important, especially for the female. And so when you're looking for protein in your diet, if you're a duck, you're going to be eating all sorts of aquatic bugs, worms, and things like that. Yep, fairy shrimp. They'll eat little crustaceans, little mollusks.

Chris Jennings: Which is when you may see them in like a bottomless habitat.

Mike Brasher: Snails, yeah.

Chris Jennings: if they're in there later in the season trying to eat invertebrates, you know, that if someone does say, oh yeah, they're in there.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, yeah. Need calcium for egg formation.

Scott Stephens: I recall shooting one in the woods, Chris, you know, when it was a mallard hole, but it was like in January, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Jennings: That's pretty cool. You don't see that. I think you see it almost every year. You see a couple people will send a picture or something where I see like shot one pintail in a traditional green timber hole. But it's pretty rare.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, they get corrupted by those mallards. Can't resist.

Mike Brasher: That's right. See the big swirl going in and they just go right along with it. So, yeah, they'll eat any type of grain, corn, obviously, as well. Not a whole lot too surprising or unique, I guess, other than maybe the showgrass rhizomes. That probably is one of the more unique aspects of them. When you think about all the other type of foraging that we just did, dry field feeding on peas and corn or flooded rice and inverts, et cetera, but then they also are known to feed heavily on on showgrass rhizomes in very salty water, which then requires them to go get that dietary fresh water. Wigeon do that as well. So yeah, it is a little bit interesting there.

Scott Stephens: Yeah. I think they're also a bit unique, like you think about that slender, long neck. So I suspect, I mean, they like shallow water, but… they're probably feeding in a little deeper of the shallow water than blue-winged teal are, just because with that neck they're reaching seeds and tubers and those kind of things at a greater depth than a teal would with a short neck.

Mike Brasher: Scott, I'm going to talk next about sort of the breeding ecology, and then I'm going to just real quick like age at first breeding, those types of things. But then I'm going to come back and ask you to talk about breeding habitat preferences, things of that nature, because I think that's going to sort of lead into some of the other questions about like their conservation issues. And then we'll close out, maybe we'll move things around here. We'll close out with a conversation briefly about sort of survival rates, harvest rates, and things of that nature. So, with that said, real quick sort of primer here on pintail breeding ecology. We have already talked about they'll first start arriving on the breeding grounds mid-April. It's going to be a little bit later if you're talking about birds arriving in Alaska, but if we're talking about arriving on the prairies, we're looking at mid-April, they will breed at one year of age. So, birds that were born this year will be capable of breeding next year. They're a pretty short-lived species, and so when you're a pretty short-lived species, you have to be geared to breed as quick as possible. Let's see, nest sites, and Scott, you can also elaborate on this, but we've talked about it a little bit also. They have a strong preference for that short or mid-grass prairie, very short vegetation. They have… One of the things that I found said they have a relatively large breeding home range compared to some of the other dabbling ducks that nest in that landscape. They are ground nester. I mean, let me say that before I forget to do so. But with regard to that home range, 1,200 acres was the average home range size from a study some 30, 40 years ago. I don't know. It's just… That's not a very… research-rich sort of metric there, home range during the breeding season. There may be some other folks that have some data out there, but clutch size seven to eight is what I found, which is a little bit smaller than what we see in other species. Nest success can be highly variable, like in most ground nesting duck species. Scott, you actually did some research on this for your PhD, but I found reports from various studies, anywhere from 2% to 3% nest success for some study area and year, all the way up to like 43% during one year of study in Alaska. So there's a high variation in nest success. I was going to say predation is going to be the primary cause of those nest failures, and that's… Partly true, but there's also a very important, I guess, percentage of pintail nests that are lost to agricultural activities associated with spring seeding. That gets to some of the other conservation issues around this species and some of the programs we're trying to put in place. Incubation period of 22 to 24 days. To your earlier point, Scott, very short incubation period compared to some of the other species. that are ground nesting dabbling ducks. Time to fledge, about 45 to 60 days, so a month and a half to two months once those little ducklings hit the ground. And like most other duck species that we have here in North America, The moment we're within 24 hours of the ducklings of the eggs hatching, the ducklings are capable of going to the water, feeding themselves. They're precocial. That's what that's known as. It's a female parental care only. The male does not have any role in protecting or providing for the ducklings once they hatch. And, of course, once the ducklings hit the water, they're after invertebrates. They're not eating seeds. They're eating all sorts of little bugs because they need all sorts of protein to build muscle and feathers and all sorts of tissue to help them grow super quick. What did I leave out, Scott? I'm sure you could add 30 minutes to that.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I was just gonna say one of the cool things about nest sites is I know pintails are kind of… notorious for, you find lots of nests in little depressions, could be little burrows, you know, in that short grass landscape. It's like if there's a little depression that gets them another couple inches down to kind of blend in with the landscape, you see that. So definitely common to find, you know, a pintail nest in a little you know, in a little badger hole or burrow or something like that. So, just one of their unique features.

Chris Jennings: And, Scott, I just have a quick question, and I think this is a good question for you. You know, Mike was talking about when the ducklings hatch, they get, they're going straight to a wetland. What would be, if you could describe, like, the ideal wetland habitat in the prairies, obviously, that these ducklings will find. What are they looking for when they're going to look for these wetland habitats to really get started that first 48 hours?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, so they're probably getting into very shallow wetlands that will be some of the richest invertebrate communities. When we think about brood survival, we think about seasonal wetlands being really important. So by the time the ducklings are hatching, some of those can be beginning to dry down depending on the year. But the ideal conditions for duckling survival is when we have those seasonal wetlands get re-flooded with a rainstorm, and there's flooded vegetation, and there's lots of places to hide. And those are the years that when you do brood survey work, you don't see very many broods. That's because conditions are such that you see only a small percentage compared to other years where the wetlands are drawing down and there's nothing emergent that's flooded, and you probably see every brood that's out there. So that may relate to a conversation that we had about some brood surveys a bit ago, but we'll leave that one for now.

Mike Brasher: I thought you might go there. He was wanting to go there. Yeah. I could see it. It's like a stop sign that you see coming from a quarter mile away and it's like, yeah, there you are.

Scott Stephens: But best conditions are when we have those seasonal wetlands that are flooded, you know, emergent vegetation and they're full of aquatic insects. And so, you know, the landscapes where we have those are the ones where we've kept that whole community of wetlands all the way from ephemeral and seasonal all the way up to permanent wetlands intact. And then the birds have the choice of using all of those when good environmental conditions exist.

Mike Brasher: I didn't mention anything about renesting propensity. I'm going to throw that one to you. I have a note here, but I want your take on that, Scott, because like I said, you studied some of these birds. Yeah. So tell us renesting propensity. Remind folks what it is and how does it compare in pintails to some of the other species?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, so re-nesting propensity is if you lose your first nest, how likely are you to re-nest again, make another attempt or multiple attempts? And I would argue that pintails are probably the poorest at this feature, you know, like if they If conditions are really good, we have good wetland conditions and lots of invertebrates and food is available, they will re-nest, but it is at a lower rate than mallards for sure. I mean, mallards, they are like the Energizer bunny. They just keep going and going and going. If they're losing nests, pintails, once, sure. Twice, maybe. Three times, probably not. And I think it goes back to you thinking about those classic landscapes that they're attracted to. It's like, well, if you keep drying too long and those areas are drying out, it doesn't do you any good if you hatch ducklings and then all the wetlands are dry. And so I think probably in the evolutionary time scale, that's probably what constrained that re-nesting propensity for pintails.

Mike Brasher: Scott, this is probably a good place for us to transition to what we've learned through the years about how the unique nesting ecology of pintails has positioned them to be a little bit more vulnerable than, let's say, some other species in terms of what's happened for land use on the prairies. the areas that are most important to them in that particular geography. And I guess what I need to do here for folks that may not be aware is just kind of lay out a little bit about the population status of this bird and how it has changed over the past, what, 55 or 65 years. And if you go all the way back, this is data that comes from the Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey, the May survey. Breeding Population Survey had been conducted every year except for two since 1955. If you go all the way back to 1955, you look at these breeding population estimates for northern pintail, and they're like 10 million. Now, I don't know, that's a really odd number, 10 million, when you look at, we're now down south of 2 million, but those first five or so years of the survey were really, really high. I don't know if we'll ever have like total confidence that there were really 10 million breeding pintails. That's still hard for me to fathom, that we would have had 10 million breeding pintails and they would have declined to an estimated 4 million breeding pintails within like five years. Maybe it did, I don't know. But anyway, if you go back and look at that survey, you will notice that real high blip at the very part of the survey. But I know a lot of people, even when you focus on let's say early 1970s to now, you see a dramatic decline. From the 1970s period, we were averaging about 6 million pintails in the breeding population at that time. And I've been part of some conversations recently with some scientists there in the Fish and Wildlife Service, Migratory Bird Office, that have looked in detail at some of these data. And when you go from the early 70s forward, there's a high degree of confidence in the quality of that data. Anytime you start a new survey, there's some things that are going on the first few years, you're having to figure things out, you're making a few tweaks. But when you get into it to this point, like the mid-70s, early mid-70s, we're pretty confident in that six million breeding population estimate for that bird.

Scott Stephens: I'm suspect of those early numbers from the 50s too. Like, that's a wild number of pintails. If that was real, I'd love to have seen that.

Mike Brasher: Is that true? It may have been. But even when you look at like 1970s on, we were dealing with average B-pop at that time in the six million range. And when the 1980s hit, The extreme drought of the 1980s, we saw dramatic declines in duck populations in the prairies for all species. Some species recovered, but pintails not quite so much. They did a little bit and got back up just north of 4 million, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, but now we're back down around 2 million. So, from the 1970s to now, we've seen, what is that, about a 60% decline or something of that nature, if I do the math on the fly, something like that, about a 60% decline. So, Scott, that's sort of the backdrop for why there's been so much attention to this bird, this species. It is one where we have seen long-term population declines and we've seen those declines at a time when in those same landscapes where we know pintails will nest, we've seen other species increase or at least recover from depressed populations. And so that led to a lot of investigation, trying to figure out what was going on. So I'm going to turn it over to you and let you kind of narrate what we've, what we surmised, what we studied, what we found. Yeah.

Scott Stephens: So that's a big topic to tackle, but yeah. The numbers in the 70s, we definitely saw declines in pintails. Now, I think some of the things that we've talked about is, if you think about what we described, landscapes with shallow wetlands, short grass, those were easy landscapes to convert to agriculture because the wetlands were shallow and there wasn't much needed to drain those. That propensity probably put them in a situation where there was lots of habitat loss. And those areas also correspond with pretty rich soils too. So those were some of the first areas converted to agriculture, so there's that challenge. But yeah, this early nesting propensity, there was a time, probably, well, we know during that 70s period where agricultural practices were that, like in Prairie Canada, There was like half of the agricultural land that wasn't planted to a crop every year and was just fallowed. So they would let it grow up in weeds and then they would go in later and cultivate that. But the pintails, it probably already had a chance to nest in that habitat.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, so Scott, I want you to unpack that a little bit because I remember when we were writing an article on Pentel a few years ago, I called Jim DeVries and was talking about this, and Jim DeVries is a friend and colleague of ours who's Dr. Pentel up there for DU Canada. He's now retired. But he was the one that really put in a lot of work to decipher sort of what all has been going on. And I talked to him about this, and it took me a while to fully wrap my head around the timing, because the timing of this is critical, because I had always heard about the part of, if you go back to the 70s and then through the maybe 80s, I forget really when the decline started, The very thing that you said is a half of the of about half of that agricultural land was fallow But then I couldn't piece something just was amiss in my mind And so what I I figured out it it is it was exactly what you said in that when these When these birds arrived in the spring, that area that was fallow had started to grow up in some weeds, right?

Scott Stephens: And there was time for them to hatch a nest in there. So you think about these birds showing up in April or early May and laying eight eggs, and would we say 22 days to incubate? That's like 30 days you need, right, to get everything done.

Mike Brasher: But then the producers come in, in let's say early summer, And they would disk that fallow, that fallow area, right? To begin to prepare it, do some weed control and begin to prepare it for growth or for farming the next spring, right?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, but that disking the fallow didn't happen until everything for that year was seeded, right? So, it's that part that bought the time to get them through the… 30 days, get them through basically May, even into mid-June before the farmers started tilling that fallow.

Mike Brasher: And then the other half that they did put into spring production during a given year, they would harvest it, and then they would leave it untouched until the following… Because it would then go into what is fallow, and so it would be untouched until that early summer, mid-summer, once they had gotten all of their other planting done, right?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, so when we talk about half of the cropland at first, maybe that doesn't seem like much. But that could be, what would we have? 30 some million acres of cropland across the Canadian prairie. So that's like 15 million acres of fallow nesting habitat mixed in with wetlands. And then basically agricultural practices changed. Now that Follow strategy probably wasn't great from a soil conservation standpoint. There were other challenges with that but we moved more to where half the acres were not fallow. More of them were planted every year, managed with herbicides and those kind of things. And yeah, basically we lost that summer fallow, it was called. And then almost all of that cropland would be planted on an annual basis. And that's probably responsible for that decline since the 70s and the peaks haven't been as high. not to bum people out, but I'm not sure we're ever going back to fin tail populations like we had in the 70s there, unless we see a huge scale of change in agricultural practices again across the prairies. And maybe that could happen as we think about climate change and those challenges that that brings. But yeah, that was a big driver.

Chris Jennings: Scott, I was going to mention something to Mike about you know, program when I first started at DU, it became pretty popular with the UCanada. And it's an interesting habitat switch, but it's the winter wheat program. And how that winter wheat, that short grass, native grass, you know, is very similar to winter wheat. And I think we have some research that shows that it was fairly successful for pintails. Can you kind of elaborate on that and just kind of talk about that and whether or not that those types of programs are still ongoing?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, no, that is something that we instituted because, you know, there was a lot of work done and it looked like there was potential because pintails, one of the other unique things that I don't think we've said, Mike, is that from a nesting standpoint, when we do studies, they don't seem to have a strong preference for any kind of nesting habitat. So, they will nest, we call it in science parlance, in proportion to availability. So, if you've got lots of cropland stubble out there that's going to be planted to wheat, that's what they will nest in. So winter wheat is planted after the harvest in the late summer or early fall and then remains, kind of goes dormant during the winter and then starts growing but doesn't have that planting disturbance and there's some There's some spraying of herbicides and that kind of thing, fungicides during the growing season, but there's not cultivation during the nesting period. So we did a bunch of research around that. We did a bunch of investment to help develop winter hardy. varieties of winter wheat. And in fact, still today, most of the varieties of winter wheat that are planted across all of the prairies, US and Canada, would be varieties that were developed through the labs that we invested in. So DU had a hand in helping develop those varieties that are still used today. Now, there have been economic challenges around… It yields pretty good. The quality is a little different than spring wheat. And from a market standpoint, it hasn't taken off like we hoped, like we hoped to have half of the cropland be winter wheat. We're not at that stage because of some of those market challenges, but we still do promote winter wheat. Maybe the evolution of that is there's other things like fall rye that they've been working on, but we would We would love to have a way that tens of millions of acres of cropland were providing suitable nesting habitat, and that's really what winter wheat did. So we still have that program that we work with producers and help them understand how to grow winter wheat and how to be successful with it.

Chris Jennings: So it sounds like it wasn't necessarily specifically the winter wheat itself, it's the timing of how you don't have basically a disc in there in April and May.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, so really we talk about fall seeded crops and winter wheat was the primary one. Now there are discussions about, I talked about fall seeded rye and some of those things. So any crop that was planted in the fall and then lay dormant over winter and then just started growing where you didn't have to have that seeding activity and cultivation activity would fit the bill, but winter wheat was the one that that at the time, and there's still some hope, has some economic viability and works out there on the landscape.

Mike Brasher: And if we didn't make it clear enough, so what happened when we lost that summer fallow is that we went to the continuous cropping, which meant that 30 million acres or whatever it is was subject to that spring planting practice. and a necessary part of that spring plant. Well, so the stubble would be left standing after the harvest the previous year. Pintails return north. They see what appears to them to be suitable nesting habitat in these stubble fields. Back in the time of summer fallow, that would have been okay. When you moved to continuous cropping, If they nest in those areas, then along comes the mechanical equipment to do the seed prep and seed bed planting and that destroys some percentage of nests. The other thing that Scott, I think some research up there has documented is that predation rates are higher in some of those spring seeded croplands. Is that right? So, you sort of had a double whammy. You've got the mechanical disturbance and higher predation rates.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, higher predation rates in those than we probably anticipated at the front end. Because it's like, what's going in there? But there must be other prey that predators are going in there to find. And they're stumbling across nests, because nests are not at that high a density.

Mike Brasher: So that kind of led to some of the conservation practices. And we used the science to understand what was going on, to document those nest losses. That's what kind of led to what Scott's talking about. Are there other programs, Scott, that we're trying to implement there in Canada or in the US prairies that you're aware of that are particularly valuable or we hope will be particularly valuable for pintails?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, good question. I would say winter wheat or fall seeded crops are the primary thing that really is kind of pintail specific. you know, most of the other stuff that we do, protecting existing wetlands and protecting existing grass, that benefits, you know, all the species of ducks and shorebirds and songbirds and everything that's taken advantage of those areas. So, you know, fall-seeded crops are kind of one of the uniquely pintail things. You know, there are some landscapes that that we talked about that remain, that get wet occasionally, that are especially attractive to pintails and don't have a ton of other birds in them. So there are some geographic areas that are pintail-unique, but most of the other programs are kind of duck-friendly programs, not necessarily focused just on pintails.

Mike Brasher: And we talk about breeding habitats in Alaska and maybe portions of the subarctic also being important for pintails, but there's not a whole lot of direct program, not a lot of activity that we do there. I mean, we just kind of hope those areas continue to be productive. Of course, they're facing their own set of changes and challenges. But yeah, one of the interesting things that I don't have the paper here in front of me, But the fact that we've seen these more challenging conditions in the prairies since the 1970s, where we've got the nesting habitat is not as secure, it's not as productive, a lot of places, especially when you're looking to California, the birds that they, the pintails that they harvest in that state are increasingly coming from Alaska. And that's really the case in any place that any wintering destination that's going to get birds from both Alaska as well as the prairies. that Alaska population is increasingly important. The percentage of birds harvested in California that derived from, let's say, the prairies has dropped dramatically since the 70s and 80s. So, a direct reflection of the loss of productivity out of that prairie landscape that we're talking about. Scott, what type of priority science investments are you aware of that we're making there now? I've talked a little bit earlier about some of the ecology that's being studied with these GPS tracking devices, looking at how different migration strategies affect productivity and so forth, but what else might you be aware of?

Scott Stephens: I think some of the work on integrated population models for pintails is important to understand, at the big scale, what's driving populations, how much should we be focused on harvest and those kind of things versus… reproductive success and things that we focus on from a habitat standpoint. So I know we've made some of those investments and that work continues. You know, I think Mitch Wiegman and some of his students have been involved in that work. Yeah, so those are some of the specific things. You know, we had a big investment in the winter wheat research and We were sampling all ducks, but there were a bunch of pintails in that. So, those are the things that come to mind.

Mike Brasher: I know we continue to invest in research here and there on some of the wintering landscapes, again, seeing how pintails are using these different areas, and if there are differences in birds and the reproductive success of birds wintering in different geographies. That's some of the same type of information we get from these studies that you've… that you've mentioned there, Scott. We've covered a lot of material here that on these species profiles, we typically go into things like harvest, recovery rates, survival rates. I mean, that's not a lot of detailed information that's significantly different from what we've talked about with some of the other species. Maybe we'll have an opportunity in the future to talk about that again with maybe some of the research, some of the science that we've talked about. I think those folks would be a good place to kind of supplement those episodes with that type of information. Otherwise, I think we've done a pretty good job here. It's a species that's like one of the more intensively studied duck species that we have out there. We've learned a lot. We feel like we've zeroed in on some of the key challenges. And unfortunately, those key challenges are massive. in terms of what it's going to take to fully reverse it the way you talked about there, Scott.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I mean, I would maybe just wrap by saying I think pintails are a cool, iconic species that everybody appreciates. Yeah, I'm not sure we're going to get back to populations of the 70s, but I think maintaining populations that we've seen in more recent decades is a pretty lofty goal. And that will require focusing on keeping habitat on the ground and things that many of us focus on every day out there. But yeah, cool species, they're fun to see on the wing, they're fun to listen to buzz peeps and those kind of things in the springtime. But yeah, I could spend a long time talking about pintails.

Mike Brasher: So keeping intact grasslands and wetlands on the landscape, hang on to what we've got, and try to find a way to get some agricultural practices that are more amenable to to spring nesting pintails. Awesome.

Chris Jennings: Well, this has been great. I know our species profiles are always popular. I'm pretty sure the pintail will be right up there at the very top, just knowing how popular the species is in itself. But Scott, I appreciate you joining us today, bringing a wealth of information from DU Canada for the prairies and boreal. Mike, this has been fantastic. Glad you put it together. Glad I could be here. Filled up some space. All right. Well, hopefully we'll get you guys on to do another species profile in the near future.

Scott Stephens: Sounds good. Thanks.

Chris Jennings: I'd like to thank my co-host, Dr. Mike Brasher, for joining me today on the Species Profile of the Northern Pintel. I'd like to thank Dr. Scott Stevens for jumping on the DU Podcast with us and sharing his wealth of knowledge about the species of the Northern Pintel. I'd like to thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for putting the show together and getting it out to you. And I'd like to thank you, the listener, for joining us on the DU Podcast and supporting wetlands conservation.