Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Everybody welcome back. I'm your host on this episode. Dr. Mike Brasher. It's great to have y'all with us Once again here after Christmas and it is Christmas come a little bit late for us. We have in studio Physically sitting right across the table from me. None other than The one and only Dr. Scott Stephens I used to introduce you from Ducks Unlimited Canada, but that has changed. That has changed. Welcome back to Ducks Unlimited, Inc., and you're here with us physically this week doing some visitation here around National Headquarters. We're gonna talk a little bit about that change in your life here a little bit later on, but it is great to connect with you finally in person, in studio.
Scott Stephens: Yeah, it's great to be here in the world-renowned podcast studio.

Mike Brasher: I don't know if it's world-renowned, but we'll take that compliment from you, however we can get it.

Scott Stephens: It's fancier than my kitchen table, which is where I usually join from.

Mike Brasher: Is it more spacious than you envisioned it, or is it a little more cozy?

Scott Stephens: It's cozy and more poorly lit. Oh, is it?

Mike Brasher: Well, the poorly lit aspect is our producer over there, Chris Isaac.

Scott Stephens: Well, maybe. Maybe that's not the right descriptor. Maybe it's more sort of mood lit. Mood lit. Okay, we'll take that.

Mike Brasher: I mean, that's the positive spin. Chris Isaac says he agrees with that. Mood lit. So, we have you here. We wanted to take advantage of this opportunity with you physically in the office to talk about, you know, I guess a few things related to duck hunting and migration. It's early January and And nobody's happy. It's that time of year when everybody finds something to complain about. But seriously, this year, about this time, it's been a struggle across a lot of the country this year in terms of the number of ducks we're seeing, the quality of hunts, hunting success. We're hearing it from a variety of places and people. And I know a lot of our people who are experiencing it, too, just talked to one of my coworkers and he said, we've shot seven mallards off our club in Arkansas.

Scott Stephens: Now, are you going to ask if the two of us are surprised?

Mike Brasher: Because we talked earlier in the year, it's like, not surprised. We're gonna get there. That's kind of the nature of this conversation that we wanted to have, checking in and get some of your thoughts on, yeah, what we're hearing, what we're seeing, how some of the weather has unfolded, and how all of that, whether we're surprised, given where we were in the spring, what we talked about relative to habitat conditions, breeding habitat conditions, and then what is turning out to be a strong El Nino. I've looked at a lot of data sets or maps here lately, and one graphic I saw had it firmly into the strong El Nino category. So, there's a lot of things that are sort of working against us in a lot of different locations with respect to birds this year. And so, yeah, none of this surprises you that you're hearing from people down south. Have you gotten that question a lot already here today?

Scott Stephens: I haven't. A few people have asked about snow, but that's sort of setting up next year and the answer is we don't have much. It's been, I think, in Manitoba. It's been the second warmest, was the second warmest December on record.

Mike Brasher: Second warmest December on record. And I know I saw some maps also from Wisconsin, from the upper Midwest and the U.S. prairies. record warmth in December across most of those geographies. The snow, you mentioned people asking you about snow, but that was primarily from the standpoint of what do things look like as we approach spring and the potential to put water back in some of those potholes. But right now, early January, people down here are like, we needed to snow up north because we needed to cover up the food resources so birds will migrate. We've talked over the years about what it is that triggers migration, and it's really cool to see a number of additional papers coming out now that are using new technologies, tracking individual birds, and are able to look at exactly when these birds are moving and when they're initiating migration from those northern latitudes, and the same factors keep coming up. It's not a surprise.

Scott Stephens: No. Now, I should say, it's not like we're holding a pile of ducks in Manitoba. That is not true. Like, ducks left Manitoba in late October. So, we aren't holding the ducks, but it's been warm. There are other places a little further south that are probably holding ducks that You know, normal weather would push those to more southern latitudes where a bunch of the folks who still have seasons open would be having their crack at them.

Mike Brasher: So what about some of the western prairie provinces there? What are you hearing in terms of still some birds maybe in those locations?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, places like Alberta probably still, well, I know, I've seen friends and colleagues on social media who are shooting geese, there are ducks still around. I was in Iowa visiting family and I actually went for a little duck hunt. There was open water that was over Thanksgiving, but I was back over Christmas and I saw a little wad of mallards going into a cornfield. And so there are ducks still present in Northern Latitude states for sure.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, and I've been chatting with a few folks in Montana, Idaho as well. If they've got open water, if they've got cut cornfields that don't have snow on them, they've got mallards and they're pretty darn successful from what I've heard and what I've seen. And, you know, not to confuse the matter totally, there are a lot of people down here that are having sporadic success. I got a text message from a friend just this morning. He and a buddy went out Got their two-man limit of mallards, pretty short order. That's been a rarity for them, but there are still those opportunities out there.

Scott Stephens: Well, I would think, I mean, usually what happens at these southern latitudes in these kind of years where it's dry and there isn't water spread all across the landscape is if you have good old H2O, you are likely to have ducks. So, that applies down here, too. It applies down here, too. Johnny Lynch was right, ducks. The water in Waterfowl, they still need some of that.

Mike Brasher: They do. How about that? What else can you tell us about snow, weather, anything that, you know, just any superlatives from either your experiences there in Manitoba or what you're hearing from other people?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, we've talked before about we were dry coming into the fall. We got some wet snow earlier in the year. It warmed up and that went away, which isn't necessarily a bad thing because it provided us with some soil moisture. But since then, we do not have much snow. So there's Very little snowpack. That's true across Saskatchewan, too. And Alberta always has a tendency to warm up. You know, it's like places in the western U.S., Montana, where you get Chinook winds off the mountains and things warm up. And they have almost no snow cover there, too. Yeah.

Mike Brasher: And what I was going to say just left me.

Scott Stephens: You are 50 now. It happens. It happens to the best of us.

Mike Brasher: God dog it. What was I going to say? I got it. It came back to me. So Scott, you're talking about the snowfall into fall and winter. And I know this morning you and I both would have received an email and there's some maps that have come out. I think every week I get a copy of them. You get a copy of them talking about soil moisture equivalent. I think that's… Yeah, snow water equivalent. Which is a map that depicts how much water is contained in the snowpack that is across the landscape there in Canada. And… Alberta is brown. Alberta, Saskatchewan, brown. No snow. So, you're saying that early snow that fell warmed up, melted, and there's practically no snow on the ground, no moisture there in reserve. Well, no snow for covering up food resources for birds that are still there, but then also for the spring runoff. Right. Yeah.

Scott Stephens: Drought continues, would be the short news flash.

Mike Brasher: And so that kind of takes me back to one of the things I wanted to discuss. When talking with folks down here about the frustration that they're having, a lot of people are saying, well, what do you expect? It's an El Nino, it's a strong El Nino year. It's producing, well, we came into the fall and winter with extreme drought across the Southeastern US. El Nino typically produces cooler, wetter conditions across the Southeast. Those haven't materialized yet. So we're short on moisture down here right now. That's another complicating factor. But the other thing that an El Nino will produce is warm conditions in the North. That certainly is not helping. So it's literally- It's sort of the worst case scenario. It's literally a worst case scenario for what we need to to encourage ducks to migrate south, but then also to attract them once they do start migrating. You don't get the weather, the climatological triggers for the migration, nor do you get those, quote, attractants once they do start moving. But we can even go back last spring and talk about what was shaping up. And another reason why the things that we're hearing, the lack of duck numbers that we're seeing, the record low aerial waterfowl survey results that we're seeing from places like Arkansas and Louisiana, And that, the factor that we kind of start with in this conversation, I guess there's two of them, breeding population survey and prairie habitat conditions. Remind us where those were.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, so breeding population survey, we had, like you hinted at, for mallards, if we focus on them, we had some of the lowest counts that we've seen in a long time. They're about 30 years. Yeah, about 30 years. So, you know, what was the stat you shared earlier? In 80% of the years, there would have been more mallards than we saw this year.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, if you take, so we've been doing the aerial survey for 68 years, 65, 66, 68 years, give or take a couple of years, depending on how you count the COVID years. And if you took all of those results from Mallards, those 66 numbers, let's say, and then look to see where this year's number, 6.2, 6.1 million Mallards in the traditional survey area fell, 80% of those numbers would be higher than what we saw this year. So, we didn't start out with a robust mallard breeding population in a traditional survey area, right? What else do we know about what ducks need in order to crank out ducklings?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, so then we think about conditions that we had this past spring, which was not great across much of the prairies of Canada for sure. Maybe we had a little bit better conditions in the Dakotas, in the U.S. prairies. But yeah, so that means we did not likely have stellar production. I know things were dry even late into the summer, which probably made brood survival not great. So low duck populations in the breeding pairs, less than ideal conditions for production. So yeah, we… We'll have a fall flight coming south, you know, for all the folks at this latitude of mostly adult birds, not a ton of young birds. Nobody's going to be real excited about how they're going to behave, even if you get water. You know, they're not going to be, you know, bombing into the decoys like we get when you have high populations and lots of young in that population.

Mike Brasher: Now, there were some positive signals out of North Dakota. We talked about that last year as well. They did get some rain and they did produce a few ducks. But, and there are probably a few other isolated areas across the prairies that produce ducks. I'm not saying there weren't any ducks produced, right? But it was just, it was not going to be a banner year for duck production across that large landscape. And the Dakotas are only a small portion of that. I mean, during a good year, they'll support 35% of that traditional survey area population.

Scott Stephens: And the number that I was going to pull out of my head was 20%. 20%?

Mike Brasher: Okay, maybe in some of the recent really wet years that we had about 10 or 12 years ago, I think it might have gotten up to around 30, 35, but… We can check on that.

Scott Stephens: We can check on that, but anyway, 20 to 35, that's right. So, it's an important area, but there are a bunch of other areas and, you know, we know that many of those areas were dry. didn't have great conditions. I know when I was out in the field this summer, I was struck by just how dry some of the landscapes were, you know, in even June. It's like there was no shallow water on the landscape. I know as I looked at those areas, it's like, ooh, this is going to be tough conditions from a brood survival standpoint. So even if Even as birds attempted to breed and hatch nests, not great conditions to have, you know, a high percentage of those ducklings survive. So that means, yeah, not many young in the fall flight. That's not going to make folks at this time of the year at these latitudes very happy. They're going to be what I like to call ill-behaved. They are not going to be friendly to your decoys. You're going to be like, why will they not do it right? Why will they not come in? It's like, because they're mostly adult birds. The unfortunate thing is folks at the northern end of the flyway get the crack at the most number of young birds that are out there. And, you know, even the young birds are well educated by this point in time.

Mike Brasher: Scott, I also want to talk about the total duck number from the traditional survey area. It was 32.2, 32.3 million earlier last year. And when I did the little percentile thing, take all the years that we've done this survey and put those numbers together, last year's number fell within about what we call the 35th percentile, meaning 65% of those numbers. over that time period were greater than what we saw last year. So also for total ducks, we were starting with a pretty low breeding population. We always say breeding population alone is an ingredient. It's not the end-all be-all because it takes habitat conditions that are good, It takes the right kind of conditions throughout that breeding season to stimulate nesting and then to stimulate re-nesting and then to support the broods, as you pointed out, to get those birds fledged. And then from a hunter perspective, you got to have the right type of conditions to stimulate that migration and then to put birds in your area where it is that you hunt. And all of those things have been challenging this year. So, the one thing that I will say, just from my personal experience, is we have killed a fair number of young birds, non-mallards. So, there was obviously production from some of those other dabblers, which… Where were they produced, in the prairies, in the boreal? A lot of them were green wings, so you got to really think. That's right, boreal birds there. We've had pretty good success with a few juvenile shovelers as well. I mean, would those come from Alaska? Maybe. They could, yeah. But there has been some production, but mallards, I think, have been, in terms of the juveniles that I've seen in the bag, they've been fewer.

Scott Stephens: Yeah. And when I think back on, you know, my duck season has been over for a while, you know, by the end of October. But when I think back, you know, when people had asked me, how was your duck season? It's like, it was okay, but it was tougher, you know, even on breeding areas that I hunt because things were drier. You know, we had birds around late in the year, but they were not everywhere across the landscape. So it's like when we found them, I had some really good hunts at the end of the year. but ducks were not everywhere like they can be in some years when we have water conditions.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. So, to kind of wrap this up, we do have, we have in like the two-week forecast, we're recording this on January 3rd, about two weeks out, there are prospects for a really cold, Now, it's two weeks away. A lot can happen. We've all seen that many, many times. It can get colder or it can get 20 degrees warmer.

Scott Stephens: Two weeks out, sometimes that forecast is just the mean of this time of year, right?

Mike Brasher: That's right. But that certainly doesn't look like the mean of this time of year whenever you look at it. It looks like there's a pretty severe polar vortex disruption, if I'm getting that terminology correct, forecast about two weeks out. It's tempting for southern hunters to get really excited about that, but it's also getting late. It's getting closer and closer to breeding season. And so those birds are already feeling the pull to breed. Am I wrong?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I was thinking… When I recall the time that I spent in the South hunting ducks, once you get into January, like a bunch of birds are paired and aren't really interested in coming to decoys, you know, where there's a, you know, a whole pile of birds together because paired birds kind of like to be off and isolated. So, you know, it's like, oh, here comes a pair. They should come right in. They'll land like 80 yards away.

Mike Brasher: The only thing worse than a pair like that is a courtship flight. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But make no mistake, if it gets… Well, I'm going to be out there anyway in a couple of weeks, but if it… Well, my advice earlier was hunt.

Scott Stephens: You might as well hunt.

Mike Brasher: Life is short, you better hunt. If the weather temperature, if the forecast holds, then yeah, I'm going to get excited because it's going to change things. It's going to freeze some water. It's going to force birds to move around, even the few that we do have in some of the southern locations. They're going to move around, and they're going to make themselves available for hunters in other locations. But then also, if that forecast holds, it will move some birds from some of those northern latitudes. Will it create a mass exodus of birds? It's going to depend on how much snow they get. And snow is probably the aspect of those long-term forecasts that I have in my unprofessional or unexpert perspective found least reliable, you know. I could be wrong, but you've lived there. When you think about those two-week forecasts, do you put more weight into the temperature or the snow forecast? Probably into the temperature. Yeah, that's kind of my thing too.

Scott Stephens: Now maybe, we need a meteorologist on here for sure because, yeah, I don't know how good two-week precip forecasts are these days. Maybe those have improved dramatically and we could be educated on that. Yeah, it's two weeks out. Yeah, it's hard to know exactly how systems are going to move. You know, usually three days out they have some idea, but the track can change and that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's going to get cold. Will there be snow everywhere to push birds south? Yeah, we don't know. Stay tuned. Yeah.

Mike Brasher: Well, so I think if you hadn't picked up on it from Scott's and my conversation, what we're hearing from people here in Southern Latitudes, what we're seeing in some of the surveys that states are conducting, none of that surprises us, given all of the factors that we've talked about. happy about it. We're not thrilled. We would like for things to be much more favorable from a weather, habitat, population abundance perspective. That's certainly the case, but we don't have that this year. And so those These years are gonna happen. We just hope they don't happen too often.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I was gonna say, tongue-in-cheek, if you don't like all of this variation and challenges due to environmental condition, you need to be like an upland bird hunter or something. Duck hunting's probably not for you. Yeah, duck hunting may not be your gig because we deal with that all the time. It's a key driver.

Mike Brasher: Scott, we'll put that conversation to the side. I'm sure we will connect with you here in the coming months as we get closer to the breeding season. We're going to be hoping for a lot more moisture between now and April to fill some of those wetlands because it's not looking good up there right now.

Scott Stephens: No, if we think this year was tough, if it stays as dry as it is right now… You think it's going to get back to like 21 conditions during 2021?

Mike Brasher: Yeah, good question.

Scott Stephens: It'd be close.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. And that was like really, really dry. Some of the driest conditions we had seen since the late 80s maybe.

Scott Stephens: And in 21 we didn't have the survey, right? That's correct. So, we didn't have the pond count to actually document where we were. That's right, that's right. We estimated those.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. And I think we had some questions about those. Yeah. Let's move on real quick. I want to talk about your move back to DU, Inc. A lot of folks may not remember that. I think we probably talked about this one of the first times we interviewed you, your background, and you worked for DU. Your start first came with DU, Inc., right here at headquarters. Tell us about that.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I started here at the U.S. National Headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee on my birthday, August 12, 1996. So that's been a while ago. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but yeah, it's been a number of years ago now. I spent almost 15 years with DU Inc. and then in December of 2010, moved for a role with DU Canada and have been up there until a couple days ago and enrolled with them. So, yep, transitioning back home, you could say, to work with DU Inc. again and yeah, excited about the new role. You're from Iowa originally?

Mike Brasher: Drew up in Iowa, yeah. And so the opportunity for the position that you've newly taken is what? Tell us about that. Tell us what you're going to be doing and how excited are you?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I'm pretty excited. So the position, the title is Director of Prairie and Boreal… Geez, I should know what this title is. Director of Prairie and Boreal Conservation Strategy. There it is. It came to you. It came to me. It's still new. Yeah, it's still new. Yeah, this is the second day on the job. First day was just traveling to Memphis. So, yeah, and really the charge, the big picture is to help facilitate our success in those two geographies, which are without question the two most important geographies on the continent from a waterfowl perspective. That's exciting. It's like getting to spend all my time and energy focused on driving our success in the two areas most important to Ducks. It's like, if you're a Duck guy like me, what could be better?

Mike Brasher: I mean, that's a pretty sweet deal. I know whenever you saw that position announcement, I know you had to get pretty excited about that. Yeah, it's like, please don't throw me in the briar patch. Is this position similar to but maybe an expansion of what our good friend Dr. Fritz Reed had been doing for quite some time?

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I would call it sort of an evolution of that because Fritz's role was mostly focused on the boreal and so this is an expansion to capture the prairies and the boreal and yeah, it It feels like a good fit for me because I've spent a bunch of time helping, you know, do science and then deliver conservation in the prairies of the U.S., the prairies of Canada, and the boreal. So, yeah, it's kind of a logical fit and I am excited about it. We'll get to work with a bunch of colleagues that I knew from my start with DU Inc. and some of my colleagues from DU Canada that I've been working with most recently. So, really looking to facilitate their success. You know, as we come up with strategies where we can make more progress from a conservation standpoint, we'll need money to do that conservation work. So we'll get to work with our development teams on both sides of the border to raise the money that we need to deliver that conservation work. And then finally, we know that policy work plays an important role, and so we'll integrate with policy teams as we think about what are the key plays from a policy standpoint for the conservation in those geographies.

Mike Brasher: And it's a great time to have you come on in this position because we've recently had the public launch of our new fundraising campaign, Conservation for a Continent. So it's going to be great to have you involved, fully involved in that. I suspect you've had some conversations about that already today. If not, I'm sure you will. But you're so well positioned. We have a lot of friends, mutual friends within the organization, and whenever we saw the position announcement, I'll just be honest, there were several of us that were texting one another and says, It looks like it might be appealing to Scott. And it was. And it was. And we were also like, yeah, it'd be real appealing to us to have Scott in that position. So, things worked out. They did. Glad that happened. I know you're gonna… I know you're going to miss your colleagues there on a day-to-day basis in DU Canada. You're still going to get to work with a lot of those folks, and that's a great thing. We're still family of three organizations from Mexico to Canada. Nothing changes in that regard, does it? That's right.

Scott Stephens: Nope. Mission's the same for all three of us. Still focused on filling the sky with ducks forever.

Mike Brasher: And you're not going to be here in headquarters. You're not going to be living here. I don't know if y'all have made any decisions there yet, but you've got some options.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, we've got options. We will relocate at the latest mid-May to one of the Great Plains states. So options there are the two Dakotas, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska. I think Kansas is maybe in the region too, but yeah. Yeah, a big area to choose from. I've told people I think I have a 49% vote in where we land. My wife will have a strong opinion and she'll have strong influence on where we… And where the kids end up will maybe sway some of that voting? Yeah. My kids are in Missouri and Iowa now. So, yeah, we'll be closer to them.

Mike Brasher: I think there's some Kansas City Chiefs fandom and maybe Kansas City Royals fandom.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, I've got my Royals City Connect socks on today. So, yeah, it's a tough time to be a Royals fan. A little easier to be a Chiefs fan, but maybe not so much recently. We'll see. We'll get it straightened out.

Mike Brasher: Well, Scott, that's gonna wrap it up for us today. Appreciate you taking the time to join us here in the studio. Again, welcome back to DU, Inc. And look forward to having more conversations with you about all the new work that you're doing, but we'll continue to have you on the podcast for these periodic updates, because you'll still have an eye on those habitat conditions up here closer to the prairies. Yeah.

Scott Stephens: And I still plan to visit to do field work up there in the fall, for sure.

Mike Brasher: That's right. Yeah, for sure. For sure. If you ever need any help, you know where I am, right? I do. All right, thanks, Scott. Thanks, Mike. A very special thanks to our guests on today's episode. Dr. Scott Stephens, now back with DEU Inc., and we look forward to all our future conversations and the great work that we'll do conservation-wise with him. As always, we thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for the great job that he does with editing these podcasts, also the mood lighting here in the podcast room. It's fantastic. He's really stepped up his game there. We appreciate that. And then to you, the listener, we thank you for your time. We thank you for supporting the podcast and for your commitment. Commitment to waterfowl conservation. And for your commitment to waterfowl and wetlands conservation. Yeah, the wetlands, man, my brain is just fried.

Scott Stephens: You need that, what is that supplement for brain health?