Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast and thanks for joining us again. We have a brand new guest joining us today and one that I'm really excited about. I learned of this person, oh, I guess it was about a year ago. And then a few months ago, just the way a lot of these things happen, I just find time during one day to say, I'm going to send an email. I'm going to reach out to this person, see if they're interested in coming on the podcast because they have a lot of knowledge. and insight that I think our listeners would want to hear about. And she said, yes. And we got to talking and I said, yep, this is going to be great. Super knowledgeable person. And I am very pleased to welcome and introduce Dr. Sarah Gutowsky. Sarah, it's great to have you.
Sarah Gutowsky: Thanks for having me.

Mike Brasher: You are no stranger to podcasts. You've been on several others already, talking about some of your background, some of your research and experiences, and you bring a very unique set of experiences, like relative to a lot of the other people that I've spoken to and are familiar with. You have a specialty in sort of, you're an ornithologist, you specialize and have a keen interest in marine birds. You also are very unique, at least through, you know, from my perspective, in expeditionists, an Antarctic expeditionist. We're going to talk about some of that. You've worked in some incredibly unique places, incredibly remote places, including areas such as Midway Atoll and certain Falkland Islands, I think even. And so you're just very well-traveled, very well-versed in ornithology, and you've also done some duck work. And that was how I first came to know about about you and the work that you're doing, and we're going to talk about that a little bit later on, but it's enough about my introduction of you. I do want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to our audience. Kind of start with the formalities of who you are and what you do, and then we'll kind of delve into some of your personal background.

Sarah Gutowsky: Okay, sure, yeah. Well, thank you very much for that introduction. It's very nice to be called unique in so many ways. I appreciate that. I'm a Canadian, for starters. I grew up in southern Ontario and now I live in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada. And I landed in Nova Scotia when I moved to Halifax for grad school in 2011 and I never left. And birds have sort of been part of my life.

Mike Brasher: all through it. And so professionally right now, you work for Environment and Climate Change Canada. Tell us about the role that you're in professionally.

Sarah Gutowsky: Sure. Yeah, I actually just started just a few weeks ago because I just recently wrapped up my postdoc work with Ducks Unlimited Canada, which I'm sure we're going to get into. But yeah, at the same time as I wrapped up that postdoc, I started this new job at ECCC with the Canadian Wildlife Service. And I'm a quantitative wildlife biologist. So that means, you know, I'm a stats nerd with a deep love of biology and in particular, marine birds. So that includes seabirds and sea ducks. Sea ducks have been a big part of my research life for the last little while. And this new job is, it's helping to coordinate efforts to monitor and assess population status and trends of marine birds in Canada at the national level. So trying to keep our finger on the pulse of how many marine birds we've got here in Canada and how they're doing, essentially.

Mike Brasher: You mentioned that birds have been a part of your life probably for as long as you can remember. Can we talk about that a little bit? How did all this start for you? What was your first introduction to birds and science and how did you end up marrying those two to make a career out of it?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, well, I guess I don't have the typical sort of cliched story of the little girl that was like birding with her grandpa when she was just four years old. That's not me. I was always a nature nerd. And in large part, that's from the influence of my family. My mom, dad, my two older brothers, Lee and Adam. My parents always encouraged us to play outside and get dirty and be curious. And we were a fishing and hiking and camping family. super grateful to my parents for bringing us up like that. And I sort of, I always grew up just desperately wanting to impress my older brothers. And I still do to this day, to be honest, nothing really matters more than their opinion of me. And so they were always interested in plants and wildlife and nature in general. And so, so was I. So we weren't a birding family, just very outdoorsy and birds kind of came later. So I went off to university for an undergraduate degree as like a little tree hugger, hoping to save the planet in general, going for a degree in environmental sciences. And then in my second year as an undergraduate student, I had a really incredible opportunity to participate in some research studying this little endangered species of seabird in British Columbia in Canada. And that really started it all. So that's when I realized that seabirds were super interesting as a research topic that they are one of the most sort of threatened groups of birds in the world and that putting some time and energy into their conservation and management was worthwhile. And really, they're just a really nice study subject for studying questions in ecology in general. And so yeah, that's what… it really snowballed from there.

Mike Brasher: Okay. And yeah, so then how did you… where did you end up doing some of your research? Like you said you did some sea duck research that was partly funded through Ducks Unlimited Canada. Remind me where that was. That's been like over the past three years.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, the Ducks Unlimited Canada research was as a research fellow and that work has been, yeah, it started three years ago and there were sort of two main streams to my works with Ducks Unlimited. So first was trying to understand sea duck population trends using combination of traditional monitoring data and citizen or community science data and namely for two species so the American common eider and the harlequin duck and those two species have very different stories and population trajectories so that's sort of the first piece of what I was tackling with my postdoc and then the second stream is using satellite tracking to answer a pile of questions about American commoniders in particular. You know questions from large-scale migratory connectivity across the whole subspecies range to You know, trying to use movement patterns during the nesting period to estimate some vital rates for hens. So yeah, kind of a mixed bag, but using satellite telemetry as our tool for answering some questions.

Mike Brasher: We'll come back to that in a little bit more detail later on, but I just wanted to kind of get some brief introduction of that and give a bit of a tease for folks and encourage them to stick around. We'll talk about that in a little bit more detail. You know, I mentioned that you've gone on all these exotic, what to me is exotic expeditions. You've led expeditions and people can learn more about those. I think you told me that you're probably taking a break from some of those at least right now, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, but people can learn more about you and some of the expeditions that you've participated in and helped lead. by just searching for your name. It's one of the first things that I did. I found Sarah Gutowsky, basically your website, sarahgutowski.weebly.com, just Sarah, S-A-R-A-H, hope you don't mind this plug I'm giving you. Not at all. Sarah, S-A-R-A-H, Gutowsky, G-U-T-O-W-S-K-Y. just an amazing set of experiences and trips, photos. I cannot begin to imagine all the things that you've seen and the places that you've gone and the, you've seen this, earth is an understatement, but it's a huge place, right? And a lot of times, unless you travel, you don't realize, it's only when you travel that you realize how truly expansive the world is in which we live and that happens, that awareness happens at different scales. I remember when I was a young kid and I lived in Mississippi most of my youth, didn't travel a whole lot to other states, we did a little bit, but then you gain more awareness as you're traveling to other parts of the US and then as you go to Canada and then as you go to Mexico and you realize just and how vast this world is that we live in, and then whenever you take it to this next level that you've done, going to Midway Atoll, the Antarctic, and a whole host of other places. I mean, it's… How… I don't know. Did that strike you? Just how increasingly aware you became of the vastness and the wonder and the awe that you can find in all these places?

Sarah Gutowsky: Oh, my gosh, yeah. I count myself very lucky to have gotten to experience some of the most remote places on the planet. I think that's the key. And for me, it's because of Seabirds. Seabirds have been my ticket to getting to all the sort of far-flung corners. of the planet because seabirds require remote islands that are isolated from terrestrial predators to nest, but that are close to productive marine feeding areas. And so that makes for some pretty epic spots that are far flung out in the middle of the ocean, but that are teeming with life. And so you get these just incredibly epic spots. And I've gotten, I'm really lucky because I've gotten to spend time in those places, both as a biologist for, you know, extended periods of time in the field conducting research and like, as you said, as an expedition guide. And that's where I'm, my job is to sort of facilitate visits for intrepid tourists to these really far flung remote spots, mostly in the polar regions is where I've been doing the majority of my guiding work. So yeah, I mean, I, It strikes me as being unique, but at the same time, I study seabirds and I follow seabirds, so it only makes sense to me that I would go to these places. That's right.

Mike Brasher: You have to go there. Yeah. So some of the places where you've been, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Antarctic, Rangel Island, Russia, Midway Atoll, I mentioned. What were some of the other more notable places? Greenland, I think I saw here. What were some of your, I don't know, when you tell people some of the coolest places you've been, which ones are always at the top of your list?

Sarah Gutowsky: Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, you hit on a lot of them. So Midway Atoll, obviously out in the North Pacific Ocean and at the end of the Northwest Wine Islands. And so just a really, really unique spot, but also the largest albatross breeding colony in the world. And so you've got a million of these, the largest seabirds in the North Pacific nesting there. And so that makes for a really special spot. And then the other big one that always jumps out at me. And these are places that I spent the longest duration of time because I was conducting research there. So the other spot that's really special to me is Keragalan. Keragalan is an archipelago that is in the sort of southern Indian Ocean but at the boundary of the Southern Ocean as well. And so essentially think of where Madagascar is off the southern end of Southern Africa and go halfway south to Antarctica. And this island group is there. It's in the middle. It's maybe, it might actually hold the title for the most remote island in the world in terms of being so far removed from humans. And again, that's a spot where it is a mecca for albatrosses and all kinds of other seabirds, penguins, elephant seals, and fur seals, and even an endemic species of duck, the eaten pintail is there. And so yeah, so that's a very, very special spot that I've spent a lot of time. But the spots that I've gone on expeditions are ship-based. so we're dropping in we're visiting for a day to some of these places or a few days at most and so you mentioned Wrangel Island that's you know in the Russian far east one of one of the coolest spots I've ever been in part because it is a nursery for polar bears in the Arctic. It has the highest denning density for polar bears. And so you see a lot of bears and it's really, really incredible. But I've also gotten to travel down the Kural Islands. And so I've… Kamchatka and the Kural Islands and the Sea of Okhotsk. And that is a spot that people just don't it's not on anyone's radar for the most part but oh man this is the ring of fire and it's active volcanoes and these islands that are volcanic calderas that are filled with water in the center. And you can go in a zodiac, a small inflatable boat into the middle of these islands. And it's just teeming with tiny, tiny seabirds, alcids that aren't in those densities anywhere else. And then the Southern Hemisphere, there's so many cool spots that I've gotten to go in the Southern Hemisphere. I'm just so lucky. But the New Zealand sub-Antarctic islands, are really, really special. And Campbell Island and Auckland Island and Macquarie Island further south from there, that's in Australia, Australian territory. Another spot is similar to Kerguelen in that it's penguins and sea birds and seals. And then the Ross Sea of Antarctica, which is sort of the eastern side of Antarctica. And that's the land of emperor penguins and all these cool, cool birds. So yeah, I mean, I don't know. I could go on and on and on about all these spots because they're so special to me. But there's a lot of spots that I've just been super fortunate to get to experience.

Mike Brasher: That's amazing. I'm just sitting here smiling from ear to ear as I'm hearing you talk about them. Just, those are, it's an amazing set of experiences in places that you've been. Some of the places I've never even heard of. For the island that you mentioned, I forget the name of it, but it's where the Eaton's Pentail is, the Southern Indian Ocean. What's, how long does it take to get there? And what does travel from Nova Scotia to that location look like?

Sarah Gutowsky: Oh my goodness, that's a fantastic question because it is quite the journey. So yeah, as we fly, you know, over to Europe and then south to La Reunion, which is, so the Kerguelen is a French sub-Antarctic and Antarctic territory. And so access there requires a French visa to travel there as a research scientist, just to go there.

Mike Brasher: Oh, wow.

Sarah Gutowsky: So to access it, you have to get on a ship from a French territory, which would be La Reunion. And La Reunion is just east of Madagascar, so right there. And you get on a small vessel. In this case, we were on an oceanographic sampling vessel called the Marion Dufresne. And so you get on this little ship. And this was actually my first time traveling by ship on the high seas and it was quite the introduction because these are definitely some of the most rough waters on the planet as far as oceans go very very open a very windy part of the world and so big big waves big big swell And not only that, but we're on this little vessel that was doing oceanographic research. So we were kind of hitching a ride to the islands. And so it took us two weeks of very slow, lots of stopping to do water samples, you know, taking water samples from great depth. So, yeah, and it was rough and I was so seasick. And not only that, but everybody I was working with was French. And so nobody really spoke English. And I'm Canadian, so I have a little bit of French, but it's almost, you know, incomprehensible to somebody who's from France, or Canadian, French. And despite that, maybe the worst part, what some would think was the best part of this journey was that the French take food very seriously. And so the meals on the ship, even though it was a research vessel and kind of rough, the meals were very involved and they were very fancy. Always wine, always dessert was always a platter of very stinky cheese, which is not good when you feel like you can't even eat anything, let alone that, and there's already this cultural barrier. Anyway, so then we arrive down to Kerguelen.

Mike Brasher: So were you… I gotta go back to this. Were you seasick the entire two weeks? Because I can relate to being seasick. I would probably die if I was on that research vessel in any kind of rough seas like what I'm imagining. Did your body ever acclimate? You ever get used to that motion?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, maybe a little bit, like closer to the end. Also I… Which when you were about dead? I was all drugged up, yeah. You can get these sea sickness patches that you put behind your ear, scopolamine. They mess you up pretty badly, but they do help.

Mike Brasher: I think they say not to use them for an extended period of time, but you probably had to if you're out there for two weeks.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, and so when we finally get down there, you actually take a helicopter to get from the ship. to the shore, to the island. And the craziest thing for me was when we landed and we went inside the first building that we were getting our introduction at, I got land sick, which is where my brain couldn't understand that I wasn't moving. And so the room we were in was like thrashing about in my mind as if we were on the high seas. And that was really disconcerting. But Anyway, it was worth it because then you're there and you can get stuck into the fun stuff.

Mike Brasher: How long were you there? Hopefully it was longer than two weeks.

Sarah Gutowsky: It was, yeah.

Mike Brasher: It was over three months. Oh, yeah. Nice. And that was part of a research. Were you an assistant? Were you the lead or co-lead researcher?

Sarah Gutowsky: I was a research technician so I was helping out on the general research program that was being carried out there for monitoring seabirds and marine mammals, so also seals. So I was a field tech and then on top of that I was conducting my own research so we kind of piggybacked the way that I ended up down there was they had somebody drop out last minute from the seabird and marine mammal team, and they needed somebody with the skills and experience to sort of just jump right in and do the work that needed to be done. And so somebody put my name in the hat, which was crazy, and it all happened really fast. And I was supposed to be starting grad school at Dalhousie, studying albatrosses in the North Pacific. And so this was in September when I was supposed to be starting my degree. And then my supervisor said, Oh, but there's this opportunity to go to Kerguelen. I think you should do that because this doesn't come around very often. And so I abandoned that we kind of came up with an idea for a project that I could do as a master's at Kerguelen. And that was deploying these, these really cool custom built data loggers to deploy on albatrosses to try and understand really fine scale movement. And these devices were designed by somebody from MIT or something like this. And they had been tested on airplanes. And so I took them down to Kergalen while we were carrying out our standard monitoring of albatrosses, you know, catching them, banding them. monitoring their productivity, we put a couple of these devices on them. And when they came back, they were completely destroyed because they could not handle the sub-antarctic environment that these birds are in. And so I ended up getting no data at all. But I ended up going down and being a field technician for three months anyway. And so I didn't care. But everybody couldn't believe that I had this attitude of like, doesn't matter. Look where I am. So yeah, so then I just restarted back in the North Pacific when we got back with that project for my actual PhD work, but at any rate.

Mike Brasher: That sounds like an amazing experience. And I'm sure you have a dozen, several dozen that would rival that one. You know, I get a question. fairly often from undergraduate students or even high school students asking, like, and I know there's people listening to this episode that are just infatuated with the descriptions, the experiences you've had. If they were to ask you, like, how do you, what would you recommend to somebody who says, I want to do that? I want to travel. to the far reaches of the planet to study and work and contribute to science in these remote locations. What's the advice that you give to people? Because I can talk about what people need to do and how they need to network if they want to get in to, let's say, the waterfowl wetlands conservation field here in North America. America and travel to Alaska or Canada or even Mexico and things of that and everywhere in between. But I have no clue what I would tell somebody if they wanted to do, if they wanted to study the Antarctic or the far, you know, any island geography, biogeography. What do you tell folks?

Sarah Gutowsky: Oh my goodness. Well, it's a bit tricky because I haven't had a traditional career path. Everything that has sort of set me up to where I am today with the experience that I've gained is from a hodgepodge of different experiences. And so there was never any clear path to get from like where I started to where I am now. So it's a very hard question to answer because I've been walking sort of parallel paths and kept my feet in many different sort of realms over the course of my career so far. And that has set me up to sort of be able to do what I've been able to do. And so it's a little bit hard to answer. But I think keeping an open mind is really important. And that has served me really well in terms of you know, not not, it's my own fault because I can't focus on one single thing. And so that's just a part of who I am. And so if I was just doing one thing, I would get bored. And so I've sort of just padded out my day to day with a real variety of things. And that includes academia, teaching, guiding, and that keeps me stimulated and excited about all the things. So, you know, I think maybe one piece of advice would be to keep an open mind and seek opportunities that are outside the box. I think that's kind of important. There's no like, there's no description of my, my job title that is just as a single job title with like a single career trajectory. So it's tricky. But I would say that like, if you're at all interested in, you know, bird conservation and management, there's never been a more important time for passionate people to put energy and resources toward that. And so if that's something that interests you at all, the world needs you. And so, you know, find a way and the way to build a foundation is probably with an undergraduate degree in science and some specialty in that realm. And then to to look for people who are doing things that sound interesting to you and talk to them. Because there's no recipe for how to do it, but you can sort of figure out what other people have done along the way that could help you get to where you want to be.

Mike Brasher: There may not be a single recipe, but you got to be in the proverbial kitchen, right? That's just it.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, you got to put yourself out there. I think that's really important too. Things aren't going to fall in your lap. Go looking for opportunities and even when they're really scary, say yes.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, perfect. Sarah, we're going to take a break right here and then we're going to come back. I want to hear about Midway Atoll. I want to hear about albatrosses. I want to hear… I'm certain you're familiar with the most famous albatross on the planet, one by the name of Wisdom. And then we're going to talk a little bit about ducks and your research, and I think that gives us a little bit more to talk about. So, stay with us, everyone. We're going to be right back after these messages. Hey everyone, welcome back. We are here with our first-time guest, Dr. Sarah Gutowsky, an ornithologist, quantitative wildlife biologist, and I have also dubbed her ornithological badass. So, we're going to go with that. She's got a tremendous number of stories and experiences. I want to go to the Pacific and hear about Midway Atoll. How did you wind up there? I am certain that is a destination on the list of many, many people that kind of have an interest in seabirds and ornithology in general. How did you land a spot out there? Because it's not easy to get in out there, is it?

Sarah Gutowsky: No, it is not easy to get in out there. I managed to get there as a volunteer with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and I got picked from the pile because I had quite a few experiences working with seabirds elsewhere before I landed on Midway and so after I finished my undergrad degree and studied those endangered little seabirds called marble murrelets on the west coast of Canada for two years and you know did an honors thesis with them and fell in love with research and seabirds. Then I sort of bopped around to a few different places studying studying birds and seabirds and sea ducks. I did a stint in the Canadian high arctic working on eiders for a summer on a little island and then That summer, I read a book called The Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina, which I could not recommend more. An incredible book, and it details his experiences learning about the seabirds, particularly the albatrosses of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. And the book is told through the perspective of a single Laysan albatross. So when I read this book, I thought, someday I have to get to Midway. And I just happened to… The timing was right and I tossed in an application to the US Fish and Wildlife Service and I got accepted out there. And so I went out there and I spent a four-month field stint there working on all different things. So they do fantastic work out there monitoring their seabird populations, not just albatrosses, but other species of birds, tropic birds. There's also an endemic species of duck, the lay sand duck. Gotta love those ducks, always finding those weird places. Yeah, and always these endemic funny species of duck that get sort of isolated in these cool spots. And anyway, and then we're also doing a lot of native plant propagation and restoration of the habitat and removal of invasive species in these things. And so while I was there, there was a professor from San Jose State University that came to visit for a few weeks because he was conducting some research, some tracking studies on the albatrosses. And so I volunteered to help him recover and deploy these satellite tracking devices and these other little archival devices on albatrosses. And so while we were doing that work together, we got to chatting and I said, at that time, I knew I wanted to go to grad school. But I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I had secured funding for graduate research in Canada through NSERC, which is our sort of national funding body for science and engineering research in Canada. And so I had secured funding, but not a particular project yet. And so I said, I have funding, but not a project. And he said, well, I have project and tons of data with all these tracking data for many years, but we haven't had a student or funding to support a student to do that work yet. And I said, oh my gosh, perfect. So what I ended up doing was holding my scholarship in Canada and going to Dalhousie University and being co-supervised by this professor at San Jose State and then a professor at Dalhousie, Dr. Marty Leonard. He's an amazing woman. And that's how that's how I did it. And so after I finished up with my volunteer stint, then I ended up spending, you know, three and a half years with a small hiatus to Kerguelen and back, ended up working on both Leysen and Blackfooted albatross at Midway Atoll and trying to answer a bunch of questions about their movement ecology. So what they're doing when they're not at the nest because seabirds spend 90% of their lives at sea and that's the part that we can't see. And so that's when we use tracking technology to try and get answer those questions.

Mike Brasher: And so you went to Midway to help capture the birds and deploy the transmitters, the tracking devices. What else were you doing? Collecting vegetation data, anything of that nature that you were also doing?

Sarah Gutowsky: For the most part, for my work, for my research, it was all just tracking device-based. And so, you know, also monitoring the birds that are equipped to ensure that they return and that their nest is healthy, that they successfully raise a chick and things like that. But for the most part, we're interested in basically looking at the data once you get the device back or it sends the data remotely via satellite. But yeah.

Mike Brasher: That's right. You said your first trip to Midway was as a volunteer, right? So that would have preceded your graduate research, right?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, well, the crazy thing is actually that I didn't go back to Midway again. It was only that volunteer opportunity when I actually got to be there in person because what ended up happening was a bunch of sort of turmoil with funding in the US Fish and Wildlife Service and a few false starts to planned field seasons. It was kind of because of that that I was able to pursue guiding and teaching at the same time as I was doing my degree because I wasn't away. I was supposed to be away for six months of the year for every year for three years on Midway Actual and we never ended up getting to go back. But the cool thing was I was using this data that was already collected because it was from a five-year effort of tracking studies and so As far as my thesis went in my research and the questions I could answer, that didn't change. But what did change was I had this extra time to devote to other things. And so my supervisors were really supportive of me when I said, well, if I'm not going to Midway, maybe I should go to the Canadian Arctic on a ship and try expedition guiding for a hot second. And, you know, they were supportive of that.

Mike Brasher: So… You don't know unless you ask, right? That's just it. Yeah.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah and so that's that's how that actually happened is I wasn't sure if academia was going to be the path for me and so I wanted to test out the waters in a few other realms as well and guiding was one of those and I know I had the opportunity and then I managed to find a way to do it all at the same time.

Mike Brasher: That's amazing. Good for you. Good for you for asking the questions, not being afraid of someone telling you no, right? What is it? I've told other people this before. I can't remember if I ever said it on the podcast before. I think it's something that my wife passed along to me. And it's a quote from Oprah. It says, you only get in life what you aren't afraid to ask for. And there's so much that's true about that. You know, if you want to do something, You have to either take the initiative to do it yourself or if your ability to do that is kind of, if it depends upon the approval of someone else, you have to ask. There's nothing wrong with asking. So, right? It sounds like you did and look where it got you.

Sarah Gutowsky: I connect with that very deeply.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'm curious, I want to go back to the tracking devices on the Albatrosses. A lot of our audience, I think, is going to be familiar with some of the modern tracking devices that we use on Waterfowl now, which are these GPS, GSM, high resolution in terms of the locations, and they upload the data through cell towers, through cellular network. There's no cell towers like roaming out in the ocean, out in the Pacific and so forth, in those areas. Were these the Argos technology where it uploaded to the satellites and the precision of those locations is not quite what we get with GPS or do they have GPS technology in those?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, so this is early days, much earlier days of tracking. So these devices were deployed in 2008. And so pretty early days. And this was a time when devices size had not shrunk enough to put them really on smaller birds than albatrosses. And the other piece was that the black-footed albatross, which were the ones that we were studying with the satellite telemetry, they were listed as an endangered species at the time. And so it was a little bit easier to get funding for these devices because at that time, and they still are very expensive, but the cost has come down considerably since those early days. So it was a pretty big deal that we were able to deploy them at all. And yes, they are the type that are transmitting and those transmissions are picked up by satellites. And then those satellites triangulate the position of the source of the transmissions and then that gets actually sent remotely back to satellite receivers that then record the information and send it to a researcher at their computer and so you never need to get the device back which is key for species like this especially because uh in this case we were deploying these devices and and you do the same with waterfowl but you attach it to their feathers and then the duration of the deployment of the device is only as long as the bird has those feathers and so when they undergo molt they drop the device and that's very very common and so with the newer technologies where we have gps gsm unless the bird is wearing like a backpack style or it's surgically implanted, the device will be lost unless you catch it again and get the device back before it comes off.

Mike Brasher: That's interesting. Most of the tracking devices that I'm familiar with in the waterfowl science field are the backpacks. I'm not aware of any that have actually glued the devices onto the feathers, but you're saying they do in seabirds then.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, and in waterfowl as well. So, you know, we've done it with eiders on the East Coast. Glue or tape or both, a little bit of both, and then when the bird molts.

Mike Brasher: So these have to be pretty small. What's the size of these things, like 10 grams or less?

Sarah Gutowsky: Probably about that. You'd be surprised what a bird can hold onto its feathers. Really? Interesting. Yeah. We even put them, you know, there's cases with larger seabirds like northern gannets where we put like cameras on their tail feathers. So, you can actually tape a camera to a gannet's tail feathers and then when it molts its tail, it'll just fall off. But you can sort of spy on its movements.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, that has to be some pretty strong glue because gannets were thinking like, plunge divers that impact the water. I don't know. What's the speed at which, again, it impacts the water? Do you know?

Sarah Gutowsky: Oh my gosh. I don't remember what the speed is, but it's incredible. It's like Oh my gosh, I want to say like, you know, more than 30 miles per hour. Wow. Like it's very, it's very fast. And it's not even about the speed, it's about the force with which they hit the water when they do that. But they have all kinds of really cool adaptations for being able to withstand that.

Mike Brasher: Okay, I got another, I got another question, just a random question just popped in my head. I remember seeing a video of the Gannetts just plunge diving in such mass numbers. How often, and I'm sure you get this question a lot, it has to run through the mind of everyone that watches that, how often is there, are there, does one gannet sort of impale the other when they go into the water?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, when they're in really high density, feeding frenzies like that, it happens. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. And I mean, it's a cost benefit analysis for the birds that are participating in that feeding frenzy. So they have really exceptional spatial awareness. When you think about it, if this bird is diving from great height into the water targeting a single fish, then they know what they're doing. They're very good at it. So they can avoid one another for the most part until you have these really wild feeding frenzies. And then it can get a little dangerous. And it does happen. They can get each other by accident, a little friendly fire.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. Anyway, sorry for the little detour there. We can go on a lot of those. I'm sure. I'm sure. Okay, now I'm distracted. Where did I want to go? Where were we? Yeah, we were talking about Midway, Midway Atoll and some of the work there and some of your tracking devices. What were some of the more notable findings from From tracking these birds over such long periods of time, you said they spend over what, 80-90% of their time at sea? Is it over 90%? Is that what you said?

Sarah Gutowsky: It depends on the species, but yeah, for the most part. For something like an albatross, 90% of their lives, so they're only tied to the colony because they have to be, you know, because you can only have your egg on dry land. But they're marine birds fully and completely, and so they… they are getting all of their food resources from the ocean and for albatrosses their whole strategy is to search far and wide and they are incredibly efficient flyers so they can sort of lock their wings open and take advantage of the wind and just soar around without spending any energy so they're like their heart rate when they are in flight dynamic soaring where they're not flapping they're just soaring which they can do continuously for hours and hours and hours their heart rate is the same as if they were sitting on land so they're not spending any energy to do this so they can cover huge distances and search the ocean where food is patchy um you know in the pelagic realm so this is like deep waters they're not foraging like sea ducks you know on the coastal shelf by any means they're way off in the open water where you have these very intermittent feeding opportunities and so that's their whole thing and so they're at sea for you know even when they have a chick on shore they can be at sea for weeks at a time and then come back with a really big meal so they sort of package up all of this fish food that they're eating into like a really high-density, high-calorie oil that they store in their stomach. And then they regurgitate that oil to their chicks. And this is a seabird thing. You know, most seabirds that are related to albatrosses do the same sort of thing. And so, yeah, they spend a ton of time at sea. And not only that, but for part of my thesis work was trying to understand the juvenile phase of their time at sea. So, albatrosses are super long-lived. And this brings us to Wisdom, of course, who is 73 years old this year. And Wisdom is the oldest known wild bird in the world. She's a Laysan albatross who nests on Midway. And I met her.

Mike Brasher: I got to track her. That was a question.

Sarah Gutowsky: Okay. I did. I did meet Wisdom and I have a tattoo of a Laysan albatross on my wrist and I like to say that it's wisdom. Sure. Because this year she had a chick. I mean she's still nesting. She's still breeding which is wild.

Mike Brasher: Do they nest annually like an albatross of that age?

Sarah Gutowsky: it's not about the age as much as it is just their general strategy and so they do tend to take sabbatical years all adult albatrosses every depends on the species summer every other year they take off because raising a chick is so energetically demanding for these birds and so is molting because they have a lot of feathers and big wings that they can't do both so they have to take a year off to recover body condition lost from breeding and to actually undergo a mold and so so yeah so it's um they are they're very long-lived they have a very slow life history strategy and so that means that after the chick fledges from the island and leaves the island for the first time and goes out to sea, it doesn't come back to land until it's five for some species until they're eight, 11 years old. So they spend, they don't touch land. They're just at sea for the first 10 years of the five, 10 years of their life. And so we don't know anything about their movement or their habitat use during that period because how would we? And so that was one of the most remarkable things about the study that we did was we deployed these satellite tracking devices on chicks, black-footed albatross chicks, so that when they left the colony, we could track their movements for their first year at sea until the device, until they molted and the device fell off. And so we could compare their movements to adults and see if young birds are going to the same places as adult birds? And that question is important because in the North Pacific and across the world's oceans, albatrosses and other seabirds are really threatened by interactions with fisheries and bycatch. And so One of the big questions was we know how much adults potentially interact with fisheries, but we don't know anything about this entire cohort of young birds for the first, you know, five or 10 years of their life. And so that was one of our first questions. And the big finding that came out of that was that the young birds, first of all, when they leave the colony, they all leave on the exact same heading, like north, northeast.

Mike Brasher: Never ventured out, never left. They don't have any prior knowledge of that. Wow.

Sarah Gutowsky: And no adult taking them. They're not with anybody else. They're just on their own. It's just programmed in their DNA to do this. And they go. And then once they hit about 800 kilometers from the colony, they start doing these huge east-west movements and just searching and learning about this huge open ocean, you know, going from Japan over to California.

Mike Brasher: Are there any practice flights for these young birds or… Yeah, there are. Okay. So, it's not like the first time they fly, they're gone. They do… develop their muscles and their flight muscles.

Sarah Gutowsky: This is their first long flight for sure, but they do, they spend a lot of time developing their flight muscles. And one of the things about Midway Atoll, which is pretty crazy, is that tiger sharks come into the atoll when the birds are fledging because it's a smorgasbord. And so these birds are trying to fly for the first time. They're not often successful. And so they end up in the water, sort of flapping around, swimming back to shore. They get all waterlogged and tiger sharks just come and clean up. So, again, getting funding to put these expensive devices on these albatrosses that, A, we knew we weren't getting the devices back. So, this is like, bye-bye. But also, they could just get taken out by a tiger shark, you know, on their first flight and then just no data. But we did end up getting, you know, a good sample size from enough animals that… Those units were probably about, what, $1,500, $1,200, $1,500?

Mike Brasher: No, more at that time.

Sarah Gutowsky: Really? Okay. Closer to $5,000. Oh, really? Okay. All right.

Mike Brasher: Wow. This is a long time ago. That's an expensive loss.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah. They're still really expensive though. But I mean, the thing is, the information that we gained is invaluable. You can't put a money value on that. So for an endangered species that could be interacting with tuna longliners and getting drowned on hooks.

Mike Brasher: So, how long… Okay, I'm going down another little random question here. So, albatrosses and other seabirds that do that, I think you called it dynamic soaring for long periods of time. How do they sleep? What do we know about that? What happens to them? Because they don't, I mean, they can't come down. Do they ever land on the water? What do we know about that? But then also the sleep aspect of it. So you just answered your own question for sure.

Sarah Gutowsky: So they can land on the water, they can float, they're really waterproof, right? So any marine bird, sea duck or seabird is incredibly waterproof. And so they can sit on the water, but they do rest in flight, at least we think that they do. And there are studies from other species of seabirds where they've actually had like brain wave monitors on bird, wild birds, frigate birds actually are the sort of poster child for this, but that they've found that they catnap one side of their brain at a time while they're flying. So they can sort of keep one eye open and keep an eye on what's going on, but by having catnaps. And we know that now we know penguins do the exact same thing. So there's been recent work that just came out this year, super cool on penguins, where they found that they're doing the same thing. They are sleeping the equivalent of like many hours a day but in like millisecond cat naps these tiny little one hemisphere at a time micro naps and so there's no reason to think that albatross can't do the same thing and then also land on the water and that One of the other aspects of my PhD work on albatrosses at Midway was looking at activity budgets through the non-breeding season. And so how much time did they spend on the water versus in flight? And the way that we did that was using saltwater immersion loggers on their legs. and so you know in 10 second intervals whether the bird was wet or dry and then we can reconstruct their activity budget through the entire non-breeding season and by doing that we actually found that there was this like 40-day period during the non-breeding season where they were just sitting on the water and so the assumption is that they're molting And they're actually unable to fly. They could fly. We call it quasi-flightlessness, which is really a bit… So, 40 continuous days, nonstop. With very limited time off of the water. And it's probably because it is really energetically costly for an albatross that has a gap in its wing, a feather missing that it's trying to regrow because they don't just drop. They're not like ducks. They don't just catastrophic molt. They do one or two feathers at a time sequentially through the whole wing. and they don't do all feathers in all years and so they are on like this multi-year wing replacement strategy but that all leads to the same conclusion that it's very costly for them to to replace their flight feathers and so there's this period where they're they're kind of somewhat flightless like they'd rather not fly if they don't have to and so The important thing is that for Laysan albatrosses, they all seem to do this in the same area off of the southern tip of Kamchatka. And that's kind of like a got all your eggs in one basket scenario. Like if some sort of catastrophic oil spill or something occurred in that area, you would impact a large proportion of the population at once, whereas black-footed albatrosses tend to undergo that like quasi flightless stage across the North Pacific from east to west. They're kind of all over the place. But yeah, that was really surprising. That was a really exciting finding. Wow.

Mike Brasher: Hey, I could ask you a dozen more questions about albatrosses. Sorry. Oh, no. It's interesting. I mean, we talk often about the fascination that we all have with, obviously with waterfowl, but broader migratory birds. They're just an amazing group of animals when you think about the rigors they have to go through, long distance migrants, whether it be, or wanderers. I don't know if you really consider albatrosses to migrate. Is it a formal, do we consider it a migration?

Sarah Gutowsky: Do consider it a migration. If you define migration as like a seasonal redistribution of the population, then yes, they do. They do migrate in the sense that they completely change their distribution between distinct phases of the annual cycle. So yeah, they do. They migrate.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. So yeah, there I went with another question. There's just so many, but there are connections to what we do for waterfowl. And it's the same thing. In order to manage these and sustain these populations of birds that that pay no attention to boundaries, our political boundaries, our international boundaries. We have to understand what they're doing at every part of their annual cycle and throughout their life cycle once you get beyond multiple years for some of these birds. So, yeah, it's a fascinating group of animals. obviously a favorite of ours. I do want to come back and talk a little bit about ducks and seabirds and contrast the two, but let's just kind of start. You introduced some of your research that was supported by Ducks Unlimited Canada. Where was that? What were some of the key findings that came out of that?

Sarah Gutowsky: Okay, so sort of two main study species that we ended up focusing this work on were harlequin ducks and American common eiders and both of those species we're talking about the sort of eastern Canadian and eastern seaboard species. So for the harlequin duck we're interested in the eastern wintering population is sort of how the delineate harlequin ducks but uh in this case it's it's the birds that spend the winter on the coastlines of of canada in the eastern u.s and uh and so for harlequin ducks we it's well known that their population sort of crashed in the 19 late 80s essentially and we didn't really know why their population sort of declined so quickly but one of the fingers was pointed at harvest and it's not necessarily the driving factor, but the thought at the time was, okay, we need to just have essentially a moratorium on hunting of harlequins. And since that time, we've been trying to monitor populations, population recovery, but harlequin ducks are a little bit tricky. Harlequin ducks are, I mean, they're so cool. Both of the American common eider and the harlequin duck are, I'm very infatuated with these two species because they are just badass little, well, little and very big sea ducks, kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum, aren't they? And Harlequins are are awesome because they they breed on fast-flowing streams but it makes them very in very remote places but they're really hard to census because how do you how do you find them and count them so the way that we try to track their populations is typically with winter time surveys and they winter They're just so hardcore, these little ducks, but they winter in really, really cold coastal places along the Western Atlantic, and they like rough waters. So they like a lot of turbulent coastal action, and that's where they hang out. And so over time, we figured out sort of where the main harlequin wintering little hot spots are. and you go and you count them in the winter and the way that we've done that in the past has been using helicopter surveys. Helicopter surveys are expensive and challenging for so many reasons and so we don't have a lot of great data where we you know counted all the ducks across the range in Canada during the winter in the same year. So the question was you know how can we assess how Harlequin populations have been doing over the last, you know, 30 years essentially, at 40 even actually. So we use Christmas bird count data because the Christmas bird count, which is a volunteer citizen science program, the longest running citizen science program in North America. And essentially, you know, people go out and they count birds on a 24-hour period around three weeks that sort of centered around Christmas on one day, everybody goes out and they count all the birds that they can find. And if a circle, so you know these circles that are counted within are about 12 kilometers in radius, if a circle overlaps the coast then these volunteers count coastal birds as well. And for harlequin ducks, where they winter is fairly well known. And so we can look at how many harlequin ducks were counted in a CBC circle within the range of the harlequin ducks where they winter and we can actually get a decent idea of trends over time over a 40-year period. And so that's what we did. We used the CBC data and that hadn't really been used very much for sea ducks before and so it was kind of a a neat novel idea to use a pre-existing data set and what we were able to do was was show that harlequin ducks have been recovering like crazy over the last 40 years so a really good new story and then what we could do was in 2017 and 2018 in Canada we had a pretty comprehensive survey effort for winter surveys from helicopters and we counted what we think is basically all of the the harlequin ducks that are out there then we use that the the trend so the rate of change per year from the cbc data to sort of project those 2017 numbers out to 2022 so basically to today and the numbers that we get for the estimate of what the population size is today is huge. It's like 6,000 ducks. And what that means is that as far as population recovery goes and population targets set in the recovery plan for the species, they're doing very well. And that's a really good news story. And we don't hear stories like that enough. So that was like, I was really excited when we showed that quantitatively that the species is doing okay.

Mike Brasher: And so how low did the numbers get?

Sarah Gutowsky: That's really hard to tell because at the time, the thought that they were in such severe decline was based on just a few sites. And the numbers there dropping so low.

Mike Brasher: And so we don't have comparable data from back then till now.

Sarah Gutowsky: We don't have comparable data. But if we back cast it, you know, and we're looking at the trends, you know, it could it could have been something like 1000 ducks to 6000 today, when you think about the annual rate of change over 40 years. So, yeah, it's, it's a big deal.

Mike Brasher: So, any idea of any smoking guns on the causes of those declines? I mean, obviously, if we restrict harvest and then the population recovers, it's probably a signal that whatever the harvest rate was back at that time probably was not compatible with the rate of recruitment for that. It's like, it's one of the things that I've described before is that You can overharvest any population of animals if you try hard enough and so what our federal and state partners try to do through their harvest management decision processes is ensure that the allowable take through harvest regulations is compatible with whatever the productivity of a given population is at a given period of time and if it's not then then yeah, it can have adverse effects on the population. And so, what do we know about any insights from that? From a productivity standpoint, harvest standpoint, what's our understanding of the drivers of that population right now? Very limited. Still.

Sarah Gutowsky: Very limited. Yeah, still. So in terms of productivity, again, really, really hard to assess for the species. But it is entirely possible that there were a series of years of poor productivity and then just a little bit of harvest on top of that was too much for the population to sustain. And so there is a school of thought that that is possibly what happened. there's it's also possible that you know birds move uh offshore more or less in certain years and so it's possible that the population's distribution had changed but the the general school of thought is that that's not the case but the the reality is we don't have those answers because there it's very hard to actually quantify those things so for this species in particular for a lot of ducks in general but yeah so still don't really know

Mike Brasher: Okay, let's move on real quickly to common eiders. What was the research question? They were running out of time here. I knew we would.

Sarah Gutowsky: I know. Okay. Yeah, so for the American common eider, this is the dresserized subspecies, which hangs out again on the east coast of Canada in the US. And this subspecies, again, very, very difficult to monitor. They nest on island colonies, very hard to count during breeding. So generally, we count them during winter. and we count them using, again, aerial surveys as most common. And we don't have good comprehensive survey data, but there's been various lines of evidence from regional researchers and biologists indicating that in certain parts of the range of the dresser eye American common eider subspecies, we're in decline. And so this is a species that breeds from southern Labrador down to you know Massachusetts and a little further south and then they winter about in that range has shifted south just a smidge and so wintering populations and breeding populations in the center part of the range so sort of in the Gulf of Maine ecosystem there were a lot of different signals indicating that they're in decline But we didn't have a data set that captured the birds across their whole range across space and time to be able to, again, try and understand the big picture of what's happened over time. And so, again, we turned to CBC data to see if we could sort of nailed down what that spatial pattern of trends is across the range. And the signal is loud and clear that the subspecies has been like very severely declining in the central part of its wintering range. So from you know southern Nova Scotia through New Brunswick, Maine and down toward Cape Cod. And then Cape Cod is sort of the only spot that seems like pop numbers there depending on where you're looking have have increased greatly or declined or stayed sort of stable over time over the last 20 years so since 2000 we're talking about trends since 2000 so there's this signal that probably the species is redistributing within its wintering range not necessarily like an overall population decline but definitely It seems like the Gulf of Maine ecosystem is no longer supporting eiders and there's lots of reasons for that. You know that the ocean warming is occurring at a faster rate in that region than almost anywhere else on the planet. The whole ecosystem is in big trouble and it seems like eiders are picking up on that and moving out. So that's the big news for dresser eye eiders and that has implications for conservation and management of the subspecies for sure.

Mike Brasher: And when we're talking about the warming of the ocean and how it affects waterfowl, either their productivity or their distribution or whatever the metric may be, one of the principle means, correct me if I'm wrong, is through its effect on their prey base, right? Is that kind of the primary… Can you talk about that a little bit to help people understand? So, what's the consequence? What's that connection between a warming ocean and and common eiders in this case?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, so for common eiders, they're mussel specialists, so they love a blue mussel. And we know that the blue mussel populations in the whole Gulf of Maine are not doing well. Mussel beds seem to be shrinking, mussel size seems to be getting smaller. In general, we know that blue mussels don't like hot water. So yeah, that's the big one is the impact on the prey base. And so probably there's not enough food available, but there's a lot of other things going on in the Gulf of Maine. in terms of coastal development and aquaculture that could also all be compounding to influence the bird's use of those areas.

Mike Brasher: Are you going to stay involved in research on the harlequin ducks, eiders, any other waterfowl species in your current job?

Sarah Gutowsky: Absolutely. Yes, that's a that's a big, big part of me taking on this new role was being able to sort of roll in what I've been working on and they all fall under the same sort of umbrella. So absolutely. Yeah, especially with the satellite telemetry project for the eiders. So that's for me that this is a very long term research program that it's important to me to continue to be involved in.

Mike Brasher: And then will our counterparts with DU Canada be some of your key partners in some of that research and conservation? You can even kind of give a shout out to some of those folks who have helped support some of your past research or who you're involved with now.

Sarah Gutowsky: Oh, absolutely. So Dr. Nick McClellan has been my, my main, my main guy at DUC and you know, Nick and, and Ducks Unlimited Canada have been really important partners for the telemetry project in particular. And so, yeah, absolutely. We'll get to continue working together moving forward.

Mike Brasher: That's awesome. I probably, matter of fact, I know I have, yeah, I've seen your name, I've seen reference to some of the studies that you're involved in through some of the science reports that we publish. And so, yeah, we, DU Inc., doesn't, I mean, I guess we're involved in some of those probably if I think back on it, but we work hand in hand with our colleagues at DU Canada. all operate under the same international conservation plan. So, this is actually one of the reasons why I was somewhat familiar with our current understanding of the common iters. We had a little section of our international conservation plan where we identify some of the most pressing conservation challenges, either regionally or ecosystem-wise or for specific individual species, and common eider was one of those, and I remember I might have even done some of the writing on that section, talking about blue mussels and so forth. So yeah, we all work together and work together with our state, federal, provincial partners, We're delighted that you're going to stick around in one of those agencies that we depend on and work with so much. Sarah, I have had other questions that I was wanting to get to, but we're not going to have time. We're going to have to, but that's okay. Because what I didn't mention at the beginning is that, you know, whenever we first started talking, I reached out to you, I immediately sensed that you were an excellent science communicator. And I think even on that first call, I said, would you, would you be willing to be a regular guest? And so you said yes, so thank you for that. We got you hooked up with some good equipment for use on this, and so we appreciate that. And we will circle back with you here sometime in the future. I've got several topics that we wanted to discuss, but we'll follow up and get those scheduled, and hopefully people will get used to hearing more of you. A lot of unique experience and knowledge and some that we probably haven't featured much previously on the DU podcast. So we're thrilled to have you be the provider of that.

Sarah Gutowsky: Well, thank you so much.

Mike Brasher: A very big thank you to our guest on today's episode, Dr. Sarah Gutowsky, quantitative wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada and ornithological badass. We greatly appreciate her time and all the stories that she brought to us today. We hope you enjoyed it. As always, we thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for the wonderful job that he does with these episodes. And then to you, the listener, we thank you for your time and support and we thank you for your commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.