Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Welcome back everyone. Thanks for joining us here again. I am Dr. Mike Brasher. I'm going to be your host on this episode and we are again joined in studio by Dr. Nick Masto and Dr. Abbey Blake Bradshaw. Welcome back.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Thanks for having us.

Mike Brasher: Abbey, we are going to pick up with where we left off and that was we're about to get into your study which was a very novel idea of experimentally disturbing sanctuary to see what kind of response it was going to generate. It's a question that's of interest to a lot of people. Pretty much every hunter who's been adjacent to a refuge or sanctuary is like, you need to go over there and run those ducks up. It's all well and good, but you need to know what it does. And so that's what your study set out to do. And so we're going to pick up this episode right there. So Abby, go ahead and take it away.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yeah. So we basically, we were trying to capture birds and mark them with these GPS, GSM, uh, tracking devices. And then once we had, uh, marked birds on different spatial sanctuaries, uh, we went out and we conducted three different disturbance treatments. and so we either conducted a truck disturbance, a pedestrian or just someone walking out kind of mimicking birding or something like that, or we conducted a high intensity disturbance treatment which was using an ATV or a boat just depending on the flooding conditions of the of the sanctuary there. And so these were a lot of fun to do. We disturbed sanctuaries once we had marked birds on them approximately weekly and approximately for about an hour, usually around eight to nine in the morning. Once birds had kind of gotten to the refuges and settled down, we wanted to get them back up and see their responses. And so we were interested to see, I talked about it earlier, but we weren't just conducting disturbance to conduct disturbance. We were trying to see if like some of these types of activities could simultaneously occur on these waterfall sanctuaries. And we wanted to take a look and see how disturbing sanctuaries would impact surrounding hunters. We went out and we disturbed birds, and for the most part, when we actually conducted the disturbance treatments, the birds would get up. They, of course, would get away from the observer. We would drive at them with ATVs, walk at them, and just basically observe that. And we would see birds get up and basically circle around, and for the most part, land right back down on the sanctuaries. And so we were trying to see whether they were leaving the sanctuaries and um how that was like really changing their their behaviors and for the most part um yeah birds they they increased their distance move they maybe used a little bit more space but ultimately they did not leave spatial sanctuaries when we disturbed them despite being there for an hour straight um driving at them walking at them They were hard pressed to stay on that spatial sanctuary. And so to test whether or not we were seeing any differences or impacts on hunters, we actually use what are called autonomous recording units or ARUs is what I'm going to call them. But basically there's these acoustic devices that we put across our whole study area.

Mike Brasher: People can think of like a trail camera, but it's recording sound.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So we put these, um, acoustic devices across our landscape. And so we were basically, um, trying to measure shotgun volleys on days that we did these disturbances and shotgun volleys on days we did not do these disturbances. And so as a reminder, birds increased their distance move. They were moving and fleeing away from the observers, but then staying on those spatial sanctuaries. And with those acoustic devices, we were able to show that we saw about a 30% decline on days that we did disturbance treatments in those shotgun volleys. So there was 30% less shooting when we were out there disturbing birds.

Mike Brasher: So when you say they increase their distance move, that's like over the cumulative distance moved during that day? Yes. Compared to days which you do not do. And so that basically, does that mean that they, is that measuring their movement in flight? Or is that measuring their movement from one like sit down place to the next? Or could it be any and all of that?

Abby Blake Bradshaw: It could be any and all. It's just with those hourly GPS locations. So it could be in flight. It could be resting or loafing. But yeah, on those days that we conducted disturbances, their distance moved increased. So they were expending a little bit more energy. but ultimately staying on those spatial sanctuaries. I ran the data over and over because I was really expecting to see an increase in those shotgun volleys. We were really expecting that birds were leaving the area or at least going off of spatial sanctuaries just even briefly and maybe making a bad decision there. But no, we saw a decrease in shotgun volleys. And so, I mean, and then when digging into the behavioral data showing that they didn't leave the spatial sanctuaries, it kind of makes sense in that they hunkered down more when we actually went out there and disrupted them.

Mike Brasher: And with the ARUs, which is another phenomenal element to this study, to be able to objectively measure a response that a certain action is having for hunters. I think it was just incredible and great work by y'all to kind of make that happen. I know there had to be some, you have to test out the ARUs, you have to do some checking, how far away can they hear, can they detect, and there's a lot of other work that just went into being confident in your use of that data, right?

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yes, absolutely. And I want to shout out Brad Cohen. That was, it was his, his kind of like original idea to use these acoustic devices because he had used them in the turkey world. And so we were trying to think of a way to measure hunting pressure. And so that's kind of where, where, uh, using these devices came, came about. But, Yeah, we had to test them. We put them out at Bogota state area and we put like three or four of them around and then me, Nick and Corey walked around and shot 110 different times. And so it was, yeah. It was kind of, kind of interesting. We were just walking around. I mean, I think Nick and Corey were scouting a little bit, but it was, it was an interesting, an interesting test basically. And we were able to determine that these acoustic devices could pick up shotgun volleys. um, very well, um, up to about, about a kilometer, a kilometer and a half, or about, about a mile. Um, and so they were picking them up, um, very, um, with high probability. And so, yeah, we, we figured that out. And so then we spaced these acoustic, uh, devices, we spaced them, um, a few miles apart so that we weren't getting like double detections of these shotgun volleys. And yeah, it was interesting. We were also able to look at just kind of the variation in shotgun volleys over time. And so, like Nick mentioned, the hunting pressure remained the same. So hunters were out there hunting, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they had a good hunt and actually shot at birds. And so this was just kind of another layer to that data collection looking at, okay, when birds were actually moving and people were actually getting successful or having more successful days actually shooting at birds.

Mike Brasher: So what do you think is going on there with the birds whenever you disturb them? They moved more, but we didn't see an increase in, let's say, hunt opportunity or shot opportunity as measured by the ARUs. I know you've thought about this a lot and you kind of described it as them hunkering down, but then the fact that there would be more hunting opportunities or shot opportunities on days when you didn't disturb means that those birds still move. Do you think that when you don't disturb them, are birds moving? Is that movement more spaced out? Is it occurring in smaller groups? Is there some kind of behavioral thing going on here whenever you disturb them? You've got this whole big bunch of birds flying around, and all of a sudden they become kind of like snow geese. You know, they've got more eyes, and you get to shoot at this, maybe you do get a flock of a hundred, and a couple of them break off, but when you shoot at those two, you've educated all hundred of them. Is there some of that that you think is

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yeah, that's a really good question because it's just like, okay, well, well, why? So when they're hunkering down, of course, that makes sense. Like there's, there's fewer shots because they're, they're, they're, they're, they're hunkered down there. But I think that for, to me, to me, when we weren't disturbing them, um, there's just like thousands and thousands of birds on these sanctuaries and in many cases. And so they're, they're, they're getting up there. They're every once in a while, they're, they're just having kind of like reg, their, their regular day where they're, Exercise flights, or whatever. Exercise flights, and so… If that's even a thing, I don't know. They're bumping into each other, they're aggravating one another, and so I think that, honestly, when we got in there and disturbed them, then they were on more high alert after that. And so, just on a regular day, you're gonna get some birds that get up and make a wrong decision and leave the sanctuary. or an ill-advised decision, I guess I should say. But yeah, I think that we were just kind of interrupting their regular behavioral kind of fluctuation throughout the day. And that's kind of why we were seeing that.

Mike Brasher: And all of your sanctuaries were inviolate, they had no hunting, any type of access allowed other than the experimental disturbance? Any, anything?

Abby Blake Bradshaw: No, they were all, all inviolate. And so other than, um, if, if like a water control structure, if you, if the water levels were really changing and managers needed to get in there just really quick to check those, pull a board, something like that. Um, really it was just the disturbance treatments occurring.

Mike Brasher: And what else from, I mean, that was, that's pretty remarkable the way you were able to demonstrate all of that. Um, what other big takeaways? And I, I mean, I guess it sort of solidifies TWA for TWRA. It's like we have these inviolate sanctuaries. We need to keep them that way.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that was one of the main takeaways for me. I mean, coming into the project, I ultimately did not have an expectation. I was really like, it was either that they were going to leave the sanctuaries or that they were going to hunker down. I kind of had this fork in the road that I thought that we would hit. And so I think that's just kind of the one of the main takeaways is that, um, yeah, a brief disturbance. So just, I say brief, but I mean, an hour continuous disturbance ultimately did not, um, force them off of the sanctuary areas. Like the sanctuaries still had birds. They weren't completely devoid of birds at the end of these disturbances. So I think that's kind of one of the main, kind of one of my main takeaways there.

Mike Brasher: I know you've gotten a lot of questions about, well, what would have happened if you would have disturbed them more frequently, multiple times a day, multiple consecutive days? What would have happened if you would have allowed hunting on it one day a week? You don't have that data, right?

Abby Blake Bradshaw: But what else can you say? You know, I mean, like, like you said, it's it's I don't have that data, but I do think that so we disturb them for an hour straight about once a week. I think that originally we were thinking that if they if they completely left the area and we just like totally messed up the sanctuaries or messed up the hunting for these local hunters that we'd be in trouble there. So we were thinking that once a week was about appropriate. But I do think, and like I said, no data there, but if you increase the disturbance duration, if we were there for maybe like two, three, four hours, maybe eventually then you would get some birds to actually leave the area and be like, okay, hey, this place truly isn't safe anymore. But I think for the most part, we were there and we were moving around and birds were able to perceive that, okay, this is temporary or they're over on that side of the sanctuary now, I can rest for a bit. I do think that if we allowed hunting or increased the duration or frequency of disturbance that we would have seen some birds actually leave sanctuaries at that point.

Mike Brasher: answered some important questions, at least a couple of other important questions using the data from those ARUs. I'm looking at a couple of the graphs here. You measured changes in shotgun volleys or variation in shotgun volleys in relation to distance to sanctuary, as well as departure from normal low temperature. Is that worth talking about?

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yeah, yeah. So we also measured, we placed the ARUs across the study area, some close to sanctuaries, some further away from sanctuaries, sort of with the thinking that, or with the expectation that, oh, there's a ton of birds on sanctuaries, there's probably a lot more opportunity close by these spatial waterfall sanctuaries. And so we were able to empirically show that, and that the ARUs closer to sanctuaries detected more shotgun volleys than those that were kind of more isolated, still within hunted areas and like in wetlands and everything, but further from these hubs of birds. We also looked at some temperature variables. And so on colder than average days, we saw a greater harvest opportunity. So birds were likely moving more on those really cold days, maybe to find some Forage after forage was more depleted on these sanctuaries.

Mike Brasher: I'm glad you stated that the way you did. It made me look twice at this graph. I failed to realize that the zero was kind of midway of the x-axis. Because I was thinking it was showing me something totally different from what I would have expected. So, no, more shotgun opportunities when it was colder than normal. And yeah, predictably, what you would have predicted is that on warmer days, not as much thermal regulatory need, demand, not as much need to go out and feed and expose themselves to hunting risk. So, yeah. I mean, that's…

Nick Masto: Were you gonna add something there? If I may, and I hate that Cory's not here, but just one of the coolest things is that one of his master's chapters was measuring activity or flights, right? When birds might be more vulnerable to hunting. And his covariates completely corroborated Abbey's covariates, right? So his variables of barometric pressure and wind and weather, temperature, her ARUs or hunting opportunity was completely corroborated by the behavior of the birds and using the exact same measures and variables. Pretty neat to have both data sets.

Mike Brasher: So that basically means that those hunters weren't out there just kind of randomly shooting at a picture of a bird.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: They were most likely shooting at actual birds. With the prices of ammo, I guess.

Mike Brasher: That's right. What have been some of the more interesting or more common questions that you've received around your study, these questions?

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yeah, you already asked it, but really what would happen if we increase that disturbance, that threshold, trying to see when the birds, that threshold of when they would actually leave the area. And I don't necessarily have the answers, but those are the main questions that I get from my part of the project.

Mike Brasher: Where do we want to go now? Got a few other questions. Do we want to go back and talk about probability of movement, kind of given distance between sanctuaries or whatever the phrase that is.

Nick Masto: I can transition, so I can try and transition, right? So the project started out as experimental disturbance to see if we can't allow access but simultaneously you know, get birds off and improve hunting, right?

Mike Brasher: And when you say access, you're talking about access by non-hunting users or… Potentially.

Nick Masto: It kind of, right, even if you drive through, maybe. And that's also why… Like an auto tour. Right, an auto tour. So that's also why Abby did, like, the car, you know, the truck disturbance. Or fishing in a boat. Okay. Right, right. So… any access really. And that was the idea is, okay, well, can we allow access and simultaneously, can we get birds kind of move in during the day to benefit surrounding hunters, right? And so another just purpose of the sanctuaries, especially the state sanctuaries in our area, is not to hold ducks, right? And a lot of people think that might be the case, but that's really not, and especially the states. The state, TWRA, is trying to serve their constituents, and so they're juxtaposing these sanctuaries to hold birds in the general region.

Mike Brasher: For the purpose of making them available to hunters.

Nick Masto: For the purpose of them kind of coming off, getting agitated, like we were talking about, switching between sanctuaries, right? So you can imagine if birds are going from one area to another, they might be seen more. They could have more potential for harvest opportunity, right? And so we did kind of try and evaluate that because the general thought was, OK, well, these birds must be. bouncing to and from these sanctuaries. And I guess a surprising finding was about 69% of individuals only used one sanctuary and about 20% used two. And if you translate that into like a modeling framework What we did is it basically says, OK, well, if we caught a bird on November 1. It would take them almost three months to use two sanctuaries.

Mike Brasher: So 80 days. That's one of the most surprising results that came out of this for me. Right. That's astonishing.

Nick Masto: And if we're looking at this map, these sanctuaries aren't that far away either. No, they're not. Right, right.

Mike Brasher: And so… Those birds get there, they figure it out. I ain't going nowhere. There's too much shooting out there. Unless and except going out at night. You know, that's the only thing we haven't talked about is their sort of daytime use patterns, go out right around the end of shooting hours and come back.

Nick Masto: But anyway, yeah. Well, maybe we should talk about that as just the repeatability of those patterns, right? And just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. But so yeah, we thought that we could, we thought that, you know, that would be very different. And so what we did was we tried to measure, okay, the probability of birds moving to and from, because if that is a goal of the sanctuaries, we would want to know, you know, what is that probability that birds are actually transitioning to and from and making themselves more available diurnally for hunters. What we essentially find is that the probability of transitioning between sanctuaries was really, really low. I think it was about under 50% chance of transitioning from one sanctuary to another when these sanctuaries were 13 miles apart. So even at six miles, you're increasing that chance of connectivity threefold. And so, yeah. I guess that leads us into maybe the next phase, but I don't know if… Sorry, Mike, I'm not sure exactly where to go from here.

Mike Brasher: Well, no, no, no. I'll just kind of add a little bit in that. So, I've thought about sanctuary and its role in conservation planning for waterfowl for 15 plus years, working down on the Gulf Coast. We're working with the Gulf Coast Joint Venture. That was prior to this work. INHS, Illinois Natural History Survey, and others have done a lot of work on measuring effects of disturbance on bird movements and so forth. But in terms of thinking about how we incorporate sanctuary and conservation planning, the Gulf Coast Joint Venture has thought a lot about it. And back in the 90s, there was a There was a project down there called the mini refuge program, right? Sort of distributed sanctuary across the landscape. The same idea that there's a lot of pressure on the landscape and we need to provide more. sanctuary to help birds distribute and make the landscape of food and habitat more accessible. And that's an entire conversation in itself and whether it was successful and in some places we saw abundant use but in other places not so much and you got kind of some administrative challenges associated with programs that you're trying to put out there. And then you look at places like the Texas Midcoast, that sort of stark contrast. There's very few refuges or sanctuary, I should say, at all. in that landscape, and then compare it to West Tennessee, where how many sanctuaries did you say you had? Thirteen? Thirteen. You know, and you see this kind of behavior, and I'm mentally, I'm just kind of on the fly trying to square all this, and I can't. Like, how would, if we put thirteen sanctuaries on the Texas mid-coast, what are birds going to do in a place that doesn't really have a whole lot of that right now? And I think there probably are some places on private land that provide sanctuary, but it's a topic that has been very elusive, at least in trying to figure out what's the right amount of sanctuary, how big do these sanctuary units need to be, do they need to contain food, how far apart do they need to be. Fundamentally, answering those questions requires an identification of what it is you're trying to achieve. What are you trying to achieve by providing sanctuary? Are you trying to influence survival? Are you trying to influence body condition so that these birds are in excellent condition whenever they're, you know, in body condition by way of ensuring they have access to food resources that you're putting out there on the landscape without having to spend, without having to fly 50 miles to get to it, to dodge all the pressure. And then that's important because we want these birds to depart early in spring get to the breeding grounds early and breed and yada yada all that stuff or are we also trying to use them to provide opportunities for hunters and there's been some combination of all of those either stated or implied when you look back across the history of sanctuary and its application. But this was a really cool approach to figuring out what's going on with sanctuary and bird movements, because you're measuring that probability of movement between from one sanctuary to the next. I guess the one thing that I would say is that based on a lot of your surveys, where you're out there, your aerial surveys, there weren't a lot of ducks just resting on private land. I think that's the other thing that we need to probably the other dots we need to connect. And you talked about this in that these places are hunted all the time, pretty much every day. There's a lot of hunting going on. So, you didn't have this group of birds that was just sitting out there. You didn't have a thousand birds sitting here and 5,000 birds sitting here in areas that would otherwise be hunted, did you? I mean, there were some heavily, heavily concentrated birds on sanctuary.

Nick Masto: Yeah, I appreciate you putting me back on track there.

Mike Brasher: I tried.

Nick Masto: I don't know if I did. No, you did. These sanctuaries were effectively islands. Throughout all the aerial surveys, you don't see many ducks off of those sanctuaries diurnally, right, during the day. And that's really what led us to that analysis was, okay, well, If there is no place for the birds to rest during the day and they're going to be on sanctuary, then the opportunities for hunters are when they can switch and when they move off of those refuges, right, when they move to another safe place. And that was really the thrust of the of the analysis. And, you know, one thing that we also found was We measured several variables, right? So the sizes of the sanctuaries, right? We thought maybe, you know, a larger sanctuary would be better to either move to or a smaller one, you might want to move away from that one. right, maybe there's not enough food, for example, on those sanctuaries. We thought maybe age or sex demographics, right, so drakes, given a 4 to 1 or 3 to 1 sex ratio of drakes and these birds pair bond in the winter, right, maybe drakes are more exploratory, so maybe they're moving more, maybe they're trying to transition more to different sanctuaries where there are more hens, right? And then the distance between these sanctuaries. And what drove connectivity, at least how we measured it, what drove these sanctuary transitions, these probabilities of movement, was only the distance between the sanctuaries. So size didn't matter, age, sex, they were pretty much irrelevant. Which kind of leads us to believe, hey, in our landscape, You know, it doesn't matter really too much. We don't want some massive sanctuary that holds all the birds for all winter, but we don't have that, right? But the size might not matter. And so smaller sanctuaries distributed up and down these river tributaries might actually increase hunting opportunity. And for the longest time we were thinking, since even 70s, 80s, we were thinking, hey, we need the biggest bang for our buck, right? We need to buy or lease the largest amount of land to spread these birds out. But there's more and more studies, including this one, that suggests that that might not be the case and that smaller sanctuaries could be as effective at moving birds across the landscape and perhaps making them more available to hunters in our landscape. But you can think of different landscapes where bird watchers might be really important as well, right?

Mike Brasher: Okay, so what I want to do is put myself in the mind of a hunter that may be listening to this and essentially what we're talking about based on the results from the study thus far is like we're wanting to answer the question of what happens if we put more sanctuary on the landscape. And hunters listening to this may be thinking, wait, we don't need more sanctuary. What they want to know the answer to is what happens if we take sanctuary off the landscape? Maybe that's what we need to be doing. And so, well, Nick, from your and Abby's study, you kind of do have, you may not have that exact, the answer to that exact question, but your data does show that as the, if you, you know, one of the outcomes of removing sanctuary from the landscape is you're going to increase the distance between those remaining refuges or sanctuary on the landscape. And your data show that as the distance between sanctuary increases, the probability of movement decreases. So that's a logical conclusion or a logical hypothesis what would happen if you in fact removed sanctuary. And so then of course the next idea would be, well, what if we remove all the sanctuary from a given landscape and we don't afford them those safe places, then maybe they would be moving around to interact more frequently with hunters So, logic tells us, though, that ducks can fly, they can move, they like safe spaces, as my good friend Scott Stevens tells me, that he studied ducks a long time, and the one thing he is confident about is that ducks don't like to get shot. So, we would have to believe that ducks would move around, would seek safer landscapes, and chances are they would find find a landscape where there is sanctuary. So I don't know that removing all of that sanctuary would also be the most logical thing to do. And probably what happens is where we see these landscapes that have more reliable sanctuary, I would bet, sort of speculating here, that maybe those are the areas where we see higher return rates, higher degrees of phytopatry or fidelity to those locations. So anyway, what your study is doing is sort of paving the way to test some of these assumptions through the addition of sanctuary. And so anyway, I don't know if my thinking there is correct, but Abby, I guess I'll ask you if you have anything to add.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've had those kind of discussions in the project, too, of like, well, what if I got rid of sanctuaries? And like I had, those discussions were very similar, is that I think they'd keep going. They're highly mobile. They'll go until they find somewhere safe. So, nope, nothing to add. Just definitely agree.

Mike Brasher: So, Nick, where do we go now? Let's see, this is where it gets really cool, at least, in saying we measure the behavioral response to the distribution of sanctuary that we have. How can we use that information to maybe manipulate the way the landscape looks to ducks and try to give hunters an advantage based on that information?

Nick Masto: Yeah. Well, you said something that's really interesting that maybe we're probably going to touch on it, but you know. Yeah. That's right. That's right.

Mike Brasher: So, let's talk about this first thing. Let's kind of close out this thing. Close out the winner.

Nick Masto: Yeah. Okay. So, basically from this analysis and actually right, like you get rich where birds can, right? And our analysis at least to some degree speaks to that. So, the idea in this phase two is Corey Highway is the PhD student on the project and TWRA again is funding this project similar amount of money and what they're doing is contracting or leasing private lands with certain restrictions. They have to be able to pump or they have to have water by a certain date and so on. And so there's about 11 what they're calling rest areas on private lands. And this project started last year, so this would be the second winner of distributing smaller rest areas on private lands to see if we are, and using the same technologies, right, so the GPS transmitters, the ARUs, even drone surveys of the rest areas compared to bull mays, so temporals, if you will, and bonds of these birds and hunters in multiple ways to see if these rest areas are actually improving hunting, and when I say improving, We're talking about the shotgun blast. We're talking about hunting the opportunity. Are they better distributed across the landscape? And what Corey's finding, he texted me a little earlier and just gave me… Let's hold that because I want to add a little bit here.

Mike Brasher: So they're strategically located, not randomly, like, right? It's sort of using a stepping stone context to kind of fill in from what you found. You're wanting to place these things strategically so that you reduce the average distance between sanctuary, right? Probability that these birds can fuse to the next during the day.

Nick Masto: So you're absolutely right. Thanks for reminding me that these areas are strategically placed, right? So we have 13 waterfowl sanctuaries and what we really refer to those in the paper is mainland sanctuaries. They're larger areas, right? And so these rest areas or these stepping stone sanctuaries are really designed to be in between those areas, right, relating to the proximity, relating to that analysis where movement among those safe areas would be promoted by cutting the distance, if you will. So the idea of the new project funded primarily, well, I think all through TWRA with a similar sum of money is to lease private lands and actually really establish these sanctuaries, these stepping stone sanctuaries strategically up and down the river bottom. So for example, we have the Obeyan River where on the north end of the Obeyan River is a refuge complex or sanctuary complex and all the way down south at the end of the O'Brien River is a sanctuary. And in between, there's really no rest area and there's really chronically hunted areas. And so Corey is the PhD student on that project, really spearheading these, trying to get these lease agreements on private lands in between these mainlands, right? And the idea, again, is to distribute birds more homogeneously equally across these riverbanks.

Mike Brasher: Just shorten that distance between those sanctuaries and hopefully get them to move a little more frequently, right?

Nick Masto: That's right, that's right. So the idea really is, you know, what we've been talking about is that, and which is quite amazing, is that these habitual patterns of these birds, you know, day and night, they're going back and forth from sanctuary to private lands or public lands, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Now, if we can get them to move to somewhere that they're not familiar with, but they're safe there, you know, maybe they degrade their memory, spatial memory of the landscape. and theoretically they can perhaps be more susceptible to harvest.

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Mike Brasher: It's really cool that you take this idea from the study, you make this observation of what the birds are doing in response to some sort of spatial configuration, and then you're like, well, can we tweak that? Can we make them do things differently based on the way we configure that landscape? We talked all the time about how what birds do is a product of whatever they need at a given point in time. the ability of the landscape to give them that, and that configuration of the landscape kind of dictates what we see birds doing, where they do it, where they end up. And so, I know this is, I think, where we say, where we really need Cory, and we say, damn you, Cory, for not being here, for getting sick, for having food poisoning. Hope you're feeling better. We'll connect with you again in the future. But you do have a text message from him with some really, I think, cool information about what he's seen so far, just anecdotal observations, preliminary, I should say, information. So, go ahead and share that with us.

Nick Masto: Yeah. So I talked to Corey this morning. Um, feel better, Corey. Thanks for this. Um, so, uh, he, he really is finding some really amazing information. So I guess I'll start out with, he has now 11, uh, rest areas across, across the, across that study region that we've been talking about in Western Tennessee. I guess the first thing I'll say is he's flying drones, which is not actually something that we did in the in the first phase of the project. But the idea is he wants to another way, including the telemetry devices, but another way to measure bird use of these rest areas. And so what he's actually found is a pretty good use of these areas of these rest areas compared to, for example, wildlife management areas. Which is really interesting because these rest areas are not, you know, planted cornfields, or they're most often kind of scrub-shrub habitat, something that you wouldn't really consider as a food plot, for example. And so he's seen a lot of bird use on these areas. He also told me that there's a number of at least two to three individual transmitter marked birds that were harvested and we can actually look at their previous location and they were right on the rest area right before they got harvested. He did tell me a good anecdotal story too where they were hunting near the rest area and he had that drone and he was looking at some canvas backs, and they were diving, and they had mud on their bills. They knew that they were foraging there, and that day or that afternoon, they harvested a limit of canvas backs, right? So it appears with some of these observations that the rest areas seem to be working preliminarily, getting used at the very least, and one, I think, really special thing is that, you know, he continues to get people asking him, hey, can I enroll in a rest area? Can I do this? And I think that speaks, you know, to the value of some of this communication of the importance of sanctuaries.

Mike Brasher: Imagine that, people wanting

Nick Masto: That's right. That's right. So, uh, maybe it sounds counterintuitive, but I think, I think what we're finding is, is at least in our landscape and perhaps many others, you know, just maybe sanctuary really is of, of true value, uh, to the hunter next door and elsewhere.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. I think we've talked a little bit before about the context of this West Tennessee landscape and how it's configured, and I'm excited. Hopefully, this will stimulate similar studies in other landscapes that are configured differently and maybe have different amounts of sanctuary right now and see what happens when you add sanctuary from, let's say, a lower starting point, and I think it opens up a world of possibilities of additional studies going forward. And this is one thing I'll say here, I'll chime in, I guess, from DU's perspective and say that we, this is a part of the study where we are making a small contribution, but we appreciate the opportunity to support this really important work, I guess it was Corey that contacted me a couple of years ago and shared with me the idea of creating this spatially targeted sanctuary experiment, if you will. And he was asking for, it turns out what they needed, you mentioned that TWRA is providing the funding for this, they're entering into agreements with landowners, willing landowners, to agree to establish sanctuary on their property, subject to some conditions. And what they needed was like a legal instrument, a binding agreement. And as you can understand, that's kind of difficult for state government to do or any kind of government to do and a lot more hoops to jump through there. And so, within Ducks Unlimited, we enter into agreements with landowners quite often through wetland development wetland development agreements, whether it be associated with projects that we're funding through NACA and we have certain conditions that they need to meet and so forth. And so they asked us if we had a mechanism to kind of assist with that. And so first thing that I did was contact my counterpart in the Southern Regional Office. At that time it was Dr. Dale James and now it's Dr. Aaron Pierce. Dale has gone on to another position. I explain the situation to them and anytime you talk about sanctuary, we at Ducks Unlimited are a little careful because of the ease with which people may jump to the wrong conclusion on why we're interested in asking that question. But fundamentally, we're always interested in anything that is going on with waterfowl ecology. We're wanting to understand it from the perspective of what's good for the birds, but also what's good for the hunters. And sanctuary is one of those things that intersects both of those and knowing after listening to Corey and him describing why they were proposing this, what type of data collection efforts were going to be in place to learn once this stuff was that's done once these agreements were in place it made it a lot easier for us to say yeah this is a this is an awesome idea and it's something that that we want to support if we can. So what we ended up doing is we're kind of the ones helping with the agreements with the landowners. TWRA is providing the the incentives for those and so we're happy to be partnering on that and really thrilled to hear about some of the encouraging results thus far and hopefully this provides us with more insight on, well I know it will, already is providing us with some more insight on the potential role, proper role of sanctuary in conservation planning, habitat management for waterfowl during the non-breeding period. And so always willing, eager to learn more in that regard. So that's our small contribution. Appreciate the leadership of our people to And the interest in being willing to do that. And for your team for giving us the opportunity to do so. Anything else from Corey? Any preliminary results?

Nick Masto: Yeah, so let's see. So this is his second field season. And so he's caught about 900 ducks this past year. 217 were transmitted. He's actually putting transmitters on Gadwall. uh, as well. So he had about 90 transmitters on Gadwall and, uh, you know, we had terrible drought conditions last year and super warm up North. Um, but we did have that January that probably saved a lot of people's duck seasons down South. What he told me about his birds is that, uh, those, those Mallards still really didn't move kind of like what we've been discussing. Right. Even, you know, in that mid to, I'm trying to think it was probably mid January that we had that, that cold snap and those mallards, they're really still finding those open areas and staying in Tennessee. They didn't push farther South or anything. And, uh, the only thing that he did report is that, that the gadwall in particular got kind of hammered, you know, they were going, they were going to, uh, to open water, you know, wetland obligate species. And so they got hammered.

Mike Brasher: You know, Nick, this reminds me of the other part, the other little study that was opportunistically, I would say, that was taken advantage of by your team. It was February of 21, when we had that polar vortex disruption, the frigid temperatures like sub-zero, minus 30, maybe even in Texas and some of the other southern mid-latitude reaches of the central Mississippi flyways. We used that opportunity, we used some of the telemetry data, some of the transmitter tracking, some of the birds that were being tracked by your team as well as Dr. Osborne and his team, and tried to answer that question about did ducks move? You know, whenever that happened, did we see ducks push south the way traditionally people think they do or expect them to? And what we found, what you led this research, is that they really did it, not in any to any significant degree, and it's, I think there's a number of things going on there. So that was in February, this cold event was in January. What is your, how do you view that? What are you learning from this in terms of birds' willingness to move farther south in response to some of these events? And maybe depending on the time of the year that it happens.

Nick Masto: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great question, and based on, you know, those anecdotes, you know, we framed it up in the paper is, you know, there's a really strong pull for these birds to want to go back up to the prairies and to their breeding areas. And so, you know, whether in the mid-south and deep south, You know, we might not expect weather to matter quite as much, for example, in western Tennessee, northeastern Arkansas, to actually push birds when we're getting into late January, when we're getting into February. I mean, that February cold snap was one of the coldest on record, and everyone suspected, okay, well, surely, you know, we're going to have birds move down. And it's almost a bet hedging thing where it's like, hey, I got to stick it out because also, I have to get up to the breeding grounds as fast as I can to obtain the best pothole and have the best opportunity to breed early so that maybe I need to re-nest and so on and so forth. So that's basically how I've been thinking about migration at this point. Weather certainly matters. It absolutely matters in northern reaches, and it definitely matters early. But as we get later and later into the season, I think what our research is showing, and many others are finding similar things, is that it might not matter as much, or at least, and certainly doesn't matter as much as we get farther into the hunting season.

Mike Brasher: You know, it's, I find myself and other people asking this question also is like, are birds, well, let me say it like this. One of the things that I believe we continue to, we haven't yet figured out is the individual quote decision-making for birds. Like they're not, They're not able to see seven days into the future from a weather forecast standpoint, so they don't know whether they should be moving right now farther south. I kind of wonder about if what we're seeing now in terms of these birds failing to move or sticking around, is that what they've always done? What did you see? What did you learn in terms of any like survival consequences to birds during this time? I think you said Gadwall took it pretty hard, right?

Nick Masto: So, so Corey told me that Gadwall took it pretty hard. Um, and then actually, and that was, that was this year. That was this year. That was this year versus, versus for example, the Mallards, uh, I think they were harvested at a higher rate with searching for open water, but not nearly as much. I think the Mallards for this year. In mid-January, probably found some cornfields iced over or something, could hang out. Whereas the gadwall, we're probably searching for these rivers and open water systems. But as far as that February polar vortex, Abby actually did the survival analyses on our birds.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. She can take over from there. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so we collaborated with Dr. Osborne out of Arkansas and Paul Link out of Louisiana. We were trying to get kind of a wider array of marked mallards when this polar vortex hit the Texas and Mid-South. So, we wanted to first see if there was an influence of latitude or sex or age, seeing if the birds further south in Louisiana, if they died at a higher rate, thinking that, oh, well, these birds are used to more mild winters. Maybe this polar vortex, this cold spell really affected those birds more readily than the birds up in Tennessee. But we really didn't see that. We saw overall that about 10% of our birds with transmitters, we were able to verify that we had mortality events during that 2021 cold snap. But for the most part, there was no influence of age, sex, or latitude. It was sort of across the board. It looked like conditions just had deteriorated and birds were suffering at that point. Even the cold hardy species that is the mallard, if it's severe enough for long enough, they're eventually going to have some more mortality.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, that's pretty… I'm trying to remember. We saw the same thing. I've told this story a number of times on an earlier podcast reflecting on that 2021 event and we saw mortality of songbirds on our property and so occasionally we do get those years where things just, they make a bad decision I guess to not move or what is it that influences one bird to move and not the others and what are the consequences of those decisions and That's an area that I think we continue to wonder about. We've talked about maybe there being some genetic control to those decisions. And during some years, those conditions are going to deteriorate so rapidly that the individuals who were some individuals will have made a bad decision and if those decisions are influenced by genetics and if those type of conditions happen frequently enough, you know, what we should expect is a reduced frequency of the genes responsible for that kind of behavior and then you might get a change in what you observe in terms of bird distributions and abundances and so forth. A lot of that is just, I guess, wrapped up in additional questions to be studied. A lot more information to be pursued there. Anything else on either Corey's study or the Extreme weather events, probably not. I think we've covered that. We have one more big topic to cover, that being winter fidelity returning to their previous place. But before I fully move us off of that, anything else to wrap up?

Nick Masto: No, no, I think you're ready for the… I think you caught it. I mean, yeah, it's definitely genetically controlled in our paper. We, you know, we kind of posited that if these weather events happen more frequently later, And later, you know, then we could potentially see some carryover effects and things like that, um, reduced body condition going up north. But, um, if these, if these things continue to happen, then, then, uh, my full expectation is that birds are adaptable and we'll adjust and figure it out, right?

Mike Brasher: So the final question here, I mean, you've got, you guys answered all sorts of other, tried to address all sorts of other research questions in this report you talk about and show. location of where these birds return to breed. You've got the birds from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee all in here as part of this report showing where they return to breed in the prairies and so forth. And I mean, that could be a discussion in itself. But I think to wrap up what we're doing here today, the other big question was related to winter site fidelity. Do birds marked in Tennessee, in this case, return to Tennessee? What did we learn there?

Nick Masto: Yeah, so maybe we should just define fidelity first. And it could be defined in various ways, but basically, do birds come back to the same area, right? And that area is scale dependent. Do birds come back to the same wetland? Do birds come back to West Tennessee? Do birds come back to the Mississippi alluvial valley? And so we kind of summarized fidelity in two different ways in this study. And the first is just, do they come back to a certain state, right? So we're catching them in the winter. These birds have to migrate and survive the breeding season and then come back down and meet certain criteria. They have to live long enough to be faithful to a site, for example, to have any sort of fidelity to be included in this analysis. Uh… That was a long way around to get to your very easy question, do birds come back? Yes. Yes. We found that about 30, 38 percent of ducks came back to Tennessee and additional 36 percent came back to kind of the general region. So when I'm talking about when I say the region is Illinois, the Boothill, Missouri, for example, northeastern Arkansas and Kentucky. Right. And so that's that's there's a few things maybe to pull out of the graph that I'm looking at the bar graph. One is that I guess what I summarized is about 70% came back to the region. What we have is about two birds maybe that went farther south than kind of the eastern Arkansas, Mississippi, Alluvial Valley, right? So only two birds. Otherwise, they're in more like Kansas, Wisconsin, Iowa. So that's important.

Mike Brasher: You know, I'm also looking here, Nick, at, so you answered the question, one, do they return to the same state? But then you also asked the question, what percentage return within a certain distance of where they were marked? And so this is some of what I found pretty interesting. 25% returned within 15 miles of where they were captured. 50% returned within 88 miles of where they were captured. So, you know, that's 75% within, than, you know, about 90 miles from one year to the next. And that's, were you surprised at that? Coming into this, what did you think?

Nick Masto: I was blown away.

Mike Brasher: You thought birds were going to be, you'd mark them in Tennessee, the next year you'd find 10% in Kansas, 10% in Louisiana. You thought they were just kind of moving, going to be going across the landscape.

Nick Masto: Yeah, Mike, I mean, just I mean, just like we were surprised that, you know, most of our birds stayed in Tennessee. We certainly didn't expect that they'd return to the same wetland. Yeah. For example, we had one duck that spent two years at Hoppin Refuge, which are it's like three or four impoundments, right? Two years in a row at Hoppin and then two years in a row in the same exact breeding site. We had another duck that literally we caught in December of 2019 and came back to West Tennessee to the same refuges all three years of our study. So short answer is absolutely that blew me away. And so when you think of a quarter of those ducks within 15 miles, most of that quarter, they're coming back to the same impoundment sometimes.

Mike Brasher: And some of the other studies that are going on out there, whether it be Arkansas, Louisiana, what do you know from them? Are they finding generally the same thing? These birds are going back, generally speaking, to areas where they were. Mark, not all of them do. We're talking about 60, 75 percent. There's still 25 percent that are out there doing other things. But what are some of these other studies finding? Something generally similar to what you did?

Nick Masto: Yeah, I guess I can speak. I know Dr. Doug Osborne has done a pretty robust winter banding program and found pretty strong evidence for some winter fidelity. Now, I don't know if they've done any specific analyses on their telemetry birds. Now, I have heard anecdotes. For example, this is a fascinating one. I don't think he'd mind me sharing, but Dr. Drew Fowler is tagging pintails. We had this record drought down in Louisiana. So he tagged it down in southeastern Louisiana last year. They had this record drought this year. Well, this bird came back, checked out southeastern Louisiana where it was banded, and then flew back up to Arkansas. So I guess not all birds are doing exactly what our mallards are doing.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: But maybe they're trying.

Nick Masto: But perhaps they're trying to. And I think kind of maybe a hypothesis is, well, if you have really good conditions, You have a lot of sanctuary. You don't have a degraded system. You got consistent water, for example. Maybe that's driving some of the fidelity, right?

Mike Brasher: Yeah, I think so. It's interesting that you say that because people ask me that question recently. I had somebody ask me. I think there's a a new trend out there for people to scatter corn after the season's over. And they'll ask me, are they more likely to imprint, in quotes, on an area late in the season or early in the season? And I said, my read is that they want to go back to a place that the probability that they go back to a place increases the better it is for a longer period of time. And that means in providing all the resources that they need, food, cover, pears, shelter, I say cover and shelter, but places to avoid disturbance throughout that non-breeding season. And it's exactly what you said. The other thing that was interesting about what you shared from Drew is that I was talking to Jim Ronquist here recently and I think Chris Jennings as well. It was a recent episode and we were talking about how we saw what appeared to us to be a larger than normal number of pintails in this part of the world this year and we got wondering about that and I said you know it could be given how dry it was in Louisiana and Texas. Those birds went down there There's not anything here. We got to go somewhere else. So it sounds like that might have been part of it. Don't want to draw too much of a conclusion there, but I mean, it's logical. Sure.

Nick Masto: It's one bird, but still, I mean, it's an amazing story.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, that's right. And we know that from other study, well, I say, we know from Bobby Cox's work back in the day that they saw pintails making some of these long movements. And there's a lot of stories that people tell around here of, Around early January, you'll see a movement of pintails into this area, and a lot of times, they will show up with that rust coloration on their chest or neck, and that's typically, usually an indication of they've been in some coastal environments or something like that. So, yeah, we could tell some stories there if we wanted to, just make up things and tell them interesting. Make it sound like we think it should, but regardless, yeah, the study of of birds returning to wintering grounds has always been an interesting one. It hasn't been as easy to study with high degrees of confidence. Well, I guess we've studied it a number of different ways. You oftentimes think about phytopatry being measured on breeding grounds where the birds are returning to a field where they nested or a nest site or wood ducks returning to a a nest box or whatever, but people have in the past used banding data. Birds banded in the winter and then recovered in subsequent winters and looked to see where those recoveries occurred and banding data is good in some respects for that. It gives you, I think it's fair to say, a bit of a conservative estimate of winter site fidelity because a bird has to be recovered in order for it to be for you to know where it was, and also if a bird is harvested north of where it was marked, you know, I think that counts against you in that calculation of fidelity, and so you don't know if it would have gone back to that place in the south, farther south, for example, if it had lived. But the tracking, the data that you're getting from some of these tracking devices allows you to get around some of that, right?

Nick Masto: That's right. Yeah, we can really, I guess, narrow the scale, right? Narrow the inference to, wow, this bird was really on top of where it was the previous winter.

Mike Brasher: Well, and you know, if it's alive, you will know where it is and if it returned to that general location. I think we were talking maybe earlier, or maybe I read it, there were about 100 birds that actually met the criteria to be used in some of these fidelity analyses, right?

Nick Masto: That's right. Yeah. So they do have to, they do have to survive the breeding season, uh, tough on hands for sure. And, um, then they have to, the transmitter also has to survive, which is, which is another thing. So starting out with 500, uh, they got to survive the winter. They got to survive spring migration. They got to survive the breeding season and they have to come back and basically survive fall too. So, so it does cut down on the sample size. We're hoping with Corey's study that that really boosts. sample size and we can get at that question even more, right, even stronger.

Mike Brasher: What do you know about return rates to the same, let's say, migration areas as they go back north from one year to the next?

Nick Masto: That's a great question and one of considerable interest to the lab, and so I didn't look at that. I did this coarser scale winter fidelity, but Dr. Cohen, Brad Cohen, has as a master's student looking at these fidelity rates. So, for example, you know, how successful is a bird that uses the same spring stopover site and then comes back and perhaps uses that same site during the fall? The better this technology gets, the more fine-tuned we can answer some of these questions, right? The longer the telemetry backpacks last, well, then we can start to really get these multi-seasonal, multi-annual cycles and try to nail that question down. But right now we're just scratching the surface I think.

Mike Brasher: Well, there's a lot of data that y'all collected. There's a lot of information there for several remaining students and postdocs to come in and analyze and answer yet more questions. I know a lot of those plans are in the works. I know there's big interest in using these millions and millions of data points that have been collected. Probably a lot of questions that you've envisioned that you haven't even been able to yet kind of put on paper, but it's in your mind. It's a really exciting time and it's been, it's been fun watching the career paths of each of you. Nick, having you as a Ducks Unlimited fellow, was it one year or two years that you were a fellow? Two years. That's been a treat and happy that we could provide some of that support. Also, you know, just been really cool seeing what Brad and everybody in his lab have done there at Tennessee Tech and Certainly leaving their mark on the waterfowl management community and certainly, obviously in Tennessee, but even broader and collaborating with a lot of research partners in adjacent states and across the country too, matter of fact. on some of these shared questions. And so thanks to Brad and everything that he's bringing to this field. And let's see, the other thing, last part of this final report is always kind of neat to see. It's a collection of photos showing some of the outreach that y'all did trying to engage and being successful in engaging members of the local community up around where the study site was, engaging participation from folks such as Joe Benedict, Benedict of TWRA, appreciate his leadership on this. Jamie Feddersen as well. We've mentioned him a number of times. He's in here. holding a duck or working in some capacity. So good to see that, Jamie. And yeah, you know, it's anything to add there, Abby, the opportunity that you had to involve the people of West Tennessee in this study. What was that like?

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I knew coming from Minnesota, I wasn't sure how I would be how I would be received in West Tennessee, but I was received with open arms and it was just a wonderful experience like to truly just get in there and then have people learn about the project and be excited to see what we're doing and excited that you're our mallard team and it was just it was an excellent experience we had I mean just an outpouring of help from a local TWA biologist, state fish and wildlife or fish and wildlife service biologists but also just the community at large and so it was really excellent to get some of the different private landowners and other people in the community hands-on live ducks as opposed to just hunt or harvested ducks, which is also a wonderful experience. But to get their hands on live ducks was a really cool experience to give these folks. And it was just, yeah, overall just a wonderful experience. I feel very, very fortunate.

Mike Brasher: A special thanks again to Heath Hagee, Dr. Heath Hagee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and all that they did for y'all. Anybody else we need to thank? We've covered a number of people, but you never know who else is out there.

Nick Masto: Yeah, I mean, I couldn't have said it better. You know, those private landowners, Murray Moore, Sam Bradshaw, Monty Warren was my pilot. He's a fantastic friend. There's been a number of people that are our friends and colleagues that have really, really, Joe Benedict, I mean, it's a long, long list and it was extremely rewarding and again, I couldn't have said it better. I actually, my favorite part was going out in September and looking at people's duck properties and measuring the vegetation and showing them what species these were and so on and so forth and just interacting with them. was by far the most rewarding and in turn what they gave us is a very successful project because we couldn't have done it without them.

Mike Brasher: I've been there before and knowing that there is a large community of people out there that is so passionate about this resource that they want to know all the nitty-gritty about the plants and what the ducks are eating and wanting to improve their property for the ducks, wanting to improve their property so they can hunt and so they can harvest a few of these birds. But at the end of the day, all of that interest provides passion and it enables us to do the work that we do. And thanks to everybody out there. I echo every bit of that. Nick, Abby, thank y'all so much for being here. Corey, we miss you. Too bad you couldn't be here, man. We've talked about you a lot and we'll catch up with you in the future. But yeah, Nick, Abby, thank y'all so much.

Abby Blake Bradshaw: Thank you.

Mike Brasher: Appreciate it. A very special thanks to our guest on today's episode, Dr. Nick Masto and Dr. Abby Blake Bradshaw. We appreciate them being here with us in studio and sharing wealth of knowledge, all that they have learned and experiences they've had over the past few years. As always we thank our producer Chris Isaac for the wonderful work he does with these episodes and we thank you for your support of the podcast and for your commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.