Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I am your host on this episode, Dr. Mike Brasher, and this is part two of our species profile for common eiders, a group of birds, four subspecies of one species that has so much information on it that we had to go over time. And so this is part two. I am pleased to welcome back to this episode, our two wonderful guests from the last time, Dr. Sarah Gutowsky from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian Wildlife Service, What are you, biometrician or something? Sarah, welcome back. It's so great of you to join us again.

Sarah Gutowsky: Thank you. Yeah, it's a quantitative biologist, biostatistician. You can call me all sorts of things.

Mike Brasher: I was in the neighborhood. And then also Kate Martin with US Fish and Wildlife Service, the coordinator of the Sea Duck Joint Venture, joining us all the way from Alaska. Kate, it's wonderful to have you back as well.

Kate Martin: Great to be here. Thank you.

Mike Brasher: And I'll give the two of you an extra special thank you for the tremendous organization and preparation that you did leading up to this. I hope our viewers and our listeners appreciate it. We even have a reorganized outline for the last half of this discussion I'm excited about. All the information that we're going to bring to you, we have some cool animations of some telemetry work that has been done in recent years. We've also got a cool video showing some of the foraging behavior of these birds. We've got a lot of really interesting content to bring to you. I guess to start with, let's throw up the photo again, Chris, of the species that we're talking about, Common Eider, Somateria mellissima. Did I get that right? Yep, correct. And the four different subspecies here, we covered the identification of those previously. Most of the work that we'll be talking about here going forward will be the cemeteria Melissima dresseri, right? And that is the American? Yes? Exactly. Okay. I'm looking for a head nod here and I'm getting a head nod on the American subspecies of the common eider. I told y'all that I do not have a lot of experience with sea ducks, especially eiders. That's why I brought in the experts here. I'm learning a lot from this as well. Whenever we left off the last episode, we were kind of going through the annual cycle of these birds. We had gotten them through the breeding season, through their molt, and onto their fall migration. And Sarah was so disappointed that we were not able to get into the foraging ecology of these birds at that time, but we left that for a tease. And that's what we're going to lead off with. So, Sarah, I'm going to turn this over to you to talk about the super exciting foraging ecology of common eiders. And so you just cue Chris whenever you want to play the video.

Sarah Gutowsky: Sure. Yeah. Well, I guess we could bring the video up right now and I can just sort of talk through it. But one of the things that makes eiders unique is that they are what we call benthivores or specialists on benthic prey. So that's prey that's on the bottom substrate. And for eiders in particular, they really love mussels, crabs, starfish, sea urchins, but really blue mussels are their absolute favorite. So if we could put that video up. We can watch how eiders actually access that substrate, that bent thick area where muscles are. So they use their wings and their feet to sort of swim their way down to the bottom. They can go as deep as 30 meters. And then they're going to use their really chisel-shaped strong bill to pry muscles off of the bottom. And that requires pretty exceptional strength and power in the bill itself. And then they're going to come back up to the surface. swallow their prey whole and then they use their super strong stomachs to crush up all those shells and actually process the food itself. And so they have to sit and rest and they do a lot of preening while they're digesting and processing all of those hard shelled organisms that they tend to eat. One of the fun things watching these videos of them sort of diving down to access the bottom is when they sort of let go of all the bubbles in their feathers and just shoot back up. This video actually is taken in an area in Hudson's Bay around the Belcher Islands. And so these are wintering birds that are overwintering in the pollinias. in that region. And so it's one of, again, the unique aspects of eider biology is that some subspecies and in some parts of the wintering range, they will stick around these Polynia areas, which is somewhere where there's a current that keeps open water where there would otherwise be solid sea ice. Chris, can you play that again?

Mike Brasher: I want to watch that again. I'm going to let Sarah continue to narrate here. Absolutely. What people don't know is that if we had the audio on this video, it would be David Attenborough, but I'm having more fun listening to Sarah narrate this. Go ahead. And you don't have to use your David Attenborough impression. Just keep doing what you're doing.

Sarah Gutowsky: Kate, did you want to do an afro impression? I do not.

Sarah Gutowsky: Okay, that's fine.

Mike Brasher: Hey, one thing I will point out to folks as we get to the latter end of this video, you can see the current, if I'm not mistaken, actually running through that bulenia.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's actually quite a tidal current as well. And we could get into some of the issues in the Belcher Islands with dam projects that are actually changing the currents and impacting the eiders in this region as well. But maybe we'll circle back to that if we talk about some conservation concerns later. So again, yeah, using that chisel bill to pull. I don't know if you've ever tried to pull a mussel off of a rock, but they are really solidly on there with those hair-like feet that they're called, cemented on. And eiders, this is the habitat that they require basically for foraging is mussel beds as their primary prey source, and that's across their entire range, their breeding and wintering range. And anywhere that they are, even along the Atlantic seaboard, they're accessing mussel beds. And they can actually really significantly impact the intertidal biomass or the amount of these benthic organisms that are in a given area. Because when these birds are all clustered up in big wintering flocks, they can… clear out muscle beds quite easily, for sure.

Mike Brasher: So Sarah, were those sub-adults that we were seeing there? There were a couple of close-ups with one on the surface. Is that what we're looking at?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, that's a good point, actually. And we were chatting about that, about identification and how difficult it can be when they're pre-breeding age and those males have that sort of in-between male-female plumage or… Yeah, exactly. So those were young males.

Mike Brasher: I also saw an Arctic fox kind of roaming the edge of the ice there. Are they a big predation threat in those situations?

Sarah Gutowsky: I think they could be, I suppose. The birds have the option of diving and evading and staying in the water, I suppose. But if you have a harsh winter, a particularly harsh winter, and those pollinias freeze over on the top, the birds are sort of stuck just sitting and waiting on the ice and they would be really vulnerable for short of predation and just perishing because of no food and and being exposed to the elements like that. But yeah, that happens in the Belcher Islands and those populations are really susceptible to that. You can have an entire cohort wiped out by a bad winter for that reason.

Mike Brasher: One other question I had with foraging ecology, I remember I I studied that literature a fair bit when I was in grad school, and I know that oftentimes for species that feed on mussels, there's an optimal size of mussel relative to handling time and profitability. Do we see the same thing with eiders?

Sarah Gutowsky: I would imagine so. I actually don't know.

Kate Martin: Kate? Yeah. I do think that they like that smaller, I guess I would say more like a medium-sized muscle, that they will take very large ones. But I think, as Sarah mentioned, the gizzard is going to need to break that down. And I think that the energy that it takes to get to that protein is probably an issue too. So having that kind of mid-size muscle is probably the best for them. Yeah. And I'd also add too that it's really interesting thinking about these pollinias with a small area of open water surrounded by ice. Those birds actually kind of need the ice as well because they can thermoregulate better when they're standing on ice than when they're in water. So it's like they kind of need both. So, having that platform allows them to kind of deal with those really extreme cold temperatures as well. And then that would make them very susceptible to an Arctic fox sneaking up on them when they're roosting.

Mike Brasher: I have another note here, courtesy of the two of you, about sort of the potential of… Well, the way in which… The dramatic nature in which Eiders can reduce the biomass, can actually have a measurable effect on the abundance of the mussels in an area to the extent that they, in some cases, can cause conflicts with the aquaculture industry. Can we talk about that?

Kate Martin: Yeah. I guess I could just say that aquaculture industry would be growing mussels, oysters, those sorts of things. And if they end up getting a flock of eiders coming in, they can really do a lot of damage. The aquaculture industry and scientists have put some kind of research into thinking about what kind of exclosures are best to keep the eiders and scoters out using nets that wouldn't entangle the birds, but would keep them away from their valuable product that they're producing. So you can just imagine if an eider flock sees this huge muscle bed available kind of close to the surface, like how much damage they could do in in a small amount of time. So there's definitely some conflict there, but also I think folks are working through ways to prevent the issue.

Mike Brasher: There's another note here related to stinky poop. I cannot ask what that's about. I will ask if it is, if it has… I know it relates to what they eat, but I'm also thinking about a connection to… their diet and its influence on eiders as table fare. We think about it in terms of people that harvest eiders and eat them. And generally the… I don't know if it's a rule of thumb, but most of the people will talk about how sea ducks are a real strong flavor to them because of what they eat, whether it be fish or mussels. And so I'm sure there's a connection there, right? Between how these things taste and then this little note here about some stinky poop story.

Kate Martin: There probably is. I would say that it's an acquired taste. And then I think that it may be strong, but I do know that a lot of indigenous people love it. They love that flavor. A king eider soup or a common eider soup is one of the favorites during that springtime when they first get get birds coming up and are able to harvest them. So maybe it's just an acquired taste, right?

Sarah Gutowsky: And eggs as well, I'd say. I've tried a boiled eider egg when I was in Iceland, and again, a very acquired taste. The fishiness of their diet comes through in the fishiness of the taste of their eggs, and their poop is also very fishy.

Mike Brasher: Not tasting, not tasting the poop though, that's not what we're talking about. No, no, no, no, of course not.

Sarah Gutowsky: No, that would be… I mean, if you work with birds enough, you do end up with poop in your mouth. That's just the reality at some point, but I'm very fortunate to see… There's a story there. Is there a story? Well, I mean, I work a lot with seabirds and seabird colonies. And if you've ever walked anywhere near a gull colony or a tern colony, part of their defense mechanism is to poop on you. And inevitably, if you spend… 60 days in a row on a seabird colony getting pooped on, at some point you're going to make the mistake of opening your mouth at the wrong time. I mean, that's pretty disgusting, but it's a reality of being a bird biologist, I think. For eiders, it's whenever you're handling these birds, you kind of have to control the muzzle direction, so to speak. It's really important not to point a biter at a friend, for example, because it could projectile poop the smelliest, greenest, grossest poo.

Sarah Gutowsky: So yeah, it's a hazard of the job.

Mike Brasher: Thank you for sharing that wonderful story.

Kate Martin: I have special chest waders that only go out to eider colonies.

Mike Brasher: No kidding.

Kate Martin: Exactly.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, it's got a staying power.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, that's right. Yep.

Mike Brasher: Amazing.

Sarah Gutowsky: Aren't you glad you asked?

Mike Brasher: Yeah. I mean, we love it. Sarah, I want to say you shared a bit of that story with us the first time you joined us, just the hazards of working with seabirds. I remember that being a part of your conversations, but we had to have more context there. So, Kate, I want to turn to you now and talk about some of the general habitat needs associated with this. We covered this a little bit in the previous episode, but let's go back to that. Where are you likely to find these places? You can look at this from sort of a micro scale, like what are the characteristics of the water in which they are, but then also a macro scale from a continental scale. are there certain places that tend to be more important for eiders and sea ducks in general?

Kate Martin: Absolutely. So we did cover some of this already, but eiders are going to prefer these shallower coastal areas up to maybe 20 meters deep. They can And they can dive deeper than that, but they prefer something a little shallower. Offshore shoals and archipelagos, like groups of islands, specifically rocky substrates. So as Sarah said, if it's something where blue mussels grow, that's where they prefer to be. And we do, I wanted to show a figure on here, a map of- I think we have a photo.

Mike Brasher: I think we have a photo before that. Oh, we do. We have a photo of birds. Let's see it. I think so. Yeah, there we go.

Kate Martin: Right. So we talked about the importance, and especially the northern areas where some of these subspecies are wintering further north where there's still sea ice. They need those openings in the sea ice. Those could be either kind of leads along land. that open up like in the spring, or they can be these pollinia areas that Sarah was describing. And this is just a photo of a pretty nice large flock of combinators in the sea ice and kind of using those openings for feeding. And then they use the edges of the sea ice to roost and rest after they're done.

Mike Brasher: And so now go on to the map, we'll show this.

Kate Martin: Yeah, if you could go on to the map. The Sea Duck Joint Venture put together an atlas of the key sea duck habitat sites in North America. Really wanted to focus on the places where you get the highest concentrations of sea ducks. This includes not just eiders, but also scoters and some other species. But you'll notice on this map that most of the areas that we have identified are these nearshore coastal areas. That's where you find these concentrations of the birds further north, but also along the Atlantic coast, even as far south in some cases for scoters as South Carolina. which is pretty cool too. But we will show in a little bit some more information about a telemetry project that the Joint Venture has been involved in, American Combinators. And it shows a couple of places where you get high concentrations of combinators. And one of them is Nantucket Shoals and Sound. And I don't think I can use a pointer on here. But you'll see along the Atlantic coast, right off the coast of Rhode Island, there's a green dot there. It's very important for wintering culminators. And then there's another place in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I wanted to point out that we'll see in this animation later, called the Magdalene Islands. And they're an archipelago in, as I said, the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They're right along this area that's called, I believe it's called the Laurentian shelf or… Sarah can correct me if I'm wrong there. It's not the Gulf, not the Laurentian Gulf, or no, it's… It's like a shelf that was formed glacially that is a really deep… The islands are in a shallower area right next to this nice deep Gulf, and that provides an upwelling that really ends up having increased productivity. And so you end up with a lot of mussels and other sea life that the eiders like to eat, especially in the winter. So there's a couple of places in particular to pay attention to, and we show you some stuff later. But just as you can see, mostly this is near shore coastal areas, rocky substrates. Is it the Laurentian Abyss? I think that is what it's called. Yes.

Mike Brasher: Google is your friend.

Kate Martin: Google, I know, right?

Mike Brasher: I couldn't find the word, but it came up.

Kate Martin: But it's those areas where you get these currents and upwellings and meetings of cold and warm water that tend to give the ocean more productivity. And then the filter feeders, mussels, clams, the prey for combinators really do well in those spots.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, and it's not just common eiders that would benefit from those type of areas, right? Oh, correct. There's a lot of difference. It concentrates food items of various types for a lot of different animals.

Kate Martin: Yep. Yeah. Not just sea ducks either, like whales and fish and things I don't know much about, but yeah.

Mike Brasher: And so Kate, the reason for that map, what's like the… How does that improve our ability to think about conservation for sea ducks? Because we can't easily go out and manipulate habitats or enhance the annual productivity of food resources the way we can, certainly for diving ducks or the way it happens for geese. And I guess if you think about agriculture as a proxy for generating that. high yield of seeds and things that they take advantage of. We can't really do that in any way on an annual basis for sea ducks. So how do we go about conservation planning? And then, and I guess just specific to this map, how does it help you in that regard?

Kate Martin: Yeah. So by identifying these coastal areas, we can use that in things like marine spatial planning or oil spill preparedness and response. So if we know the areas where these birds are concentrating and we know the time of year that they're concentrating, we can then evaluate the human disturbances and the human activities in those areas and try to minimize them. We have overlap in these areas with, as I said, well, shipping is a good one. There's a lot of shipping. There's the fishing industry. We talked about the aquaculture industry. And now kind of a larger one that we're thinking a lot about is wind farms and renewable energy offshore. And so we can use these sorts of maps and tools to identify overlaps. And then we could focus more research and monitoring on those areas and also make some recommendations about how to minimize any kind of threat disturbance to the birds, especially really cued in on the time of year that we would want to be avoiding that area. So it is quite different than the conservation practices that we tend to do for geese and for ducks in the continent. you know, dabbling duck arena.

Mike Brasher: From a conservation standpoint, obviously one of the pieces of information that we look to in order to determine relative importance of taking certain action is like, what's the status of the population? Are they stable? Are they increasing, decreasing? How has that What's the rate of those changes? What is the overall population size in general? Smaller populations are more vulnerable to sort of unpredictable events and natural disasters and so forth. So I think that's the next thing here on our item or on our next item on our outline is talking about the population status of common eiders. Eiders and sea ducks just in general are some of the most difficult to get a good handle on their population size. And so the two of you know about that very well. And so Kate, I'm going to turn to you and ask you to talk about what we know on commoniders from a population status standpoint.

Kate Martin: Yeah. I'll just kind of reiterate what you just said about how difficult it is to get population abundance, size, and trend for Combinator, but also for sea ducks in general. Typically for dabbling ducks and diving ducks, we rely on things like the May survey, which is this huge aerial survey that occurs during the spring and summer when birds are nesting. but it doesn't cover any common nighter habitat. And another way that we keep tabs on waterfowl populations and estimate vital rates like survival rate and things like that is a banding program where you go out and you band a large number of the species and then you rely on recoveries from hunters or recaptures of those birds to get at those rates. We also… It's very, very difficult to ban that many common eiters. And then also we'll talk later about harvest, but there aren't a whole lot of banned recoveries from eiters either. So we don't have those tools, right? What we do have is more like regional type surveys that we do for eiters and other sea ducks. They include several different things. So it's almost like we're still trying to develop the right way, right? Like trying to crack this code. And one way folks look at regional population sizes and trends is using aerial surveys in either the spring when the birds are coming to their breeding grounds or in the winter. But these are in extremely remote, challenging environments. We don't do them very often. And when we do, they may or may not actually work. So just an example, there are aerial surveys conducted in the Western Canadian high Arctic occasionally for combinators. And they're done in the spring, summer when the birds are all coming in and starting to settle in the colony areas. And what they're counting are the birds out in the water near where the birds are nesting. They have to use either a fixed wing airplane or a helicopter. There are hardly any communities there, and so you have to think about where you're going to get the fuel, how you're going to get the fuel up there, how you're even going to get the helicopter and the airplane up there. how safe or unsafe it might be if there isn't enough sea ice to keep the birds concentrated and you have to go over open water. And the consequences of something going bad is very high. So there's just a lot of considerations and it makes it very expensive and difficult. But those do occur, so we have some information from those. And then we also have done a couple other things. Some scientists have used a migration count of common and king eiders. It's really a kind of a spectacular situation. So at Point Barrow, which is the very northern tip of Alaska, both common and king eiders come by in a very narrow strip of open water, right there at the point. And they're all migrating in the spring to breeding areas. And over decades, people have tried to do a migration count during that time. And sometimes they can see up to 100,000 eiders fly by in just three hours. So, it's really spectacular, but it's also difficult in terms of timing and making sure that you're getting all the birds and you're counting them appropriately, especially… Go ahead.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, because that's in the spring when there's very limited daylight, right? Correct.

Kate Martin: Well, no, actually at that point, we're having a lot more daylight.

Mike Brasher: So it has gotten to the point where you've got a substantial amount. Okay. I just wasn't certain exactly where it is.

Kate Martin: That might be one of the only limitations or no limitation on the daylight. Everything else is more difficult.

Mike Brasher: By that time, you're up above eight hours of daylight? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Kate Martin: Yeah. Especially up there, right? So I think it's almost constant by that point.

Mike Brasher: Really?

Kate Martin: Yeah. So there's definitely daylight, but then you've got- I guess you're a foreigner.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. Okay.

Kate Martin: Yeah. Yeah. Because remember by March, by the equinox, it's 12 hours everywhere. And then they're getting a lot more daylight every day from the equinox March until June when these surveys are done. Yeah, but then there's another complicating factor because the sea ice is not as predictable and it's not pushing them into shore as closely as it used to be. So you can't tell if you're actually getting all the flocks anymore. So not only was it hard when we did have sea ice constraining where these birds were, it's getting harder because it's changing and going away. And then I guess maybe the other type of survey I might mention for eiders that's a little bit different are boat-based surveys that folks do at colonies. Specifically, there's one project that the Canadian Wildlife Service and Environment Canada is collaborating with an Inuit community at Cape Dorset to use boats to go out to all the colonies near them and do walking colony counts. And in this situation, it's very unique because we need those Inuit hunters to use their skills and their boating skills and their knowledge of where the birds are to go out and get these consistent nest counts. So kind of different methods. And Sarah, maybe before I give you the overall, here's how many eiders there are, maybe Sarah can mention a project she's been working on to try to use another source of data in collaboration with all these other things.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, sure. So one of the things that we're trying to take advantage of is like these untraditional data sources that we now have from citizen science projects. So an example of one of those would be the Christmas bird count. And this is one of the longest running citizen science wildlife monitoring programs in the world. It was started around 1900, so it's been ongoing for a very long time now. And the Christmas Bird Count is where folks go out to survey all of the birds. And it was sort of designed with land birds in mind. So there's circles, Christmas Bird Count circles all over North America. And where those circles are is sort of, it's We try to sample as much area as we possibly can, but naturally circles tend to be closer to where there's higher human population density just for ease of access. But it's called the Christmas bird count because a group of volunteers will go out to an area around Christmas, there's sort of a three-week window around Christmas, where every year folks go and they count all of the birds, all of the species, and all of the number of individuals of each species that they see within about a 10 kilometer Wide radius around a central point and we realize that for those circles that overlap the coast folks were also counting water birds and because iters tend to winter close to shore. the Christmas period is actually not a bad time to get a sense of how many eiders are in a given area in a given year. And when we look at the sort of distribution of Christmas bird count circles along the Eastern seaboard in Canada and the US, we actually get a pretty good snapshot of the number of eiders wintering in these areas each year for the last 20 years, for example. And that's really, really powerful because like Kate was saying, we don't tend to have a single survey protocol that's used annually across the entire range. And so if you want to look at sort of spatial patterns and trends or like how different local populations are doing and compare it across space, that's very hard when you don't have the same information. across space and time. And so we were able to do that, use this Christmas bird count data to look at trends over the last 20 years of the American subspecies. And we've found some really powerful spatial patterns and trends where we've got sort of some stability and maybe even some growth at the southern edge of the wintering range, so around Nantucket Shoals, Cape Cod in that area. and sort of stability up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but really severe and consistent widespread declines in all of the coastal areas in the Gulf of Maine. So that's essentially from Maine all the way through the Bay of Fundy to the Southern Southwest Nova Scotia. And it's pretty alarming and it's not that surprising because we were getting a lot of local signals from you know, localized data collection for breeding colonies in one area and wintering counts in another area, signaling that declines were occurring. But we've really, this Christmas bird count data has allowed us to really show that there's a widespread loss of eiders in the winter from the whole Gulf of Maine ecosystem. And it's driven likely by changing ocean conditions. So related to climate change for sure, because that area has seen some of the strongest ocean warming and other impacts from climate change in that region. But we also used the aerial survey data from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to sort of try and show whether our Christmas bird count data was actually capturing what's really going on, because we do have winter surveys for these birds from the Canadian Wildlife Service in those areas, but every three or five years. So maybe four or five data points over the last 20 years. But those trends are in line with what we see with the CBC. And so that's, you know, it's encouraging that we can use the citizen science data. Yeah. It was a good opportunity to see if we could do something. Look, it's an untraditional data source to try and get a sense of what's going on with eiders.

Mike Brasher: Sarah, you might've mentioned this and I missed it. The declines that you described there, and you said it was in the Gulf of Maine, right? Do we know if those are actual declines? declines, if it's an actual reduction in the population size or is it a loss of… Let me just ask this. Is it an actual decline in the population size or are those birds moving out of that area such that their indices are increasing in other locations? Yeah, let me just stop there.

Sarah Gutowsky: That's a really good point, Mike, and we actually call it a redistribution, like a signal of a redistribution, but only because we don't know. We don't know how many total eiders there were in 2000 versus 2020. Like Kate was saying, it's very, very difficult to sort of get a sense of the overall population size, but more than likely it's a mass exodus from the Gulf of Maine because the Gulf of Maine is no longer providing habitat for these birds, sadly. I shouldn't say not at all, but less birds are choosing to spend time there.

Mike Brasher: And the warming sea temperatures are the cause of a change, but the change that's having an effect on the iters is a decline in blue muscles, right? The food item, the preferred diet item, and that is related to sort of some physiological relationship or… Yeah, between blue mussels and ocean temperature, right?

Sarah Gutowsky: Probably. We certainly don't have a causation, a strong understanding of exactly what the drivers are there. We're It's an assumption that it's the ocean warming that is driving eiders away. There's a lot of other things going on in the Gulf of Maine that are also probably making it less hospitable for eiders, like all the things that Kate was mentioning. We don't know for sure, but certainly there's evidence to suggest that mussel beds are suffering as well.

Mike Brasher: Kate, I think we want to, my notes say that you want to talk about population size a little bit. What do we know from all these data sets? How many do we think we have? After we get through with that, I think we'll take a break. But yeah, what do we know about population size? Unless there was something else that we wanted to cover on the survey side of things.

Kate Martin: No, I think that's good. I think we could talk about population size. So we take all of these pieces of information together, a little bit of expert opinion goes into this too. And for the American Combinator that we've been mostly talking about, we think there's about 290,000 that are wintering in both Atlantic Canada and the US. For the Northern Eider, which are wintering further north, In Canada, we think there's about 260,000 wintering, but there's about 500,000 wintering in Greenland. And maybe when we talk about harvest, we can talk a little bit about that connection between the birds that breed in Canada and then winter in Greenland. So we don't really want to forget about those Greenland birds. They're part of that population. And then for Hudson's Bay, we don't have a lot of good surveys done recently there, but again, about 260,000 birds. And then for the Pacific, kind of the best estimate right now, we're thinking is 150,000 birds. And that includes the birds that are nesting in Alaska and those that nest in kind of the Western Canadian high Arctic. Nicole Lugavere, PhD. : Would those all be breeding population estimates? So… Jessica Flake, PhD. : These are winter population estimates. And that's because we have most information about those. And that's how we talk about sea ducks a lot. We talk a lot more about their wintering. populations and distribution than breeding. Mostly because we can actually see them and count them in those cases, right? Yeah.

Mike Brasher: They remain a very, very difficult group of birds to survey and to survey accurately. And there's probably not a universally applicable like magic solution on the horizon. I would imagine folks are thinking about and experimenting with sort of remotely sensed imagery, whether that be from unoccupied aircraft, drones, or anything else that we're playing around with.

Kate Martin: There's definitely a movement on the aerial photography side of things. And so, flying transects over these blocks, taking photos from an airplane or a helicopter, and then using machine learning and artificial intelligence to process those images. Because it's not a wonderful solution because what you end up with are hours and hours and hours and hours of images to process. But it's neat because we also have all this technology going on in our world right now with artificial intelligence that can help us deal with those large data sets. So there's movement there. There's also considerations about using like eBird data, which Sarah mentioned the CBC or Christmas bird count data, but we're also working with Cornell a bit to talk about how we can integrate both surveys and telemetry data, which we'll talk about a little bit later maybe, and eBird data to get better distribution maps and maybe some abundance information too.

Mike Brasher: Well, we look forward to future advancements in that regard. I think right now we are going to take a break. We are going to come back. I think, Sarah, you're going to lead us off Or maybe Kate, actually, might note, say, with a discussion about the cultural importance of eiders, that we still have some really cool discussions about eider down harvest, down collection, conservation concerns, some science investments, and a few other cool things to kind of close us out. So stay with us, folks. We will be right back.

Mike Brasher: Welcome back, everyone. We are here to conclude our part two on common eider species profile. And I've got Dr. Sarah Gutowsky and Kate Martin joining us again. And we are going to pick up with a discussion about the cultural importance of common eiders. Kate, you have a fair bit of experience and knowledge in this space. And so I'm going to turn this right over to you. And why are eiders and other sea ducks so unique from that indigenous community cultural importance standpoint?

Kate Martin: Yeah, I mean, in the Arctic North, imagine that you are living in a rural community and you subsist off of what you can hunt in most cases. And towards the end of the winter and early spring, your resources that you've gathered over that time are really starting to wane. You might not have as much in your ice cellar or your freezer. You don't have anything to gather off the land because there's still ice and snow everywhere. And that's when the birds start to arrive. And so they are kind of that first resource that people in those areas have for harvesting and for some new protein, something new, tasty that just arrived and is in good body condition. for harvesting. So that makes them very important in the spring and summer for hunting. And we will talk a little bit about harvest practices later, but usually folks in these areas are out whale hunting or hunting for seals and flocks of eiders come by and that's when they are able to get some birds down. of in conjunction with other activities. And that's culturally important to them because they've always subsisted off of these birds in that time of year. And they're not only using the meat, but they're also using sometimes the skins for making parkas, at least traditionally. And then also using down, which I think Sarah is going to talk about in a minute, but harvesting down from the nests in the summertime is very important to them too. Yeah, maybe we hand it over to Sarah for down harvest and then we can talk a little bit more about.

Mike Brasher: I think I had a couple of questions. Well, let me just ask this, and you may tell me it's better to save this for later, but I'm curious about the methods of take for, I guess, for IDERS. I'm assuming now we're talking about your standard shotgun, that type of thing, but are there any other sort of traditional methods of take that are still in practice that would be worth talking about, that you're familiar with?

Kate Martin: Yeah. I mean, yes, now it's very much what you would expect. A lot of people have boats, which makes it very easy for them to get out in these places, easier, and shotguns. Traditionally, there was also sometimes a harvest of sea ducks during molt. And I'm not sure that this does not really apply to eiders, but it's interesting in that when they were molting, there were some roundups of birds at molting lakes. So that would be more in late summer. early fall. But as I said, it's generally spring, summer, and in conjunction with other harvesting activities.

Mike Brasher: And then how do they preserve the birds for… Well, you mentioned ice cellar, but are there any other ways of still drying, smoking, those types of thing? I'm sure all are sort of in the portfolio of the way these are preserved.

Kate Martin: Yeah, and I'll ask Sarah too in a minute, but my experience has been mostly they're eating them then in usually a soup. Duck soup is a very traditional way to cook up an eider in the spring. And they're also, that's used a lot in celebrations too. Like I know in Utqiagvik when they do their whaling festival, excuse me, serving duck soup is important to that.

Mike Brasher: And forgive me for not knowing what modern, I guess, resources some of the indigenous communities may have. I know a lot of them will have power, right? But then are there others that are still living in very primitive fashions? Honestly, I have no idea. I have to apologize for saying my knowledge does not extend there.

Kate Martin: That's okay. No, I think not really anymore. I think folks have mostly started to or have congregated in rural towns and we call villages in Alaska. And that's where they have power and there's a school usually and resources like that, a clinic. And then they're using snow machines and boats to get out back on the land in some of their more traditional areas. And then sometimes they'll set up a camp, like a fish camp or something along a river. I'm sure you've saw some of those fish camps when you went out to Taco. So they're still kind of camping in areas, but not living in that more traditional way. And I guess I would just mention too that it It sounds like maybe it's easier for them in some ways to use these boats and some machines, but the prices of gas and how expensive it is for them to get out on the land now using those types of technologies is also a problem. It's good, but it's also bad, right? So it might limit them in some cases to being able to get out and harvest ducks.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, I think the fish camps were some of what I had in my mind. But then I think it's also good just to ask the question because there are a lot of people that are listening to this that have no idea what some of those villages and what some of the living conditions may be for some of those indigenous communities. And so it's worthwhile talking about. So thank you.

Sarah Gutowsky: I think it's worth mentioning too, at least in the Canadian North, that most communities have a community freezer, and that's a very common practice. And so anyone who hunts caribou or a narwhal, the meat from that usually goes into the community freezer, and then that is shared amongst the whole community for folks who can and cannot get out on the land. And I think that's a really cool part of Inuit culture. I'm sure it must be the same in Alaska.

Kate Martin: Yeah, a lot of sharing. So someone might go out and harvest a bunch of eiders all at once, but it's to share with their community and with their families and for those that don't go out and hunt anymore.

Mike Brasher: So Sarah, tell us about the down harvest. A lot of folks will have heard about eider down and how priced it is. Fill us in on what that's about and what are some of the neat stories that we need to tell?

Sarah Gutowsky: Sure. Yeah. I think we have images that we showed in the first half too, but it's worth bringing back up just of what an eider nest looks like. And I know that lots of waterfowl, the hens line their nest with their down, but eiders really, really line their nests with their down. So it's a giant fluffy down duvet right inside the nest itself. And that is an incredible resource if harvested responsibly and sustainably. There's a lot of communities around the entire circumpolar range of eiders that take advantage of eiderdown. Apparently eiderdown feathers are, I think, the warmest feather of any bird on the planet is what I've read before. And that doesn't surprise me because it is quite amazing. And so it is really, really valuable as well. if one were to sell Eiderdown, for example, to some of the large companies that make Eiderdown duvets or parkas, et cetera. I don't know, Kate, I think you looked up a stat here that the price of a down duvet can be more than 10,000 euros. Are you serious? Very, very valuable.

Mike Brasher: I was about to ask if either of you had an Eiderdown jacket or an Eiderdown duvet. I think I know the answer.

Sarah Gutowsky: I do not. But folks who live in the breeding range of some of these birds and have more traditional uses, not for selling or for gain, but for traditional use. So you can harvest eider down by finding eider nests, usually late into incubation, because that's when there's going to be the most down in the nest, and collecting about half of the down that's in the nest. And you can do that without impacting the nesting success of that hen. So it's super sustainable, super renewable resource, and you just cover over the eggs with the down that's left, and the female will come back and probably add more to the to the nest as well anyway and replenish what you've taken. So there are some communities that are really tied to local eider populations, like in the Velture Islands, for example, in Hudson's Bay. And we keep bringing up this little localized population, but it's quite a unique situation. And there's a really wonderful documentary called People of a Feather that was made about the Inuit of the Belcher Islands and their connection, their reliance on eiders, eider down, but also how those people and the eiders are both contending with changes in the environment in that area. So that's where those birds were reliant on the palenias, but also there's There's energy development happening in that region that's changing, ocean currents, and the salinity of the water, and that's all impacting how pollenias form and how the eiders use it, and also how the local Inuit can use the ice as well. So I would really recommend checking that documentary out. It's really powerful. And there's also, of course, traditional eider down harvest in parts of Northern Europe, in Iceland. So I was lucky enough to do some field work in Iceland on a small island on the West Coast. And this island has eiders nesting all over it, as well as all kinds of other bird species. And my colleagues in Iceland had been monitoring these bird populations for a very long time, for decades. And so whenever we're out on the island, we have an arrangement with the local folks who there's two families who kind of have traditional rights to the land, kind of split down the middle of this island. And we have agreements with both of those families that if we're walking around on the island doing our work you know, catching birds to ban them, looking for snipe nests is a big one. If you come upon an eider nest, you need to collect half the down from that nest for the local family who will then be processing that down. And so you always, whenever you're out on the island, make sure you have a bag with you so that you can collect eider down as you come upon eider nests. And it's really fun to see how these families have barns that are for eiderdown processing. So where they lay all of the down out and they clean it and they sanitize it before they sell it. And Icelanders, for that reason, really hold eiders in a very high regard. They're really culturally very important. and cherished, I would say, in Iceland, which is really cool. And one other place that's worth mentioning the importance of down harvest is in the St. Lawrence estuary in Quebec. There's a really cool program that's been ongoing for a long time. run by this group called Duvetnor. And what they do is they harvest down on islands that they own where eiders nest, and then they use the proceeds from that down harvest to put toward conservation of eiders on those islands. And even They're procuring more islands in the St. Lawrence estuary that have eiders nesting on them. And so they've actually been able to grow their footprint of protected eider islands. And they also have an ecotourism operation ongoing. So they have folks come out and stay in cabins on the islands. And all of the proceeds from all of that goes back again to the conservation of those islands for eiders. And it's a really cool sort of self-perpetuating conservation story. Anywho, Eider Down is valuable to all sorts of people all over the place, and it's really good stuff.

Mike Brasher: So the documentary, again, is People of a Feather. I found it here online. I have watched it. Very, very good. I have also been perusing Eiderdown jackets, Eiderdown duvets. What are we buying, Mike?

Kate Martin: This is our payment for the podcast, right?

Mike Brasher: Well, I was just going to say, Scott Stevens had always harassed me about getting him a jacket for all of his appearances. And I would always tell him that it's in the mail. And I would ask him, has it not arrived yet? It must have gotten lost in the mail. I could apply the same type of messaging to y'all. We'll get you an Eiderdown jacket as payment for this. It's in the mail. Can't wait. But just, yeah. But the prices here for the Eiderdown jackets are $5,000, you know, just a clean $5,000. Then the duvets are, for a standard king, regular $11,000, on sale for $8,300. So it's a Christmas bargain. So that's pretty cool. I would encourage folks, again, spend some time if you can think about it. Just, it's a neat little walk down the… I guess, down the market for Eiderdown and the products that you can find them in. And so, yeah, really, really cool story there. So thank you for that. Where do we go next? I got to get off of my Google search pages and back to something else. Anything else? I think we're onto Harvest now, even. onto harvest. Yeah, we did the eiderdown collection and harvest. And so, Kate, do you want to start with the harvest? I have a few stats here that I can supplement with if necessary when we get to it.

Kate Martin: Kate Sills, Dr. Yeah, I can start. I mean, I already kind of talked a little bit about subsistence harvest practices, but I would say that a large portion of the harvest for most of these species is subsistence harvest in the spring, summer, and other times, but less so recreational harvest, but you'll talk about that, Mike, in a little bit. kind of interesting in that harvest for eiters in Alaska during the spring and summer was not legal until fairly recently. So under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, we didn't open harvest until at least September even though people traditionally still harvested birds. Now it is legal in Alaska for rural residents to harvest eiders and other sea dachshund birds of other species. And it's governed by a really interesting group called the Alaska Migratory Bird Co-Management Council. And it includes Alaska Native representatives from all the regions in Alaska, the state, Department of Fish and Game, and then U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And they provide recommendations to the Service Regulations Committee. So it's kind of a neat, you know, now things are… legal and there's a kind of co-management and co-interest and concern about the populations. And then in Canada, it is entirely legal for folks to harvest during the spring summer. So in Alaska, just to get a sense of how many, right? So in Alaska, I mean, 4,000 to 5,000 combinators are harvested annually. Also, Pacific combinators winter in Russia in some cases, and so there is some harvest there in Chukotka and parts of Eastern Russia. In Arctic Canada, the numbers I found was maybe about 12,000 annually for all three subspecies. and about 8,000 for American Combinators, specifically in Atlanta, Canada.

Mike Brasher: Nicole Johnson 1 Just to clarify, are we still talking about subsistence harvest here? Okay, all right.

Kate Martin: Jessica Flake Yes, that's what I was talking about. Something kind of interesting, too, that we mentioned earlier is that a lot of the Canadian nesting Northern Eiders winter in Greenland. And we didn't really know how many until some satellite telemetry was done and folks learned kind of what those connections were between breeding areas in Canada and those in Greenland or wintering areas in Greenland. And there's a pretty high harvest rate of combinators in Greenland. And it's a little bit different because they're actually commercially sold in markets there. But once that information was known that those high harvest rates were really kind of affecting the population size, there were some restrictions put on it. The birds have rebounded at least initially. And so once kind of that information flowed in from the satellite telemetry and kind of understanding of the connectivity, There were some harvest management efforts made to try to deal with that, but it's kind of a unique situation in Greenland.

Mike Brasher: And so, Kate, should I go into some of the recreational, some of the support harvest now? So we can do that. And I think the way I would start is just by reminding folks there are four species of eiders. There are only two species of eiders for which that recreational harvest is allowed right now, that being the common eider and king eider. And so when you look in the annual report that the US Fish and Wildlife Service puts out for the migratory bird hunting activity and harvest, So, as you look through that table of estimated harvest, whether it be by state or flyway or the entire US, you find just an entry for eiders. And I guess what we'll say is the vast majority of that, maybe over 95%, maybe even more than that, of that harvest is going to be common eiders. There's small king eider harvest annually? I've got books around here. I could look that up. What are some of the best estimates of king eider harvest on a given year? Do you know that?

Kate Martin: Shannon Albrecht, Ph.D. : For recreational harvest in fall, winter, probably just 100.

Mike Brasher: Very few. Very few. Yeah. Paul Matzko, Ph.D. : Could you have to just go to incredibly remote places to find them, to harvest them, right?

Kate Martin: You know, maybe I should probably say I'm not very well versed in the Atlantic side, so maybe it is a bit higher over there. I'm thinking a lot about the Pacific side. But still, the majority is probably Combinator.

Mike Brasher: So, when we look at the eider harvest in general, as it's reported in those surveys, I actually went back to Baldessari's Ducks, Geese, and Swans publication from a few years ago, and it included some stats from the period 1999 to 2008. And it had reported 21,000 common eiders harvested in the US on average during that timeframe. And the majority of that harvest occurring in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In Canada, that publication reported average annual harvest over that timeframe of 19,000, yeah, in Canada, with the majority occurring in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. And what I will say based on kind of a more recent look at these estimates from the US, is estimated harvest still essentially all occurs, vast, vast majority of it occurs in the Atlantic flyway. Kate and you and I were talking earlier about there are some, there's a very limited harvest of Pacific common eiders on an annual basis, but the majority of the common eider harvest that occurs in the US is going to be in the Atlantic flyway. for the American common eider subspecies. And so if I look at 2019 and 2020, we're at between 8,000 and 15,000 for the US total. And then I think I went to another pair of years And it ranged from 1,500 to 6,500. So there's some pretty wide variation from year to year. That's not unexpected when you're dealing with an estimation process for a species of such low harvest in general, kind of given the way these harvest surveys are conducted. It's in that six to 20,000 range, I guess we're probably safe saying with some variation from year to year. Anything to add to that? I don't have more recent estimates from Canada, but I would not imagine them to have changed a whole lot. Any insight from the two of you?

Kate Martin: Not on the Canadian harvest side.

Kate Martin: I would just say for the Pacific that it's a very specialized hunt. And it's usually a guided hunt that people kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity and very expensive for folks to come out to these remote places to get their Pacific culminator. And so, yeah, you got to be very comfortable being uncomfortable hunting for common eider, and you have to have some resources in order to do that as well in the Pacific, at least.

Sarah Gutowsky: It's kind of the same in the Atlantic, at least in the States, in Maine and Massachusetts, in those areas, it's the same thing. It's a lot of a guided hunt. And then in the Canadian part of the range, it's It's definitely hardcore hunters who are going out for sea ducks.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. I do have a note here and I want to make sure I didn't misspeak for that harvest in Canada in the Atlantic Flyway. It says it's mostly of the Borealis subspecies. That's the northern, is that right?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, that's right. And that's going to be hunters that are in Newfoundland and in Quebec especially. And I think one of the other interesting things is because the hunt for common eider in the Atlantic in the US is more a sport hunting endeavor where folks want to get a male. And so the hunt tends to be more male biased. in the southern part of the wintering range for dresseri, and then in the northern part, it tends to be a little bit more equal because the motivation is a little bit different for going out for them.

Mike Brasher: Okay. Well, let's move on. Let's try to wrap this up, bring this into a landing. We're approaching two… Well, probably approaching two and a half hours of collective discussion on this species, which is awesome. Conservation concerns, and Kate, I'm going to start with you. What can you tell us here, like key habitat, population threats, management concerns? What are we talking about there when we think about common eiders?

Kate Martin: Kate Sills, PhD Yeah. We talked about quite a bit of this already. It's really about those coastal areas, near shore coastal areas, and the intersection between eiders and humans, right? Some of our concerns are shipping, oil spills in these areas, and for shipping it's mostly around oil spills, but also disturbance and also collisions. So eiders fly really fast, really low along the water, and when you have bad weather, they can fly into boats and it happens. I think it's maybe more common than we know. So it's one kind of individual effect that can happen. We talked about nest predation, fox and increasing polar bear predation on nests. And then wind farms are becoming more and more prevalent. And I'm not sure… That's more about displacement. So where these wind farms are going may be places where eiders like to be. And so if they're displaced from quality habitat, that would be our biggest concern there. Less of a concern about them actually hitting wind farms because they fly so low and the turbines are so high. So those are some of the things we, you know, probably the biggest thing right now that we are concerned about though is climate change and its effects to the marine habitats and the prey. And we talked a lot about that already. But I think one thing that we could maybe bring up now is an animation that we have. And I'll just give a little bit of background first. So there was a concern that Sarah talked about with declining combinator populations, especially around the Gulf of Maine and kind of changing redistribution. And no one knew what is going on, why is this happening? And so a partnership formed between Ducks Unlimited Canada, the Sea Duck Joint Venture, several academic institutions, Canadian Wildlife Service, to do a large-scale telemetry project on American Combinators. So mark them across the whole part of their whole range and use satellite telemetry to do that. That requires capturing birds and surgically implanting them with transmitters inside their body cavity and then antennas coming out their back. They look like little robo-ducks. And it's very difficult and logistically challenging to do all this. But at this point, the group has marked, I think it's 200 and I want to say 217 birds across the entire range. And so we wanted to show an animation of this. We don't have, we haven't been able to really dig into the data analysis yet, but we do have some location data that we can show you guys. I'm trying to pin this so I can see it. There we go.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. So what are we seeing here?

Kate Martin: So all of these individual dots are eiders that were implanted with satellite transmitters, and they're moving throughout the year. This is three years of time. And you'll start to see on the top, there's the date. And so it's this running date. Right now, they're moving into the wintering areas. And so you'll see they're really concentrating in that Cape Cod, Nantucket region. Now they're moving to the breeding areas again. It's turning into June. They're on the nesting colonies and then maybe headed to molt nearby and then heading back down in the winter to Cape Cod. And then you also notice those Magdalene Islands, which are right in the middle of that Gulf of St. Lawrence. It's another hot spot for the winter. And this is really helpful for us because we can start to see some of the areas that these birds are concentrating in. We knew they were there, but it gives us some idea of the connectivity between certain breeding colonies and wintering areas. There's a ton of information that we can get from these kinds of studies.

Mike Brasher: Roll that again, Chris. That was pretty cool. I saw at one point there was a bird that kind of went to the north about the time where you were talking about some of the birds leaving to go to a molting site. I wonder if that's what that was. I mean, that was an inland location though. That's kind of weird. It was just a single bird. I don't know what's up with that bird. Yeah, I've been wanting to dig into that individual. The other thing that I noticed here that's pretty cool is you see some of the pathways either north or south, some of them go overland and then some of them do sort of the sort of circumnavigate that piece of land. Any thoughts?

Sarah Gutowsky: The Gaspé Peninsula, yeah, of Quebec, north of New Brunswick. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, some do that overland flight and then others go around. We don't know why a bird would choose to do one or the other, but one of the things that we can look into, which is really cool because these birds have been implanted with these devices for three years continuously, we can look at individual repeatability, like how consistent is an individual and the routes that they take and what might drive that. There's so much, like Kate said, there's so much we can do with this information. It's a wealth of discoveries waiting to happen.

Mike Brasher: And is that work still going on, still marking birds?

Kate Martin: Yeah, I think at this point we've marked birds from all the areas that they wanted to. Expanding it a little bit into marking some northern combinators as well, kind of a separate project, but some additional telemetry data that will be coming out of northern Labrador. But I don't know of any other plans of additional transmitter deployments. I think they're finally all been deployed, but we're still getting data, right? So it's going to be a while before we have the full data set from all of these birds.

Sarah Gutowsky: We added a few more deployments this spring on the North Shore of Quebec and in… What was the other place, Kate?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, wintering birds in Rhode Island. And so that wouldn't have been included in that animation. So that's two more sites that we're adding to the pile of data there. So it's really exciting. But otherwise, it's been in the St. Lawrence Estuary on islands there, in Southern Labrador, on the West Coast of Newfoundland, off Nova Scotia, in the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, around Grand Manan, and in Maine. So all of those sites have been covered now, which is really exciting.

Mike Brasher: And then from a Ducks Unlimited standpoint and our involvement in conservation to benefit common eiders or sea ducks in general and the other eider species, as I mentioned previously, there's little that we can do from a habitat management standpoint or really a habitat restoration standpoint. There may be some of that that I'm not aware of, but what we can do is work with our partners to protect, in some cases, some of those most important sites. I'll be honest, I am not well-versed on on our involvement in discussions related to some of those issues. But I do know that we were involved in those partnerships, the Sea Duck Joint Venture. Kate, we have folks that work with you. Sarah, we supported some of your research as well, right?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yep, exactly. I had a postdoctoral fellowship with Ducks Unlimited Canada working on this project and that related Christmas bird count trends.

Mike Brasher: I do have some notes in one of our documents saying that we have been involved in the past and may still be, I don't know, in constructing and maintaining some of the eider nest shelters, which provides protection from aerial predators, egg predators during that vulnerable period of time. Are we still involved in that that y'all know of? Sarah?

Sarah Gutowsky: I'm actually not sure. I know that it was in an experimental phase for a little while there. I would have to reach out to my colleagues here to see if that's still ongoing. I'm not aware of I know that there were multiple iterations of the nest shelter design, and I don't know where we landed with what is best and what works best.

Mike Brasher: Nick McClellan, MD, PhD And who's our most likely DU Canada contact there? Nick McClellan, MD, PhD That'd be Nick McClellan. Nick McClellan. I was wanting to say Ian, but I knew that didn't sound right, but I had McClellan in my mind, so Nick. So thanks to Nick for all of his work on this. I hope he's listening. He can come on and correct us on any of these things if we need to. But yeah, I think a lot of this is centered, a lot of our knowledge and a lot of the work we do is just making sure we're understanding what's going on and that we can identify opportunities for interventions when possible, but a lot of times, obviously harvest is one of the levers that we can pull, and there is harvest management that occurs through that collaborative approach, and there are tweaks made to those harvest regulations periodically from a habitat standpoint, though there's, as I said, more limited options for us. But Nevertheless, we continue to invest in the science, first and foremost, to understand what's going on with the populations, and so that we can, as we've talked about here, identify the drivers of those changes, whether they be actual declines in a population, total population estimate, or redistribution. And then we have to, the same as we talk about with all other species of waterfowl, we have to constantly invest in our science to make sure that we keep track of the changes that the birds are making along with the way and the pace at which their environments are changing. And it's some of those far northern areas that are changing the most rapidly. And you two know about that better than anyone, right?

Sarah Gutowsky: I don't know, I'm not going to toot my own horn in that regard, but sure, yes.

Mike Brasher: You know better than me. Better than you.

Sarah Gutowsky: I don't want to say better than anyone, but better than you.

Mike Brasher: So anything to add to that from the way y'all think about conservation and the way we are going forward with how to benefit and make sure we're taking care of these birds?

Kate Martin: I might add that I think that DU plays a role in communicating the importance of continuing these monitoring programs and thinking about how changes in budgets and things could change that opportunity for us. And I think that, yeah, DU is really good at communicating the importance of some of these things that maybe are, you know, C-ducts are kind of off the radar for a lot of people, right? So continuing, like, amplifying that message and that that they're important and we need to be monitoring them and thinking about creative ways to move forward on conservation is, I think, a key role for DU.

Mike Brasher: Well, and this is one of those important communication platforms that we use and you two are great experts to bring onto this to help deliver that message. So as we close out, Sarah, I'll go to each of you. Sarah, I'll go to you first. Anything else that you want to offer related to this species to convey to our listeners and viewers?

Sarah Gutowsky: Well, I would just echo what Kate has said, and especially with how sea ducks are sort of out of sight, out of mind for most people, and fair enough. But say thank you for the opportunity to do a species profile on the common eider, because I'm biased for sure, but they are one of the most interesting ducks that we have in North America. So thanks, Mike, for the opportunity to do this.

Mike Brasher: And then, Kate, final word to you.

Kate Martin: Yeah, I would just echo what Sarah said. Thank you for the opportunity. It's nice to get to talk about sea ducks in this kind of venue. So thank you, Mike.

Mike Brasher: Thank you to both of you. I will also give one last plug to the Sea Duck Joint Venture website. You can go find it at seaduckjv.org. You can find all sorts of great information and resources related to not just common eiders, but all the different species of sea ducks. Kate and her group do a wonderful job with the information presented there. And it's been a tremendous asset and resource for everyone in the waterfowl community. So Kate, thanks for all that you do in that regard. And again, thank you. If nothing else, you have, the two of you have cemented yourself as viable candidates for a few other species. You're incredibly prepared. I appreciate it. And thank you for your willingness to do this and I'll be in touch in the future. So thanks to you both. Thanks, Mike. Thanks. A special thanks to our producer, Chris Isaac, who's been navigating all the video components here and been switching out the PowerPoint and the animations and so forth. We appreciate all of his work here leading up to and during this episode. Also thank Landon McCullough for the video editing that he does. And to you, the listener and viewer, we thank you for your time. We thank you for your interest in waterfowl. We thank you most importantly for your support of wetlands and waterfowl conservation. Y'all have a good one, y'all.