Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Hey, everyone. Welcome in. I am Dr. Mike Brasher. I'm going to be your host on this episode, and I'm pleased to have joining us remotely two of our state waterfowl biologists, Brandon Reiches from Oregon, Mike Szymanski from North Dakota. I'm going to get them to introduce themselves here in a moment, but we're going to be talking about pintails today, and specifically Pintail harvest regulations, it is a topic that has been in the news a lot, been in the news of waterfowl hunters a lot here over the past year. And we're going to use this episode to explain some of the details, to answer some of your questions about how this came to be, why a new pintail harvest strategy was even conceived, what kind of goes into it. And then there's a number of questions and concerns that some people are raising. Brandon and Mike are deeply involved in this process, and so we brought them in to help answer some of those questions. So, Brandon, I'm going to go to you first and just introduce yourself to our audience.

Brandon Reiches: Yeah, thanks, Mike. So, yeah, my name is Brandon Reischus. I'm the migratory game bird coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and what that really means is I'm kind of the state waterfowl biologist with morning doves and band tail pigeons out here in this flyway throw into the mix so all of the migratory upland game birds just to help kind of coordinate that that role for our agency kind of heard the cats within our field biologists and doing surveys things like that so.

Mike Brasher: Thank you, Brandon. You've actually been on an episode with us before. So people, I don't think you've been on a video episode with us before, but you have certainly audio where we've talked about a few things. Appreciate you agreeing to come back and talk about this important topic. And then Mike, same with you. You've been on an episode with us before. Thanks for coming back. For those that may be hearing your name, seeing you for the first time, tell us who you are and what you do.

Mike Szymanski: Sure, Mike. I'm Mike Szymanski. I'm the migratory game bird management supervisor for North Dakota Game and Fish Department. I oversee our program for migratory game birds, that's waterfowl, doves, cranes. Like Brandon, I sit on a waterfowl tech committee for He's on the Pacific Flyway, I'm on the Central Flyway Waterfowl Tech Committee, and then we also represent, Brandon and I both represent our respective tech committees and councils at other functions, higher level functions for harvest management.

Mike Brasher: Mike, that's actually a great place to go. And for a lot of people, a lot of duck hunters, goose hunters, waterfowl hunters will know that the harvest regulations that they adhere to, they hear about those through their states, their respective state in which they hunt. But there's actually a lot more that goes on beyond just the state's involvement and kind of announcement of what those seasons and what those regulations are. And you hinted at a couple of those on some of these larger groups that y'all work on. We don't have here any representative from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They have been on some episodes before with us. Today, we just got you two guys, but they're a crucial part of this process as well. So, for those that may not be aware, if you can, what's your thumbnail sketch of this co-management of migratory waterfowl that occurs between the states and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?

Mike Szymanski: Sure, I can hit on that. That's our legal responsibility to manage migratory birds in a, like you said, a co-management sense. So that's a memorandum of understanding between the states and the federal government through the flyway system to do that work. It's a special situation where, you know, we are really in control of everything. The state's working hand-in-hand with the federal government. So that means, you know, not only the Fish and Wildlife Service, but also like USGS in some of these strategies. And then, yeah, we're taking input from our conservation partner organizations like Ducks Unlimited and Delta Waterfowl and our hunting public and we bring all that into the flyway system to you know make sure that we're all on the same page with our managing geography our jurisdiction so you know as you can imagine trying to trying to deliver harvest regulations across you know, the continent and the United States is a little tricky. So we try to make sure we're on the same page. And the Central Flyway has 10 states that we're trying to all be on the same page with. And Brandon can talk a little bit about the Pacific Flyway.

Brandon Reiches: Yeah, so Pacific's really similar number to the Central. We actually have 11, but we actually share states between the Central Flyway. So Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico are kind of split down the continental divide with Montana kind of just divided right down the middle. So we share those states. But yeah, the whole flyway system is just a really good partnership and cooperative process with the service. has legal aspects to it, but as well as just that partnership allows us to work hand-in-hand with the service to develop the federal migratory bird hunting frameworks on an annual basis. And then those trickle down to what the states do to actually get their hunting regulations published.

Mike Brasher: You know, guys, the specifics of how waterfowl harvest regulations are set, how they've been set in the past, the entire history of that is a long, long topic. And we actually have a, I think it's a 16 or 18 episode series. on the history of waterfowl harvest management in North America. I think folks can go on the Ducks Unlimited website, probably our podcast website, and find that. And so it is rich in tradition, rich in history, rich in key players within the waterfowl management community, rich in science and data. And we're going to touch on some of these things as we go throughout this conversation, but we're not going to be able to cover all the details of harvest management in this episode, but we're going to touch on some of the more, some of the key elements of that. So I know a lot of folks have questions about this pintail harvest strategy, and I guess I should probably start using the right language. It's a new interim pintail harvest strategy. And you guys correct me if I get any of this terminology incorrect, because the words matter in how we're describing some of this. It's a very intentional process that is used to establish harvest regulations that is based on data. You're going to talk about some of those data streams. This is something that is very well thought out and very rigorous and As a result, sometimes it takes a bit of time, but the end result is something that's agreed upon by all the different flyways, and you guys can talk about some of that as well. But let's just start right from the top for people that may be wondering. Pintails are a species for a number of years. We've talked about how their population has declined. I think the 2025 State of the Birds report actually identifies pintails as one of seven waterfowl species that are recognized as, quote, tipping point species. Now, that's a designation given in that report to species whose populations have declined by 50% or more over the past 50 years. Much of the pintail population decline has happened in the past. Over the past number of maybe decade, two decades, we've seen that population generally stabilize a fair bit, and that's why the pintails in the State of the Birds report are in that lowest level, that lowest category of tipping point species. I want to provide that context as well. It is a species that has a lot of management and conservation concern around it. It's a species that has a lot of harvest management intention driven or geared towards it. So why, given that kind of backdrop and given the long familiarity with restrictive regulations for pintails, was there even a need or a discussion about updating pintail, the pintail harvest strategy. Brandon, you want to take that one?

Brandon Reiches: Yeah, sure. I think there's a couple things that come into play. First was there was just a lot of new emerging science that was leading to some questions about whether or not it was simply time to update that strategy. You can't really implement these things and let them run forever. You do need to take periodic looks at the strategies and maybe a full on revision or maybe a more of a minor update from time to time. We had that going, the initial pintail harvest strategy was implemented or instituted in 2010. And folks may remember that's about the time that we got our first kind of two pintail bag limit in quite some time. I think maybe in 2009 we got our first one, but then the strategy went into play in 2010 and we had a string of two bird bag limit years. That generally came about because of that strategy. At the same time, of course, pintails have always been a very important duck to Pacific Flyway waterfowl hunters and more so the Pacific Flyway, but Central Flyway is right there behind us with importance to their hunters with pintails. And that 2010 strategy actually did not include an option to have a higher bag limit than two. And that was kind of always under the skin of our waterfowl hunters. especially here on the West Coast states of Oregon, Washington, and California, you can see a lot of pintails and our hunters are really questioning. This is ridiculous. Sometimes, you know, we're seeing a lot of pintails. Why can't we even go to three if the conditions warrant? And so Pacific Flyway had kind of always been advocating that would be our preference to at least open that door and allow three when possible. But with the 2010 strategy not allowing it, we thought it was a good time and kind of started pushing a little bit and a good time to open that strategy up. and take a look with all the other flyways in the service about revising.

Mike Szymanski: See, yeah, Brandon makes a great point there about getting the two bird bag into play where, you know, we really didn't have contemporary data relating to that daily bag limit. So, you know, importantly with this revision, we were doing, you know, like Brandon said, a bunch of different things that needed to be done, one of which was getting up to speed with the new SEIS 2013 regulations where we set harvest regulations a year in advance. That wasn't implicitly part of the harvest strategy from 2010. But yeah, having that contemporary data from recent years with the two bird bag limit along with We've had a lot of banning data, we've had more population data, more US PON data, which was just more sparse than the previous strategy. So it was a great opportunity to get into a new modeling paradigm with updated data and more recent modeling strategies such as using integrated population models.

Mike Brasher: Mike, you mentioned an acronym there that I'll clarify. You said SEIS, that's Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. Did I get that right?

Mike Szymanski: Yeah.

Mike Brasher: Which is a federal process, federally governed process that you have to go through whatever you're making. I don't know exactly what triggers it, but you have to, when you're making some maybe significant regulatory changes, you have to go through an SEIS. Is that just a fair way of summarizing that?

Mike Szymanski: Yeah, triggered by NEPA and then that's the process to vet different options for making decisions and or delivering decisions as well. So yeah, we went through that 15 15 to 20 years ago was the process to figure out if we could deliver regulations a year in advance.

Mike Brasher: And the other thing that you mentioned, I'll probably come back to this a number of times, is that how we had new information, Brandon, you said it as well, it just seemed like the right time to reevaluate what the new data and the new modeling methods would allow us to understand with regard to pintail population dynamics and the effect of harvest in changing those annual population levels. And I think it's what I always think about in these discussions is when people say, yeah, but why are we doing this when we've had one bird pintail bag limits for X number of years? Yeah, but why are we doing this when pintail populations have declined by 50% or now 49% below their long-term average? You know, there was a time when, under the point system, when people could shoot 10 pintails, 10 Drake pintails. We've talked about that in some, in certain, uh, certain flyways. Um, we've mentioned that in some Ducks Unlimited magazine articles, but then there, there came some harvest restrictions, um, as populations declined. And we've been under a system of, of restrictive regulations for pintails the past few years, but. All during that time, new information is being gathered, new methods are being developed, and science, we use that information through scientific processes, and I guess that's the point, is that science is a process, not necessarily a set of hard facts that never change. Just as our understanding changed, that led harvest managers to go from a from that, you know, potential 10 pintails in the bag for when we were under the point system to something more restrictive, and then to AHM, and then to other regulatory changes through the years. Those are all based on discussions and analyses and data, and so it's captured in this larger, I guess, this larger discussion and larger activity of using science to improve our understanding. And so, I mean, that's, I was talking to Kevin Crye last week and he said, that's probably one of the most important things to convey to folks is that what we knew and the models that we had been developing and operating under. For the past 10 years, they're out of date. Uh, the data are, I mean, that data is still valuable, but we have new data and you guys are saying that it's your job along with the Fish and Wildlife Service to always be looking to update those things with a certain frequency. Is that fair? And that's, that's kind of where we are.

Mike Szymanski: Yeah. And I would say, you know, the biggest, the biggest part of that is we've got a lot more pintail banding data. since 2010, and like I said, the new analytical methods to create IPMs, integrated population models, that takes us another leap forward in our ability to deal with some of these assumptions. And yeah, science is working. You know science is working when your ability to deliver decisions evolves. And that's exactly what happened here. We had the ability to incorporate new data and handle it differently too. You know a big part of it is, you know, scaling harvest to population size that the previous harvest management strategy didn't have. fall flight component and we weren't scaling harvest with banding data. So basically the old strategy had this sort of assumption that whatever harvest you were going to expect from a certain bag limit size, was going to convey all the way through the population no matter how big the population was. And we kind of know that's not really how it works, right? When there's fewer birds, there's fewer birds encountered by hunters and numerical harvest will decrease, you know, in response to a harvest rate. So, you know, getting that incorporated into the new harvest management strategy was really important to opening up harvest opportunity for hunters.

Mike Brasher: So I want to go now to talk about some of the objectives behind this harvest strategy. Whenever you guys are dealing with these harvest management strategies, harvest models, etc. The outcome of those models is a decision or a set of decisions. And so you're making decisions to try to achieve something. You're not making decisions just because. You're making decisions in a certain way because the modeling and the process that you've used tells you that that decision is going to be the optimal or the best or whatever word that you want to use. to achieve a certain objective or set of objectives. You're not doing this willy-nilly. So, the same certainly applies with the pintail harvest strategy. I should say, the new interim pintail harvest strategy. And I want to talk about those objectives. So, Brandon, I'll kick this to you. We don't have to get in deep into the details, but at a high level, what are the most important objectives that kind of framed up this discussion of, okay, we're going to revisit the pintail harvest strategy. What are the objectives that are going to drive the way we build these models and then implement the decisions?

Brandon Reiches: Yes, you're certainly right there, Mike. When we do these AHN strategies, whether it's kind of a sub-strategy like Pintails or Scop or Black Ducks, or the overarching strategies like Mid-Continent Mallards or Western Mallards here in the Pacific Flyway, we do have a set of objectives that we develop in advance of the things that we're trying to achieve Buy these and then those objectives guide how how we work and where we end up and so first and foremost with all of our harvest strategies that overarching objective is to simply maintain the population in perpetuity. And so that's exactly what we have here for pintails. The first objective, and I'll read it right off, is conserve pintail populations in perpetuity. And because we don't want, through our harvest processes, to tip birds the other direction via harvest and start driving them down. That's not our goal here. And we recognize that harvest at some point is sustainable. And so the second objective underneath that is to provide high quality harvest opportunities commensurate with that population status. And so Typically, what we try to do is maximize or nearly maximize the annual sustained yield of that population. And so for the science nuts, that's MSY or maximum sustained yield. And that's the point at which population is its most productive, essentially. So those are our two overarching objectives for a lot of the harvest management that we do. So we want to conserve that population, and we also want to allow harvest on that population at the same time. There are a number of other objectives which come into play here, which shape our decision making, some of which are to minimize regulatory burden on the public. So that helps us or guides us in being not so reactive, right? So you can really split the hair as fine as you want to, but you might be changing regulations every year or every other year. And so that's not something that we desire through these. We also wanted to encourage hunter participation. We want to be able to communicate effectively with our strategy and all the way on down to making sure that we're providing for other uses of the pintail population, such as viewing and things like that. So a whole host of objectives that go into these, but the two main ones are really we want to conserve that population and then provide harvest opportunity on it.

Mike Brasher: Anything to add, Mike?

Mike Szymanski: Yeah, it's, it's, um, and Brandon hit on that first one. Great. I mean, it's, it's super important for everyone to remember that when, even when we add more liberal options to a harvest management strategy, it is in a sustainable manner. And what that does is it, it will then influence like the percent of time you might have a closed season or more restrictive seasons, things like that. So all of the objectives that we have are competing with each other. and we have to evaluate the trade-offs. And I think that's really what maybe doesn't get conveyed to the public as much is because it's really complicated. I mean, for one, you know, I think we evaluated 76 different strategies as part of the Penthill Harvest Management Strategy Development. And that's scenarios that are trading off, you know, whether or not you have three bird option or two bird option or you know different closure levels things like that. So all of those things compete against each other and then we're just trying to find like the right optimization of not not pushing something too far where we end up like you know, in the central flyways perspective, we were really trying to limit the amount of closed seasons, we're trying to limit the amount of seasons that only have a one bird bag, and we're trying to limit the frequency of change between seasons year to year. So we're really focused on that, you know, regulatory burden to the public. And, you know, we didn't, in some strategies, we do look more at the average breeding population size, but frankly, in the pintail harvest management strategy, there really wasn't much change. within the mean observed bee pop for pintails. So we really didn't work on that as a trade-off because it just didn't vary that much. Harvest within the realm of what we're talking about just doesn't change things. I think the best case scenario for the bee pop size, which would have been our absolutely most restrictive and most kind of egregious thing for hunters that we could do, only improved the mean observed BPOP by 14% above, like, our most liberal option for harvest, which we also didn't do.

Mike Brasher: So, Mike, the thing that allows you to make those statements is, and do the modeling, is the availability of the data. And in your discussions at the Flyway Council technical section level, data dominates pretty much every single presentation, every single discussion, every single model. You can't do the work that you do in developing these science-based harvest management model. without the data that make this possible. We know more now than we did 10 years ago because of the data that are collected on an annual basis. And we will know more, hopefully, in 10 years than we know now. because of our commitment to collecting data on both populations and habitat and harvest. And so I want you to talk about and emphasize the key data streams that make all of this possible and why they're so important to maintain.

Mike Szymanski: Yeah, Mike, that's our three horsemen for sure. You're talking the May breeding population habitat survey, our annual harvest surveys that are made of two components, the diary survey that hunters get, and then also the parts collection survey that make up the annual harvest survey, and our annual pre-season duck banding programs. Of course, we wouldn't have pre-season duck banding programs if we didn't have the bird banding laboratory either. A lot of key pieces at play here that make all of this work. And of course, our analytical support too from the Fish and Wildlife Service and USGS. Brandon and I, we're the state administrators on this type of thing. We know the biology, we know the science behind it, but we're not running the analytics. You know, that's Mike Runge with USGS, and Scott Bluer with the Fish and Wildlife Service. So very important, you know, parts within our federal partnerships that, you know, we rely on very heavily. And if we didn't have the data that we have. I mean, believe me, people don't even know how lucky they are, waterfowl hunters, for the data we have, you know, compared to other species management trying to do this across such a large geography with so many constituents spread out everywhere, you know, over a million duck hunters spread across the United States. It just wouldn't work. And if we didn't have those data streams available, those data you know, they're enabling us to make the best optimized decision that we can. And without them, our uncertainty increases dramatically and we would have to have more conservative harvest regulations available to hunters. There would be a loss of hunting opportunity.

Mike Brasher: You know, Mike, there's something else that some people will probably have picked up on, but I will point it out explicitly, is that two of those data streams that you talked about depend fundamentally on the participation of hunters to actually get that information back to us. The system itself is built as a result of the collaboration between state and federal agencies. banding data, band recoveries, band returns, as well as the harvest data. The hunters are the back end part of that. The ones that, all right, they're probably the, they're on the front lines, let's say. The back end is built by our state and federal agencies, but the hunters are on the front lines of collecting and reporting that data. So just an opportunity here, like we always like to take, to say thank you to the hunters that are absolutely pivotal critical in delivering the data that helps make up the work that you guys do. And I know you guys, those are your constituents, you work with them every day. And so it's probably second nature for you to thank those folks. But I just wanted to take a moment to do that. I will say, let's probably take a break right here, and then we will come back, and I have a series of frequently asked questions. We'll get into these, and then a few more things to discuss. So thanks, folks. Stay with us. Everybody, welcome back. I'm here with Brandon Reischus and Mike Szymanski, and we're talking about the Northern Pintail Interim Harvest Strategy that was announced last year. Now we're going to move on to a series of sort of frequently asked questions that I have gotten from a lot of our… Some of our staff, also some of our volunteers and members. And so I have these sort of written down here, guys, and I'm just going to toss them to you. And so the first one, Why do we, why do we keep referring to this and why do I kind of painstakingly try to remember to refer to this as a, as a new quote, interim strategy? Who wants that one?

Brandon Reiches: I can, I can take it. So, um, you know, as we've already talked about the, this whole process is, is a huge, um, cooperative effort between the states through the flyways acting as the flyways and the service. And we all have different objectives to some degree for how we do these things and what we want to see as the end goal. We all being, in this case, kind of the states through the flyways. And so we just wanted to, you know, you're certainly not necessarily concerned, but a little bit of the unknown of going to The new bag, the new potential bag limit when the conditions allow of a three bird limit. And there was quite a bit of discussion about whether we should just jump right in or whether or not we should kind of test drive this first. And so it's not an explicit experiment. The three pintail option, and if the model selects that, is the data guiding us to our selection. It's not jumping outside and saying, we're just going to test what a three bird does. But we wanted to make sure that we could sit back, watch it run for a couple years, and then reconvene and really have some thoughtful discussions about Is this operating the way that we anticipated and that the model suggested that it would? And so we decided to use that interim label to just explicitly tell us that that's what we're going to do. So after three years of experiencing a three bird bag limit under the new model, we will reconvene as a group. and just have these same discussions again, make sure that the model is operating as it's intended, and then make a decision about what to do going forward. So, those three years could happen the first three years, or it could take some time to get there depending on what the pintail status is in subsequent springs, and what the data streams that go into that model tell us what the optimal bag limits or the optimal regulation should be in coming years.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, and so it's, again, absolutely vital having those data available. the band recovery data, the harvest, the BPOP and habitat survey, that's what makes this possible. Because you can, as you said, there's a bit of an admission of uncertainty associated with that three bird bag. But it's like, you're going to continue to monitor the population. And then, so it's going to allow you to do two things, monitor the population as you go forward, but then also come back, as you said, after those three years with that three bird limit and just test, test your, your understanding again, applying that the, the philosophy of science is a process, not a set of known facts that never change.

Mike Szymanski: And yeah, just to add on a little bit there, Mike, the, um, the notion about this not being an experiment is really important. We hear a lot that AHM, Adaptive Harvest Management, and Duck Harvest Management is some kind of experiment, and it's not. It's a decision-making process. And, you know, within Pintail, harvest within this model, we're actually using partial compensation. So we're in no way trying to evaluate whether, you know, harvest is additive or compensatory. We're acknowledging that there's some partial compensation that fluctuates from year to year. And the other part about this data stream coming in is that we just don't have contemporary data in a three-bird bag. So all of the simulations show us kind of what we think would happen is that there's really not that big of an increase between a two-bird and a three-bird bag in realized harvest. You know, the simulations are showing something like a 8% increase, which kind of tracks. It's a lot different than what people really think. People assume that if you increase the bag from two to three, a 50% increase, you're going to have this massive increase in harvest. And a lot of times that just doesn't come to fruition. So nonetheless, we do need to get that real world data with a three bird bag and reevaluate this strategy.

Mike Brasher: I can tell you guys with a high degree of certainty that a three bird pintail bag is going to have zero difference in my pintail harvest because I didn't shoot a single pintail this past year. And I think that's part of it. That's one of the reasons why you don't see why it's not a linear… Well, it's probably the reason why it's not a linear relationship between an increase in the bag limit and the harvest that results from that. is because the number of opportunities that people have for a two bird or for a two pintail bag or a three pintail in the bag type of day are limited outside of certain situations. Brandon, you mentioned the Pacific Flyway. Certainly, the Central Valley of California is an area where they have more frequent opportunities for pintail harvest, and so going from a one to a three will make a bigger difference for them. It won't make a big difference. It won't make any difference for me, let me just say. So, just something to point out there, and I would challenge people to think about that themselves. and even have that discussion around the around the duck camp like how many times would your pintail harvest have changed if you'd been able to shoot three versus one. I guarantee you for most people it's not going to be very often.

Mike Szymanski: And generally speaking Mike when we're talking about impacts of harvest and and what manipulating regulations does to overall harvest it's it's always days in the season that matter more than the actual bag limits. So you know, small changes in the number of days have a bigger impact than small changes, like a much bigger impact than small changes in daily bag limits.

Mike Brasher: We've touched on this, I think, or hinted at it a couple of times, but just for those that don't, that aren't aware, as aware of this new interim strategy, what are the three, or what are the bag limit options under this strategy? Brandon?

Brandon Reiches: Yeah, so it's simple. It's one, two, or three. And, of course, there's a closed option, too. We would hope that we would never get to that point. But, yeah, depending on the model outputs, the strategy's model outputs, at the end of the year, once all the BPOP data things are entered in, it will spit out one bird for a full season, two birds for a full season, or three for a full season.

Mike Brasher: Now, I know there's some nuance here that one, two, or three, I'm going to try to explain this. You guys tell me if I get it wrong. That one, two, or three option is going to be for the Pacific, Central, and Mississippi. And during any year when the pintail season is open as called for in the pintail strategy, then the Atlantic Flyway will have a three pintail limit. And so I've gotten some questions about why is the Atlantic Flyway fixed at a three pintail bag? anytime the pintail season is open. Mike, what's the answer to that?

Mike Szymanski: Sure. We, you know, in our efforts to try to simplify hunting regulations, you know, across the country, really, you know, we recognize that the Atlantic flyaway just isn't a huge player in pintail harvest. In fact, their entire flyaway is harvesting, I think, probably even less pintails than North Dakota does as a state. So we wanted to try to provide them with some opportunity to simplify the regulations a little bit. And, you know, of course we factored that into all of our trade-offs and evaluations of these different strategies that we looked at. And it really didn't move the needle on anything. It wasn't going to cost the other flyways anything to allow the Atlantic Flyway to have a three bird flat bag as long as the pintail season was open. It really didn't affect anybody else's opportunity. So it was just the right thing to do in that situation.

Mike Brasher: I was looking back at one of the documents that was put out last year, and I think the number was the Atlantic Flyway accounted for on average about 3.3% of the U.S. pintail harvest. So, kind of to your point. Again, though, it's the data that enables you to make those decisions confidently and say, We can simplify regulations for the Atlantic Flyway without any worry of it, A, harming the pintail population, or B, taking away harvest opportunity from other flyways. Data makes all of these decisions possible. Okay. So another question, and Brandon, you've already mentioned this in terms of a closure threshold, but Mike, I know there is a little bit of a nuance here as well. So is it, What is this, we'll call it a, I'm going to call it a closure threshold whenever I ask the question, but you correct me as you want. What is the closure threshold in the interim strategy and how does it compare to what was previously in place?

Mike Szymanski: Sure. That closure threshold for our interim strategy is 1.2 million. And that is a, that is a closure threshold where we do actually close at that point. We've had previous strategies. The strategy that was used prior to 2010, I think, had a 1 million bird closure level. The strategy that was used starting in 2010 was a closure threshold of 1.75. However, the way that one actually worked was the season had to be open above 1.75 million in the BPOP for pintails, but the real closure threshold was actually quite a bit lower than that. As it came out of the modeling, it was more like 1.5 million. So dropping down to 1.2 million wasn't really a big deviation from what we've been using in the past. In fact, it was pretty much right in the middle of where we've been between 1 and 1.5 million. And again, that's where we went to think about what was acceptable from a population level standpoint, what we thought would be acceptable to the hunting public, bird watchers, all of that, but then also, you know, eliminate some of the risk for hunters to be, you know, facing a closed season on pintails.

Mike Brasher: One of the big questions that I've gotten more than any others, and I suspect you have as well, is, does the new interim strategy have a sex restriction? If it doesn't, why not? Brandon?

Brandon Reiches: Yeah. So the answer is, is it does not. And, you know, one of the things that we've already touched on a lot, well, there's two things we've touched on. So we just talked about bag limit frequency and how often hunters attain these various bag limits. And the bottom line is it's not often. And so then to further restrict that bag limit with a sex restriction, in a lot of cases, wouldn't have any impact whatsoever. The only places you might see that impacts, a potential impact, would be in your high harvest pintail states, such as out here in the Pacific Flyway or maybe Texas. When we look at the model and how the model uses predictions of harvest and all of that information that we've gathered, there simply isn't a reason to do so. Putting a sex-restricted bag limit in and reducing the hen harvest to some small degree would have no effect on subsequent breeding populations, or at least not a measurable effect on subsequent breeding populations. So when we tie that back to our explicit objectives that we had up front, one of which was to minimize the regulatory burden on the public. which is minimizing the complexity of the regulations, that feeds right into that too. So, you know, while we certainly, you know, admire folks' desire to feel like they're making sure that we're doing the right thing, we believe we are. And if we want to have complex regulations, we want to make sure that it's having a desired goal or a desired impact. And in this case, it simply wouldn't be. Yeah.

Mike Brasher: And, you know, to that issue of complexity, I've oftentimes, so Ducts Unlimited is not involved in the regulation setting process. I do, however, attend Flyway Council tech section meetings and so on to stay familiar and aware and educated about some of these processes. And even like, so in those meetings, as well as whenever I'm looking at waterfowl regulations, there are a number of them. And this example can be, or this situation extends to a lot of different wild game harvest strategies. There are some that you can look at, some states, some species, et cetera, that are incredibly complex. And I've oftentimes imagined that what we want to avoid is complexity that gets to a point where we feel like we as hunters have to have this little wristband on the way you see with quarterbacks in the NFL that have to look up what's happening here and there. And I can tell you, even now, there are some duck regulations that are that are kind of complicated or that definitely add some complexity whenever you have a species-specific restriction that allows you to harvest that bird, that species, only during a certain time of the season. You got to know about that. You got to be able to identify the bird. You got to remember Where am I date-wise in the season? Am I within the first 10 days or am I beyond the first 10 days? Can I harvest it legally? Can I not? There are others where depending on which, which, what, what time of the season you're in, you can harvest one, one scop or two scop. And I'll be honest, a lot of times I've, I've have said, you know what? I'm going to play it safe. I'm not going to harvest scop. I'm just going to avoid that because I don't want to misremember what day it is or what I can, uh, what I can shoot. So the idea of, of complexity and wanting to kind of avoid that, I certainly appreciate. Uh, and again, like I said a little while ago, the difference between a one pintail, um, and a three for me, uh, it's going to be essentially nothing. And, and if I do have a chance to shoot two or three, I'm going to focus on the drakes just because they're beautiful birds, and I'd rather have that in hand than a hen. And you've kind of found some of the same things, I guess, with some of the evaluations.

Mike Szymanski: Mike, just to hit on a question that might be scratching people's brains on this is, what about mallards, right? We have a hen restriction on mallards. Again, it gets back to this, you know, bag limit size and what we're actually dealing with. And, you know, Mallards have a larger bag limit size, you know, four, six, seven, depending on what flyway you're in. Five in the central flyway, you know, depending on what country you're in, I suppose, too. But, you know, we're already, we've already cut that down to two versus, like, five Drake Mallards in the central flyway. So the cut's already there. you know certainly if we didn't have a hen mallard restriction and it went up to five it might matter but it might not matter as much as you think. Like we simulated this stuff back in 2018 as part of our revision of adaptive harvest management for mid-continent ducks and you know what we saw was increasing the the hen mallard bag limit in the mid-continent the central and Mississippi flyaways from two to three only increased harvest like not even four percent And the net effect on the meat observed breeding population size was only 2%. So, you know, with that kind of knowledge and history of looking at these data, it was a no-brainer to not try to implement a sex-specific regulation for a species that already has its bag limit cut down pretty low.

Mike Brasher: And as it stands right… Oh, go ahead, Bren.

Brandon Reiches: Sorry, Mike. And the other thing too with pintails here that we're dealing with is we know we have a somewhat male-biased population. So just by random chance, hunters are gonna… Encounter more drakes and and so even if they were just randomly shooting pin tails, which they're not hunters are trying to select for drakes to some degree The chances of encountering drakes are even higher. So it just just by default those hens are buffered um from harvest and and so yeah, and just you know coming from like my state is one of

Mike Szymanski: many states I'm sure that kind of goes by the motto, you don't regulate what you can just have people do on their own. And I think waterfowl hunters are generally pretty good about trying to select drakes. And we just don't want to make a situation where it's super costly to the hunter to, you know, if they should make a mistake. because it just doesn't help the breeding population. It's too much risk for the hunters. So, you know, of course we always ask hunters to go out there and, you know, if they're so inclined, perform voluntary restraint and try to shoot drakes only. It certainly makes it an interesting twist to the hunt, but we just don't want to have it be some violation risk hanging over people's heads.

Mike Brasher: Okay, so we are recording this episode in March of 2025. The interim pintail harvest strategy that we're talking about was approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Regulations Committee in May of last year, 2024. Then in August of 2024, the breeding population survey results came out. And then you look at those results, you guys do your thing, and the Fish and Wildlife Service does their thing of comparing the numbers from that report to the process laid out in that new interim pintail harvest strategy. And when you combine those things, what was recommended for the 25, 26, duck hunting season coming up was for a three pintail bag limit. So the recommendation for that bag limit is kind of going through the motions right now, going through the regulatory process, the publication process and the federal register and et cetera, et cetera. Then the states will kind of promulgate their selections here a little bit later in the year. My question, because people, when you think about adaptive harvest management, mid-continent mallard adaptive harvest management, we've gotten people pretty, a lot of people pretty well educated on the two data points that feed into that simplified matrix for selecting restrictive, moderate, or liberal frameworks for mid-continent mallards. What are the two metrics that we look to when selecting what will be the bag limit for pintails? Mike?

Mike Szymanski: Sure, it's the breeding latitude, and then the population size.

Brandon Reiches: Yeah, Mike's right. The matrix includes the mean breeding latitude, what the pilots and the biologists observe in the spring, where those pintails are on a north-to-south gradient on average, and then that bee pop size. And it looks at both of those things, and that's the simplified matrix.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, so I guess the point was that people, we've done a good job getting people to understand how the data from these different surveys are used for mid-continuum allergy, and the same process is going to be in play here for pintails. So we don't have to get into all the specifics behind why mean latitude and the BPOP, how those were selected. That's kind of a conversation for a different day where you evaluate different aspects of And what are the most effective predictors for selecting among this sort of simplified range of regulatory alternatives, bag limits in this case, but just to kind of give people an idea there of what we'll be looking at kind of going forward. And so, I guess to reiterate, we have this coming up, the interim strategy is in place, the recommendation is for that three pintail bag limit in the 25-26 season. Mike, as you were looking through any of those papers, did you find anything else that we need to clarify here?

Mike Szymanski: Well, I think it's just maybe an expectation for hunters in that while we do have a one, two, and three bird option, you know what we've seen in the simulation so far is that the occurrence of a two-bird bag probably isn't going to be that often.

Mike Brasher: So most of those things to that point is it will either be a well simulation wise we don't know don't know can't say with with high confidence we can't say factually what the frequency is going to be going forward because that will be determined based on data that's yet to come in.

Mike Szymanski: But they'll get updated every year.

Mike Brasher: But the simulations were suggested that it would sort of oscillate between a one and a three bird bag. And we've kind of talked about that in the AHM context as well for midcontinent mallards, why it takes. You kind of have to land on just the right spot to be at a moderate package for moderate framework for mid-continent mallards. And so, uh, the same will be the based on, on the simulations would be expected for this pintail strategy. And Mike, my understanding or Brandon, whichever wants to take this is that that is because. It really takes going from a one bird to a three bird to make a meaningful difference in harvest, to actually tell that model to select a different package. The difference from a two to a three bird bag, and the difference between a one and a two bird bag is so small that it's very difficult for it to say a two bird bag is the one that's gonna be the best option. So it's typically selecting either the one bird bag or the three bird bag. Again, that speaks to the limited effect of this bag limit on overall harvest. Am I getting that right, Brandon?

Brandon Reiches: Yeah, that's correct. And you could even take it further that not only just the effect on the observed harvest, but then the effect on the observed population, so how that harvest impacts the subsequent populations between two and three, just it's not there.

Mike Szymanski: And we'll continue to re-evaluate, you know, how that looks as we get more data with a three-bird bag limit.

Mike Brasher: Okay, I'm looking here at my list and I think we've gone through pretty much all of the questions. Have I, you and I, the three of us could continue to talk about this in detail, but I want to avoid some of that. What are the, or are there any other sort of key pieces of information that we want to make sure our hunters have with them that they understand about this strategy? Mike, anything from you? Did I miss something?

Mike Szymanski: Well, there's one thing that I think gets confused amongst biologists. I don't know that the public necessarily sees the frequency of occurrence of the different bag limits. You know, one misconception is that the frequency of occurrence over simulated time gets confused with the probability of a season occurring the next year, and that's absolutely not what it is. So if we're saying, I'm just going to make up a number that a liberal one option occurs 53% of the time, that means like 53 out of 100 years, not that we have a 53% chance of hitting that from this year to next year.

Mike Brasher: Brandon, any, any final thoughts, any other key pieces or key aspects of this strategy, the strategy that we want to make sure folks are aware of?

Brandon Reiches: Nothing that comes to mind, you don't want to kind of down into the minutia or anything like that. I, you know, the, the bottom line is that. We as a collective enterprise have a ton of data behind us now, right? BPOP surveys going back to the 1950s and banning information going back almost as long. And so I think we're just in a really good spot data-wise right now to be able to make these informed decisions with a pretty high degree of certainty that we're making a good decision. And we're gonna need that to continue into the future. It's gonna be vitally important to be able to keep doing business the way we are, not just for pintails, but for all of the waterfowl species that we manage. And so it's just been a rewarding process to kind of see this come to fruition using all of these new techniques and this new information. to be able to hopefully provide a better regulatory framework for the population itself, both the waterfowl population and our hunter population.

Mike Szymanski: So the other thing, Mike, with this that we want folks to remember is just that Habitat is our biggest concern with these birds. Harvest certainly plays a pretty big role in how we manage these species, but when it comes to affecting pintail populations, it's habitat conservation in the U.S. prairies, both wetland conservation and upland nesting habitats. They nest in grass. And I guess the other thing I wanted to add that I maybe hit on a little bit before is that Brandon and I were part of a larger pintail harvest management working group. So we were a subset of representatives from each flyway. Each flyway had two representatives on this working group. So we worked with a lot of folks to get this done over the last, well, geez, it was six years. But yeah, it was a lot of us, you know, going through these discussions and providing input.

Mike Brasher: Thank you, Brandon. Thank you, Mike. Uh, I will echo those thank yous to, to you guys, to all, to everyone in the Flyway Councils, Flyway Councils, Flyway Council Tech Sections, um, Hunters, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Uh, they are at USGS, Bird Banding Lab, all of those groups that make this possible. And of course we can't leave off our Canadian counterparts with the Canadian Wildlife Service, present provincial biologists that also assist with, with a lot of this work. It truly takes a concerted, collaborative effort across state, federal, provincial agencies, and a lot of non-profit organizations contribute in some of this as well. And then, of course, the hunters also in the crucial role that they play. So everybody gets a big thank you and you are an absolutely essential part of this. I will say that as people are listening to this or watching this, I'll leave folks with this. If there's a question you have that we didn't answer, send it in to us at dupodcast.ducks.org related to this interim pintail harvest strategy. We're doing this now here in March. We'll have other opportunities to talk about this if the need arises as we get closer to the 25, 26 hunting season. But for now, we thank you for joining us. Thank you for spending your time with us. Also, I'll thank our folks here in the studio, Chris Isaac and Rachel Bennett. Appreciate all the work that they do and stay with us for future episodes of the Ducks Unlimited podcast. So thank you folks.