Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Hey everyone, join us on today's episode as we sit down with Mike Runge of USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center to hear about the storied history of this place and all the scientists that have come through it in contributing to science and management of waterfowl populations, migratory bird populations, and much more. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I am going to be your host on this episode, Dr. Mike Brasher. I'm also pleased to be welcoming our co-host, Kayci Messerly. Kayci, welcome.

Kayci Messerly: Hey everybody, nice to be back.

Mike Brasher: And we are on location in Laurel, Maryland, in a very famous and historic place to waterfowl hunters, waterfowl scientists. A lot of other people that care about environmental science and the science of our natural world, and that is the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. And we're sitting down with Dr. Mike Runge to talk about sort of the history of Patuxent and some of its contributions to the things that our audience cares about. It's prominence in this larger space of science for migratory birds and waterfowl and so forth. Mike, welcome. It's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks. Pleased to be here. So, we're going to do a little bit of introduction. A lot of the folks that will be, especially our professional colleagues, will know who you are, but a lot of our listeners won't. So, tell our folks who you are, what role you have, who you're with here, and what some of your areas of interest are.

Mike Runge: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, Mike Runge, I'm a research ecologist at what's now called the Eastern Ecological Science Center. It's been called the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center for decades, if not almost a century. Most of what I do, I'm a quantitative ecologist, so I use mathematics and statistics to analyze wildlife populations. A lot of that is waterfowl. I also work on endangered species, a whole bunch of other stuff. But what I like to think about is how do we take the science we have, integrate it in a policy context? Because the decisions we make about wildlife management are about science, but they're also about values and the things that we care about as a society. So how do we bring both of those things together and how do we use the tools of decision analysis and quantitative ecology to help us make good decisions for wildlife management?

Mike Brasher: The decision part of that is, I'm not surprised that you would emphasize that because that is what our lives are made up of. It's a series of decisions. We make decisions every day from when we, what time we wake up, what we're going to do, how we're going to get from point A to point B. But then there are a lot of other decisions affecting animal populations. Waterfowl harvest, we've talked about this on a number of other episodes, waterfowl harvest involves a lot of decisions. And to your point, You and others, and we will get into this as we go through the conversation, have played pivotal roles in using science to learn about waterfowl populations, to learn about the effects of harvest on waterfowl populations, to inform the decisions that are made regarding hunting seasons, hunting regulations, and this place right here and the people at Patuxent If you're a student of waterfowl science, the names that have come through here, it's incredible. There's probably not another place like it. And that's what we wanted to do today with you is sit down and talk about the history of this. There's a document, Casey and I have joked about this a number of times here over the past couple of weeks as we prepared for this. How many pages is it? 272 page document. We will link to it in the show notes. I think it was the 75th history that it was celebrating. I believe that document, if I remember correctly, and it outlines in great detail all of the tremendous work that has been done here. And yeah, so we're gonna get right into this, and hopefully people will gain a greater appreciation and just awareness of the importance of places like this. The legacy of places like this, and there are others across the country that have done the same thing in other areas. So, what is so special about Patuxent Wildlife Research Center? And why should duck hunters and other listeners care about it?

Mike Runge: So the thing I'd start with is, waterfowl harvest management in the United States, in North America, is the envy of the world from the standpoint of wildlife management. Why is that? And I don't know to what extent your listeners really sort of understand that other countries around the world look to this example of wildlife management as sort of a model and as inspiration. And some of that, a lot of that comes from work that's been done at Patuxent. So in this policy science interface since the 1930s. And there's a lot of scientific pieces that have come from the work that scientists at Patuxent have done that have allowed that management framework to develop. Happy to talk about for hours about all the elements of that that go into that. But I think to me, it's exciting to be here because of the legacy of Patuxent. the science that led to waterfowl harvest management and how that serves as an example in a lot of other fields in a lot of other countries around the world.

Mike Brasher: And so here in this building where we are, there are a lot of other people. There's the bird banding lab. We're going to be talking with folks running that program here on an episode we're going to be recording after this. There are folks that lead a lot of the analytical work, logistical work of the breeding bird survey. What are some of the other kind of more prominent, like that some of our folks would know that are housed here in the Eastern Ecological Science Center or looking back through time that would have, that people may have heard about?

Mike Runge: So, we'll probably get into all the history of different agencies in a little while here, but I need to mention one thing right off the bat is right now, There's co-location of two agencies, Fish and Wildlife Service, which is the management agency at the federal level for waterfowl harvest management.

Mike Brasher: Talking U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. U.S.

Mike Runge: Fish and Wildlife Service, right. And U.S. Geological Survey, which is a science arm of Department of Interior. We all used to be one prior to 1996. We were all part of Fish and Wildlife Service. We can talk about it if you want. There was a split in 1996. And so you have both the science and the management arms. So collectively in those two groups, you have not only the bird banding lab, as you mentioned, that's on the USGS side. You have the surveys, the aerial surveys that are run that count ducks and count ponds, right? That there's people here that are involved in that. You have the surveys, the hunter surveys. The wing bee, those kind of surveys, those are run out of here. There's folks here at Patuxent on the Fish and Wildlife Service side that we're co-located with. On the USGS side, you also have folks like me, quantitative ecologists, that are doing a lot of analysis stuff. There's also quantitative ecologists in Fish and Wildlife Service that do a lot of analysis. We have people that do a lot of other bits of science that are related to waterfowl management, not necessarily harvest management, but habitat management and other aspects of understanding ecology of waterfowl. There's also work on environmental contaminants. Some of that's done thinking about waterfowl, some just thinking more broadly about environmental contaminants. Yeah, a bunch of other scientific realms we can get into.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, well, one of the other things that I'll point out, and I know you've become a leader in this space, and that is decision analysis. Talk about the importance of that.

Mike Runge: Yeah, so for me, I guess, and for Patuxent, I think where this came about was when adaptive harvest management came into force in the mid-1990s, right? People got really excited about this as a structured process for making decisions of a particular kind. harvest management decisions that are repeated every year. And so we started to build up, there was interest in that, and there was interest in expanding that capability to other examples. Where else can we do adaptive management? So we built up some staff in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and then started to realize that There's a broader field of decision analysis in which adaptive management sits as one kind of decision analysis, but there's a broader field. And so we started to expand out into a lot of different areas. I mean, pretty much all the areas that Department of Interior works on. So how do we make decisions about endangered species? How do we make decisions about water management with Bureau of Reclamation? How do we make decisions about land management with Bureau of Land Management? How do we make decisions about Um, you know, national parks are complicated, right? You've got, you've got natural resources that you care about. You've got historical, um, features of national parks that are important and you've got visitor resources. How do you balance all that kind of stuff? So we started to think about. What are all the wide range of decision analysis tools that can help managers and Department of Interior sort of sort through these difficult scientific and policy decisions?

Mike Brasher: And so we hear fairly often, I think sometimes it's tongue-in-cheek, sometimes it's a It's a legitimate belief that science makes the decisions. It's like, you'll hear people say, well, just follow the science. Well, what does the science tell you to do? Why is it not that simple?

Mike Runge: Yeah, it's a great question and it is. It bugs me sometimes when people say, like, we're gonna make the decision based on the science. What does science do for you? Science can… Say you're choosing among a bunch of different options you've got for, say, management of a refuge or something. Science can help you… Take the available knowledge and say, if you do action A, here's what we think is going to happen on a whole bunch of array of objectives. Here's what it's going to do to waterfowl. Here's what it's going to do to shorebirds. Here's what it's going to do to upland game birds. Here's what it's going to do to visitor satisfaction. Here's what it's going to do to native plant communities. Option B, what does the science tell us about what's going to happen to all those outcomes for option B, C, D? You've done all the science. You know, you've sort of predicted for each of those alternative management strategies what's going to happen, what you think is going to happen based on what you know for all these seven or eight or nine objectives. I don't know. It depends. It depends on how much you care about, like, you're probably not going to find one alternative that's going to knock it out of the park on every one of those objectives. So how do you balance them? You know, in the federal and state and government management, you got to go back to the legislation that created that refuge. What was it created for? What are the other laws that govern it? What is the public sentiment about what's important for that refuge? And then the refuge manager's got to balance all that stuff and say, I'm going to choose alternative C because it does pretty good for waterfowl, but it's really great for shorebirds. It allows visitor access, whatever. It's not as good for native plant communities, but that's offset by this other thing. There's an endangered species. Whatever, however you have to balance those objectives. Science can't tell you how to balance those objectives, right? That's a value judgment. Because the objectives are created by the people. They're created by people, and they're created by laws, and they're created by public sentiment. I mean, I think one of the things I really appreciate about working in the government is the public trust responsibility. And government agencies take this really seriously. That's like, I'm not involved. I'm not a decision maker. I don't make decisions for refuges or for harvest management. I help them sort through the difficulties. But a refuge manager isn't making a decision for themselves, right? They're making a decision on behalf of the public for trust resources that the public, through their elected representative, said were important. And so we're thinking about, yeah, what's important to people and how do we make decisions that achieve those objectives that are important to people.

Mike Brasher: I want to ask you one other question, I want to back up a little bit, and then I'm going to hand it to Casey for the next question. So we've been here, this is day three now, for Casey and I to spend some time here in this hallowed ground, is what it feels like. And it is, in a lot of respects, for those that care about and are aware of the work that has been done here and his contributions. You mentioned, and I alluded to it, this idea of what does the science tell us. In your view, what is science? How do we, do we do a good enough job telling people what we mean by science?

Mike Runge: Yeah, it's a really hard question. There's a lot of debates right now about who gets to say what science is and what are the different ways of understanding science. To me, and this is a particular viewpoint, We're humans walking around the world, there's a lot of data coming in. We observe a lot of stuff. How do we take those observations and make sense out of it? How do we begin to tell a story about the causal chains, the causal mechanisms in the world? Why, when we observe something, why is that happening? What are the things that led up to it? Particularly because we also want to say, if I do this action, what's the likelihood that some outcome is going to happen? So understanding—to me, you know, science is taking all that data that we've collected, that has been collected in generations before us, integrating that all to have an understanding of how the world works. It's always imperfect, right? We never know exactly how the world works. We don't have perfect knowledge of those causal mechanisms, and they might change, right? And so we have to have ways of taking observations, comparing it to what we've seen in the past and the hypotheses we've developed in the past, seeing whether that still holds true. And then seeing how that understanding of how the world works influences our decisions.

Mike Brasher: So I'm going to follow up and then I'll pass it to Kayci So the other day I offered the idea that I think of science as a process. Is that fair?

Mike Runge: Sure. Sure, I mean there's, we're always getting, there's always new information coming in, right? And there's always new techniques for analyzing, processing that information. So the fact that we never have perfect knowledge, yet we're always seeking to improve it. And if the system's changing over time, for whatever reason, and we have to chase that as well, yeah, there's always a process of getting new information, reconciling that with what we've seen in the past, developing new methods for gathering information, for processing information, for understanding what's going on, yeah. Definitely a process.

Mike Brasher: Perfect example of that here recently has been… The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's adoption of the new interim pintail harvest strategy. We're sitting across the desk from a guy that was prominent in a lot of that work. And that is one of the things that we've tried to communicate to folks in helping share that message, helping to explain because a lot of our members are like, Why are we doing this? Why are we going from one to three when pintail populations are still below long-term average? And my response has been science is a process. We know more now than we did 10 or 15 years ago. We have used that information and new methods to improve our understanding in a systematic way about the effects of harvest at certain levels on pintail population dynamics and that new information very methodical way of going about evaluating using that information and those new methods tells us that we can do these things. So I don't want to get off into a discussion about that harvest strategy, but as I was talking it kind of made, it gave me an opportunity to link what you were saying to some other things we've talked about in the past. We had Mike Zemanski and Brendan Reischus on a recent episode. Yeah, I watched it. It was great.

Mike Brasher: Good. Very good. So, now I think I'm going to hand it to Kayci Do you have something to follow up on?

Kayci Messerly: Thank you, Mike. Well, like you said, though, we've had the privilege over the last day or two to actually go around and explore the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. And Patuxent has had the opportunity to be the first to do a lot of research. And so we got that opportunity to look around and see some of these first across the landscape here. And it's just incredible to me exactly as we're talking here today about we've had questions that we made ideas for of how these things that we're doing throughout time are going to affect waterfowl species. But to understand that in truth, we had to test them. And so that's happened here in many ways. So this is a place for first for a lot of different experiments. But when was Patuxent Wildlife Research Center first established and what is so special, not just about the research that's done here, but about Patuxent Wildlife Research Center as a whole?

Mike Runge: Yeah, so Patuxent was established in 1936 by an executive order Franklin Roosevelt wrote. Prior to that, so early in the 20th century, you had the emergence of modern wildlife management laws, right? The Lacey Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, sort of this recognition that we needed to be a little more thoughtful about wildlife management. And in the 1930s, a lot of federal science about wildlife focused on the negative impacts of wildlife on humans. But there was a shift in the 1930s, there was a long drought. There was decades of wetland drainage, heavy hunting pressure that led to some major declines in waterfowl population. There started to be this concern about waterfowl populations, and that sort of led to a lot of awareness about wanting to do some research to understand what was going on. So Patuxent was formed in the 1930s. Initially, there was 2,600 acres in this area. Right now we're on the central tract. We now have 12,000 acres that extends both north and south. It was the only refuge and remains the only national wildlife refuge. So it's in the National Wildlife Refuge System. It's the only one that was specifically created in its enabling legislation as a research refuge. And the point was to have a place where you could do these experimental things, you could say, What if we want to do moist soil management? Here's a little snippet of history I read about. I kind of knew this story but didn't know the full story except I was preparing for this podcast. There's a bunch of ponds down here that we call the Euler Ponds. They were created by this scientist named Fran Euler in the 1930s. And they created these moist soil units. This was before moist soil management was a thing, right? And Fran Euler was saying like, what if we plant these different seed species and control the moisture in these things? Will it produce duck food for us? And then can we flood it and have it be good habitat for ducks in the fall? So they had all these replicate ponds, they just lined right next to each other and they did different drawdown schedules and they did different plantings and different timings of the drawdowns and stuff. Moist soil management is, like that is… Every wetland management area across the country is doing some form of… this kind of management of wetlands for the benefit of waterfowl. So anyway, there's all kinds of stories like that about stuff that got started here at Patuxent because it's meant to be this sort of living laboratory. It is a refuge. It has refuge purposes, right? We've got a lot of forested land here that's typical of the mid-Atlantic, and there's great bird diversity in those forests. But there's a lot of their wetlands and open areas and places where experimental management is done to try to increase the tools available for wildlife management.

Mike Brasher: I didn't realize that about the moist soil management. Most people think it originated in Lee Fredrickson, University of Missouri, Mississippi State, those areas.

Mike Runge: Right, this was just really, really early stuff. And yeah, we have not continued as sort of the major scientific center for moist soil management. That's why the story kind of surprised me. I was like, huh, I didn't know that. But it's a little humbling to work here because the legacy of science that's been done here on so many topics over the last century, Yeah, it's humbling. And I'm proud of it. I'm proud to be a part of it. I'm proud of what Patuxent has contributed to wildlife science generally and to the management of trust resources in America.

Kayci Messerly: Yeah, I think too, as I was reading some more about this, it wasn't just about the new experiments that were going on, but also the new methodologies and the new survey types that were being tested out. And a lot of that came and was established with the help of people outside as well. It was a lot of work and volunteers that were willing to help contribute with trying new survey types. As I was reading, I was thinking, oh, like this is kind of the heart of the area. But then in that document, I actually, there was a quote in there saying that Patuxin was the lungs of the Baltimore, Maryland area. And I wonder from your perception, does that still feel like it rings true today?

Mike Runge: I mean, if you look at a satellite picture of this area, we're in a gigantic metropolis that stretches from way south of DC to way north of Baltimore. And you just look at a satellite picture, you're like, what's that green space there? And so, yeah, the 12,000 acres is Patuxent. We're right next to the Department of Agricultural Experiment Station. They've got a lot of land as well. But there is this… Yeah, there is this… Nice little forest here. It's amazing to sit on a wildlife refuge, you know, have your office on a wildlife refuge. It's pretty nice.

Mike Brasher: And there is a visitor center for the refuge. People cannot access this area. At least the general public cannot access the… The Central Tract is a small bit of it.

Mike Runge: The South Tract is where there's a visitor center, which is pretty impressive. There's stuff to see there. The North Tract, which is a formerly part of Fort Meade, is also accessible by the public. There's a wildlife drive that goes through the north track. There's a lot of other, they have a contact station. There's some interesting programming that's done up there as well. So yeah, most of it can be accessed by the public, not just this central piece, which is the historical wildlife research center.

Mike Brasher: And if I remember correctly, so people can get to the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center, but it is a refuge that has an entry fee, right? I believe that's correct. And the reason I remember that is when I, and I could be wrong, so don't hold me to that. I want to say this was the refuge that we came to, or maybe we were just having the conversation as we approached the gate, not knowing if it had an access, an entry fee, because I was with Greg Soulier, and he said, well, I'm covered because I have a duck stamp. And so that's why I remember that conversation. I don't remember what the exchange was there as we went through the entry, but something is telling me that we, maybe we, showed them our duck stamp just to say, hey, we got it. That's another important point there for the duck stamp is that while it contributes to habitat conservation, it also gives you access to refuges for those that may require it. Now, this is not the only science center within US Geological Survey. I had the fortune of working at one of the companion science centers when I was in Lafayette, Louisiana. for 13 years. We worked at the National Wetlands Research Center. That's where my office was. I was a Ducks Unlimited employee, but we were co-located with federal scientists, Fish and Wildlife Service, and USGS scientists within a USGS facility. It has now been renamed the Wetland and Aquatic Research Center, but that's not the only one. Talk about some of the others around the country, a number of which have contributed also in prominent ways to waterfowl research.

Mike Runge: Yeah, I mean, the legacy of these science centers, there's 13 of them, USGS science centers that focus on biological issues around the country, and they all have fascinating histories as well, right? You've got Northern Prairie. Yeah. Northern Prairie… Jamestown, North Dakota. Jamestown, North Dakota has really been focused on understanding waterfowl habitat and the dynamics of waterfowl habitat in extraordinary ways. And in some ways, Patuxent and Northern Prairie have sort of had this companion role for, I don't know, 60 years anyway, of sort of understanding the habitat side while also understanding sort of the population dynamics side, and in some cases working together. Yeah, you mentioned Lafayette, there's a science center in Gainesville, Florida, there's… West Dixon, California… Right, the Western Ecological Science Center in California does a lot of work on Western waterfowl. Really interesting stuff on pintails there. Also, really interesting stuff that they're doing that's looking at the… flyway to Asia, right? And what is the migratory connectivity between Asia and the Western United States, which, you know, as an interesting side note, has become really important in understanding avian influenza, the movement of avian influenza.

Mike Brasher: The Alaska Science Center, also prominent in that, right?

Mike Runge: Alaska Science Center, really prominent in that. Also thinking about, I mean, Arctic nesting studies, some of the goose studies out of Alaska Science Center, just amazing, helping us understanding sort of the life history dynamics of those species.

Mike Brasher: You guys are a very well-kept secret, and I think it's because you don't have a football program, right? You think about all the work that happens at the universities, right? So we do a great job talking about our university partners, and there's a lot of, obviously I'm joking here, but it is, at least in terms of the football part, but you don't have a football team, right? There is a lot of pride, you know, sort of affiliation pride with the universities that we attend and I think it's when we talk about the research being conducted by Dr. Brian Davis at Mississippi State University or by Dr. Doug Osborne at Arkansas Monticello or whoever else may be the case, there are people that hear that and oh yeah, I know that university and I went there or I know somebody that did or you see their names and you can associate, you can You can attach some affiliation with those. I think there are more people that can attach a personal affiliation to that and have some pride and can remember some of that. You guys kind of work behind the scenes all of these places now and people don't really hear about you or the incredible work that you do a lot of times in collaboration with those university folks. A lot of times in collaboration with the NGO folks like Ducks Unlimited or Delta Waterfowl. And so I think that's one of the reasons why we wanted to do this episode, as well as talk about some of these other areas, is to make the people that care about this kind of aware of these contributions. So I think there probably are some scientists that are like, yeah, you know, I just… I want to do my work and I don't care about a lot of that recognition. But I think also you probably do care about knowing that that people value what you do and benefit from it.

Mike Runge: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, what motivates a lot of scientists at Patuxent and these other USGS science centers, I think, is we're particularly interested in working on applied science. Yeah, we're interested in how the world works just out of curiosity, but what I really get excited about is science that's going to matter to a management agency that's going to have an effect on what people are doing in the world and how that's changing our ability to manage wildlife. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of pride in being able to do that kind of work and in work that which necessarily means working with other agencies. Right away, we got to be working with the management agencies. But you're right. A lot of times we're collaborating with academics that have resources that we don't have. state agencies, right? I mean, in waterfowl management, right? The name of the game is the partnership between states within flyways and partnership with the federal government. And so I think one of the things that happens at Patuxent, it happens at these other USGS science centers, is we can make investments in certain kinds of capabilities that are hard for some of our other partners to make. Bill Link is this guy just retired a little while ago. He's worked at Patuxent for his whole career. Mathematical statistician, genius, right? Really helped us develop sort of new models for, I don't know if people have heard about these integrated population models, but we've got all these data streams. How do we bring these data streams together to estimate things that we can't otherwise observe? Bill Link did this, a really, really early example of this, working with hooping cranes, right? Trying to figure out, hooping cranes, you can tell the juveniles. And you can tell the adults, but the adults, you can't tell their age just by looking at them, right? But if you wanna understand, and your listeners will know, if you wanna understand how a goose population works, you gotta know the age structure. Like how many of them are two, three, four, five, six years old? If there's a whole bunch of that are two years old, right? You're not gonna have as much breeding propensity in that population if there's a whole bunch that are five years old, right? But you can't observe that, can't observe that in cranes. So he figured out how you take this time series of, juvenile to adult ratios, and from that figure out the age structure of the population over time. That was sort of the genesis of a lot of these integrated population models. How many wildlife agencies have a mathematical statistician on staff, right? But I don't know, some center director along the way said, this would be smart for us to have this capability. So there's a lot of examples of that where we can invest in some capability that the state agencies we work with, they're not gonna have the resources to do it. But then we work with them and we can develop some methods that then they can use. Great, everybody wins. And so, yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of working behind the scenes. But all of it done with a sense of public purpose.

Mike Brasher: But relative to the people that are sort of the key beneficiaries, if I'm thinking about our audience, they're not aware of a Mike Runge or a Jim Nichols, unless they hear about it. Like we had Jim Nichols on to talk about the harvest management. We had this whole series of like the history of harvest management for waterfowl and folks like Jim Nichols came on and participated in that. Otherwise, waterfowl hunters don't know about them. They don't know about you. They don't know about the work. They don't know about John Sauer. They don't know about all of these incredible people that make it possible for us to make better decisions. I would also be remiss if, as I'm sitting here thinking, Lisa Webb would not be very happy with me if I didn't mention, you know, the other kind of aspect of USGS that is associated with universities, then that being our co-op units there, and they, we have several very There are several folks that work in those co-op unit roles, they're USGS employees, they're USGS scientists that have contributed in incredible ways to our history of waterfowl science, waterfowl ecology, and they do have football teams. So that throws my hypothesis out the window there. So what I think we'll do right now is we'll take a break. And then we'll come back and we want to lead off with sort of a discussion of some of the specific examples of how the work here and the people here have worked hand in hand with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on advancing our scientific understanding and decision making regarding migratory birds, the migratory bird program. So stay with us, folks.

SPEAKER_04: We'll be right back.

Mike Brasher: Welcome back everyone. We are here again with Dr. Mike Runge and I'm joined as co-host with my co-host Casey Mesterly and we're going to pick up to talk about the incredible role that the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and folks like Mike have played in supporting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Program and the connection that is important for all the folks that are listening is that it's the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Program that is responsible for managing waterfowl populations, migratory bird populations, the decisions related to those, and of course specifically harvest management decisions. And you started out, Mike, by talking of how this system of migratory bird management, waterfowl harvest management in the U.S. is the envy of the world, not just in bird populations, but in wildlife populations worldwide. Correct?

Kayci Messerly: Right.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. And it is, I think, I think largely because of some of the commitments that have been made by leaders of these departments and the people that have been here to invest in a very rigorous data-based, science-based method of making those decisions. There are obvious roles that our state partners play in this as well, and I think it would be great to touch on those as we go through this, but specific to Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and its role, talk about some of the Some of the things that exist today or that have been developed through time that make the migratory bird program, adaptive harvest management, everything that waterfowl hunters know, whether we're talking breeding population survey, the bird banding, etc. The role that Patuxent has played in this regard, and there is a document here and you're looking at one of the chapters that we talked about earlier. There's a chapter in here that does specifically reference this, this very thing, the role of Patuxent in migratory bird management decisions. And it's, it's incredible when you look at the list of things that you've contributed to. Speak about that. Sure. Yeah, happy to.

Mike Runge: So a reminder that prior to 1996, this was Fish and Wildlife Service. Patuxent Wildlife Research Center was part of Fish and Wildlife Service. And there were both the management arm and the research arm. Fish and Wildlife Service had both, right? They had a research arm, there was a name for it. And that's who Patuxent was prior to 1996. In 1996, the research arm got moved to USGS to sort of consolidate research functions in Department of Interior in USGS. But Fish and Wildlife Service remained co-located here. So when I talk about what Patuxent's done, it's USGS, we're now called USGS, the research arm is, but back in the day it was Fish and Wildlife Service. Okay, so what has happened? What are the components of this waterfowl harvest management system that have seeds at Patuxent? Well, for starters, the aerial surveys, right? The design of the aerial surveys that are done in May, they're going on right now. We were just talking to some of the pilot biologists yesterday. Those are really well-designed, carefully designed surveys, designed in the 1950s, continually redesigned over the years. Really sophisticated statistical work was done here at Patuxent, has been done and continues to be done between USGS and Fish and Wildlife Service to say, how do we design these surveys to make the inference about the populations that we want? So that's one of the… you know, that's one of the contributions. Now people do aerial surveys all over the world for all kinds of things, right? And so, but this was one of the first really well-designed comprehensive aerial survey programs in the world. Second thing, we take this kind of stuff for granted now, the bird banding lab. We just think like, well, this is what you do is you put little rings on birds and then you learn all kinds of stuff. The bird banding lab was started in 1942 at Patuxent and it's run by USGS now. And that led to some amazing things. The whole analytical framework, all the statistical analyses that go along with bird banding now, and it's used in all other species. I mentioned earlier that I do some work on endangered species. I work on manatees as one. We don't put rings on manatees. Most manatees have enough scars on their back that they're individually recognizable. So we take pictures of them. We've got an individual identification of them, and then you can take another picture later on and recapture them. That technology for analysis of survival and reproductive rates from that kind of data, it's all got its genesis in analysis of bird banding lab data here at Patuxent. So the methods of what's called Mark-recapture analysis. All of that statistical framework, there were contributors from all over the world, but like Patuxent really had a central role in the development of that methodology. So, you know, that's exciting. Who were some of those people? Well, so Jim Nichols is the one for me that like he was my mentor, is my mentor. And he came here early in his career and he just had a mind for the math, he had a mind for the inference. He's really good. He's a really good thinker in terms of like, how do you take information and make inference from it? Figured out all this Mark recapture stuff. Dave Anderson before him? Dave Anderson before and at the same time, yeah. I didn't realize Dave was here for a while. Dave was here, yeah. Bill Kendall was here, now at Colorado State University. Real, real innovator in a lot of the mark recapture techniques that we use. Andy Royal is here now. He's done a lot with spatial mark recapture, so how do you extend this kind of mark recapture stuff to spatial inference? Yeah, a lot of folks. And the other thing about Patuxent that's been interesting, just a side story about Jim Nichols. So I started here in the late 1990s. So, I'm an early career researcher sitting at this kind of storied place, and everybody around the world is walking through my building because everyone wants to come see Jim Nichols, right? So, folks from France, folks from Australia, folks from South Africa, wherever, they wanted to come and spend a week here and talk to Jim about some stuff. you know, it was just kind of cool, right? To have this sort of parade of the people that you read about, you know, as a young scientist, you're reading all these papers. And so anyway, that's been kind of neat.

Mike Brasher: And this is, I said this before, but to give people some additional context here, this is the same Jim Nichols that joined us on an earlier episode of the Ducks Unlimited podcast. We had dinner with him the other night. Great guy, very personable, very passionate, just an absolutely phenomenal individual. Nicest guy you want to meet, yeah.

Mike Runge: Yeah. Okay, so the mark recapture stuff. So other stuff that this foundation of science that we build waterfowl harvest management on, the hunter surveys, the hip surveys, the wing part, the parts collection survey, That's all done on the Fish and Wildlife Service side, but that got started here. That's human dimension stuff before we called it human. We didn't know to call it human dimension stuff then, but like that kind of the development of those survey techniques, how do you do those in a statistically robust way? How do you analyze that kind of data?

Mike Brasher: And even some of the more simple, and I say simple, but it is compared to some of the methodologies that your analytical techniques you're talking about, but there are parts of this. that produced fascinating bits of information for average hunters, like the wing identification. I mean, that became necessary because of the sampling and estimation methods or the data collection methods that became the harvest surveys, right?

Mike Runge: Right. And I think what was really interesting is in the 1970s, So you start to have these aerial surveys, you start to have this banding data that you had at the time emerging methods for analyzing. But people are also thinking, okay, we want to understand waterfowl populations, all their dynamics, what are we missing? We don't know how to estimate reproduction, right, from those data sets. So then they think, well, if we could collect wings from hunters and estimate the ratio of juveniles to adults in that wing collection, then we've got an index of reproduction. And then in the 1970s, they started thinking like, okay, now we can start to put these things together in kind of a model that tells us the whole story of things. So that's sort of the next bit that I think has happened at Patuxent is the development of these modeling techniques to integrate these data streams to understand population dynamics. And that's continued, and Patuxent still is. a leader in that, not only for waterfowl, but what's interesting is, I think we've always sort of thought that our ethic has been, we want to solve a problem because there's a particular manager that needs something solved. Like we want to set harvest regulations for ducks, that's great. Would this technique be valuable to somebody else too? And how do we think about development of methodology that has much broader use? And so the population modeling kind of advances that Patuxent participated in, in collaboration with a lot of other people, used around the world in kind of all kinds of species. I guess the next thing I'd say, for me, the next really interesting pivotal development in waterfowl harvest management came about in the mid-1990s, and that was development of AHM. Now, to me, the story behind this, and I don't think people remember this story anymore, but why did AHM get implemented in 1995? Waterfowl, particularly duck hunting regulations, were really controversial. They were controversial within the waterfowl community, right? Everybody's fighting about added diverse as compensatory mortality, right? People had differences of opinion about what was driving the dynamics and how you should set regulations in response. A lot of conflicts among states, between states and feds. And when did you start here? I started in 1999, so this predates me a little bit.

Mike Brasher: So you missed out. Well, you missed out on some of the way it used to work. Right, just stories. I'm telling the stories I've heard, yeah. But throughout your career, though, there were other opportunities that you had for that kind of attention. Right, right. I'm just trying to frame up in my mind how much of this, and the smoke-filled rooms is the classic analogy, right?

Mike Runge: Well, so when I started, it was three or four years into AHM. So like everybody that was working on it remembered all this stuff really well. So that was still part of the conversation. So what precipitated AHM was a big, I don't even know the details, but there was a big legal kerfuffle that happened in 1994, right? And the Secretary of Interior said, we're not doing this again. Figure something out, put something into place. Well, it turned out Fred Johnson, and Ken Williams and Jim Nichols and a bunch of other people. All brilliant guys. Yep, yep. Working with the states and the flyways, had been behind the scenes kind of going like, is there a different way that we could be setting harvest regulations? They'd been sort of working on this idea that Dave Anderson had in his PhD dissertation in 1974, which was, okay, and this is where we get weird, right? Can we take methods from optimal control theory, which is a field of operations research, which is usually found in engineering departments. This is how you do yield control in factories, right? Really advanced mathematical optimization techniques. Could we use that for waterfowl management? Sure. Makes a lot of sense, right? This is Dave Anderson's PhD dissertation in 1974. Ken Williams had done a lot of work on this. Fred Johnson got really interested. And so they started playing around with this kind of stuff. Happened to be ready when the secretary sort of said, we've got to have something different. And in a matter of a couple months, got AHM up and running for implementation in 1995. So that to me was, what was interesting there was, okay, and so, and like Patuxent was sort of the center of where that was happening. The Migratory Bird Assessment Division had a really big staff at that time. And a lot of folks sort of working on making this happening in close conjunction with, in close cooperation with the states and flyways. To me, that sort of ushers in sort of the modern, in some ways a modern era of wildlife management, which is very decision focused, decision analysis focused, and bringing in those techniques from operations research, from decision analysis to help inform how we do that. And I think as I mentioned earlier, we've used that as sort of a catalyst then to say like, okay, that's great for duck harvest management. Excellent. What else can we use it for? And how do we expand out the set of tools of decision analysis and operations research we use for wildlife management and a lot of other areas. So that Patuxent played a big role in that, which is kind of interesting historically and an interesting part of the foundation of what we have now. There's a lot of other areas that Patuxent has contributed to, and they're sort of… Like you said, science is process, so is management. We're always learning new methods to use, and all of that's evolving. There's also a lot of other stuff that Patuxent has done. Geez, wood duck experiments back in the day of nesting boxes and stuff like that. The breeding bird survey, you mentioned the breeding bird survey earlier, that's a volunteer, it's statistically designed, but volunteer program for counting breeding birds of all, not just waterfowl, all breeding birds in North America. That was started by this guy Chan Robbins in the 1960s here at Patuxent, and it's run from Patuxent, and that's used for It's actually used for wood duck harvest management, right? That's one of the data streams we use in wood duck harvest management. There's a bunch of experimental research that's gone on. We've got dive tanks here to look at behavior of sea ducks, right? So these dive tanks are… I'm gonna get all this wrong. This is not my area of research, but let's say they're 25 feet deep, right? And they do these interesting studies where they… They create sort of a artificial benthos and they put different food items in there and they try to see what the ducks… How are the ducks choosing those food items? They're trying to understand some of the dynamics in the Chesapeake Bay, like why have some of the divers changed? Why are there different populations in Chesapeake Bay than there were historically? We've got some work on high-path influenza studies in migratory birds that Patuxent's really involved in right now that I think is sort of important in understanding, well, really it's interesting, the connection between wild birds and domestic birds, right? You talk about the connection to the poultry industry and how that's interacting with wild birds and how wild birds can carry this disease around the world, right? And then how do very local producers respond to that, right? So we've got some projects along those lines that are really pretty fascinating. Yeah, just a lot of history here at Patuxent. It's great.

Mike Brasher: Maybe before you got here, would have been before you got here, the scientists at Patuxent were figures in the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, certainly some of the early evaluation efforts of that. Do you remember some of that work and some of those folks that were here?

Mike Runge: Yeah, so that predates me. The first NAWOP plan predates me, and that's not an area that I don't know a lot about the history of that. I got a little bit involved in the mid-2000s when we were trying to think about how to integrate harvest management with habitat management. So NAMWAMP talks about, well, three pieces now, right? You've got harvest management, you've got habitat management, and you've got humans and hunters. And we were thinking in the mid-2000s about how do we How do we understand how habitat management and harvest management go together? These are not independent programs. We treat them that way. They're managed that way, but they're not independent, right? It's the same population that you're managing with different sorts of tools. And so, you know, I was involved in some kind of interesting work in the mid-2000s thinking about how we integrate those things.

Mike Brasher: Looking at the interconnectedness of these things and how one decision affects the other.

Mike Runge: Yeah, because let's say your habitat management is wildly successful. What's the impact? That means you're raising the carrying capacity for ducks in North America, right? You raise the carrying capacity for ducks in North America. What does that do to harvest management? Well, it means you can harvest more, right? It means that you should be holding the population at a different place to optimize your harvest at a different population size. But we don't have embedded in our harvest management strategies whether the carrying capacity is changing, right? And likewise, you know, if you want to evaluate the effects of habitat management, you got to know what harvest management's doing, because if harvest management's been changing, that could change the population size and the population size, you know, in ways that maybe don't track what's happening on the habitat. So like, anyway, you're managing the same system with different tools. So how do you, how do you integrate that?

Mike Brasher: So I have another question related to adaptive harvest management, but I want to come back to that later. A lot of our listeners are familiar with AHM. There's a number of criticisms that we hear occasionally. There are a number of folks that appreciate it, understand it. So we'll come back to that in a moment and have a question for you that I want you to answer. But now I'm going to hand it to Kayci

Kayci Messerly: Yeah, so we talked about how, you know, there's a lot of different priorities for managers and that you guys help sometimes kind of with the decision making in that what decisions can you make to help best advance your priorities. But with that, Patuxent has done a bunch of research and has focused on non-game bird science, containment science, endangered species. How have Patuxent's priorities developed and grown over the years with such a broad array of different research that you guys have going on?

Mike Runge: Yeah, that's an interesting question. Yeah, so Patuxent is a federal research facility, right? And how do we get our priorities? I think we get our priorities from the management agencies in Department of Interior in particular that we work with, and then their partners. So talking to Fish and Wildlife Service, talking to Park Service, what do they need? What do they need to know? We also have long-term ties with EPA and other federal agencies. to try to think about what are the sort of unique things that Patuxent can contribute to scientific knowledge that are relevant to federal management agencies. So some of the things you mentioned, I mean, one of the really interesting historical parts of Patuxent and current, right, is its study of contaminants. So, in the 1950s, there was this woman, Louise Stickle, who was the center director here, and she was a really famous contaminants scientist, and she was studying the properties of DDT and related chemicals that were used in agricultural practices. We didn't understand what DDT did, so they're doing all these experiments. All this stuff about understanding DDT and eggshell thinning in birds and how that's led to peregrine falcons being endangered. This was a place that a lot of that research was done back in the day. sort of led up to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Rachel Carson didn't work here. We don't know if she ever set foot on here, but she was aware of the research that was done here. And that sort of, a lot of that led to legislation in the 1970s to start to look at how do we think about these dangerous chemicals and how do we manage their use. So, really fascinating history there. You mentioned that you got to drive around Patuxent yesterday and saw the worm plot. There's this historical place where they had… We're looking at the effects of DDT and there was a series of plots that they were using. There's one that's sort of preserved for historical reasons. And I forget what year they were doing this, but it was 50s or early 60s that they applied DDT to this plot. And that experiment was done and then somebody decided to go back in the 1980s or 90s and say like, huh, can we still detect this stuff here? And they dig up this worm plot and sure enough, there's still evidence of DDT. DDT and the breakdown products from DDT, they're still in the soil after decades and decades. So anyway, yeah, anyway, so that was one of the areas. And we still do a lot of work on contaminants research.

Mike Brasher: So just a side story this morning, talking about the rebound of raptor populations following the banning of DDT. Just this morning, we stopped to get coffee in a shopping center. And Casey pointed out that there was, she was kind of looking, I was like, what are you looking at? She said, there's a flock of crows mobbing some bird. And so we get into the parking lot and we're like, what? Usually it's the crow that's getting mobbed, right? And so we look up and it's like, is that a raven? No, it's not a raven, it's a bald eagle. A bald eagle right over this shopping center in downtown Bowie. And it's like, Sort of an interesting connection to your story, the recovery of raptors in response to that decision informed by a scientific understanding of the consequences of a pesticide on an animal population. I mean, it's an amazing conservation story.

Mike Runge: Like, yeah, so we're sitting in my office, we look out my window, and it's not unlikely a bald eagle will fly by, you know, while we're sitting here. And the interesting thing about being a Patuxent is, because Patuxent also did work on bald eagles, did a lot of work on captive propagation of endangered species. That was another area of research. Because in the early days, that's what they were doing, particularly with peregrine falcons, is you raise them in captivity and then release them in the wild, and that's how they sort of jump-started a lot of these populations after they sort of banned DDT and built back these populations. Yeah, bald eagles are everywhere now, like this part of the country. It's pretty neat to see that conservation success. Yeah, so that's another area, the endangered species. One of the things that Patuxent's really well known for is hooping cranes. Patuxent figured out how to breed hooping cranes in captivity. So this story, a lot of your listeners will know, in the 1940s, world population of hooping cranes down to about 14, right? And so they brought in some eggs from the wild, brought them with Patuxent, figured out how to get these eggs to hatch, raise the chicks, and then figure out how to then release them back into the wild to help build up populations. There's a population of hooping cranes that migrates between Wisconsin and Florida. That's an introduced population that came out of captivity, mostly from Patuxent, but there's a handful of other places that also were doing the captive breeding. And then these are the ones that were taught to migrate behind the ultralight aircraft. Anyway, a lot of that work. Really interesting work about how do you, one, raise birds in captivity. How do you get them back out into the wild successfully in a way that's going to lead to a sustained population? Those are hard questions. So a lot of research done back in the day on that. We've got other areas of research, avian disease. Actually, we do quite a bit of disease research, wildlife disease research. We've mentioned AI. We've done some work on chronic wasting disease. SARS-CoV-2 in deer, right? Fascinating little side story there. Amphibian diseases, there's work on Lyme disease and some of the other vector-borne diseases. All kinds of work, offshore energy, island restoration. There's an island in the Chesapeake Bay called Poplar Poplar Island where that's been created at a dredge.

Kayci Messerly: We were there last night. Yeah, we got the luxury to go out on a boat last night and go see the island. So we got to see all the rocks that have been put out and how the island has been brought so much farther out than it originally was. I guess that this was its original state now, but from where it started before the restoration project.

SPEAKER_01: We met up with Ken Richkis and Kathy last night. Wow, that's great. That's great. Wow, you guys have gotten that VIP treatment.

Kayci Messerly: Nice. Yeah, I think we got back at like 11 last night.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, Poplar has a lot of stories along the way, visiting establishments and restaurants that are closing within 10 minutes and not being too, you know.

Mike Runge: I mean, Poplar Island's an interesting story, and also just seeing the birds come to that and start nesting right away, build it and they will come kind of thing. That's been a neat, neat study. So anyway, to your original question. We pay attention to the needs of the management agencies and think about… And some of that's responsive. Some of it's proactive. Some of it is saying, hmm, here's something we see on the horizon. We want to start up this research program because we think this is going to be something that a management agency is going to need in the future. And we talk to them about it in advance. So some of it's proactive, some of it's responsive.

Mike Brasher: What about pollinator work? We saw lots of milkweed, and I don't know if how much of that would have been kind of encouraged or if it's just sort of natural in this landscape.

Mike Runge: We've got a scientist named Sam Droege who's here, who's really started, built this incredible pollinator program. Kind of fascinating, he got interested in native bees. And as pollinators, as part of the ecosystem and trying to think about what are some of the pesticides, herbicides, stuff that we're putting on, how's that affecting? And he realized that there was no good guide for all of the… Identification guide for the native bees in this area. And so he started doing these studies, just trapping all the native bees that he could. And then trying to figure out how he taught himself all the taxonomy and how to identify this stuff and built this really fascinating photography lab to do this really zoomed in photography of these individual animals to then be able to use them in taxonomic identification. And he's really expanded that work to think about just expanding pollinator science.

Kayci Messerly: Yeah, I think I was hearing that people will ship bees into you guys for identification. That's crazy. That's incredible.

Mike Runge: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's just not a lot of folks that have that expertise. So that's another aspect. So some of our scientists at Patuxent are taxonomists, right? Some of the lead avian taxonomists. So I think the AOU is about to come up with an update to its bird list. I guess this is a podcast, I guess you're quoting me.

Mike Brasher: They do every now and then, like a supplement to the… Yeah, I think one's coming out. Anyway… So, you're saying eventually they will update it? I mean, there'll be an update.

Mike Runge: Yeah, one of our scientists has been working on that, right? We've historically had some of the best taxonomists for mammal taxonomy working at the Natural History Museum in D.C. and here. And so yeah, and then now some of this bee taxonomy. So just another part of the science portfolio that's been at Patuxent.

Kayci Messerly: And I think that's the pattern that you see come up over and over again, is that your staff is so versifiable. They can adapt and change based on the interests that are needed here, and they dip their toes in a bunch of different water, and they're trying on different things all the time. And it's just incredible that they're able to do that.

Mike Runge: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, speaking personally on an individual basis, sometimes it's hard to be flexible. Like we've all got our favorite things, you know, that and stuff that we've developed the expertise on. But, um, yeah, no, I think, I think it goes back to sort of the sort of public service mentality. It's like, we're trying, you know, we're not doing this only because we're interested for ourselves. We're doing this because this science means something to somebody. And ultimately matters to folks like waterfowl hunters, right? Or other members of the American public. Like we're trying to help these management agencies achieve better things for wildlife. So you opened the door.

Mike Brasher: I'm going to ask you the question. What's your favorite area to work in? And favorite, favorite can be a, there can be different ways of defining favorite, I'm sure.

Mike Runge: So this is really nerdy, and I don't know, this is where your listeners are just gonna shut off the podcast, but sorry.

Mike Brasher: No, no, no, we've got a very key question about adaptive harvest management coming up. Okay, dangle that, dangle that for later.

Mike Runge: I'm fascinated by how people make decisions and how they could make them better. What are the… When we're, everybody's a decision maker, right? We all make, you mentioned this earlier, like we all make hundreds of decisions a day. Some aren't that consequential, some are, right? And so how do we do that? We've got a lot of ingrained processes, cognitive processes that we use. Sometimes they don't work out for us, right? Our intuitive predilections for how to make decisions sometimes aren't as good as we hope. So what processes can we use? What sort of logical processes, what kind of discipline can we teach ourselves about how to face really difficult decisions? So anyway, that's a fascinating question to me. And I like math too, so how can we use math to help us do that, right? And to me then thinking about how can federal agencies, state agencies, wildlife management agencies in general use these kind of techniques. To make decisions that are replicable, like the next manager comes along, has to make a similar decision, it's not just whimsical, right?

Mike Brasher: It's almost like eating the same thing for breakfast every day, right?

Kayci Messerly: I knew you were going to go there. This is a serious podcast. Focus. I'm really good at making food decisions.

Mike Runge: Excellent. Some people have to be. Yeah, you should be.

Kayci Messerly: I'm being sarcastic. I eat yogurt every morning for breakfast so that I don't have to decide. I heard it was a really good way to stop making your life hard to decide in the morning what to eat. So I just eat yogurt every single morning.

Mike Runge: That's fine. You have made a conscious, structured decision. You've said, I've got all these options.

Mike Brasher: It's like a repeated decision and they're difficult. And so if you find one that you like and that works,

Kayci Messerly: Spend my energy on more major decisions.

Mike Runge: Right. And that's a real thing. So this is a real thing I think about too, is like there is cognitive fatigue in making decisions. Decisions are hard. It takes up energy. And so you only have so much energy. How are you going to spend that? So if your morning decision about what to eat, it's virtually the same every day, right? You've got the same options. Is that decision really changing? So if you make it once, is that enough? You just make that once. You don't have to make that decision repeatedly. You don't have to burn up the energy. Save that energy for the harder decisions that come later in the day. That's really good. That's rational. Yeah. And interestingly, there's literature on that. Like what you just described, there's a lot of literature on cognitive fatigue and decision-making. And so I'm just fascinated about all the cognitive scientists that are studying decision-making in humans, all of the philosophers and decision analysts that are saying like, how could we make decisions better if we really wanted to be fully rational, whatever that means. And bringing those together and say like, okay, how can I use these tools to help wildlife managers be more transparent about their decisions, be more replicable, and better represent the values of the public that they're serving? That's what interests me.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. That's cool. It doesn't surprise me, knowing you, it doesn't surprise me that you would go there. So, appreciate that. I mean, ducks are cool too. That's fine. Well, I would imagine that one of the reasons why you have been drawn to waterfowl harvest management is because it is replete with decisions. And there are decisions that we have a wealth of data to apply to those decisions. That's sort of like the perfect marriage for you, right?

Mike Runge: And there's one more thing. The governance structure that's set up for waterfowl harvest management is robust and functional, right? So you have the flyway systems, you have the states that work really well with each other, with the flyways, with the feds. Everybody knows each other. The ground rules by which these decisions are made are pretty well spelled out and have been for a long time. And the data sets, long-term data sets that go along with that. So you have a system that's Um, easy to work with, right? Doesn't make the decisions any easier, but like you, it's not, it's not sort of this chaotic system where the decision maker is changing every day and you don't know really what you're trying to achieve. And, you know, um, so it's sort of well behaved from a sort of governance standpoint, um, which, which allows us to really, um, do some really interesting things with a decision analysis.

Mike Brasher: Okay. Here's the question about adaptive harvest management. So we are on the verge of 30 years since adaptive harvest management was implemented. We've had 30 years of liberal frameworks. I hear, I read occasionally our folks in our hunter community saying there's nothing adaptive at all about adaptive harvest management. We've been doing the same thing for 30 years. Tell them why they're wrong. Adaptive management

Mike Runge: is only the promise that you're open to change. It's not a promise that you're going to need to change. So let me unpack that, right? In 1995, when AHM was put into place, there was a lot of arguments. We started to mention this earlier in the podcast. There was a lot of arguments about how ducks should be managed. controversy, and some of it was being framed as uncertainty. We don't know if harvest is additive or compensatory with natural mortality, right? And we think that could change how we manage. So there was uncertainty. And the promise of AHM was like, okay, we're gonna make smart decisions in the face of that uncertainty. We're going to put in the apparatus to resolve that uncertainty and adapt to it as our learning increases. We've done that, right? We had these four models that were different ways of, different hypotheses about how Mallard, mid-continent Mallard's dynamics worked, right? And every year we update it with new data, update our weights on those models. Those model weights have changed. The harvest management strategies, the strategies have changed over time, continue to change. There's a lot of other adjustments that we've made as we've gathered more data, understood more aspects of the dynamics of these ducks. It turns out that the strategy's called for a liberal season the whole time. It didn't have to be that way. We could have discovered something different and we would have had to do something otherwise. That just happened to be what we learned. In fact, there's a couple of things we learned. One, we learned there's actually more harvest potential for mid-continent mallards than we can achieve. We could actually probably have higher harvest rates if we were willing to tolerate changes in regulations and stuff like that. But we can't really… You can't make the season length any longer in the Pacific Flyway, right? It's already 107 days. How are you gonna get higher harvest rates than what we've got? So we've learned that. We didn't know that in 1995. The other thing that maybe people don't appreciate is… The way we're managing now is very different than how we were managing before 1995. We probably would have gone to a moderate season sometime since 1995 if we weren't in AHM, if we had been doing it the old way, because we would have seen one of the downturns in water, one of the drought cycles, and we would have said, well, we gotta back off, but the models and the predictions and the hypotheses to represent uncertainty we've put into place and the monitoring we've done to update all that has showed us, no, we can continue to have these liberal seasons. So we've learned a ton and we've changed our harvest strategy, the strategy, quite a bit over that period of time. We just haven't changed the particular regulations because that's not what it was called for. So, so I think that, I think if you equate adaptive management with constantly changing regulations, that's not what adaptive management said it was going to be, right? We just said we were going to smartly, we're going to open ourselves to the idea that there was uncertainty. We're going to set in place systems for reducing uncertainty and we're going to respond to that. And we've done that.

Mike Brasher: One of the things that I often look to and point to, to show people that there are parts of AHM that are changing is the matrix. When you look at that matrix from year to year and the number of liberal, moderate, restrictive season options within that matrix, it changes every single year. And it's just, just as you said, though, what we, what the models show is that there's substantial harvest potential that given population levels, environmental conditions, always lands that optimal strategy within the liberal categories.

Mike Runge: The other thing that this program has done, and because we're constantly updating all the information, is that every point along the way we can say, We're making decisions with the best available information. Yeah, there's the values embedded in that, and those get renegotiated with the states, you know, periodically. But we're always using the best available information. We're constantly updating that. waterfowl harvest management on really, really sound footing, right? We can defend that these decisions are justifiable, right? That's important, right? That's important to the continuation of the opportunity for waterfowl harvest management.

Kayci Messerly: Yeah, I just want to emphasize again, we keep saying science is a process and we had many questions. We learned a lot and we've made changes based on the information that we've learned. But what that does is it helps lead us to more questions that we hope to continue to research and understand and answer. So what does that look like on the kind of emerging scientific frontier for Patuxent here doing research?

Mike Runge: Yeah. So the tagline for USGS is science for a changing world, right? And I think those are where the really interesting and hard questions are for all of our wildlife management. waterfowl harvest management as well. So what are the kinds of things that are changing? Aspects of climate maybe changing, land use changing, right? So there's plenty of changes in the prairies, which is where a lot of the ducks are produced. Agricultural changes that occur over time, agricultural technology and practice changes, how does that change habitat for ducks? Other aspects of land use change, weather changing. Hunter behavior changing, the demographics of hunters changing, the number of hunters changing, the kind of hunting they want to do, where those hunters are located, the technology that's available. When spinning wing decoys came in in the late 1990s, early 2000s, there are some signals in our data set that there were some changes in how… Hunters were behaving, ducks were behaving, the interaction of them. So, interesting question for me, and I think for a bunch of us, is how do we understand those societal changes, how do we understand those ecological changes, and how do we understand the impact of those on waterfowl populations? Shock is disease, right? Avian influenza, what's that going to do to waterfowl populations? Maybe nothing, but maybe something. I don't know. So there are questions about our world's constantly changing. How do we detect those changes? How do we understand their ecological implications? And how do we understand the management implications? So I think there's sort of a lot of open questions there for Patuxent. From my standpoint, the decision analytical standpoint, how do we make smart decisions year after year after year when the system we're managing is changing over time? Can we anticipate those changes? If we anticipate those changes, like how far in advance do we anticipate those changes? Interesting questions that we don't have the tools for yet, so we're trying to develop some of them.

Mike Brasher: I have two more questions for you, then we're going to wrap up. So the first one. When you look back, how do you describe the legacy of Patuxent Wildlife Research Center?

Mike Runge: From my particular lens, because I'm a quantitative ecologist, I see the legacy of Patuxent from that standpoint of putting quantitative ecology sort of on the map and making it the de facto standard for wildlife management. That's a big legacy to me and one I'm proud to be on the tail end of, to be sort of the recipient of that legacy and participate in a small way. The larger impact of Patuxent beyond just the quantitative ecology piece to me is about understanding applied science and the value of applied science. Applied science as a partnership between a decision maker and a scientist, right? Where the management agency, say, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the scientific agency, U.S. Geological Survey, are jointly thinking about what are the scientific questions to investigate that will help us make better decisions on behalf of the public. And so, A lot of universities don't see their role as applied science. Some people are very interested in it, but universities also have a really important place for primary science, science that we don't know if it's going to be valuable or not, but we're going to do it because we're interested. But I think the federal or government science entities in general, and some states have really excellent research programs as well that work in this space of science that is going to be used by somebody almost immediately. And so I think to me, in some ways, the science that Patuxent has done writ large, that's the legacy of showing what applied science can do.

Mike Brasher: Final question is more from your personal perspective. We didn't pull this episode together to necessarily focus on you or feature you. You talked about Jim Nichols as one of the most brilliant men that you've ever worked with, and I've known you for, what have we been working together, in one way or another, 20 years or so? Probably, yeah. 20, something like that? You're one of the most brilliant people that I know and have had the pleasure of interacting with, and a lot of our Flyway, some of our Flyway colleagues have kind of made a verb out of your name. You've probably heard this. Nobody can out-runge Mike Runge, except Mike Runge. So, I thank you for all of that, for all that you've done for our profession, for one that I care so much about, that our hunters, our audience cares so much about. I'm glad we had this opportunity to shed light on some of your contributions, your incredible intellect, and all of those that came before you as well and that have come through Patuxent. As you look back, one of these days you'll retire. We all retire, we get to that point. I will be ecstatic if you are around as long as I am for the rest of our careers. I don't think that's gonna happen. I think I have a few more. I think you're closer to retirement than I am. In your career, when you look back, what are you most proud of and what will you remember most?

Mike Runge: What I'll remember most and what motivates me every day is to get up and work with people that are passionate about what they do. I love my job. I'm not an expert on any one thing. I get to go work with the experts in the world and talk to them about ducks or polar bears or manatees or ground squirrels or whatever, eagles. and see their passion in the work that they do and then work with management agencies that are equally passionate about carrying out the laws that Congress asked them to do, you know? And to be a part of that, just to be a cog in that machine and have the privilege of working with those people is something I'm most thankful for and it's something that has been really gratifying about my career. And I'm just proud to be a part of it. I think there was some little bit that I could do in sort of my own, like, nerdy way of, like, oh, let's just make this decision a little bit more transparent. Like, if we, you know, we push the needle a little bit on that, a little bit on that, then I'm happy to have been a part of it.

Mike Brasher: Thank you for that. Thank you for taking nearly an hour and a half to sit down with us today. This is, like, from my side of it, probably been one of my favorite episodes to record and be part of because I've seen and been close to a lot of the work that you've done, your colleagues here have done, and to be able to tell that story is really, really cool. Also very pleased to have Casey join us here and see some of this as well. I think the circumstances around us being here this week for the workshop that we had, adds to that, you know? It reiterated the passion behind continuing to learn about emerging issues in waterfowl populations and waterfowl science, and we continue to see that. As much as we know, as much data as we have, there are still things that we're trying to figure out because systems are changing. Science for a changing world. I mean, that's perfect, right? So, thank you, Mike, for being with us.

Kayci Messerly: Thank you. Yeah, it's been absolutely humbling being here. I mean, for someone who loves science and loves research to see other people, like you said, just the passion they have for the work and the energy they're willing to put into it and then getting to go across the grounds and see some of the original locations of some of that work that was done was just insanely gratifying and humbling.

Mike Runge: Well, thank you both for the work that you do. Communicating to the public about what wildlife means to us and how science informs that, that's hard work and it's important work. And I appreciate that you guys are doing such a good job of it. So thanks for having me.

Mike Brasher: A very special thanks to our guest on today's show, Mike Runge, quantitative ecologist at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, and special thanks also to my co-host, Katie Messerly. Thanks to our producers, Chris Isaac and Rachel Jarrett, for the great work that they do. And of course, to you, the listener, we thank you for spending your time with us, for caring about waterfowl, caring about waterfowl science and waterfowl conservation.