Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Katie Burke: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host, Katie Burke, and today I have co-host Mike Brasher with me.

Mike Brasher: Hey, Katie. It's great to be here with us. We've got a stranger here in between us. I know.

Katie Burke: He's not really a stranger.

Katie Burke: This is Mark Petrie. He's the Director of Conservation Planning for the Western Region and author of the Canada Goose book that's soon to come out. Welcome.

Mark Pietre: Thanks for having me.

Katie Burke: That's kind of why we're here today. We're not here to talk about your DU role. We're here to talk about your other… We've done that before.

Mark Pietre: We've done that before. My minor role.

Mike Brasher: Short conversation.

Katie Burke: He hasn't done video, though, before, has he? I don't think so.

Mike Brasher: No, strictly audio.

Katie Burke: Just audio.

Mike Brasher: Ratings are bound to go down from here forward. It is what it is. Had to happen at some point. Mark, it's great to have you here. Thank you, Michael. Come back anytime.

Katie Burke: All right, so basically, I'm sure everyone's heard me talk about this Canada goose project. So Tim Peterson is a collector who has offered his collection to be on loan to be at the museum for a year. And with that, we have written a book to accompany it that talks about the Canada goose conservation history, hunting history, decoy history. Basically all things Canada Goose. And Mark here is our author, voluntold author. And we've been working on this. I think I started it five years ago. I think it was during the pandemic is when I had my first meeting. And then I asked you to come on.

Mark Pietre: I think I've been into it for about three years now.

Katie Burke: Okay.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, and made it a reality. Katie, you said that, you know, Mark was kind of voluntold to do this, but I will say you don't get voluntold to do something unless you're really good at it. Unless you have the skill set, the diverse knowledge, and I think we're going to talk about that. Mark and I are friends, and we've known each other for, I don't know, 20 years or longer, and we pick on one another endlessly, but I think we also have admiration for the skills that we each have, and Mark has some talents that are rare in our profession with regard to the way he writes, his knowledge of waterfowl ecology, but also his knowledge of sort of the history of waterfowling, and I think that was one of the things that, when you were first approached about this, that appealed to you is the opportunity to marry all those three interests, your writing skills, your knowledge of waterfowl, as well as your admiration and knowledge of the history of waterfowling.

Katie Burke: Right, and that was also one of the things that interested us in the project because there's been a lot of decoy books. There's been a lot of hunting books, a lot of conservation books, but this is probably the first time, two first, first time a book has been dedicated to a species of waterfowl. So it's just the candy goose. And then the first time that it's combined that conservation, hunting, and decoy history into one book. So, it's really a much broader audience for this book. You're not just going to have decoy people. I mean, a lot of decoy people, collectors are going to want this book because this collection is amazing and they're going to get to see pictures of these decoys that people haven't seen, but they're also going to learn kind of a more… Especially, I don't think that audience would even know anything about the conservation history. They might know some hunting history, but they're going to learn so much more about the conservation side and where those geese have come from.

Mark Pietre: Yeah, when Tim approached Ducks Unlimited about writing a book featuring his Canada goose collection, which is probably the finest private collection of Canada geese in the world, I would venture probably. And as you mentioned, there's been a lot of decoy books written. Usually they're kind of regional in nature, they're focused on a particular carver, and they usually have multiple species, ducks, geese, in the book. And so what Tim was proposing was kind of unique. It would be a decoy book focused just on the Canada goose, which made it unique, and we thought, well, let's take advantage of that. Let's try and tell the story of the Canada goose through Tim's decoy collection.

Katie Burke: And it's been neat. I've learned a lot. I mean, I'm sure you have too.

Mark Pietre: I have. You know, the truth is I did not know a tremendous amount about Canada geese. I knew more about ducks than geese when I started this project. I know a little more now.

Mike Brasher: And a lot of research went into this. I don't know when we want to get into all these different things, but one of the things that I'm really interested in is the sources, the source materials for the research that you did. Before we go there, Katie, is there anything else that you want to talk about in regard to Tim's collection, those types of things?

Katie Burke: So I think it leads a little bit into what you want to talk about. So when it comes to decoys, and you'll see this in the book and in the exhibit, But it really, decoys, it's definitely by flyway. It's definitely regional for decoys. So primarily most of the Canada goose decoys will come from the Atlantic coast. That's where most of the carvers were. That's where they were hunting them at that time when they were using those kind of decoys. So you'll see it's heavy there and then it'll move over to the Mississippi flyway. And then when you get over to the central and west coast, you'll have a lot less decoys. Um, and that all, like, that history plays into the same parts of, like, where you're searching for stuff, the information you're finding about different things, because there's just more material for those areas, and they were thinking about it more. So it's interesting how the collection kind of could lead you along through that history as well. But no, this collection is amazing. And we can get into a little bit, at the end I can talk a little more specific, but there's some geese that people have never seen before or in a long time. There are definitely geese that will be together that have never been together before that you'll see in one place. So it'll be really great. And I guess, wait, I should mention before I get into it, the reason why, and we can talk more about it, but the reason why Canada geese for Tim, that's a really good point for it. So Tim grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, near Silver Lake. And Mark can kind of go into the Silver Lake story a little bit. But that story, which is a super unique conservation story, played into why he chose to collect this species of decoy. And that's kind of the inspiration behind the book as well as the collection. And it features heavily in the book as well. Well, I'd like to hear that. Yeah, let's let Mark tell the story.

Mark Pietre: Well, Tim obviously has a very Very strong connection to Silver Lake given that that's where he grew up in Rochester, Minnesota. And I think he developed his love for Canada geese there. And of course the history of Silver Lake is really, really interesting, especially with respect to giant Canada geese and the rediscovery of giant Canada geese. Giant Canada geese were thought to be extinct up until about 1962. when a biologist by the name of Harold Hansen had typically gone every fall fishing in Minnesota. And he'd driven by Silver Lake on the way home and he'd noticed that there was these kind of really large bodied geese that were on Silver Lake. And he often wondered about them. He ultimately got the opportunity to help band some in 1962. And when they were banding these geese, they were getting really, really big weights on these geese. They were really heavy. And they're like, our scales must be wrong. And so one of the biologists went to the local grocery store and got some sugar and some flour to kind of test their scales. Well, their scales turned out to be accurate. And they realized that they had rediscovered the giant Canada geese, which been extinct or thought to be extinct at least since the 1930s. Yeah, that's crazy. From there on, giant Canada geese have taken off, obviously.

Katie Burke: Obviously, yeah. And I think so many people listening will, like, not understand, like, that they weren't there.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, that wasn't that long ago. No. So 1962, that would have been right around, I mean, that would have been, Tim would have been of age, of an age at that time where And I'm assuming he's a waterfowl hunter. I've never met Tim. He grew up hunting in Minnesota with his dad, so yes. So I'm assuming that would have been a very impressionable time for Tim, seeing all of that play out. I'm sure he would have been aware of that discovery. So that's really cool that that was sort of a formative observation and occurrence in his childhood that went on to… to touch on and will influence a lot more because of his collection and now the work of the production of the book.

Mark Pietre: Yeah, I suspect you're right, Mike. In the early 1960s, before giant Canada geese were officially rediscovered, if you will, there were 3,000 or 4,000 geese wintering on Silver Lake every winter. There was a power plant there that kept the lake open, and so there had been several thousand geese wintering on the lake for a number of years. What Harold Hansen later discovered that those were birds, those were giant Canada geese that were nesting in the inner mountain lake of Manitoba. And it was a relatively short flight from there to Rochester to spend the winter. And that's where those, that kind of was the source of those giant Canada geese.

Mike Brasher: There are so many different topics that could be a discussion of their own. Just the history of the disappearance, presumed extinction of the giant Canada geese, the rediscovery, the reintroduction, those are the type of topics that we haven't covered yet on any of our episodes. I think part of that is because you know it is, it's such a prominent story in our, prominent story in waterfowl conservation history, you want to do it extreme justice. You want to get all these details right. And so you've been able to learn a lot. You started out, maybe, I don't know if you said this when we were recording, but I think you did. You're not, you don't consider yourself a Canada Goose expert, but you spent a lot of time researching this and can bring some additional color to these stories. So, I'm fascinated by, I've been fascinated by this entire project. Because I'm friends with you both, and when I first learned that you were being asked to do this, I knew you would do a phenomenal job with it. And when I learned that Katie was going to be assisting, then I knew that was another incredibly important and valuable part of this project. And so you, the both of you have bounced ideas off of me, uh, because of our friendships and I've been aware of the project. And so I've been able to see parts of this take shape and some phenomenal stories throughout, um, regarding the, the. The way you wrote it, you bounced ideas different. There were a few times where I'm like, Mark, I don't have time to read this. Your writing style is better than anything that I could do. I don't know if I ever said that or put that in an email. You're saying it now, Mike. Now we know. But there were several of us in our group that you were bouncing these ideas off of, some of whom

Mark Pietre: hunted and studied Canada geese and were able to bring much… Yes, and well, two in particular, Greg Soulier and John Colussi, close friends of both you and I, and both deeply involved in Canada geese over the course of their careers, and then really some important issues, whether they were giant Canada geese issues or the Mississippi goose wars in the 1980s and 1990s, those gentlemen know a lot more about Canada geese than I do, and I relied on them pretty heavily throughout the book.

Mike Brasher: I guess maybe, Katie, can I now ask about sort of the source material? What did your search for this information look like? Because you had to educate yourself by looking at all these different and sometimes very obscure documents and publications. You would reach out to me several times and ask if I was aware or had access to a publication from, I don't know, the 50s or 40s or whatever it was. So, this was a pretty exhaustive research endeavor for you.

Mark Pietre: Right. Well, we try to do several things in the book. One of the things we try to do is reconstruct the history of Canada goose hunting in each of the four flyways. And we wanted to do that, not just the recent history, but tried to go back as far as possible. And that usually meant going back to the late 1800s. And of course, there's just not a lot of material, written material from that time. A lot of it was probably, some of it was recorded in these periodicals, which have long since vanished and really just aren't accessible. And so hunting down a lot of that material to kind of reconstruct those earlier errors of Canada goose hunting consumed quite a bit of time. It was very enjoyable. I learned a lot, but it was a struggle at times to do that.

Mike Brasher: How many books would you have, do you think you read as a result of the research on this project?

Mark Pietre: Oh, I don't know, Michael. It wasn't just books. It was, you know, it was articles from, you know, Field and Stream in the 1930s or Outdoor Life.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I was on that.

Mark Pietre: Katie helped me pull together some of those. Yeah, because those kind of periodicals or those long ago articles allowed you to kind of get a little bit of the flavor of Canada goose hunting during that era.

Mike Brasher: It's doing a bit of forensics, I guess you would say.

Mark Pietre: It is.

Mike Brasher: Because you're not, there was no, none of those articles would tell the full history of what was going on and make those connections. You had to kind of piece it together based on where a certain hunt was occurring as described in a magazine article. their description of the birds. There's one of the more colorful stories. I don't know how it ultimately made it into the book, how it's cast in the book, but it was evidence of giant Canada geese on the Texas coast. Right? Remember that? Because it was a very colorful story.

Mark Pietre: And a bit of pure speculation on my part. You know, back to the giant Canada goose story. Now this would have been in the 19… There's records from, I believe, the 1920s in coastal Texas of hunters down there shooting some abnormally large geese, you know, up to 20 pounds perhaps. It's hard to verify those kind of records, but they do come from a couple fairly credible sources. And these were geese that were being harvested on the Texas Gulf Coast in early fall, well before any, you know, Giant Canada geese would have actually migrated to the Texas coast if they ever did. So we speculated a little bit, well, they were shooting birds that were 15 to 20 pounds in September on the Texas coast. Does that mean there was actually a population of giant Canada geese nesting on the coast? on the Texas coast during that time. So I had a little bit of fun with that and a little bit of speculations. I'm sure that will raise the eyebrows of some waterfowl biologists who are more careful than I am with the facts. But anyway.

Mike Brasher: But you reached out to renowned journalists from some of these geographies. I believe Shannon Tompkins is one of the guys that you reached out to there. And I saw some of the emails, email correspondence, and everyone that I saw Maybe didn't share any of the ones that weren't of this nature, but I can't imagine there would have been any, but people were incredibly complimentary and they recounted how much joy they had and even having a conversation with you about this topic because the history of waterfowling in some of these areas means so much to so many people. And it means more to some of the generation that we're seeing fade out now. And so I think some of this is an opportunity for them, was an opportunity for them to chronicle bits of the knowledge that they possess and had heard through the years. And I'm really looking forward to seeing the entire book and seeing all the different stories.

Mark Pietre: And so it's… Well, interacting with those kind of people you just described, Shannon Tompkins, Rob Sawyer, whose Rob has written several books about hunting in Texas. And yeah, having those kind of conversations with those kind of folks was really a highlight of the work. The other individual I mentioned too, and I think has been on your podcast, is Grayson Chesser.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I am.

Mark Pietre: Grayson, of course, is a great historian of hunting in the Atlantic Flyway, and Grayson and I spent many hours on the phone. Once you get Grayson on the phone… It's hard to get him off. You don't get him off in 5 or 10 minutes. You're pretty much there for an hour, hour and a half. You schedule accordingly. I would tell my wife to put my dinner in the oven, I'll be back in about an hour and a half. That was, you know, talking to Shannon, talking to Rob, talking to Grayson. Those were highlights of putting this book together.

Katie Burke: Well, you mentioned, and this is very much like a theme to the book, and I think one of the special things about the book, capturing that flavor of what it was like to hunt in those different periods, because it evolved so much from those early days to what we do now, and to get what it was like, because those books don't really do it justice. Like, talking to Grayson and them, they give you that flavor of what it was like to be in the field and to shoot geese. And it really does a really good job of capturing that and letting you kind of know how it's changed and evolved and you can kind of imagine what it was like.

Mark Pietre: Yeah, you know, once I started to try and go back in time and describe earlier eras of goose hunting and then go to more modern areas, you realize that, or I realized anyway, that goose hunting has kind of been torn down and rebuilt several times. It's really changed. And I would argue it's changed even more than duck hunting. And I think a lot of why it's changed is just because geese have moved. You know, many goose populations have entirely different distributions, at least on the wintering and migrating grounds. than they did, you know, 80, 100 years ago. And that is really, it's really had a big impact on goose hunting in the country, depending on where you are. And I think you can't understate the importance of the increase in giant Canada geese and Atlantic Flyaway resident Canada geese, which have an interesting story in themselves, is that Those birds I think over time have acted almost as live decoys and have drawn these other populations of geese into areas that they otherwise wouldn't have been and that brought with it changes in hunting culture as well.

Katie Burke: Yeah and that's evident in the decoys too because like when you see in the book you'll see majority of them are floaters.

Mark Pietre: Yes. Yeah.

Katie Burke: And that's not what we do now.

Mark Pietre: No, not at all. Not at all. It's completely trans… not completely, but to the most extent, it's transition into field hunting. In places like the Atlantic Flyway, that always wasn't the case. They, in the earlier areas, they focused on hunting. They were hunting coastal habitats, not fields.

Mike Brasher: So how easy or difficult was it to find information about these different populations of geese? I would imagine for some it was far easier, but I guess that's one of the other things that is worth sort of describing is you – the book is – set up by Flyway, right? And like I said, I haven't seen the entire book. I've seen excerpts, so I'm just kind of guessing here, but let me just ask the question. So if we look at the Atlantic Flyway, are all the different subpopulations of Canada geese presented in that chapter? How does that work out?

Katie Burke: Yeah, this was a debate, so we divided the book up, like we had to kind of figure that out.

Mark Pietre: Yeah, it was kind of… A lot of discussions about what the structure of the book should be. Yes.

Mike Brasher: Because you also have to try to pair it with the decoys, right?

Katie Burke: Absolutely.

Mike Brasher: And try to figure out which population were they likely hunting with those decoys. Was that part of your…

Katie Burke: When as a person who knew nothing going in, I didn't even realize, I just assumed they were like ducks and we just did them by flyway. And then he was like, no, it's population. I was like, oh, that's different. And then we had to figure out how to treat that in there and divide it up.

Mark Pietre: Every chapter, every flyway chapter, we have a, you know, we identify, we list the Canada goose populations or the Cackling goose populations that occur in that flyway. And we, you know, there's a map, a distribution map, and then there's a brief discussion. about the nature of that population, its status, a little bit about its history. And then in terms of matching, you know, a goose population with a Canada goose decoy, we talked about that a little bit. For example, if you go, you know, Katie mentioned that a lot of Tim's decoys originated in the Atlantic Flyway. And there's good reasons for that because, you know, during that area when a lot of these birds were carved, well, that's where your population centers were. They were in the Atlantic Flyway and it was just… It was just the laws of math. You're going to have more people there, so you're likely to have more carvers there. And that's just kind of how it evolved. And more competition. More competition obviously, or I think brought out the artist, if you will. And I think that explains why the Atlantic Flyway probably is represented so strongly in the book. It is possible to tie certain carvers or certain birds to certain populations. So for example, a lot of great birds like Kroll, he would have been hunting the North Atlantic, what we now call the North Atlantic population of Canada geese. Why we know that is we know something about their wintering distribution. It lies within Kroll's range, if you will. And so it is possible to associate certain carvers and their birds with certain populations that were being hunted.

Katie Burke: But it's probably also similar to Cobb would be the same.

Mark Pietre: Cobb would be like the Atlantic population because he lived in an area where the Atlantic population wintered. So you could make those connections.

Mike Brasher: But those carvers didn't necessarily have those individual populations in mind, and we wouldn't even know that those populations existed.

Mark Pietre: At that time, they weren't even described. Identified as sort of discrete populations that had strong associations. You know, my memory is going to fail me here a little bit, but I think we now have something like 17 species or subspecies of what I'll call white-cheeked geese, which include Canada geese and cackling geese. I think in 1942, which would have been when Courtright wrote his book, And well after most of these birds were carved, I think there was five white-cheeked goose populations identified for North America. So no, they would have all been Canada geese.

Katie Burke: Yeah, most of these carvers would have been done by then. Now we do have some contemporary carvers included in the book. We have about five or six contemporary. And you just have to ask them. They're all alive. You can just ask them what they were looking at.

Mark Pietre: We did try and do a couple of other things in the book. You know, we did have chapters on the Atlantic, the Mississippi and the Central Pacific Flyways, but we tried to… There's a chapter on the history of managing Canada and Cackling Geese, and it's a pretty fascinating history. Once you dig into it, and I knew very, very little of it until I dug into it, but… The folks who have managed Canada geese, Cackling geese over time, they face some pretty strong obstacles in getting the information need, a lot of contention among how some of those populations were managed, a lot of hard feelings. You and I know of… We have a friend who was involved in some of the Mississippi Flyway wars and threatened to throw a fellow biologist down the stairs. We won't disclose who that is, but there are some pretty hard feelings. People can probably guess if they know us well. So there's some really interesting history there in just how these populations were managed and how they acquired the information to manage them. It's pretty fascinating.

Mike Brasher: Were there certain topics that you had to sort of leave on the editing room floor, so to speak, that you wanted to get into, but you just simply couldn't for the sake of brevity or otherwise the intended purpose or focus of the book?

Mark Pietre: I don't feel like I was constrained, Mike. The book is going to be, it's kind of a coffee…

Katie Burke: It's a coffee table book, so it'll be similar to that book that came out with all the wildlife book. It's like a big picture book.

Mark Pietre: But, you know, I think it's going to run somewhere near 300 pages. It's got a lot of copy. I didn't feel like I was or we were constrained in the topics that we dealt with. I really didn't want to deal with any more topics at some point. But no, you know, others will look at it and say you left this out or you left that out, I'm sure, and they'll be right about that. But I was pretty happy to be done.

Mike Brasher: Now, you didn't get into, you didn't go deep into research, science, things like that. Now, you did a little bit with regard to understanding the ecology of the species, but how much?

Mark Pietre: Well, you know, on the science side, I would say, you know, where we describe the various populations, their ranges, their status. I guess that's a little bit on the science side. The management chapter has a lot of the early science in it and some of the later science in it too. Hopefully written in a reader-friendly way. But that was a topic of discussion. How science-y do we want to make this book, you know? We kind of, we arrived at, and I'm not sure how this ultimately worked, but we said, you know, there is a really lot of interesting natural history behind Canada geese. And you could tell it in a, what I might say, a dry way, or we could maybe look for a different way to tell it. And Matt Young was really helpful and helped me think about this. And so what we tried to do is we actually, and this sounds a little… Corny, maybe. I hope it doesn't read this way, but we created a fictional goose. And that fictional goose belonged to the North American population of Canada geese. And that goose was hatched in the early 1900s. And we followed that goose through almost three decades. And by doing that, we're actually able to tell the biology of that goose through the eyes of the goose. And that bird also encounters some of the famous hunters that are featured in the book. And we try and recreate those hunting scenes as we imagine they might have happened.

Mike Brasher: Was that the viking gander?

Mark Pietre: That is the viking gander. And the reason we chose that name for him is when When I went back and I asked myself, who was the first… We know that Native Americans lived alongside Canada geese for thousands of years. But we asked ourselves, who would have been the first European to see a Canada goose? And you might go to places like Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, you know, where geese certainly were. But after a little bit of digging, we realized it was probably a Viking. When the Vikings discovered Newfoundland, in around, I believe, 1000 BC. It's inevitable that they would have also seen Canada geese during that period of time, just based on where we knew they were. So the Vikings were ahead of Columbus by almost 500 years in terms of discovering North America. And so we said, well, it was the Vikings who probably first encountered Canada geese from a European standpoint. And so we said, well, you know what? Let's call this the Vikings.

Mike Brasher: And you took some liberties, obviously, right?

Katie Burke: Fictionally. Oh yeah, it's fiction. It's complete fiction. And one of the things I will take credit for.

Mike Brasher: But reasoned fiction based on what you thought the goose would be experiencing some time of year.

Mark Pietre: I relied on a lot of the, I relied on the great science that where the bird was. Absolutely.

Katie Burke: And there are fiction sections throughout the book, like, because we wanted to make, I guess Mark wanted to make sure that, like, my guessing is that you want to make sure to kind of get the point across that geese have always been here, like, and they've always been a part of this country. So they're throughout the book. So there's the Viking gander, of course, which is its own chapter. But Each flyaway has its own, like, vignette of, like, another fictional story that kind of places it in that flyaway early on, early in history. And they're really fun. And in the book, what's fun about it is, design-wise, they stick out. Like, they… When you get to that, it's a completely different design. You get to that part of the book, you know you're reading it. Like, the reader will have a clue that they're reading a fictionalized portion of the book.

Mark Pietre: I love history. My dad was a history teacher. My dad's still alive.

Mike Brasher: I didn't know that. That explains your interest in history.

Mark Pietre: I'm probably a better historian than I am a scientist. That came right down to it. But to what Katie mentioned, you know, once we wrote the Vikingander, and we'll see how that plays, but I thought, you know what, Canada geese are the most, Canada geese, I'll call them white-cheeked geese, Canada geese and Ackland geese, right? Because both are included in the book. They're the most widely distributed bird in North America. Which I really didn't know until I… More widely distributed than the mallard? Yes, I believe so.

Mike Brasher: Did you say waterfowl?

Mark Pietre: Widely distributed goose for sure. And I suppose they would compete with mallards for that. But when you think, Mike, of where they nest in these arctic areas where you don't have mallards, I think they have mallards beat in that category. I think they have all birds beat in that category. Hey, I might be wrong, but anyway, I wrote it.

Mike Brasher: Well, when you extend it to the urban parks, they certainly get all the other geese and ducks.

Mark Pietre: It's hard to go anywhere in North America and not see Canada geese. But when I realized that, I was like, well, you know what? Anybody making history would have encountered Canada geese, Cackling geese, just because of the nature of their distribution. So we tried to do something fun. So for each flyway chapter, we opened it with what we call, Katie, a historical tale.

Katie Burke: Yeah, historical tale.

Mark Pietre: So, in the Atlantic Flyaway chapter, for example, we talk about the Lost Colony, which is a very well-known American piece of history, and there's facts known about the Lost Colony. We tried to weave in Canada geese into the experience of those lost colonists, and we did the same thing in the Mississippi Flyaway, and we did the same thing in the Central Pacific Flyaway, too, these little historical tales. So, factually based, but whether or not, you know, we completely fictionalized or imagined what the role or role of Canada Geese might have been there.

Mike Brasher: Katie, this is probably a good time to take a break. You good with that? So, we are going to take a break. We have a number of other things to talk about. I'm sure people are wondering, like, what's the distribution of the book going to be? I think we're going to have to talk about that a little bit. And then we're going to also kind of fill you in on some of the other things that are going to be accompanying this project. So, stay with us, folks. We'll be right back.

Katie Burke: We are here with Mark Petrie. And Mark, so I want to talk about one thing in particular. So you've been on these hunts for the book. We sent you on hunts in each area so that you can kind of get the flavor of hunting today. But I want to talk particularly about going to Prince Edward Island and then doing the research for Prince Edward Island, that part of Canada, because you're from that part of Canada, not Prince Edward Island, but the area and what that was like for you to kind of get into what that was like historically in that area of the country to kind of learn about all of that.

Mark Pietre: Right.

Katie Burke: And what did you know? Did you know a lot about it going in? Or did you have a lot of assumptions? And you just, yeah, go ahead.

Mark Pietre: Well, yes, I grew up in the Maritime Provinces. I didn't grow up in Prince Edward Island. I grew up in New Brunswick. But getting to Prince Edward Island, at least when I was a kid, was a ferry ride, about an hour ferry ride. And it was a place you vacationed a lot. I actually ended up working over there when I was going to college. I worked for the Canadian Wildlife Service every summer and we would always go over to Prince Edward Island and rocket net geese. So, it was kind of, it was one of my first experiences in the waterfowl field, if you will.

Mike Brasher: And… That's a rather tame story from your… from your college days. That's not what I'm accustomed to whenever you tell stories about college and those types of early experiences, but we can save those for a different day.

Mark Pietre: I was more behaved in those days, you know.

Mike Brasher: That's good. I was a bit of a letdown. Knowing the type of stories you typically tell from that era of your life. Just say you went over to work for the Canadian Wildlife Service and rocketed into geese. That was a bit of a letdown.

Mark Pietre: I developed some of that bad behavior once I moved to the U.S. and went to school here.

Katie Burke: He was still a nice Canadian then.

Mark Pietre: That's right, back then I was still a nice Canadian. So Prince Edward Island was, when I learned that We wanted to do a hunt in each flyway. I was like, let's do Prince Edward Island. First of all, going back to the Viking gander for a moment, the North American population of Canada geese, of which the Viking gander was a fictional member, they traditionally, historically have fall staged on Prince Edward Island. in Malpeak Bay. Now, I think a lot of those birds actually overwinter in Prince Edward Island. I'm not sure how many, but it's pretty clear that some of them are spending the entire winter there. Like a lot of other areas, Prince Edward Island has gotten warmer, I think, and they allow geese to do that. But anyway, it was a place that I really… I'd never hunted over there, never hunted Canada geese over there. And John Gordon, John hooked us up with Paul McKinnon, who hunts geese religiously in Prince Edward Island. Paul and his crew are great goose hunters. I mean, they are probably some of the best prepared, if not the best prepared people I've ever hunted with. And we hunted two days over in Prince Edward Island, had two fabulous hunts. A friend of mine, Dan Sears, who also works for Ducks Unlimited in Canada. Dan and I have been friends since high school. And Dan was able to join us on those two days hunts, which was really special too. But I would say it was probably the best Canada goose hunting I've ever had. And again, thanks again to Paul McKinnon and his crew for doing that. And we feature Paul in the book. We featured everybody who helped us with the book. But that hunt in Prince Edward Island was pretty special.

Mike Brasher: So, Katie, where do we want to go now? I mean, other things in the book, I know we eventually want to talk about sort of distribution of the book, the exhibit that's coming to the Bass Pro Pyramid, and some of the other things associated with this. I have another, I have a question for Mark about the book. What is, I don't know, what was the part of this that you were most surprised about? When you did all of this research, what were you most surprised to learn or to realize? It's almost like, what are you taking away from this that will stick with you for the rest of your life?

Mark Pietre: If you had to ask me what was the most interesting material that I encountered in researching this book, I would have to say it was the history of the Mississippi Valley population of Canada geese. Yes. And that history is featured in the last chapter of the book, but it's a very long history. It involved… it's very relevant to this part of the world. It involved some very hard feelings about goose redistribution, especially… This intersects the goose wars reference that you talked about. It's very much about the goose wars and I thought the history of the Mississippi volley population and everything that came into play over that hundred-year history in terms of goose management, goose research, some of the conflicts that evolved. I thought that was the most interesting thing that I had learned in researching the book, yes.

Katie Burke: So just for people who don't know, can you like briefly describe what the Goose Wars is?

Mike Brasher: Start with describing what is and where do you find the Mississippi Valley population, where do they breed, where do they winter historically.

Mark Pietre: Yes, so what's interesting is there is no longer a Mississippi Valley population.

Mike Brasher: MVP.

Mark Pietre: MVP for acronyms. The MVP was combined with the Eastern Prairie population and the Southern James Bay population, I believe in 2015 or 2016 into a single population, which I think is the Southern Hudson Bay population. I better be right about that.

Mike Brasher: Forgive us if we're awful.

Mark Pietre: There's so many populations. But anyway, and they did that for reasons that we don't need to get into, but Mississippi Valley population nested on the western coast of Hudson Bay, I believe. And primarily wintered in Illinois at one time. Really most of those birds in southern Illinois especially. And over time, some of those birds or a large percent of those birds ended up wintering or staging in Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin. Anyway. There's some decent evidence that that population wintered pretty far south at one time, you know, probably down… Further south than Southern Illinois. Yes, Southern Illinois kind of became the terminus of their wintering area, but there was evidence that they had been wintering farther south than that at some point, maybe in the 20s or 30s. And there was a desire in the 1970s among some of the southern states to say, hey, you know, we want to see these geese again. And there was a lot of effort to haze geese in southern Illinois, in Orokin, refuges. Orokin Marsh in Wisconsin. Orokin Marsh in Wisconsin. It may not be as familiar. Right. And there was a real desire to send these birds farther south. There was some early success that they took as encouraging, but in fact that ended up just being there was a couple cold winters that forced the birds south that were not typical. And very soon they were back right where they were started in terms of, you know, most of them were in southern Illinois or Oregon Marsh and Wisconsin. And so there was some hard feelings there. Those states too, Illinois and Wisconsin, back then there was a quota system for MVP geese. And there were some years that they were exceeding their quotas and of course that produced more hard feelings. At one point, I believe some of the southern states would not serve on, would not be represented on the Mississippi Flyway population.

Mike Brasher: Do you cover that in the book?

Mark Pietre: Yes, in great detail.

Mike Brasher: Again, I… You reached out to Flyway representatives for some insight on that.

Mark Pietre: Yes. And some of it's recorded too. What typically happens is the history of these kind of things is usually recorded and pieces of it are recorded in different places. And what I tried to do to get was bring all that history into one place. But yes, it's a pretty fascinating period in our waterfowl management history. of which our friend took the lead. He was. Several of our friends.

Mike Brasher: Dale Humberg was a big part of that as well. Exactly, yes.

Mark Pietre: Great to the air. We should say Dale was not the one who threatened to throw a fellow waterfowl bottle. It narrows it down.

Mike Brasher: So, N-1 there, yeah. So, something else kind of crossed my mind. Oh, what I was going to say is that some of what you described there parallels some of the discussion that's happening even today around changing distributions of Mallards and how they are traditionally, they're now staying staying a bit farther north and there are various reasons for that, explanations that all combine to go into that. But, you know, if you go back far enough, I think what that shows is it reveals, I don't want to say a lack of understanding, but a hope that we could control this migratory resource to a greater degree through deliberate action than what their behaviors ultimately revealed, ultimately showed, right? And so these birds will respond to the landscapes that they have and the environmental conditions that they're exposed to, and it would probably take a substantial and widespread kind of disturbance regime to really overcome all of those other things. When you think about the hazing, you've had the birds long enough, let's haze them, get them out of there, force them south, you know? It's not that simple. Especially when they're going to another landscape where they're going to be hazed just as much or harder. That's the thing you got to remember.

Katie Burke: Yeah, because they're going to get treated really well. But I will say, even as a non-biologist, if you read this book, it's evident that they are just going to change to what works for them. They're going to do what they're going to do.

Mark Pietre: They don't care about our management objectives.

Katie Burke: No, not at all. They have adjusted over and over and over again.

Mark Pietre: And we did try and describe that. I mean, for some populations, it's pretty radical. You know, Pacific cackling geese. I mean, most of those birds used to winter in California, Central Valley, California. Now, almost all of them are in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. And there's very, you know, geese are big body birds and it's no surprise that, you know, they are the first to figure out that, hey, we can winter farther north than we traditionally did because there's plenty of food here, it's getting warmer, and my guess is, you know, mallards are a little farther down the line in terms of body size, but some of that is probably playing out with mallards as well.

Mike Brasher: In the not-too-distant past, one of the subpopulations of cackling geese used to winter on the Texas coast. That, too, has changed. Those birds do not go to the coast any longer. I think they're mostly in the panhandle now. And they have even, we talked to Kevin Cry, and they have even adapted their behavior in recent years. to start using more urban areas where they cannot be hunted, if I'm remembering correctly. So, all of those things combined to move birds around. And we get it though, we get the frustration that whether you're talking about individual hunters or how that affects local economies, there's a number of really good books that have kind of chronicled the effect of some of these changing distributions on some local communities.

Mark Pietre: We did devote some space in the book to what's happened to goose hunting on the Texas coast. Especially Canada goose, white-cheeked goose hunting. Just as you described, there are no white-cheeked geese now being counted anymore on the Texas Gulf Coast. None, zero.

Katie Burke: No, and you talk about that, like, changing of economies reminds me of, like, on the Atlantic coast with the cop story. Like, that is a business that was there at one point for Canada Geese and Brandt, basically, and it went away because they changed where they're going. It's the same story over and over, and it's very evident in the book that it's the same story over and over. Yeah, I mean, if the birds wouldn't migrate, this would be a lot simpler. They just stay in one place.

Mike Brasher: But that's not the way it works. So a lot of folks, listeners and viewers are probably wondering, well, where can I get this book? Where's it going to be? I'm really looking forward to at least seeing a copy. Katie, do you want to talk about this sort of the, maybe the purpose of the book and its limited distribution, I think is a fair way to describe that, but sort of tell people what we need to know.

Katie Burke: It is a limited distribution, so the main thing I guess to start is with the exhibit. The exhibit will open on August 1st this summer. It'll open in coordination with the Expo here in Memphis.

Mike Brasher: At the Bass Pro Pyramid, the Waterfowling Heritage Center at the Bass Pro Pyramid.

Katie Burke: Yeah, so if you come to Expo, you just walk across the street and you go to the Pyramid, and it will open that Friday, August 1st. It'll take over the whole museum, the Waterfowl Herrington Center. There'll be Canada geese everywhere, and that is where it will open. Now, we will… So each location… So from there, it'll be with us for a year, and then it's going to travel. So it'll be in Memphis for a year, then it'll go to the Peoria Riverfront Museum. in Illinois, and then it'll go to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, and then it'll finish at the Harvard Grace Museum in Maryland. So it's about four years. It's like a little less than four years because Shelburne is only open like part of the year, so it's not a full year there, but it's four years that it will travel. And at each location, we will have a limited stock of books. So I don't know the exact number that we'll sell in Memphis, but we'll sell those books. And then I will, we will like hold books back for each location so that each location has books to sell.

Mike Brasher: Are you going to be here at each of those locations to autograph the books?

Katie Burke: He is forced to be here for the Memphis one. Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

Mike Brasher: I'll put you to work at DUX as well.

Katie Burke: Great, because I'm sure the weather will be great.

Mike Brasher: August 1st in Memphis. Beautiful time of year.

Katie Burke: I used to live here, by the way. So, this has not been decided, but I've been working with, like, some of our communications staff. We might have— I'm probably gonna make him pre-sign a bunch of stuff, but he'll be there if people want special things. have like a very limited amount of signed copies for that weekend. Like on Saturday, maybe have like an hour where you can come get, there'll be 25 signed copies and once that's gone, they're gone. But that's not official, so I don't know. But we're planning on trying to do something like that.

Mark Pietre: You know my handwriting is atrocious.

Katie Burke: It doesn't matter.

Mike Brasher: Well, you have four months to practice, something like that.

Mark Pietre: That's true, I'll develop a new signature over the next four months.

Katie Burke: You get Tommy Harden to design, you want him to stamp it.

Mark Pietre: I need one of those pens.

Katie Burke: But yeah, so it'll be very limited. We aren't doing any online sales, it'll all be in-person sales. So you have to come see an exhibit to buy it.

Mike Brasher: But the exhibit is free, open to the public?

Katie Burke: Free of charge, open to the public, seven days a week.

Mike Brasher: And so I've seen exhibits come through the Waterfowl Inherited Center before. Is there going to be like an entire wing devoted to the collection?

Katie Burke: It's going to be basically the whole museum. Okay, that's kind of what I was wondering. Yeah, it's going to be the whole museum. We are going to like shrink some sections and keep a few sections the same or like slightly adjust it to make them more Canada goose feel. But yes, you will see Canada geese as soon as you walk in the door.

Mike Brasher: And is Tim gonna be here for any of… I'm sure Tim will join at some point.

Katie Burke: He will be here, but I don't know if he'll be here for any of the public stuff. He's kind of a shy person, so I don't know if he'll really want to do anything like that.

Mike Brasher: I totally understand that.

Katie Burke: So, but yes, and I was thinking I'll probably do, I'm going to work on doing another podcast for this, but I was going to get all the curators for each museum in to talk about the collection a little bit more and we'll talk, we'll kind of go more into those decoys that are in the collection and the history and why they're so significant.

Mike Brasher: So you said a book like this has never been done, where it's devoted to one species in the decoy world. How common is it for these private collections to go around to museums for exhibits?

Katie Burke: So it has become more common, particularly since we've opened the Waterfowl Inheritance Center, I would say it's become more common. People like Zach at Peoria as well, he's done a large exhibit now. He tends to do from multiple collectors, but he's mostly done. But yeah, it's becoming more common now. This will be for a private collection on this scale. It hasn't been done in a while. Let's say the last time this was done for a single collector was probably the Paul Tudor Jones collection. And that was over 10 years ago.

Mike Brasher: Oh, really?

Katie Burke: So that's when they did conservation through art. That was probably the last time they did something. And I don't even know if it was at this scale before my time. So, but it was probably the last time they did a one single collection. Now, not as a species. Again, those are usually mixed species. And yeah, for the most part, usually they tend to do it on a region. But this is definitely the first time we've done a single species.

Mike Brasher: Mark, with this book kind of wrapping up, are you looking forward to getting some of your time back, or do you have another project, the next project already?

Mark Pietre: Oh, I'll never write another book, if that's what you're asking.

Katie Burke: I'd like to say that to Dan Thiel, so you're listening, I will never be a part of another book project ever again.

Mike Brasher: I think that's a three for three in terms of the people on this podcast, them being part of writing another book.

Mark Pietre: In fact, we're almost done. Katie and I, before we came in here this morning, we were choosing some of the final photos for the book. So we're kind of at the fun part now, the design part, which is almost done. I've been working with a great designer. And I should say, Katie has been a great partner in this, as has Tom Fulgham, who used to be our chief of Communications at Ducks Unlimited, and it's been a pleasure to work with both of those two.

Katie Burke: Yes, we brought him out of retirement to be the editor.

Mike Brasher: Who was the one that kept you on schedule, meeting deadlines? Is that Katie? Katie described the amount of work that went into having to always send emails saying, Mark, I need this.

Mark Pietre: Katie was going to suffer all the consequences of not being something delivered on time, so yeah, it was her.

Katie Burke: I would say, if you were going to give me a title, if this was a movie, I would be the producer of this book.

Mike Brasher: It's been a pleasure to sort of be on the outside, just sort of looking in and seeing how this was coming together. Being asked for my opinion on various aspects of this, from some of your initial stories, fictional stories, to even some of the maps, to some of the other writings, descriptions of the populations, even some of the photos that are going in the book. I provided some input on those and so I feel like I've seen a good chunk to this.

Mark Pietre: You were a part of a fairly small group of folks who I bounced parts of the book off pretty regularly to make sure that we were on track. You know the other ones. John Colussi was another one. small group of folks that I trusted their opinion, usually, to give me some honest feedback. And so I really appreciate your time in doing that. Absolutely, absolutely.

Katie Burke: Is there anything else that you want to mention about that? Any like part of the book or stories that you came across or anything interesting that you learned while doing it that we haven't talked about?

Mark Pietre: I don't think so, Katie. I think we've pretty much been pretty thorough here.

Katie Burke: The only thing I guess we didn't talk about, you talked a little bit about the West Coast, but we didn't talk that much about the West Coast stuff.

Mark Pietre: No. You know, the reason I suppose that, to Katie's, to your point earlier, that, you know, what we did was we actually combined the Central and Pacific Flyway chapters into one. And the reason we did is that there just aren't a lot of birds in Tim's collection that are from those two flyways. But that's to be expected. You know, most of these famous birds were carved from the late 1800s through the early 1900s, 1920s, 1930s. Well, that was still a pretty early era in some of these more Western flyways. You really just did not have the people and really in some ways the need to carve really, really high quality decoys. The level of competition was probably less. A lot of the hunting out here in the West was done with silhouettes. Not done over water, and so you just didn't have people out there making these floaters, which are really at the heart of Tim's collection.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and at that point, there are few carvers, and even for, like, puddle ducks as well, there are still few carvers on the West Coast. Because at the time the population is starting to grow, you're also getting factory decoys at that time. So people are able to order things from Abercrombie & Finch and Sears & Roebuck and things like that. So that you're getting less and less of like individual carvers.

Katie Burke: Alright, well thanks Mark for coming on the show.

Mark Pietre: Well, thanks for having me.

Katie Burke: Yeah, it's a long time coming.

Mike Brasher: Yes, it has been. And congratulations on getting to this point. Like I said, I'm looking forward to seeing the full book once it comes out and look forward to seeing the collection and appreciate all your work on this. I know everybody that gets a book that gets their hands on one of these. We'll appreciate all the work and time that you put into it. Many mornings, getting up at probably 3 or 4 a.m. I don't know if you're insomniac or exactly what the issue is, but I know sometimes I would get emails 5 a.m. here and you're emailing and I'm doing the math and John and I are both like, why are you awake?

Mark Pietre: A lot of early, early mornings and a lot of really bad coffee. That's what it was.

Katie Burke: Well, thank you, Mark, for coming to the show.

Mark Pietre: Thank you for having me, Kate.

Katie Burke: Thanks, Mike, for joining us.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

Katie Burke: Yeah, this is going to be a special book. I can go and tell you it's beautiful already. And I can't wait to actually hold one. The only thing I want at the end of this is for me, Mark, and Tom to take a picture with the book in the middle. Like, that's literally all I want. That's going on my wall. That's the only thing I need. Thank you, Mike and Mark, for coming on the show. Thanks to our producers, Chris and Rachel, and thanks to you, our listeners, for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.