Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Swell AI Transcript: Broods NO MUSIC.mp3
Mike Brasher: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. I am Dr. Mike Brasher. I'm going to be your host on this video episode of the Ducks Unlimited podcast, and I am happy to have joining me in studio, Kayci Messerly. Kasey?
Kayci Messerly: Nice to be here, everyone.

Mike Brasher: It's great that you could join us again for this episode. We have two remote guests. They're going to be helping us talk about broods, duckling broods, and I will start by introducing Catrina Terry, a research scientist with Ducks Unlimited in our Great Plains Regional Office up in Bismarck. Welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, Katrina.

Catrina Terry: Thank you, Mike. Glad to be back.

Mike Brasher: This is your first appearance, I think, on a video segment. We had you on earlier to talk, maybe a couple years ago, just audio. Were you a DU employee at that time? Had you just started yet, or were you still a student at LSU?

Catrina Terry: Yeah, so I thought about that this morning. That was over four years ago now. I was officially a DU employee, but I was still finishing my master's.

Mike Brasher: Four years. Does it seem like four years?

Catrina Terry: No, it turns out it goes really quick.

Mike Brasher: Oh my gosh, that's crazy. Well, thanks for joining, for coming back, and sorry it took us four years to get you back on here, but it will not be the last. We've seen you around at a few other functions here lately, and so you're going to, I suspect you'll become more visible here to our Ducks Unlimited supporters going forward, so we're happy about that. Also joining for the first time on a video episode is Dr. John Colussy, our Director of Conservation Science and Planning in the Great Lakes and Atlantic region. John, great to have you on. Oh, pleasure to be here, Mike. Looking forward to chatting a little bit about breeds today. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been with DU a little bit longer than four years, right?

John Coluccy: Yeah, I started in 2001. So, that's just past 24 years.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. So, just a 20-year difference between the two of you there. And so, a lot of expertise represented. And so, your first video episode we had you on last year to help out with some of the breeding population discussion. but we appreciate you coming back, and the two of you recently collaborated on an article that appeared in the Ducks Unlimited magazine entitled, The Secret Lives of Broods, and there were a couple of different… well, the main point of that article was to talk about some new technology that's being used by some of you and your colleagues to help better understand what happens with broods, to better observe broods, and we're going to talk about some of that fancy technology, and we have some videos and photos of that as well that we'll share with people. But we want to start out here with just sort of an introduction to brood ecology, why it's important, Catrina, you've studied this in a number of ways, so I'm going to go to you first. We may just—we'll just kind of bounce some questions off one another. So, duck broods, I think that will be the majority of our focus here, talking about ducklings, but some of what we'll talk about from an ecology standpoint will also talk— will relate to geese and their goslings, but from a— From a duckling standpoint, why is it so important for us to understand what's going on at that particular life stage compared to some of the other parts of the duck life stage?

Catrina Terry: Yeah, so I guess there's multiple reasons why we are studying ducklings and I'm not sure if you've talked about on the podcast much but the breeding season is the most important part of that life cycle and when they're a duckling it's the last major step before they can actually be added into that population. So if we have good nesting habitat that clutch of eggs can hatch, but we have to make sure that we still have good brood habitat to rear that young so they can grow up, be able to fly, and hopefully make it down south. So I guess that is why we're studying ducklings, to make sure that we're keeping that connection open to make sure those ducklings can survive and grow.

Mike Brasher: John, you have been part of some studies in the past that have looked at some population models of mallards, I think it was, in the Great Lakes region and sort of decomposed all of these different life stages, some of which Catrina's mentioned there, but there's different… I mean, you can get more technical, like, on the importance on understanding the importance of this part of the life cycle, right? And so, talk about that a little in terms of what we learned from past studies, why it's so important to do the quantitative work on estimating the survival of these ducklings and how we use that to understand the overall importance in that annual cycle.

John Coluccy: Yeah, so we've, you know, in the past built a number of demographic models, a lot of work done on mallards because we have the data to parameterize it. And, you know, everything from non-breeding survival to breeding propensity to clutch size and hatch success and nest success and duckling survival is one of those prominent parameters in that life cycle in the breeding period. And we know that, as Catrina mentioned, that the breeding period is the most important in the life cycle through that demographic modeling, carrying out sensitivity analyses, looking at which portion of the life cycle and which parameters contribute the most to variation in populations. And so when you dissect that collectively, The breeding period is the most important. I think averaging over all the mallard work and some of the other species, I think it was like 74% of the variation in population growth is attributed to breeding season parameters. And duckling survival or brood survival is one of the two top ones. Depending upon the study, the research that was done, and the demographic modeling, it's either nest success or duckling survival are the top two breeding season parameters. You can't have one without the other, right? It's kind of a chicken and the egg kind of thing. So they got to be successful, they have to hatch, and the young have to survive.

Mike Brasher: Catrina, you mentioned a few moments ago that we try to focus on or want to see good brood habitat out there. What is good brood habitat?

Catrina Terry: So this would be kind of brood dependent divers versus dabblers. And I also work pretty exclusively in the prairies so this could be very different for John. But typically we're looking for a wetland that is still wet by July and hopefully will still be wet until August. has, you know, maybe about 50% emergent vegetation throughout and provides a lot of food resources as aquatic invertebrates, SAV or submerged aquatic vegetation, and then that emergent vegetation to hide in. So those are kind of the three most important things, water, food, and somewhere to hide.

Mike Brasher: I want to ask Chris to bring up the image here, this video. I think we can play this video. This gives us an idea of some of what you're talking about there. My first question is going to go to Casey here. She's totally not expecting this and that's what makes this fun. Do you know what species, any guesses what species these are?

Kayci Messerly: these right here. I really, really appreciate this. I'm going to go with a no. Okay. That's what I'm going to go with here.

Mike Brasher: I don't know either. No, go back there. Yeah, there we go. I don't know either. Oh, thank goodness.

John Coluccy: Could anybody even pick the adult out? No, I couldn't. It's just like, I can't even tell which one's adult. Maybe that one in the lower right. Now there's a couple of big ones there.

Mike Brasher: They're all pretty big. Catrina, any recollection of, I think this was one that you shared.

Catrina Terry: Yeah, remember when I said don't quiz me on live? No, no, I don't remember that. I'm kind of leaning towards Gadwall, but typically I like to take actual still photos and then I can zoom in, look at bill shape and color. And if they'll offer it speculum on a video. And this is a very old drone. It's not as good, but they look like they have pretty dark heads and a darker bill. So that's why I'm leaning towards Gadwall. And you can tell which ones are the ducklings. A lot of their little downy butts are still really apparent versus the older bigger ones have those nice tail feathers all pronounced.

Mike Brasher: I mean, that's a lot of, that's a large number of birds right there. Do you think that's, like, how old do we think those ducklings are? And do you think that's a single brood or is that an amalgamation, collection of more than one brood?

Catrina Terry: asking a lot of tough questions. I would go for at least the majority is about a class 2B. So, and we're looking at classes, so typically there's class 1, class 2, and then class 3 is where they fully look like an adult, but they can't fly. Class 1, they're cute little downy ducklings. And then class 2, they're starting to get their flight feathers, starting to get coloration. And then within those classes, we have the A, B, and C. Um, from the majority of just looking at this video, they look like about class 2B, still a lot of downy butts.

Mike Brasher: And, and that would be how many days? Like what are we talking? Oh, gosh. Let me, let me, I'm going to guess what? 20 days, 21 days, somewhere in there. Am I? See, I'm not afraid to be wrong. Cause it's been so long since I've done this.

Catrina Terry: I know, I should have grabbed my, uh, DeafBlind chart. Um, I was going to go like four weeks. Four weeks. Okay.

John Coluccy: Right on the spot. It does look, I mean, I counted 17 there, I think, in that pod. And there does look like there's a couple there, at least one that's way smaller. And that would be an enormous, if it was 16 ducklings, that would be a big clutch. So it's probably a brood amalgamation of some sort.

Catrina Terry: Yeah, that one that's in the middle looks really tiny, like a 1C or a 2A.

Mike Brasher: And so how long will they be a, quote, duckling? We're talking about ones, twos, and class threes. When they get to class three, they're nearly flighted, right? And so what's that average brood period look like, time-wise? Um… Like, right around a month for most of them, isn't it? Or is it… No, no, no. Is it a little bit longer than that?

Catrina Terry: I think it's like 65 to 80 days. Oh, is it longer than that?

Mike Brasher: Oh. Yeah.

Catrina Terry: It is a very long period of time where these ducklings are flightless and a little bit helpless.

Mike Brasher: I think I was thinking, I was, I had in my mind something closer to the incubation period is more between the 24 and 30 day period for most ducks.

Catrina Terry: Yeah.

Mike Brasher: Okay. And so they will be in that duckling stage for 45 to 60 days before they can probably closer to 60 before they attain complete flight. Is that what we're, what we're saying?

Catrina Terry: Yeah, correct.

Mike Brasher: Okay, all right, my math was off a little bit there. The other thing that this video does a really good job showing is some of the characteristics of good brood habitat that you were talking about, Catrina, where you've got a very healthy amount of submerged aquatic vegetation. That contains a lot of insects, a lot of the little bugs that these ducklings feed so heavily on as they're building their muscles, building their feathers. They need a high-protein diet and that's where they get a lot of those aquatic invertebrates. There's also a couple of other birds swimming around in there and we were talking about that before we started recording. And John, what did we say we think those were? We thought that they were coots. And they're pretty cool. I don't know if we're still playing the video right now, but if we, if we can get it back playing, you'll see, um, one of the, so there's one in sort of the upper right, one of them in the upper left just came to the surface. And as we get closer, you'll see them start swimming. And well, one just dove again, but the one that's going to start swimming here, you can see the legs stick out way behind it and real long and, and don't, um, that was one of the things that we thought. kind of gave it away as a, as well as the shape of the head and gave it away as a coot. So some cool stuff going on there.

Kayci Messerly: Going back real quick to the size of this group, John, you were saying you think this is a couple of different broods that have come together. Do we think that's maybe a product of the quality of the habitat? Like they're more likely to hang out in these larger groups or shared groups when you have higher quality habitat or is this pretty normal for them to, as the broods get older, come together?

John Coluccy: That's an interesting question, and I think that it's a combination of things. I mean, I think when you have a quality brood-rearing wetland like this one appears to be, it's very likely that you're going to have a diversity or a number of broods of the same species, but then also different species as well. there's a fair bit, you know, when these birds get out in the middle of a wetland and they're foraging, there's mixing going on and sometimes disturbance will create a rush and birds will rush off to seek shelter and may get, you know, end up in another brood somehow and that happens all the time. We did an article for the DU Magazine not too long ago about group amalgamations that kind of covered that topic. And it's fairly common in waterfowl, particularly geese, as well as ducks. So it does happen.

Mike Brasher: Catrina, did you find anything else out about how long these birds stay in their duckling phase? I heard some pages flipping. So that told me that somebody was doing some fact checking. And so what did we learn?

Catrina Terry: Yes. So according to Gallup and Marshall, 1954, most broods, and this is for dabbling ducks, are flight capable at 56 to 60 days. So at a 2b, they are 37, or wait, where's 2b? Sorry, they're 28 to 36 days. So I was, we were good at four weeks.

Mike Brasher: Cool. It's been a while since I've done any studying of ducklings, and it shows. But that's okay. We've got the experts on to correct us and keep us straight. John, I wanted you to elaborate a little on brood habitat and how it varies. Catrina even mentioned this, that it probably, that she works in the prairies. What we're looking at here is probably a prairie wetland. But you are likely to be dealing with different types of brood-rearing habitat in the Great Lakes region. And if we want to think about wood ducks in the southeastern U.S. or eastern U.S., we're probably looking at a different type of wetland and different structure of what makes good brood habitat in those areas as well. So, what do we know about that?

John Coluccy: Yeah, you know, we do get our prairie pothole type wetlands out here that are similar to what Catrina has, particularly in the Great Lakes, but those were not commonplace. There's some pockets here and there. But in the east, we have a lot of shrubby, shrub scrub, wetlands, a lot of forested wetlands. And so we get birds in that kind of cover. This is not something that you see pretty typically with mallard broods in the east, this kind of picture that we're seeing on the screen right now with open water. And you might catch them in a pocket of open water once in a while, but there is a lot of overhead cover, as we'll see on some of the future videos and images that we provided for this. But yeah, and certainly wood ducks, you know, nest in tree cavities, so associated with the forest, riparian habitats, forested riverine systems, and bottom white hardwood forests in the south. Yeah, those birds are almost exclusively in forested wetland habitats.

Mike Brasher: If we backed up from this image and were able to see the entire wetland, I'm guessing, Catrina, that we would see some robust emergent vegetation. Perhaps it's entirely cattail-rimmed, but something that allows these ducklings to escape from overhead predators or any other kind of predator. Because right now they're just out in the open as we see them in this little video, but they do need that escape cover, that real thick vegetation, and we'll see some examples of that a little bit later on. I wanted to pose a question to Casey here because, Casey, you and your research as a graduate student, I don't think it involved ducks or wetland birds. It was mostly sort of passerines, right?

Kayci Messerly: Yeah, so in my graduate program at Auburn, I was actually working with zebra finches. And so these were captive birds that we were working on. And then previously in my undergraduate work, I was working with both zebra finches in a captive population and tree swallows, which were a wild population we had there.

Mike Brasher: And so there are some important differences between the developmental process, the developmental strategy between ducklings or waterfowl and the species of birds that you were most familiar with before coming to Ducks Unlimited. So do you want to talk about some of those key developmental differences?

Kayci Messerly: Yeah. So I, just for the sake of comparing wild populations, will kind of refer back to my time at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, working with tree swallows, also cavity nesters. And so to do the research there, we put up nest boxes, which tree swallows readily will nest in. And so those birds are passerines. And so they are actually what we know as altricial. And so that means that they're born not able to be self-reliant. And so they actually, when they're first born, can't even thermoregulate. So they can't control their own body temperature. They're very reliant on their parents for that help. And they also have what we call bi-parental care. So both of their parents are coming and feeding and helping kind of regulate and maintain that nest as well.

Mike Brasher: Some of the other key differences there, like the incubation, length of incubation from time that the egg is laid to the time it hatches differs substantially, right?

Kayci Messerly: Yes, and so it's a much shorter period. Both of the species that I was working with will lay one egg at a time. The tree swallows that I was working with will actually… Typically, if it was a smaller clutch, all of the eggs will still hatch on the same day, but as that clutch gets longer, you're more likely to get a chick or two at the end of that that's hatching on a second or third day. And so their normal clutch size is around like a good size clutch is six to seven eggs. And typically six of those will hatch out. If you have seven, you start to kind of lose the viability of that. They don't all typically hatch and you're limited on space in the nest. So even raising like a very successful tree swallow nest will have six chicks come and fledge out of that. So, you have that incubation time and then have all your chicks hatch. For the zebra finches, they actually would still lay one egg a day, but they would hatch out one chick a day as well. So, you get to that point and you can reliably have one chick every single day. We would mark ours so that we know which chick was coming in what order and that's how we would keep track of them as well.

Mike Brasher: And so then the key difference there between those groups of birds and ducklings and geese is that, as you mentioned, the birds you were studying were altricial. The alternative form of that is precocial, which means that when at hatch, ducklings, goslings, cygnets for swans are They do have downy feathers. They are, within 24 hours, their eyes are open. Within 24 hours, they were able to leave the nest and then go and feed on their own. So you see those two contrasting strategies. One is where… Oh, and the other thing on ducklings, on ducks, geese, and swans. The incubation period is longer, so there are trade-offs that show up in these different groups of birds, ducks, geese, swans, incubation period is longer, but when they hatch within 24 hours, they're off feeding on their own, which sort of eliminates the need for the male, for the drake, to also participate in feeding in contrast to what we see with passerines, shorter incubation period, an additional 14 or so days in the nest, but it requires both male and female to feed them to get them to flight. So that's sort of an interesting difference there. And Catrina, that precocial nature of ducks comes into play when we start talking about what happens immediately after they hatch. I mean, their ducks nest on the ground, at least most of the dabbling ducks that we're talking about will likely be talking about. Nest on the ground, exposed to predators there, But then whenever they hatch, like what happens and what do we know about ducks and their ability to travel across land and nest at different distances from the wetlands where they eventually take their birds.

Catrina Terry: Yeah, so duck nests, like Mike said, are very vulnerable. I'll use Mallard as an example. From the first day she lays her egg till they hatch, it's about 35 days when we include laying an egg every day for 10 days and then her full incubation. And so they're all going to hatch at the same time, unlike a lot of the passerines, because within 24 hours, the hen has to lead her ducklings off because they have to eat. She's not going to bring any food back, so if ducklings don't hatch together, they're not going to make it. And some of, especially larger bodied like mallards or pintails, they can walk up to a mile to a wetland. And it's pretty interesting. It's relatively new and it's harder to study, but they've been looking at prospecting, so where these hens are taking their ducklings. USGS out of California published a paper a couple years ago showing that hens would take their deck lanes to wetlands they visited before, and most of the times that wasn't the closer wetland. So they are traveling farther to get to potentially a better wetland. more invertebrates, more places to hide, less predators, versus a closer, easier-to-get-to wetland. And we know that overland travel, very easy for predators to get them. A duckling is not very fast. And so hens will, if you've seen the kill deer do their broken wing display, they will do that to try to get that predator to chase them, and not after the ducklings.

Mike Brasher: Catrina, you brought back some vivid memories that I had. I'm sure John has some of these as well, whenever we were studying back during our technician days, helping out with research projects on the prairies, and you would see, like, you mentioned hens visiting wetlands and wondering if they're prospecting for good brood habitat during those visits. Those visits that we're talking about occur during incubation breaks. While the female is incubating periodically during the day, she will take a break and she will go to wetlands and sometimes those wetlands are distant from where the nest is. As you mentioned, sometimes it's a half mile, sometimes it's a mile. Sometimes it's right nearby, but I just remember it's very common when you're on the breeding grounds up there in the prairies to see this hen come flying in, land on a wetland at a certain time of the day, and you think, well, she's probably on an incubation break, and then your mind just goes wondering, like, why this wetland? That's the question of why is so prevalent. in all the work that we do, and whether you're there in the field or back in your lab, you're always asking that question, and so that's pretty cool to hear that we're trying to figure some of that out. John, I'm sure you recall thinking about those things and making those observations whenever you were up there on the prairies.

John Coluccy: Yeah, yeah. And then some of my work on goose broods, too. Sometimes you wonder what the rhyme or the reason is. It's like Catrina said, it's not always the closest wetland, which would, on the surface, from a human perspective, would make more sense from a survival potential, at least in the short term, getting the water. But it's not always the case. And so what's really interesting is I don't know if that California study that Katrina mentioned was involved with the newer technology with GPS transmitter units. I think it was. But with the development of that technology with marked hens, we're starting to be able to reveal some of those things. So we're able to detect the hen incubating. And we can kind of look at those movements off nest. during that period. And then ultimately, if they're successful, the brood can relate that to where they go first. It's really intriguing. But as Katrina said, it seems like the greater distance, there's some risk there. Yes, there is the reward of maybe better cover and better food. but also the longer you travel the more likely you may be to encounter a predator along the way whether that's an aerial predator or a ground-based predator and so pretty risky and you're and you got like you know 12 ducklings in tow and they're curious and it's a new world to them. They just came out of a shell and off the nest and here they are marching and so wandering about here and there, it becomes pretty risky.

Mike Brasher: And in so many instances, when you're studying ducklings and the broods and where they go, they will leave one wetland that appears to be very healthy. Lots of great vegetation, lots of cover. It would appear as though, I mean like just to us, visibly looking at it, visually looking at it, like why would you even leave that wetland? And then, but then they do, and then whenever they leave, they will often go right by one, two, or three other wetlands that you would, that you know. is supporting other broods and it looks to be in really good condition, yet they keep on going. And so why are they doing those things? It's just, it's really, really cool to continue to study.

John Coluccy: I always kind of wondered about that, Mike. When I was doing work on resident Canada geese, I heard Mark Broods down there and Oftentimes, I would note that every time there was a move, the goslings were lost to predation, or they got lost. And it's like, I'm like, well, did that happen because they moved? Or did an event happen on that wetland where a predation event happened, they lost a gosling, and then that drove them off? Who knows? Maybe the same thing's going on with with ducklings as well. And it's, you know, I guess as we study them more with better technology, hopefully we'll learn a lot more.

Mike Brasher: Catrina, any insight on that question from any of the work that you've been doing?

Catrina Terry: I mean, I just, it seems that ducklings move a lot more than we had expected. And I think that's obviously been our challenge is studying ducklings are really hard. And now with this newer technology, we're learning a lot more. We're learning broods move a lot more. what the mechanism is for why they're moving, we're not quite sure of, but it's pretty insane when there's a wetland just smack dab in the middle of a giant cornfield and there are broods on it. And I'm like, why this wetland? How did you even get to this wetland? Because at that point, the corn's 10 feet high. But maybe there's less predators in a wetland that's in the smack dab middle of cornfield. Yeah.

Mike Brasher: Well, we have mentioned new technology a number of times here. We've mentioned the importance of it and what it's allowing us to do now that we previously weren't able to. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back and share some video and photos of that new technology and the images that it is generating and how it's improving our ability to be more confident in some of the data we're collecting and collecting additional types of data. So, stick around. You aren't going to want to miss the exciting images and videos that we've got coming up and more good discussion. So, stay with us, folks. Welcome back, everyone. I am Dr. Mike Brasher, and I'm here with Casey Messerly. Joining us remotely is Catrina Terry and John Colussy, and we are going to be resuming our discussion about ducklings and broods and new technology, allowing us to study those. But first, we had an interesting conversation in the break where people were comparing The, I guess, the cuteness of precocial birds, ducklings, goslings, cygnets to altricial birds, the passerines. Do we have some thoughts to offer there?

Kayci Messerly: Well, unfortunately, Tree Swallow's look, I describe them as the Joker, like their beaks come all the way out to the side of their mouths or to the side of their ears when they're chicks. They are just the ugliest thing you've ever seen in your life. Featherless, no feathers. Their eyes are closed. You just see like these dark bulbs where eyes will open eventually. And then they have a nice little stomach that you can see everything going on inside of, which is, you know, I mean, maybe that's some people's vibes, but it's not typically my favorite. The one cool thing about the zebra finch chicks, I will say, when they open their beaks for feeding, they do have three black dots on the inside of it, and that's actually just so their parents know where to put the food. It helps direct the feeding.

Mike Brasher: The mouth isn't enough?

Kayci Messerly: No, it's not. So those three black dots are actually thought to help the parents know where each chick's mouth is and where the food should be going.

Mike Brasher: That's interesting.

Kayci Messerly: Yeah. So that, I mean, that's a cool one, but they're still very ugly. There's no getting around that.

Mike Brasher: Catrina, you're loud.

Kayci Messerly: Yeah.

Mike Brasher: Walking for food all the time.

Kayci Messerly: Oh, they're screaming. Yes. Constantly.

Catrina Terry: Yeah. Ducklings are pretty dang cute. Maybe not fresh out of the egg when they're still wet, but a couple hours later when their downy feathers dry out, they're cute, ready to run around and feed themselves. And that is a big part of why I study ducklings.

Mike Brasher: That's what motivates people to call the fire department or police department when those little fluff balls fall down through the sewer grates, right? Because they're just so cute. You can't help, but want to rescue them.

John Coluccy: Yeah. But they go through an ugly duckling stage too. You know, ducklings aren't as bad as like geese. You know, we always talk about them being like little T-Rexes and they get kind of, they get past the downy yellow fuzzy stage and they start looking ugly and ratty and they're just running around like gobbling up everything they can find. They look like T-Rexes. It's classic.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, good stuff. So, we're going to cycle through a few more photos here and videos, and what we're going to be showing you are more of these overhead shots. Catrina, before we get into those videos, talk about this new technology, what it is we're talking about, when did it come on the scene, what has your involvement in it been, and how sort of revolutionary is it for studying this part of the waterfowl life stage?

Catrina Terry: Yeah, so I don't want to state this, but I'm pretty sure it came on the scene when I started my master's. Me and my fellow colleague, we were both doing brood surveys and brood Trying to count ducklings is very hard. Most of the time, if you're on foot, the second the hen sees any kind of movement, her and her ducklings are just going to go to that emergent vegetation and hide. So you might have seen a fleeting glance of one duckling, don't know the species, don't know how many in the brood, might not have an age class, and there could be other broods on that wetlands you never saw at all. And so when drones started coming on the scene, my advisor, DU, Delta Waterfowl, all were trying to figure out how can we actually study ducklings efficiently. There was people in helicopters trying to count ducklings. They would be in tree stands all day on one wetland trying to see how many broods are actually in this wetland. And none of those were very efficient. And when you're trying to do conservation on a larger landscape, you need something that you can count a lot of wetlands quickly. And so that was when drones came on the scene. And with my early research in 2018, that was kind of the first time you could put a thermal camera on a drone. And so that really changes the game because now these broods that are hiding in emergent vegetation, with that thermal camera, you can actually see them in that emergent vegetation. And so a lot of times when we started out, we're flying at about 140 feet. With newer technology, you can fly a lot higher. And we're seeing these thermal thermal broods or ducklings and were able to go to our RGB or visual camera and typically speciate. And one of the cooler things when I was doing this and when I first started doing this in 2018 was how little of a reaction these broods had to a drone. The year a couple The summers prior, I was doing brood surveys the traditional way of just walking 15 miles a day and counting all the ducklings I could see on a wetland. And when they saw me, they fleed. But typically, the broods with the drone didn't really do anything. They kind of hung out. Sometimes they still foraged. So it was much easier to get that count. and speciate and get those age classes as well. So it was really awesome to see and so in 2018 we did a comparison study comparing me flying a drone through all these wetlands and then my technicians going and counting broods on foot and we saw about twice as many broods in about half the time. So it was much more efficient and we were getting better data with this new technology.

Mike Brasher: Catrina, I recall, I guess it was the late 90s when I was doing my master's research, and you mentioned people being in tree stands and camping out on these wetlands all the time. And I don't know, Chris, if we have this, I don't know if you've shown the image that I'm looking at right now, but it will show you the… the emergent vegetation, cattail, sort of at the edge of this wetland here. This is a video, I think, actually. It's just a still image showing the emergent vegetation, cattail, and there's a brood right at the edge. I mean, this is… This tends to be a bit more typical based on what I remember. It's rare that you find all those broods or all those ducklings out in the center of the wetland. Maybe it varies a little bit based on which species we're talking about, but this is more typical. And as you said, you get just a moment to see these broods and then do the count because that's one of the things that you're trying to do is count how many there are. And it doesn't take very much for those birds to spook and then they're deep into the vegetation and you just can't see them. And I recall that sort of in the evenings, our team would go out and we would climb up in trees or we would try to… we would sit from an elevated vantage point looking down on a wetland just for hours, just as you said. And we had the female… radio marked, and we knew she was on that wetland, we knew she had a brood, but you could never see her. And you knew which side of the wetland she was on because you're tracking her with your antenna device, but she never would come out, you just could not see her. It's so frustrating, and now to see the advances here, it's pretty cool. John, I know you have some frustrating stories of trying to count broods in your life, too.

John Coluccy: Oh yeah, I think my first introduction to that was up at the Delta Research Station at Minnedosa. And I kind of laugh about this because I was doing canvasback brood surveys and Mike Anderson was marking a lot of the hen canvasbacks with nasal saddles or nasal pieces in the day. And so I always thought they were just trying to get rid of me in the afternoons or evenings to go out to these wetlands and find this marked hen with a brood. And off I would trudge with a spotting scope and binoculars. I would just kind of crest the hill with my head to look over to see if there were broods out in the middle of that well. But yeah, you're right. You would sit out there for hours and days on end. And I remember one instance actually going out there and popping it up. And it's like, oh, there she is. And there's all the ducklings. And I got a great count. But that was a very, very rare occasion for that to happen.

Catrina Terry: A lot of the times, if you're on foot, you get to a wetland and you can't see anything but a wall of cattail. But you put up a drone and you actually have very large open area with all that submerged aquatic vegetation and broods on the wetland. And especially out here, it happens a lot.

Mike Brasher: Chris, I think we have a video. I think you showed it a minute ago. I don't know if our viewers were seeing it. It was showing the thermal signature of that one right there. That one is really, really cool. Can we get that one in motion? And there's a couple of things to point out here. One, you can tell the hen is in the front. You can see she's slightly larger. And this is a thermal sensor, so it's detecting heat off these birds. The ducklings are pretty young there. The younger they are, the more prominent… Catrina, you correct me if I'm wrong, but the younger they are, the more prominent that heat signature is because the little downy feathers that they have at that stage are not as good at conserving that body heat, so it's allowing a lot of that body heat to escape. It's one of the reasons why during those first couple of… especially the first couple of days, but even for the first couple of weeks, the hen has to kind of protect them from colder temperatures at night. It's not until they start putting on those other body feathers that they're able to, and downy feathers beneath, that they're able to conserve some of that temperature. And so, you can see a difference in that heat signature. It's not that the female, not that the adult isn't producing heat, it's just that that heat is being sort of retained as a result of the more mature feathers that she has. Am I right on that, Katrina?

Catrina Terry: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's something that's kind of cool to showcase is ducks are so well insulated and that's why we're not really seeing as much of a heat signature from the hen. And if you look really closely, you can see that their tail feathers are starting to come in cause it's a little bit darker at all their butts. Um, so you could, I mean, I don't think we can age off thermal, but they're probably at least a 2a at that point.

Mike Brasher: That's really cool. And so then in terms of like the application, what is this allowing us to do? There's a lot of different metrics and ways of summarizing whether ducklings are successful or individual duckling survival, how many ducklings out of a given brood are surviving. Do wetlands contain broods at all? What are some of the more important metrics that this technology is allowing us to collect in better ways now?

Catrina Terry: I'll go over kind of my thing, and then I'll have John go over more of the survival. But for me, especially for my master's and some of my current work, it's about habitat. Not all wetlands are brood habitat, and in order to keep conserving and doing conservation on the landscape, we need to know what's most important for broods to make sure that they can be added to that fall flight. And, you know, I think you had mentioned earlier, you go to some of these wetlands that look great, but there's maybe never broods on them. And especially, I mean, over time, there's certain wetlands that I have never seen a brood on. And so we're hoping to kind of answer more of those questions as to why. We have very limited conservation dollars, and we want to make sure we're maximizing the benefits. And also to just get better population counts, we're, you know, working with Game and Fish to try to make a correction factor for their brood surveys. We're not trying to, like, transform landscape size surveys in order to do drones, but we're just trying to improve their estimates in order to, you know, really know year-to-year how our populations are doing within the prairies and then other places.

Mike Brasher: And then John, what kind of work are you involved in? Some of our partners, maybe, I don't know if it's in the Great Lakes or if it's in the Atlantic Flyway. Tell us what all is going on there.

John Coluccy: Yeah, the Atlantic Flyway Eastern Mallard study, you know, we're in particular interested in brood survival. And so a lot of the, well, the integrated population model that's been built for Eastern Mallards, we're always looking for better information on recruitment. And so trying to get an estimate of brood survival from during that fledging period is kind of a critical component of that. Now that, you know, that misses the period where those birds have to fly down the flyway and survive and then ultimately be recruited to the breeding population the next spring, but this is a critical component of that. And like Catrina said, we're also interested, and ultimately as this develops, you know, we've got The work that we're working on, we have hens marked with GPS transmitters, and so we're also able to relate brood survival to landscape composition, home range size, composition of those home range the structure of the habitat in terms of the types of wetlands that are there and those types of things, the juxtaposition of wetlands, the density of wetlands and those types of factors. And so we can start thinking about conservation programs and what's missing from a landscape or how do we make landscape better in terms of improving things for brood survival. So that's kind of the angle that we're pursuing out east right now.

Mike Brasher: John, maybe to give some relative understanding of the challenges of production overall for a female duck. Most people are going to be familiar with the low nest success rates that we talk about, depending on what landscape we're discussing. But in the prairies, it's not uncommon to see nest success rates of 5%, 10%. You know, if you get an overall nest success rate of 15 to 20%, that's pretty darn good. What's the range of survival rates for ducklings as we kind of understand them? And Catrina, you can probably tag team this as well, but John, what's your recollection on what we're looking at from a duckling survival standpoint?

John Coluccy: Yeah, I think the range is all over the board. I mean, I think typical 50% is a pretty high number, but I've read up to, you know, anywhere from zero to 70%. And it varies by landscape and year, obviously. Think about like a dry year on the prairies, you know, a duckling's survival might be next to zero. You have a wet year, it could be upwards of 50% or higher. And then variability about species too. But yeah, it's… it's all over the place. And when you start piecing all that demographic information together, you know, only, you know, say in a year only 10% of nests hatch that are attempted, and then you've got, you know, only so many eggs that are produced out of that. And then ducklings, you add duckling survival on top of that, and pretty soon you're whittled down to just a few birds, you know, making it to at least to the fledging stage, let alone then going through a year of harvest and winter conditions and then having to return and survive and make it to the breeding grounds to start their effort.

Mike Brasher: Catrina, what kind of information have you have you gained from the work that you've done with regard to duckling survival rates? And does it vary based on the quality of that habitat? Does it vary based on the species? What do we know from the prairies?

Catrina Terry: So I have not studied survival, so this is probably not my bread and butter. You need to be able to mark hens. It's a lot more intensive than just going out and counting ducklings. But like John says, especially in the prairies, it's very water related. High water years, you're typically going to have high survival. When I'm counting broods, typically I have larger broods, so maybe they're 8 to 10 broods. In dry years, I think it was 2021, we had a lot of broods with 3 and 4. I mean, this is anecdotal, but it just kind of makes sense when I look at just brood counts across the years and how they match up with the overall habitat conditions on the prairies.

John Coluccy: Yeah, no, I was just kind of looking up some estimates that we use in a demographic model from the Great Lakes. And overall, duckling survival over a three-year study was like 0.39%, so about 40%. And yeah, and then that can vary by the age of the female, too. So there's a lot that goes into it beyond the habitat conditions as well. And that probably has something to do with the female's experience.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, and so that brings up another good point, John. We released a recent episode where we were talking with Scott Stevens and Steve Adair about habitat conditions on the prairies in the spring and in the summer, and we talked about some recent rain that had fallen during the summer. And although that rain, that summer rain may not be influential for affecting where the birds ultimately decide to settle and nest, it can be vitally important for determining brood survival, duckling survival. because if we don't get rain, so let's just assume that wetland conditions are good in the spring, but then it goes dry, those water levels in those wetlands are going to slowly recede and slowly dry, eventually to the point where that water, at least on some wetlands, will pull back from the emergent vegetation at the edge of the wetland, then the only thing that the ducklings have is maybe some mudflat or no vegetation, overhead vegetation within which to hide, then that increases their exposure to predation by all sorts of animals, aerial predators, mink, raccoons. They need water to be maintained up into that vegetated edge of the wetland in order to provide that important escape cover. Those areas, some of which are in the Dakotas this year that have received rain in late spring and into summer, should have pretty good brood-rearing conditions in those wetlands. Are you seeing that in some locations, Catrina?

Catrina Terry: Yeah, I mean, I would say overall it's still pretty dry, especially compared to last summer. We just concluded some brood surveys for one of my grad students' projects, and pretty much one of her entire sites was already dried out. which is not ideal, but we could have been in way worse conditions if we had not have gotten that rain. I would be very hopeless for opening day of duck season this year, but thankfully we got a decent amount of rain for broods, and it's been raining off and on the last couple weeks, so I'm at least optimistic about the broods that are on the landscape right now.

Mike Brasher: Okay, well that's good and it's just another layer of the challenge of being a duck and pulling off a brood of ducklings and raising them to fledge because although you may have good wetland conditions when you arrive and nest, If it goes dry, then essentially you're going to be… the amount of habitat available for supporting those broods and getting them to fledge is reduced. And if it dries up completely, I mean, the mathematics on that are pretty clear. And that will happen at some local scales and in some situations, but that's why we want good wetland conditions in the spring. And we want periodic rain throughout the summer as well to keep those wetland conditions good for the broods.

John Coluccy: You know, thinking about that, those conditions and how that leads to a better fall flight in terms of more juveniles per adults. We all know that from a hunter perspective that the more juveniles the better. They tend to be a little bit more vulnerable to harvest and decoys and things like that. And so those boom years are pretty important.

Kayci Messerly: Has there been… Sorry, I was just curious if there'd been any understanding of the broods that were reared in these drier seasons. Are they known to be more successful when they go for their nesting attempts, or is there any understanding of basically the influence of a good season, a dry season, or a wet season on nesting success for those individuals in subsequent years?

Catrina Terry: I don't know about necessarily the ducklings that were hatched, but typically the hen, if she's successful, she's going to want to come right back to that same spot. But because the prairies are so dynamic, where she was successful could have been really wet that year, and then the next year all those wetlands are dry. And a bird like a blue-winged teal, they're going to go find water. Maybe it's somewhere they've never been. But a bird like a canvasback just might not choose the nest. And so that's kind of the, I don't want to say issue, because it makes the prairies so productive, but it's so dynamic. So year to year, there's so much differences. And even just 20 to 30 miles apart, there can be so much differences on what water is available.

Mike Brasher: Well, John and Catrina, are there any other aspects of the sort of technological element of this discussion, the new technology that we have and what it's allowing us to answer? Are there any other aspects of that that we want to discuss? New projects, new applications that we haven't discussed yet? I think we do have, we're going to go through some of these photos here in just a moment, just to kind of recap this, but.

John Coluccy: Well, I think we kind of mentioned, or at least I mentioned that the coupling of other new technology along with the, uh, the, the drone work and the infrared imagery, you know, using GPS marked hens and things like that. And, um, you know, they've also done that with VHF transmitter hens as well. So to get a better, to get a better, uh, fix on, on individual broods and, uh, and get better estimates of bruise survival.

Catrina Terry: Catrina? I mean, well, I mean, just as technology advances, I think we're going to be able to answer just more questions. I mean, the drone that my grad student has right now is so superior than the drone I have, and she's able to gain a lot more information, especially on species. I have an issue, especially if you're doing roadside surveys, all of the power lines go directly over the wetlands. So for my old drone, I could see them off thermal from 150 feet, but in order to speciate, I had to drop down and with a power line and an expensive drone, I would typically just be like, OK, I know it's a dabbling duck, so we're just going to have to go unknown dabbler or unknown diver. But with her new drone and I think the drones John's students are using, you can just stay at 150, 200 feet and zoom in and get that species information. And that's just going to allow you to be able to also survey quicker because you're not dropping down. You're staying high and can keep flying. So yeah, with the new technology, I think there's a lot that can be done to understand broods a little bit more and hopefully, yeah, make better population estimates, better conservation decisions for that last little piece of the puzzle.

Mike Brasher: Speaking of that new technology, Chris, let's go through some of these final photos just to share with the folks what we were able to see and what Catrina and John have shared with us here. This is a sort of a classic example of heavily vegetated brood habitat. There are ducklings in there. There's a hen in there as well. I can't remember if this is a video or just a still image, just a still image. And so what do we have next here, Chris? And so there you go. That is what is revealed from that same location whenever you apply the thermal sensor or look through the thermal imagery. Just, I mean, phenomenal difference in what we're able to see. What do we have next? Yeah, showing the cuteness of the ducklings there relative to the female.

John Coluccy: And you'll note that if you back up there, you'll note that that's one of our backpack transmitter. You'll see a solar panel up here in the back there. And that's kind of a classic. That's enabled us to really hone in on these individual Mark 10s with their broods. And it's been really, really powerful, because we can get real-time GPS data in the morning and then send a drone operator out. And usually, they have very, very good luck at picking them out. And I don't have a picture of this thermal image. that transmitter actually blocks the thermal. Obviously, it acts kind of like another barricade like feathers due to emitting heat. And so, you'll see like a black triangle like in the thermal imager of a bird that's actually one of the marked ones.

Mike Brasher: So… I see those four or five ducklings on the right. I also see another one kind of in front of the female. Um, that's, that's pretty cool. And that's, and, uh, that's, uh, East coast or Eastern Canada wetland, I'm assuming doesn't look like a prairie wetland.

John Coluccy: Yep. This was probably, uh, New York or New Jersey, somewhere out that way. Pennsylvania potentially. Yep.

Mike Brasher: This is yet another classic example of what we're able to do with the infrared sensor, just the simple, you know, the true color, even overhead. I mean, you're able to see better with the overhead imagery from a drone, but still, I mean, just the application of of infrared just fundamentally changes what we're able to see and what we're able to count. I kind of wonder what the reaction would have been like for the first person in the duck world to have put the camera up, put the drone up with this sensor, and to see that difference. I'm sure they knew they were going to see something, but did they know it was going to be this dramatic? Was that you, Catrina, or Jacob, or do you remember that?

Catrina Terry: Yeah, I think it would have been me and Jake. And so Jake's full project was looking at, you know, pair surveys, nesting, and broods. And with the technology, the pairs and the nests kind of fell flat. But with the broods, we were just very excited because, you know, as I mentioned, it's really hard. You're walking 15 miles. My grad student, she does pair surveys on foot and she's always like, I wish I could just fly the drone to just see if the wetland's wet instead of walking a mile through the soybean field to see it's dry. And so it's been really exciting just Just actually going to a wetland and seeing broods and not just going there and being like, oh, there's 10-foot wall of cattails. I'll walk around it. Oh, still can't see anything. So it's been pretty exciting. And as I mentioned, ducklings are really cute. So doing brood surveys can be fun, except for the 3 a.m. wake-ups.

John Coluccy: So, go ahead. Just point out really quickly in this video here, this is really typical, the stuff that we're dealing with, the wetland habitat that we're dealing with in the East. And it's, you know, the fact that you can penetrate the vegetation with this technology is really, really key.

Mike Brasher: Very cool work. Casey, any final questions from you before we wrap up here?

Kayci Messerly: No, I think it's just absolutely incredible to see the difference in this. I mean, the work I did, right, I walk right up to the nest box, open up, I can see what's right in there, no problem. But I mean, an exponentially harder feat that you guys have had and to be able to overcome that with new technology is just incredible. And that's the direction we're headed with so many things. And we're very excited to kind of see how that turns out in the future.

Mike Brasher: Well, Catrina and John, I greatly appreciate y'all joining us here for this episode. I hope folks have learned a lot about Ducklington in general, and they've also, I hope, learned about how some new innovative pieces of equipment and technology are allowing us to learn things and study things in new ways that we haven't been before. And this is just one example of that in our field. And so folks will hear and have heard more about other methods, kind of past episodes, and we'll sure you'll hear more about that going forward. So, any final words, Katrina or John?

Catrina Terry: And no final words, I'm just excited for duck season to open at this point.

John Coluccy: Yeah, there you go. John? Yeah, no final words. Excited to see what the BPOP numbers show this year. That'll be coming out soon. I'm sure we'll have a bunch of people on to talk about that, Mike and Casey. Yeah. Thank you for having us.

Mike Brasher: Always enjoyable. Appreciate it. And John, you might get a call or an email of some sorts related to that. So, you know, don't go anywhere. So thanks y'all very much for joining us here today. You bet.

Catrina Terry: Thanks Mike. Thanks Casey.

Mike Brasher: A very special thanks to our guests on today's episode, Catrina Thierry, a research scientist from the Great Plains Regional Office, and to Dr. John Colussy, the Director of Conservation Science and Planning for the Great Lakes and Atlantic Region, and a thanks to my co-host in studio, Casey Messerly, great having you here as well. Thanks to our producers, Chris Isaac and Rachel Jared, for the wonderful work that they do. And then to you, the listener, we thank you for your time. We thank you for your support of wetlands and waterfowl conservation and the Ducks Unlimited podcast.