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Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Mike Brasher: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm going to be your host on this episode, Dr. Mike Brasher, and I'm excited to have in the studio with me my co-host, Katie Burke. It's great to have you on here.
Katie Burke: Thanks, Mike. It's good to be here.
Mike Brasher: We don't get a chance to do these very often, so we're sitting around, bringing in our guest all the way from South Dakota now, and thought I might get you on here to ask a few questions. That guest is none other than—we don't actually have his music queued up here, do we? We're gonna get that? You want me to kind of dance a little bit, make sure we get that? Can we get it? There we go! So, Dr. Scott Stevens. If we can get our producer to cut the music off. Yeah, Dr. Scott Stevens, the Senior Director of Prairie and Boreal Conservation Strategy, and he informed me during the playing of the music that he is actually not in South Dakota right now. So that explains some of the prior conversation about it being chilly up there. You're joining us from Winnipeg, Manitoba right now. Yeah? Stonewall. Stonewall. Okay. North of Winnipeg. I was close. North of Winnipeg.
Scott Stephens: Yeah, you were close.
Mike Brasher: Scott, thanks for joining us. It is May 13th. It's that time of the year whenever we're looking north again to see how habitat conditions are unfolding. You were actually down here at headquarters a few weeks ago. We recorded an episode at that time giving a bit of an update on conditions, and then I think within a week or two, things changed, and we were a little bit delayed in bringing out that episode, and so we just said, let's scrap it and let's do this again to provide a a better update because things have happened. We've had some rain in different parts of the prairies. Occasionally you'll see, or I'll see, we'll all see Facebook posts of people getting excited about, you know, above average rainfall. It happened again this year in the Dakotas and even into the prairies of Canada. And we want to get you on here to provide a bit more context to that, because I know there's some details to provide. So talk with us about that. What have we seen in terms of improved moisture conditions across that prairie region of the Dakotas and Canada? And size it up for us.
Scott Stephens: Yeah, we've definitely seen a few places get rain. Now, the debate will be whether that has appreciably changed wetland conditions, because You know, all rain is not created equal. And the reports that we got for most of this rain was, I know it was actually Steve Adair who shared a video link with me that had Saskatchewan farmers talking about rain that they got. I wasn't as excited when their description was, well, it came at just the right pace where it all soaked in the ground. And I went, oh yeah, that's not what we were looking for to improve wetland conditions. Because that means we got enough rain that the soil just soaked up all the moisture and none of it ran off and ended up in wetlands. So my impression is that's kind of how most of the rain that we've recently gotten came not you know in one big downpour where it ran off and would have filled up wetlands and we actually would have had runoff but more soaking rains which are good they turn the grass green. You know, ranchers are happy because they worry less about having to fall short of hay or feed that year, but probably doesn't change wetland conditions appreciably.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, Scott, one of the things that I was looking at here recently was just how dry it is all across Canada. I'm gonna get back to the Dakotas here in a second, but I was looking at all sorts of drought metrics out there now on various websites, and there's one that kind of looks at the percentage of a given country, Canada or the US in this case, that is affected by some level of drought. And I didn't realize this until I looked at it today. If you go back about a month, as of what would have been, I guess it would have been late March, about 68% of the landmass of Canada was affected by some level of drought. That was like the highest level it had been in Well, I don't know, whatever the length of that graph was that I was looking at, which was probably 15 or 20 years, and that's including the boreal forest, that's including all of Canada, well outside the prairies, and that's sort of another story that we may get to a little bit later on. We may talk to somebody else to help paint a better picture of how dry it is and what the implications may be for for the boreal forest, but for right now we want to talk, I think, mostly just about the prairies. So, you talked about Canada and that rain, the pace at which it fell. We may come back to that here in a second, but also talk with us about what we've learned and what we've seen in the Dakotas, because I think the rainfall, maybe the frequency and the pace of that, Might've been a little bit different and more long lasting than what we saw in Saskatchewan. Because remember, you can go back a couple of months and we had rain across a good swath of the Dakotas. What have you seen in your travels there through the, through the Dakotas?
Scott Stephens: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. And, and I don't know, like, like I have been back and forth between Stonewall, Manitoba and. Rapid City, South Dakota a couple times in the past month. And I usually drive a bit of a different transect each time I go. I mean, generally what I would tell you is I have not been impressed with the water anywhere that I have gone. So there could be areas that I'm not driving by where we got rain and it did generate runoff and improved wetland conditions. I have not seen a ton of that in my travels.
Mike Brasher: No. So, okay. So, maybe I saw something online that was, or perhaps it was an email suggesting that, and you tell me if this rings a bell, that wetland conditions were a bit better the farther west you go in the Dakotas. Would that make sense? As you get over towards Bismarck and a bit farther east? Because that was the area that received that swath of rain back in when it was March.
Scott Stephens: What I would tell you is that one thing, like the last trip I made down, I went down and I traveled west of the river. So I went through Mandan and was west of the Missouri river. Not glaciated, not a ton of potholes, but there had been rain and there was clearly runoff in that area because there was water lying around. Um, and I was surprised how many ducks I saw west of the river, which is not the traditional area that holds tons of ducks and kind of made me think that Maybe me being struck by that was evidence that we just don't have very much water east of the river. Otherwise, the number of ducks that you see east of the river, typically far eclipses what you see west of the river. That was not the case. You know, like I said, in my travels in the glaciated portion of both North and South Dakota, I've not been super impressed with either the water or the number of ducks that I've seen. But I was a bit surprised by the number that I saw west of the river. So yeah, moisture falling further west typically doesn't do us as much good because there aren't as many wetlands to hold that water. But I did see ducks west of the river.
Mike Brasher: And I guess one thing just to talk about here is that while we may be saying that conditions aren't as rosy as what some of the earlier posts and what some of the Precipitation maps and departures from average might lead you to believe any precipitation that we get is good. It's welcome at this time, given how dry it was. That's right. Maybe it hasn't refilled, completely refilled the wetlands the way we would have liked to have seen it. but it's given us a bit of a move in the right direction. I have seen reports from Dr. Mike Anderson in Minnedosa. He goes over there and does his CanvasBack surveys every year and I saw just a brief report from him online. Again, anecdotal and just his initial assessment is average, maybe a little better than average, maybe a little better than what he expected. If I remember correctly, he would have rated it a 6 or 7 on a scale of 10 in terms of wetland conditions. What that means in terms of productivity, I don't know. How representative that Minnedosa area is to all of southwestern Manitoba, hard to say. And that's going to continue to be a theme anytime we talk about this. We'll get rain in a swath of the Dakotas. We'll get rain at a different pace and amount in southern Saskatchewan. And it's going to create variable conditions across that entire, across that vast landscape. It always does. And that's the case again this year. Katie, you and I were talking before we kind of planned all this, and I don't know how much sort of experience you have visiting the prairies. Do you have any? You hunted there? You've been there during the spring?
Katie Burke: I've been there in the summer a little bit, but mostly like farther Wyoming. My brother used to live in Wyoming. Okay, so not really the prairie. No, but we would drive through it during the summer, but it was a summer, so it was usually fairly dry, like it was storms and stuff like that.
Mike Brasher: And I would imagine a lot of our listeners probably have a similar experience where they haven't driven through the prairies or they haven't driven through the prairies during the breeding season anyway. Maybe they've gone there to hunt, but you don't get the same feel for what that landscape looks like during the spring and why it's so important to have a wide distribution of wetlands or have the entirety of that landscape be in good wetland conditions, you know, for it to really be meaningful at a population level because of the way they spread themselves out. So, Scott, how often do you have people come there for the first time and they're like, oh, I had no idea? You've had a lot of opportunities over your career to do that. Show people a thing that they've never seen before.
Scott Stephens: Yeah, yeah, it is really interesting to see what their reaction is, especially when it is wet. I mean, most of them are struck when they fly in and from the air you can see, you know, millions of wetlands scattered across the landscape when we have water. So that's impressive to them. I think the other key thing that folks are not used to thinking about that's unique to the breeding season is the ducks become territorial. And sometimes we get very legitimate questions from people who live down south who are like, well, why don't you pack them all into one really good wetland? And it's like, oh yeah, because you can do that on wintering areas. thousands of ducks in a small amount of space. Well, they don't tolerate each other when they're breeding because they're territorial. And so when we explain, yeah, we have to spread them out so they can't see each other, then they go, oh, okay, I get it. Now you need hundreds of wetlands scattered across the landscape to put hundreds of pairs on. And it's like, yeah, we can't put 5,000 pairs on one impounded wetland.
Katie Burke: Well, I had a question. So ducks will re-nest, right? So if a pair nests successfully in an area and hatch and they move on, right, can another pair come into that area later?
Scott Stephens: They could. They could use the same wetlands because the male will be gone and the female will be off raising the brood. So no one's being territorial at that point in time. But when they all show up like this time of the year, it's like they're all being territorial. Even if the female is on the nest, the male is sitting on the pond or one of the ponds that they use as territory. And he is chasing anybody that flies by. We'll see these three bird flights that we talk about when people come to the prairies where a pair will fly by, the male that's in that area will jump up and chase them until they leave his airspace because he's defending the food resources that are in those wetlands. Yeah, through time that can change. But the other point I would make, Mike, is we're middle of May right now. Even if the heavens unleashed and we had runoff like crazy, it's like the ducks have settled where they're going to breed for this year. So it's not like we're going to pull a bunch of new birds into central South Dakota if they get a ton of rain there. Birds are generally settled. There will be some movement. based on new water. But it's not like birds from Saskatchewan or from the boreal forest are flying back south because there's water, you know, mid-May. They've kind of, most of the ducks have made their decision on where they're going to breed for the year.
Mike Brasher: Scott, that was a question that Katie and I actually talked about here earlier today, is that you see that during the non-breeding season, right? Birds redistribute all over the place. But I was not sure how much we knew about that from any of the telemetry work that had been done. I know from some of the projects I've been involved in, you never saw major movements or redistributions, you know, let's say after a nest fails. But those were years when wetland conditions were pretty good when they got there. But in conditions like this, when they arrive and they're poor, and then you have, uh, improving conditions in one landscape, let's say about now, you're saying that we still don't think there's much redistribution even for those second or third nest attempts?
Scott Stephens: Well, we, we don't think so, but I would say, you know, that's based on evidence that we have in hand. So would I love to have information from, you know, 15,000 birds that were marked this time of the year to see, you know, where they move if we get water showing up in a location. We would probably learn some new things, and there's probably some of that that happens. I don't suspect we're going to see widespread movements of, you know, birds that have decided they're going to end up somewhere in the boreal because the prairies are dry. I doubt we're going to see big movements of thousands of pears flying back south if we were to get water. So, you know, that's a long-winded way of saying You know we're already getting on within the breeding season and so we're kind of running out of time for those wetland conditions to improve to impact breeding this year. Now there are lots of other things that get impacted. We have high re-nesting rates and brood survival rates go up for the birds that have settled in those landscapes if wetland conditions improve but I don't think we're probably seeing tons of birds move around breeding landscapes if we get water at this point in time. But to your point, we don't really know. We don't have that data.
Mike Brasher: From a nesting chronology standpoint, again, we're recording this on March, no, not March, May 13th. Have all the blue wings arrived? Are they there and starting to nest?
Scott Stephens: They should be here and just starting to nest. Yeah, the species that wouldn't be nesting yet, I would say, would be gadwall and scop, but most other species, you know, in North Dakota, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, most of the other species will be starting to nest.
Mike Brasher: And this is also the time of the year when our partners with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state agencies and provincial agencies have started doing their surveys. We talked about that a little bit this morning. We haven't seen any of the pilot blogs, you know, the posts that they put online. But we do know that they're flying the surveys. I've heard some discussions in previous meetings. I think they're going to have to shuffle a few pilots here or there. They were down a couple of pilots, maybe from past years. But they are doing the surveys. They're doing the air surveys, the ground surveys. I think you said you reached out to one of our colleagues. Haven't heard back yet from that person. Is that right?
Scott Stephens: That's right. Have not, but you know, it's interesting that you talk about their, they need pilot biologists. When I did the search to try and see if there was an update to the blogs, the first tip that I got was how to become a pilot biologist. So they're, they're definitely trying to do the recruiting for those positions.
Mike Brasher: That's interesting. We definitely need it. It's a great opportunity if you love wildlife, if you love wildlife conservation, love getting to see places that few other people ever have the opportunity to see in incredibly remote locations. You get to meet a lot of wonderful people. You know, so look that up, become a pilot biologist, contribute to the data.
Scott Stephens: And if you like to fly airplanes, like that's the perfect mix.
Mike Brasher: Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Uh, let's see. What else, Scott? I mean, I mentioned briefly the drought conditions in the boreal. Do you have any just sort of high level insight on that?
Scott Stephens: I don't have a ton. What I can tell you is that this is an anecdote, but I woke up yesterday morning and it's like, hmm, smells smoky. And when I went outside, it was super hazy because there's a fire in northern Manitoba that we were getting smoke from already. Yeah. So, so we do have forest fires going on. That's a sign that it is still dry across much of the boreal forest. This one's up near Flynn Flawn, Manitoba. Um, but within the boreal and yeah, that's, I mean, this is early to be having fires. So. You know, when we get in July and August, that's when we typically have fires because things are really hot and dry then, but we've got fires already and it's already, it's only May.
Mike Brasher: And if you look at the drought map, that's a part of Canada that is in, last I looked, it was severe to exceptional drought across that area. And that's, uh, yeah, not a good thing.
Katie Burke: No, and I was looking at temperature stuff, we were talking about it earlier, and I was just kind of looking at what the predicted temperature is for the year, and it looks it's going to be high again for y'all, so that's also not good.
Scott Stephens: Can I make one comment back to, you talked about the stuff that Mike Anderson had posted, just one sort of nuance that I would make there is, you know, Mike is doing those surveys for camus backs in a wetland community that's typically more semi-permanent wetlands and permanent wetlands. So, you know, because he's focused on diving ducks, that's, you know, a little bit different look at the landscape than we would have from a dabbling duck perspective. We'd be looking for more of those shallow, ephemeral, and seasonal basins that water fills from the snow melt or from rain runoff. And that's kind of the component that we see lacking on the landscape this year. So, you know, just some context for Mike's comments, even though he said it looks okay for canvas backs, it's like that's carry over water from past years and not new water that's run off.
Mike Brasher: Could be some new water based on one of the other things I was going to add that he said the practice of consolidation drainage continues, which is where you, you drain some of the smaller, shallower wetlands and direct that runoff into some of the larger wetlands. So there's some. Some speculation as to whether maybe that consolidation drainage is sort of reducing, is affecting the hydro period of some of those wetlands and they're closer to the road. Mike's doing surveys along the roadside and so I think that's probably an untested hypothesis right now is the actual effect of that consolidation drainage on hydro period of some of those wetlands, which may be the ones that Mike is more likely to see there on the roads.
Scott Stephens: Yeah, we definitely see that same kind of trend in landscapes like Minnesota, where we've seen that consolidation drainage, and it does exactly what you described. It makes the permanent wetlands more permanent, and the semi-permanent wetlands act like permanent ones. They become basically shallow lakes and function differently.
Mike Brasher: Katie, anything else from you? Nope, I'm good. Okay, appreciate you joining on this. Wanted to give you an opportunity to, I guess, contribute to our little discussion about prairie habitat conditions. I know there's other things to discuss here longer term, Scott, with regard to conditions in the prairies beyond just what we're seeing with wetlands and the effect of the periodic drought that we're going through. There's some more persistent challenges, including the loss of CRP from part of that landscape, the continued conversion of of native grass to agricultural uses and we saw, I know you saw the email and I got a copy of it today from a colleague of ours who said they had spent, a photographer who said they had spent some time in North Dakota recently and they were A place where they used to be able to easily find CRP and wetlands embedded in CRP for a lot of photography that that person does. And he said it's very difficult to find grass in that landscape right now. If we know anything about ducks, ground nesting ducks, they need grass in order to nest. And the more grass we have and the larger that matrix of grass and wetland, the better their nesting success is going to be and the more birds that that area can support. So there's a lot of challenges that continue.
Scott Stephens: Yeah, absolutely. We could spend a couple podcasts on those challenges for sure.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, we'll do that. So, you know, I guess the mid-May, give us the 10,000-foot recap. Should people be excited? Should they be depressed? What should our temperature be right now?
Scott Stephens: Yeah, well, the caveat would be I tend to be a bit of a pessimist, so, you know, take what I say with a grain of salt. My friends would tell you that. But yeah, I would characterize conditions writ large across the prairies as Fair, not super good. You know, despite the fact we had rains, I haven't seen dramatic improvement in those conditions. So, you know, I think we're set for a fairly lackluster breeding season. You know, no, no one wants to hear that. I think that's reality this year. And, you know, it will take, it will take rains that soak the soil and probably you know, then a significant winter snowfall that then runs off to change things. But it will happen eventually. We know that this system needs to go through drought to sort of reset the productivity. That's an important part of it. We know that we see population booms after we go through those dry periods. So it's a part of the system. We just don't like living through the dry times to get to that boom.
Mike Brasher: Katie, if I didn't know any better, I would say Scott Stevens is throwing in the towel on the 2024 breeding season already.
Scott Stephens: Well, I'm just saying, like, don't get too excited. You know, if you didn't like last year, 2024 is not looking better.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, that's the way I kind of read it too, Scott, just to kind of give you some support there. A bit of a carbon copy of what we've seen one of the last two years, or perhaps the last two years in one way or another. You know, it hasn't been stellar. It's been average to probably slightly below average in terms of habitat conditions across the broader prairie landscape. And when that happens, we kind of have our population levels that sort of regress to their long-term mean, which is where we find ourselves. And maybe a little bit below average, whenever you string together several average to below average habitat condition years, add to that some ongoing drought in the boreal forest, which is normally a bit more stable and smoke is going to have fires if they break out again this year, have a little bit of an effect. And so, those types of things can add up incrementally and yeah. we probably are not going to have a large breeding population going back north because of what we saw last year. And so I think another fair to, you know, maybe slightly below average years is probably what we would predict. Good production in some areas that might have gotten some rain, local rain, but Yeah, nothing widespread, but we'll check in a little bit later on and hope that we start kind of building a better foundation for spring 2025. Is that fair?
Scott Stephens: Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, you know, we talked early in the year, I think it was in January, where we said, you know, last year only 20% of the time have we counted fewer mallards in the breeding survey, right? That's well below the average. And based on the conditions that we're looking at, that's probably not going to improve. We're probably going to be lower mallard populations than we saw last year. That would be my prediction. Are we going to do predictions? We could. What did we do? Total Ducks last year was what? 32.6 or 32.9? It was 34.2 I think the previous year. One second.
Mike Brasher: What do you remember?
Scott Stephens: I don't recall that. I recall I was overly optimistic when we made predictions last year. So, I am not going to make that mistake again.
Mike Brasher: Well, so the Mallard number that you talked about being like only in 20% of the years had we counted a lower number, that wasn't the case for the total duck population. There were some species that were still pretty healthy relative to the average, maybe even a couple that were at or above that long-term average. I think there were a few there. So overall, that duck population was still in pretty good shape. And I'm kind of stalling here to see if Katie's got it. You can't get it? There it is. Found it. Okay. We got it here. What was it? Total ducks. Total ducks was 32.3. 32.3. Okay. So you're going to go above or below that, Scott?
Scott Stephens: Below. I'm taking the under. Sure. Okay.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, for sure. Well.
Scott Stephens: Katie, do you wanna go?
Mike Brasher: Katie's going below. Huh.
Scott Stephens: Atta girl. I'm gonna, so I'll do, I'll do 33.1. Really? I'm going to go over. Based on the great conditions last year and… Somebody's got to be an optimist to balance you out, right? Like these ducks are coming out of the mud in the wintertime?
Mike Brasher: I would still be below where we were two years ago, right? And so that was pretty low. So I'm going to go 33.1. I'm going to surprise to the upside.
Katie Burke: I think like somebody like Teal and Gadwall are going to be dark horses and overpopulated.
Scott Stephens: Why not? It's going to need to be carried by species that do not primarily breed in the prairies, right? So it's going to have to be green wings and scop. It's like, I don't know.
Mike Brasher: I don't know where you're getting it. If we had a 24% increase in pintails from the previous year to last year, there's hope. That's what I'm saying.
Katie Burke: Do you want the Mallard numbers from last year? Do you know what those are?
Mike Brasher: No. Yeah. What was I going to say? I don't know. I guess I was going to say I've been wrong before. What's one more time?
Scott Stephens: We all have. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Brasher: We all have. For sure. No. 33.1. I'll go there. Still low.
Scott Stephens: Still low, but… Katie and I are sticking with lower than last year. Yeah. Okay.
Mike Brasher: That's fine. So that's going to be… I don't think it's gonna be a lot lower. Y'all will probably be right, but I just couldn't go along with it. I had to be the… You had to be the contrarian.
Scott Stephens: You know, we need somebody to be the optimist, Mike. You know, I'm like, I saw a meme here recently that said, you know, it's the optimist that invents things like airplanes and it's the pessimist that invents things like parachutes. So you gotta have them both.
Mike Brasher: That's right. All right. Well, OK, let's fly that airplane then. So, Scott, appreciate you being here. Katie, great having you on here as well. A very special thanks to our guest on today's episode, Dr. Scott Stevens, our Senior Director of Prairie and Boreal Conservation Strategy. I strung it together and got it. Thanks for having him here and sharing with us an update on the prairies. As always, we thank our producer, Chris Isaac, who does a terrific job getting the podcast out to you all. And then to you, the listener, we thank you for your time and support of the podcast and for your commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation. And keep an eye on those ducks to the north.
Scott Stephens: And if this one doesn't air, I'm going on strike. Fair enough.