Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Hosts Chris Jennings and Dr. Mike Brasher talk Boreal Forest with Dr. Fritz Reid, director of conservation programs for the Boreal and Arctic for Ducks Unlimited. Reid details his role and brings to light the importance of Boreal habitats for waterfowl and other birds.

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Creators and Guests

Host
Mike Brasher
DUPodcast Science Host
Writer
Chris Jennings
DUPodcast Contributor

What is Ducks Unlimited Podcast?

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.

VO:

Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, Reloaded. We bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In Reloaded, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong.

VO:

So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.

Chris Jennings:

Today, doctor Mike Brashers joining me along with doctor Fritz Reid, the director of conservation programs for the Boreal And Arctic for Ducks Unlimited. Fritz, welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast.

Fritz Reid:

Oh, thanks, Fritz. Good talking.

Chris Jennings:

Hey. First, let's go ahead and start off, kinda give people an idea of what you do for Ducks Unlimited and what your role is involved with our boreal conservation.

Fritz Reid:

Sure. So I have a boreal Antarctic in my portfolio. So for The Boreal, we've been working in both Alaska and Boreal Canada for almost thirty years now. We joined forces with a couple of groups, the Pew Charitable Trust, Hewlett Foundation and we're able to meet with some great folks in Canada, First leadership, Ducks Unlimited Canada, but also a number of provincial and territorial leaders, some industrial leaders. And then the group that's the groups that have really stepped up are the indigenous first nations of of Canada and The Boreal.

Fritz Reid:

Folks from the Cree, from the Akechow, Daechow, Sawto, Gwich'in. These people really have looked, doing land use planning and that's what we work with in a big way.

Chris Jennings:

Very cool. Can you kinda give our audience an idea? I know when I went up there four or five years ago with you, you know, and I would tell people, hey, I'm going up to the Boreal Forest to hunt, and they're like, where is that? Can you kinda give people an idea of of where and what the Boreal Forest is, you know, as a land landscape?

Fritz Reid:

Right. So so boreal means northern. So in the world, when we talk about the Northern Forest and everybody thinks of it as a carnivorous forest, it it really is a forest complex that runs from Western Alaska across Alaskan Canada to the shores of Labrador. And then in terms of where is it where you first encountered if you're coming from the South, Edmonton was the historical line of the Boreal Forest and then you go north and you can actually go right to the ocean. The Mackenzie Valley, very forested, important wetland complex is right at the Arctic Ocean.

Fritz Reid:

If as you move further east, you you run into Tundra and the Hudson Bay Lowlands but the Boreal Forest basically will run east to west and then north to south is Edmonton right to the Tundra.

Chris Jennings:

Okay. Yeah. I think that gives everyone a pretty good idea. And if not, you can always just check it out, pull up Google Earth and look at that.

Mike Brasher:

And it's a big area too.

Chris Jennings:

Oh, it's massive.

Mike Brasher:

It's like I was reading a book here recently, Fritz. I think it's a book that you contributed to. It says the boreal forest account for something like 58% of the landmass of Canada. That's that's impressive.

Chris Jennings:

Yeah. Yeah. It is.

Fritz Reid:

It's 1,600,000,000 acres in North America, and it's just incredible. And when you fly over this area during the summer, you you just see wetland, river, it's just landscape across, and so it's it's it's really an amazing place. And it's a wet environment. Many people call it the Forest Of Blue because there's so much water, so much peat land across that landscape.

Chris Jennings:

Which actually, you know, that kinda leads me to my next question is why is the Boreal so important for waterfowl and waterfowl production? If you can explain a little bit of that, which you've kind of gotten into with the fact that it is a very watery landscape.

Fritz Reid:

You bet. Well, waterfowl hunters know there's two great breeding grounds across North America. They're all important prairies which have really high density nesting and then the Boreal Forest which has overall very low density nesting. But because there's so many wetlands, so many lakes, you can have one or two broods on each of those lakes. And then as you look at the millions of wetland complexes that exist there, you're gonna have some fantastic production.

Fritz Reid:

And it's why year to year, we're getting 35 to 40% of our breeders across North America to be found in the Boreal Forest and chiefly in the Western Boreal Forest.

Chris Jennings:

In that Western Boreal Forest, that's that makes up a portion of Alaska as well. Correct?

Fritz Reid:

It does. We we generally define the Western Boreal Forest as Manitoba West, so going right into Alaska. And Alaska has some really core breeding areas. We were fortunate there were some great pilot biologists back in the day in the sixties that recognized and knew where some of those core areas were. And so that became under the Anoka Act, those became the National Wildlife Refuges for Alaska.

Fritz Reid:

So if you look at where the core breeding grounds of the Boreal, you know, Anoko, Yukon Flats, these are the core refuges that have that big production.

Chris Jennings:

Cool. And that kind of brings me another point. It's as far as, you know, Ducks Unlimited science and and even the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Canadian Wildlife Service survey, the Boreal is a very difficult place to to work. And and I would imagine just because of this, one, its vastness, and two, it's hard to get to.

Fritz Reid:

Logistics, it's it's really, really tough, and it's very, very expensive. You know, when when you make these flights, you know, you think about you going up to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories or going up to Alaska, you branch off from Fairbanks, but you're just getting started at that point. You you gotta get into bush. There's small planes. There's helicopters getting around, you know, how are you gonna do it?

Fritz Reid:

It whether you're doing banding, whether you're doing research, whether you're you're working with First Nations on helping identify core areas, the logistics make it very, tough.

Chris Jennings:

Yeah. Because there's no road going in there. I mean, you're not it's not like you're driving around up there. I mean, it's you're you're boating in, flying in. It's it's it's tough to get to.

Chris Jennings:

Let's talk about some of the, you know, the the the production levels as far as individual species. I mean, I think one thing, you know, waterfowl hunters, you know, you recognize I think all most waterfowl hunters recognize that the the prairie breeding species, but how important and and how, you know, selective are are these species like wigeon? Know, Mike and I were just talking before we came on air. You know, a significant number of even blue winged teal ended up in the Boreal this year. Kind of speak to that and speak to the individual species and the importance of the boreal for these species.

Fritz Reid:

What we know is is that overall, there are certain species which year in year out have have adapted to the boreal forest regime. So species that we know in the southern areas, green winged teal, American wigeon, very, very important. But also a number of the diving ducks, Lesser Scot, Greater Scot, ring necked ducks all have the highest percentage of their breeding population in the Boreal Forest. At the same time, you'll you'll find northern pintail, mallard, as much as a third of the continental population will be found in the Boreal. But but what we find in in the Boreal year to year is there's about 15 species where at least 50% or more of their population breeding populations are there.

VO:

Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.

Mike Brasher:

So Fritz, you mentioned difficulty of accessing the Boreal, getting in there to study the ducks and to do anything in that area. So it's natural that when we back over the years of how we've learned about waterfowl ecology and where we've learned about it, that area is, at least until recent years, been a bit more of an unknown than, let's say, the Prairies. Is that a fair statement?

Fritz Reid:

That's an absolutely fair statement and one that should be emphasized because we were very, very fortunate. We have a hundred years, a hundred and fifty years of work on trying to understand waterfowl basically from the Prairies. And only beginning in the 40s and 50s, expanding in the 60s do we see people go into the Boreal and the Arctic and try and begin to understand some of the energetics and some of the food habits of these species in a boreal context?

Mike Brasher:

Fritz, from an ecology standpoint, I'll confess that I don't know a lot, certainly not firsthand, about the ecology of species once they nest in the Boreal, whether it be species that have a higher affinity for the boreal such as the scoff and skoders and other species such as that, or whether it be pintails and widgeon and green wings and how their ecology and breeding effort may differ between the Prairies and the Boreal. So just one general question here, if you know the answer to this, if we as a community know the answer to this, do we see a decrease in, let's just say, for example, re nesting effort among species that nest in the Boreal? Because it sort of stands to reason when you think about this, the farther north you go, that growing season, that breeding season gets shorter. Does that show up in terms of fewer re nest attempts and less re nesting intensity?

Fritz Reid:

I think that's the general thought by most people that as you start restricting the amount of days where it's ice free and But what we're seeing too is that in August, oftentimes we see a big push of young birds that have just hatched out in the boreal. And so the question is, are these birds that are re nesting originally from the Boreal or are these at times when birds get pushed north from the prairies when they're dry? Generally our thoughts are that birds, if they overfly, aren't gonna fly that far into the Boreal to re nest. And then if they if they do move pretty deep into the boreal, they may try to survive but are not necessarily gonna be successful nesters. But the reality is we just don't know.

Fritz Reid:

We haven't been able. Only recently do we have techniques like satellites where we could track birds to truly go into the boreal and look at the timing of both initial nesting and potential remesting. And those are those are questions that still remain.

Mike Brasher:

So in years such as this where birds that made it to the Southern Prairies encountered incredibly dry conditions, a lot of those are gonna continue on fly into the boreal, Do we have any idea what percentage of those are actually gonna try to breed versus a certain percentage that might just forego breeding this year and you say, hey, I'm gonna try to wait it out. I'm gonna try to survive till next year and give it another shot. Do we have any clue about that kind of part of ecology?

Fritz Reid:

No. That's that's a great question and we don't know. We we do know that species like blue winged teal will generally attempt in the southern portion of the Boreal some level of nesting. We see successful broods in that area. But what overall percentage of those birds that are that are leaving the prairie, we don't know.

Fritz Reid:

We do know that, you know, when the prairies are wet, that's when we have our largest continental populations. You know, the prairies are essential in maintaining those big continental populations. But we also know that there is some breeding when the prairies are dry from birds that we typically think of as prairie birds, blue and teal, northern shovelers, pintails, etcetera.

Mike Brasher:

Yeah. The way I've always thought about it and I've heard it described is that the prairies, because they are so dynamic, they're they are the engine for the the population booms. But when the prairies dry, of course, we'd lose a lot of that productivity, and those are the years when that boreal forest becomes so incredibly important because it's our safety net either for some level of lower lower level of sustained production or just giving those birds that don't have, that can't find breeding habitat in the Prairies place to go and make it through until the next year and give it another shot and hope for better habitat conditions. And that's really what makes preservation of the Boreal within Ducks Unlimited's conservation work so important.

Fritz Reid:

And at the same at the same time, what we're seeing is that certain populations are really growing within the Boreal. We clearly see that in Alaska. Alaska back in the fifties when we first started doing aerial surveys at a peak of 40,000 Widgen across all the surveyed areas. Now we know there's over a million breeding Widgen annually in the boreal of Alaska and that's also true now over a million bird of green winged teal, pintail, of scoff. So those populations have grown over the last fifty years.

Mike Brasher:

And, you know, there's another interesting dynamic here that I don't think we'll have time to get into on this podcast, and I don't know if we really understand all the answers to it, but but as those birds move into the Boreal, certainly the Western Boreal and into Alaska, then that's gonna have implications more so for our western hunters and migration down through the Pacific Flyway. And so where these birds breed, is gonna obviously influence where they go, after the breeding season. And so longer term, as we see these shifts or maybe I shouldn't even say shifts in this regard, but as we've seen increases, let's just say in Alaska, in the Widgeon population, it stands to reason that we might see that manifest in numbers on the wintering grounds. Is that kinda bearing itself out?

Fritz Reid:

To some degree but there again we would sure like to see some more cross breeding and wintering information. You're absolutely right, we do see big increases in Widgeon along the Western Coast, marshes in Washington, Oregon, California but at the same time we also know from satellite data that there are birds that breed in Alaska that are ending up on the East Coast. So the North is an interesting place. Looks like it's not a direct south migration, that there's movement across the continent and then south. So we need more information.

Mike Brasher:

Yeah. Continue. It never ceases to amaze me how how much we really don't know about some of these important questions. And it's the more you know, the more you want to understand and the more you realize how little you actually do understand that that holds true here as well.

Fritz Reid:

That's definitely the truth. The other thing that's really interesting about the boreal and the ducks that use it is that as you fly over these landscapes, you see a wide variety of different types of wetlands and they're important to individual species by type so that where green winged teal tend to nest, they typically are along fluvial stream situations and they'll be in the brush around those stream situations whereas the Skodars you'll find oftentimes on islands, in big water bodies, big lakes, etcetera. And the Skodars tend to be somewhat colonial. You may find a number of nests within a certain area. So the different types of wetlands, whether it be a small, intermediate, large, you may see different species orienting to those or their nesting periods and that's pretty cool and that's why the strategy we use is huge blocks of area, both upland and wetland.

Fritz Reid:

And because The Boreal is such a big place, when we look at conservation, we're typically thinking in, you know, a million acres, 2,000,000 acres, you know, what what can we do in in this regard.

Chris Jennings:

Fritz, I appreciate you joining us. And, you know, we're gonna if people wanna learn more about The Boreal, you can always visit ducks.org and get a bunch of information there. But we're gonna bring Fritz back, and we're gonna talk about what Ducks Unlimited is actually doing, Everything from, you know, conservation wise, even on the policy level, and some of the partners that we're working with in the Bora. I think you might find very interesting. Thanks a lot, Fritz.

Chris Jennings:

Alrighty.

Fritz Reid:

Talk to you guys.

Chris Jennings:

Special thanks to doctor Fritz Reed for joining us from our Sacramento office, the Western Regional Office. Also, thanks to Clay Baird for producing the Ducks Unlimited podcast. He does a great job. And thanks to all of you, the listeners, for supporting Wetlands Conservation.

VO:

Thank you for listening to the DU podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly.

VO:

Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited. Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.