RELOADED EP345 - Waterfowl Harvest Management Series, Part 17: Eastern Mallard AHM, the Beginnings

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In the late 1990s, waterfowl harvest managers in the Atlantic Flyway began exploring new approaches to tie harvest regulations for their states to eastern mallards and other duck populations that were the primary source of Atlantic Flyway harvest. Dr. Min Huang, Connecticut Dept. of Energy and Environmental Protection, and Dr. Pat Devers, USFWS, join the podcast to lead a discussion on these early days and eventual implementation of Eastern Mallard AHM.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mike Brasher

DUPodcast Co-Host

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: 00:03

Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast RELOADED, where 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. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.

Mike Brasher: 00:35

We are here today with another installment in our harvest management series. Last year, season three, I believe it was, the fall and winter of twenty twenty and 2021, we had probably 16 episodes where we connected with various state and federal biologists from across North America to talk about the history and and sort of transition of harvest management throughout, well, mainly throughout The US, but we covered some of the entire North American aspect of things. We haven't produced any of those yet here in season five, fall and winter of twenty one, twenty two. This is the first of those. We're gonna probably have a couple, maybe three of these episodes, and this is the topic that we have here today on on this episode and the forthcoming episodes is partly in response to some listener comments. Mentioned these on some some earlier episodes where we've had people reach out and say, hey. I'd like to hear a little bit more about Atlantic Flyway waterfowl ecology, waterfowl management, and that aligned nicely with some of the way we were thinking about what our next installment of this particular series might be. So today, we're gonna welcome in two guests to help us with a discussion about harvest regulations specifically in in the Atlantic Flyway. Those of those of you out there that hunt in the Atlantic Flyway or may have some exposure to harvest regulation to cross multiple flyways, including the Atlantic Flyway, will know that the way things are occurring now Flyway is a little bit different, a little bit unique, and has been over the past few years that's, in particular, a multi stock approach to setting harvest regulations. And so we brought in the people that have been working on this for a number of years to help us with it, and so with the with that, I'll formally introduce and welcome in our guest here.

Mike Brasher: 02:24

First, from the Connecticut Department of Energy Environmental Protection, doctor Min Wong. Min, welcome to the podcast.

Min Wong: 02:31

Hey. Thank you very much, Mike. Happy to be here.

Mike Brasher: 02:33

And from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, doctor Pat Devers. Pat, welcome in.

Pat Devers: 02:38

Great. Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here.

Mike Brasher: 02:39

I I do greatly appreciate the time that each of you are devoting to this episode, sharing your time with us here on the podcast and with our listeners and helping to answer some of the questions that I suspect people have. People are probably a bit curious about some of the changes that have been made to harvest management processes in the Atlantic Flyway. Think I there are probably some of our listeners that have no clue about some of the differences in harvest regulations in the Atlantic Flyway versus some of the other flyaways, and this is an opportunity to cover a lot of that information. I hope people find it interesting. There's probably gonna be several episodes that we break this conversation into.

Mike Brasher: 03:19

Before we get into the details of the conversation, I wanna give each of you an opportunity to introduce yourself to our listeners. Tell us about yourself personally, professionally. This is important, I think, because we always talk about on the podcast how we bring in the experts, the people that know the information best, and that involves that depends upon us bringing in people that have professional credentials or professionally qualified, have been working in this field for decades in most cases. Each of you fall into those categories, so this is the point at which I'll ask you to introduce yourself. And, Minh, let's start with you.

Mike Brasher: 03:55

Tell us about yourself.

Min Wong: 03:56

I'm Minh Wong. I'm with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. I've been here for the last twenty years. I head up our migratory bird program, and so waterfowl certainly fall under my purview along with most of the other migratory birds that that make their home in Connecticut. Prior to this, I spent five years hunting and working in the great state of Washington.

Min Wong: 04:18

And prior to that, I worked for two years in the state of Florida managing habitats for the Florida Game Commission. Been in the profession for going on almost thirty years. I've worked with waterfowl for basically twenty five of those. And, yeah, I I still love what I do, which I think is is really important. And from a personal standpoint, I've been waterfowl hunting for the last thirty some odd years.

Min Wong: 04:45

I used to big game hunt, not so much anymore here in Connecticut, but I do live to waterfowl hunt, and, yeah, I guess that's it.

Mike Brasher: 04:53

Man, it's great to to to speak with you. While preparing for this episode, series of episodes, you and I talked, and and I think I might have started the conversation by saying I don't know that you and I have ever met one another, don't know that we've ever spoken with one another. I have certainly heard your name, seen your name, all in good in good ways, I I have to add. For many years, you you certainly have a a prominent name and a prominent presence in the Atlantic Flyway harvest management process, and so it's a real treat for me to be able to connect with you and kinda pick your brain and and hear from you about some of these some of these harvest management topics that we're gonna discuss. Pat, I have known you and have interacted with you and have met you and talked to you many times, and I've always enjoyed those interactions.

Mike Brasher: 05:43

We used to interact and and work together a lot more than we do now, so this, in its own way, is is pretty cool for me to be able to reconnect with you and talk about some of these issues. But doctor Pat Devers, tell us about yourself for our listeners that may not know you.

Pat Devers: 05:57

My current position, I'm the Atlantic Flyway representative for the US Fish and Wildlife Service division of migratory bird management. Been in this position, I think, officially almost a year. It was January of last year, I believe, officially became the the flyway representative. Before that, I served as the the chief of the branch of assessment decision support within the division of migratory bird management. I was in there for four years, and that branch really provides the technical analytical support, for migratory bird regulations and other issues around conservation of migratory birds.

Pat Devers: 06:31

And then prior to that, when you and I worked together on a lot of things is back when I was with the Black Duck joint venture when I I served as our, black duck specialist for the division. Originally from Colorado Colorado. I grew up there most of my life and enjoy just running around outdoors, a lifelong passion for the outdoors and for animals. Went to Colorado State for my undergrad and then went on to University of Arizona. At that time, I was doing mostly a mammal work until I ended up at Virginia Tech where I worked on ruffed grouse and and was fortunate to to move into the waterfowl arena.

Mike Brasher: 07:06

Thank you for those introductions, guys. It is great to connect with you. Let's move right into the discussion here because we have a lot to cover, and I will provide a bit of an orientation here reminding folks that, as I said at the outset, this is the latest installment in our series on harvest management in North America. If you did not catch any of those 16 episodes from last year from season three, I would encourage you to go back and listen to those. You can actually find those.

Mike Brasher: 07:36

If you wanted to shortcut to those, you can go to our Ducks Unlimited Podcast website, dupodcast.org, I believe is the is the website there, and I believe we have a specific link on that site where you click on it, it will take you to an archive where each of those episodes is listed. So that's we spoke with a number of guests, covered a number of topics. We couldn't cover everything in one year, so that's why we're kinda branching out again with with this particular episode. We spoke about, as I mentioned, the history, the the evolution of harvest management decisions. We covered the the formation, the early years of of We covered some of the technical aspects of decision making through the adaptive harvest management program.

Mike Brasher: 08:22

We talked about the point system. We talked about a whole bunch of things, and and so, yeah, there's a lot of information there that I think some of some of which will be really valuable for you to understand as we get into this conversation. You know, I I guess what I'll do here so that all of what we talk about here doesn't today doesn't depend upon those past 16 episodes, I'll provide a bit of a high level overview of of harvest management kind of as as is going to be important for understanding what we're going to talk about here, and and, Minh and Pat, once I get finished with this, you I'll have you jump in and provide any clarification that may be but I think at a very high level, it's important for people, most of us that are listening to this, you're familiar with Waterfowl Harvest are going to know this, and under our current systems, we we have different regulatory alternatives, and most people will be familiar with those alternatives as either a closed season, a restrictive season, a moderate season, or a liberal season. There are different aspects of those regulatory alternatives, season length and bag limits.

Mike Brasher: 09:29

Within each of those alternatives, you have a specific season length and bag limit. What a lot of people don't realize, and I know this from talking with people here recently within Ducks Unlimited, is the season length and bag limits within, let's say, a liberal season, liberal package differ across the flyways. For example, in the Pacific Flyway, a liberal season corresponds to a hundred and seven days, a seven day total bag limit, seven of which can be Mallards, but only two of those can be hand Mallards. In the Mississippi Flyway, a liberal seasoning corresponds to sixty days, six total ducks, four of which can be mallards, two of which can be hen mallards. Then in the Atlantic Flyway, liberal seasoning corresponds to sixty days, six total ducks, but the Mallard restrictions or the Mallard bag limits, I should say, are a little bit different nowadays.

Mike Brasher: 10:18

So the other thing that that is important to know about how those regulatory alternatives are selected is that there are different stocks of ducks that are used for basing or for selecting a certain kind of optimal regulatory decision is the way I think Minh and Pat will tell us across each of those flyways. In the in the Pacific Flyway, those regulatory alternatives are selected based on the on the status of Western mallards. In the Central And Mississippi Flyway, it's based on the status of Midcontinent mallards and and Prairie Pond counts along with that, And then in the Atlantic Flyway, this is kinda getting to the the primary topic. Nowadays, that regulatory alternative is based on a multi stock management approach, and that's that's new, and and there are probably a lot of folks that may not even know about it, but those that do know about it may not understand all of what goes into it, and I kind of fall into this category to some extent, but anyway, that's sort of a high level view. It's important for people to realize there are different different processes in place and different populations of ducks that are important for determining regulatory decisions across each of these different flyways.

Mike Brasher: 11:33

So, Pat, did I capture that correctly? What did I there are a lot of details there, but from a very high level, did I do a decent job capturing that?

Pat Devers: 11:42

I think you covered it well. And so with in an interest of not diving into weedy, weedy, weedy stuff, I that hits the big big picture. If you want, I'd be happy to add a clarification that by stock, we can mean species or populations. Right? So got the Midcontinent Mallard population is still the same species, but with multi stock, we're talking four different species.

Mike Brasher: 12:07

No. That that's a good point there, Pat. So, yeah, I I just kinda threw around that term sort of loosely when I said the Midcontinent mallard or or different stock. So what is it that we're actually talking about? Like, how do I guess the other way to say it, Pat, would be how do western mallards differ from eastern mallards?

Mike Brasher: 12:23

Why do we separate those? What's the importance of separating those as individual stocks from a harvest management perspective?

Pat Devers: 12:29

Throughout the discussion, we might talk about stocks and or populations and and loosely kinda use those terms interchangeably. But when we're we're talking about the western Mallard stock from the from the Mid Continent stock of Mallards from the Eastern Mallard stock, you know, those are the same species. They're not subspecies or any different at that level. But what we do know about them is that, the birds that are harvested, say, in the Pacific Fly away. We know where they're derived from.

Pat Devers: 12:58

We know where they breed. Some of them are coming from the Mid Continent region, and then we know a lot of them are coming out of Alaska and kind of the Pacific Flyway portion of of Canada. And so we we know where where they breed, but then they tend to have this fidelity or or just habit of returning back to the Pacific Flyway. Whereas the Midcontinent stock of Mallards, they breed almost primarily in the Midcontinent's prairie pothole region, but also up into Canada, but we can based on banding of those birds and re and getting hunter recovery of those birds, we can tie them from certain banding areas to certain flyaways during the wintering season. And so we we delineate them spatially and call that a stock.

Pat Devers: 13:43

Eastern Mallards, similar thing is they're mostly breeding from Ontario over into the Atlantic provinces and then down through the Northeast States and Mid Atlantic of the Atlantic Flyway. And so they have a tendency to breed in that area and then migrate into the Atlantic Flyway. Of course, some of those birds, particularly from Ontario, will make it into the Mississippi Flyway, but the preponderance of them will come into the Atlantic Flyway. So, again, just spatially based on band returns, we can kind of link breeding areas to certain flyaways, and we we refer to those as stocks or populations. When we get into this later on talking about the multi stock adaptive harvest management framework in the Atlantic flyaway, now we're actually talking about four populations of four different species.

Pat Devers: 14:32

So that's where we're gonna kinda interchange in between what a stock is and what a population is.

Mike Brasher: 14:37

I think as we get into this conversation, we will certainly see some examples of why the delineation of those different stocks of Mallards as as will will dominate at least part of this early conversation, why that's important from a harvest standpoint, and certainly why hunters will be interested in that. And and so I I guess to get right into that, as I was doing some of my reading and research prior to this episode, I learned a few things, learned a lot. A lot of there's a lot that I did not know and will always be a lot that I do not know about harvest management. I I don't operate in that that in that sphere. We don't have a seed at the management harvest management table, but there are a lot of reports out there available for people to read.

Mike Brasher: 15:23

The adaptive harvest management report is produced annually and it contains a wealth of information for those interested in this, in actually what goes on with waterfowl harvest management. I did not realize, while going back through some of those reports, that at one time, regulatory alternatives were set across all flyways using this based on midcontinent mallards. In other words, we we didn't have we didn't recognize western mallards, we didn't recognize eastern mallards as individual stocks or even the Midcontinent mallard mid Continent mallard as separate stocks. We looked at the status of all mallards and used that to determine what regulatory alter what the what regulations would be in a given year. The regulations in terms of season length and bag limit still differed among flyway at at that time, but we had kinda lumped all Mallards together as the basis for that.

Mike Brasher: 16:19

And so, Minh, I I guess I'll direct this question to you. You can pass it to Pat if you'd like to or Pat can follow-up, but my question as I begin to read that report is, alright. Well, so back in 1995, '96 when got its start, that was the situation. We looked at all Mallards lumped together and then set our our regulations, our our overall framework regulations for a given year. At what point did the harvest management community really begin to dig into this idea of multiple stocks of Mallards as the basis for setting those annual harvest regulations?

Min Wong: 16:53

I mean, I think that started back in the eighties, at least with Mallards. I think when we get to the multi stock aspect of Atlantic fly, we'll go back in history, even back into the mid fifties when there were proposals floated around for separate management units within the Atlantic Flyway, just again based on the derivation of of the ducks that were being harvested by our hunters. But, yeah, back in the early eighties, you know, when the when the prairies started experiencing, you know, a pretty severe drought, there was a lot of a lot of consternation in the Atlantic Flyway, particularly in the Northern States because the band return information and the harvest derivation information really did indicate that even back then, no more than 20 or so percent of the Mallards that were being harvested in the Atlantic Flyaway were coming from the traditional survey area, so from the Canadian Prairies and and the Prairies in the Dakotas and and into Montana. And so as harvest restrictions were being imposed because of declining Mallard and Pintail populations in the early and mid eighties, the Atlantic Flyway States wanted to, you know, somewhat be divorced from that situation because of the derivation of the birds that, you know, the Atlanta Flyway hunters were harvesting, which were really coming from those areas to the East of the traditional survey area that up until then, we really didn't have survey information for, but we did have a lot of banding data for.

Min Wong: 18:20

So we were banding birds, and we knew that those birds that were banded in the East, by and large, were being harvested in the East in a much greater proportion than birds that were banded in the Midcontinent. And so I think that was when it really became the impetus of the Atlantic Flyway to, again, try to divorce our regulations from those that were governing the Mid Continent.

VO: 18:50

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Mike Brasher: 19:08

What type of information and analyses are required to to take it to take that idea from concept to application? It's not you you can't just look at that simple band recovery data because that you already kinda had that data as the basis for your observations about knowing where the, you know, where the the harvest where those birds that are harvested in the Atlantic Flyway are derived from a a breeding perspective. So it's not just that simple, right, from a harvest management perspective. What was that what was the process like by which the Atlantic Flyway was able to to sort of parse out Eastern Mallard, that Eastern Mallard stock as a basis for its early sort of unique harvest regulation setting process?

Min Wong: 19:50

Right. So, again, back back to the mid eighties, you know, there was a a Northeast unit proposed, and that that unit was gonna be the five states the five northern and coastal states of of New England, excluding Connecticut. There was a proposal that was also floated to include Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania into that unit. It was an experimental unit in 1985 for those five states. A further expansion was rejected, and ultimately, that unit was not continued as an operational unit because of lack of breeding survey data.

Min Wong: 20:28

So we had the banding data, but we did not have any type of operational survey in the Northeast and into Eastern Canada. And so that really led to the development of the what we call now the Atlantic Flyway breeding waterfowl survey, which is a ground based flat survey that occurs from Virginia all the way up into up through New England, and that started in 1989. And so that that survey was developed in response to the need for survey data, breeding breeding ducks duck data. At the same time, and predominantly for the counting of black ducks, and I think Pat can correct me if I'm wrong, the Canadian Wildlife Service in 1990 implemented their current helicopter plot survey, and that's helicopter aerial surveys of five kilometer by five kilometer plots spread out across Southern Canada and into the Boreal. And so with those two surveys in place, we were able to at least start down the road of developing population models for Mallards that would then enable us to move away from our reliance upon midcontinent stocks.

Mike Brasher: 21:44

Okay. So that yeah. That makes sense. So you you can't you have to know you have to break out that population, understand the demographics of it, right, in order to incorporate it into that formal harvest management process, and we talked about that with Jim Nichols and also Scott Boomer a bit just from a a big picture perspective in terms of, you know, how does our understanding of population dynamics and systems, you know, the the the state of the system as we like to call it, but think about the number of prairie ponds, how all those things kinda come into play and how they allow us to figure out what the optimal regulatory alternative is gonna be given that understanding of the population. So, yeah, that makes sense, that we had to know something about that entire Eastern Mallard population before really moving to a harvest management process.

Mike Brasher: 22:31

One thing that's probably worth noting here, man, and and Pat, it's gonna come up later on, is that in the mid nineties, if my reading is correct, and you might have mentioned this, man, but at that time, Eastern Mallards were on an upward trajectory based on the data that we had available. Right?

Min Wong: 22:50

Yes. They were.

Mike Brasher: 22:51

And I think I even saw some reference to was a pretty steeply increasing trend, maybe dating back to the nineteen sixties. Does that sound right? Yes. We don't have to get into the weeds of everything that goes into the how we use that that new population model that that we talked about or the understanding of Mallard demographics in in the East in in terms of how we incorporate that into all the harvest management processes. We we can just kind of skip over that for now, but the the endpoint here is that when we kind of parsed out that Eastern Mallard stock, it enabled the Atlantic Flyway to begin setting harvest regulations primarily based on that Mallard on the status of that Mallard stock.

Mike Brasher: 23:31

And and so, Minh, take us take us through those early years when that was when that was occurring. You know, any anytime there's a transition, a change in the way we do we do something related to especially related to harvest management, there's typically some experimentation, maybe there's some trial runs. What was all of that like, and, you know, how much, how challenging what were you part of those discussions? I would have to do the math here. That was prob did that predate your time in the Atlantic Flyway?

Mike Brasher: 23:59

It probably did, didn't it?

Min Wong: 24:00

It did.

Mike Brasher: 24:01

Yep. So so then based on what you've heard then, kinda tell us what those early early years were like. How challenging was that transition?

Min Wong: 24:09

Sure. Yeah. I came into I came into Atlanta Flyway in twenty o two. And so just just as Eastern Mallards were being becoming operational, Eastern Mallard was becoming operational. You know, I think from the Atlantic Flyway standpoint, overall, it was it was a relief, I think, that we were, you know, now divorcing ourselves from from the Prairies.

Min Wong: 24:31

We need to remember that less than 20%, even this is back in into the seventies, less than 20% of the Mallard harvest in the Atlantic Flyway was coming from the Prairies. As time has gone on, as the Eastern mallard population started growing, it's it's been declining for the last twenty or so years, but even so, the contribution of the Mid Continent to the mallard harvest in the Atlantic Flyway has really been decreasing. Right now, it's down to less than 7%. So we truly are not deriving Mallards from the Mid Continent region. We're we're deriving them from the states of the Atlantic Flyway and and then Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes.

Min Wong: 25:13

So that being said, I think that, you know, the the adoption of in general across all four flyways was a learning curve and a learning process, you know, through the mid nineties into the February has served us well. It will continue to serve us well because it's and as your podcast, your previous podcasts have indicated, it's a completely objective and transparent way of, you know, developing the best decision for for harvest management. But, you know, I think as we'll talk later, in the Atlantic flyaway with Eastern Mallards, Eastern Mallards were never the species that drive overall duck regs for the Atlantic flyaway for a number of different reasons. However, at the time, Mallards were the best surrogate, particularly for the Atlantic Flyway to, again, divorce divorce itself from the regs that were governing the prairies. You know, it comes back a little bit to what Powell was saying about different stocks is that, you know, these birds are, you know, dealing with a lot of different environmental conditions.

Min Wong: 26:20

You know, the birds here in the East, they're not being born in the prairies. You know, they're being born in totally different habitats. They're dealing with a different suite of environmental pressures, and so it just makes sense from not only an ecological standpoint, but then when you throw harvest in to deal with these different stocks in different manners.

Mike Brasher: 26:38

And so the Eastern Mallard Eastern Mallard became fully operational. When was was it do y'all remember the year on that? I I don't have that here handy.

Min Wong: 26:50

I believe we started using Eastern Mallards in kind of a preliminary manner in the year 2000, and then I believe in 2002, it became the formal decision framework for setting the general duck season in in our flyway.

Mike Brasher: 27:07

Okay. So so early two thousands as a good sort of timestamp there. At at that point then, you know, I'm I'm guessing that, like we saw in the in the Midcontinent, the adaptive harvest management process was working well. It was objective, transparent, began it was useful for setting those regulations in a way that people could see, and and things were moving along. I I'll ask you guys reasonably well.

Mike Brasher: 27:31

Any early struggles with Eastern Mallard, or or was it sort of business as usual there for a number of years? I I guess, Minh, since you were around there, I'll direct this one to you.

Min Wong: 27:42

Definitely business as usual. You know, we were just chugging along liberal seasons every year. No real changes. You know, we would just be squabbling over, you know, bag limits for for all the other species that fall under the general duck framework. For for a while there, everything was was going easy peasy.

Pat Devers: 28:00

You know, ma'am, that that brings up a really good point that ties into the stock discussion we've been having is that you said, you know, it started off working really well. Our our frameworks do, but then there were still issues regarding all the other species or stocks, and that's something that's made the Atlantic flyaway a little a little bit different than the others maybe. Again, that they're deriving their harvest from birds that are are breeding in Eastern Canada, and it's really a different fairly different composition of ducks that they're they're hunting and getting from you know, they're coming out of Eastern Canada, Northeast States, you know, wood ducks and green winged teals, ring necked ducks. And so using the Eastern Mallards to set the general framework starts off really well, but there's been this discussion about, you know, the the birds, the Atlantic flyaway hunters harvest. Where do they come from?

Pat Devers: 28:55

Which birds are they? Going all the way back, as Minna said, to the nineteen fifties leading to proposals for the Northeast Flyway Unit, things like that, that we're still wrestling with, from the as we put Eastern Mallard into place. You know, kinda carries through the history of waterfowl harvest management Atlantic Flyway states even to up into the the multi stock framework.

Mike Brasher: 29:19

Minh, you mentioned something a little while ago in the conversation that I want to go back to. You said, if I remember correctly, that, you know, Mallards had never really driven harvest regulations in the Atlantic Flyway, and I guess I wanted I guess I wanted you to expand on that. What exactly did you mean when you when you said that?

Min Wong: 29:38

I think what I meant, well, know what I meant, was that I think, you know, in the eyes of the waterfowl managers in the Atlantic Flyway, and this goes all the way back into the mid fifties, I guess, they have never felt that Mallards were the sole or should be the sole driver of general duck regulations in our flyway. You know, when you look at the Atlantic Flyway from north to south, there's a huge diversity of the species that are available to our hunters and, you know, the weather conditions and the traditions of of waterfowl up and down our flyway. And so to have a species that, you know, doesn't truly represent most of the habitats or the other species for that matter in its demographics and ecology. You know, to drive the the general duck regulations, I think, has always been a bit dissatisfying. However, as we were talking earlier, you know, the the initiation of Eastern Mallard certainly was a success in a number of different reasons.

Min Wong: 30:47

You know, it did divorce the Atlantic Flyway from the Mid Continent regulations. It definitely accounted for that stock of Mallards that was basically only being harvested in the Atlantic Flyway. There was very little harvest of of Atlantic eastern Mallards into the Mississippi Flyway. And, obviously, being an framework, it put all of our duck setting regulations into that adaptive harvest management framework. But the main thing it didn't do was really account for the diversity of duck species and harvest that that occurs in our flyway.

Min Wong: 31:27

And so as Eastern Mallard continued, I think that we we realized that it was not the, you know, the answer for our flyway.

Pat Devers: 31:40

Just to add to what Minh was saying, I think with the MidCon Mallard framework, we have we have good data and good reason to believe that the health and status or or abundance of Mid Continent Mallards is is reflective of the other species that breed in in the Mid Continent Region and the Prairie Pothole Region. In addition, you know, the Mallard is the the most abundant or the most heavily harvested bird in that region. And so we feel real confident that, based on the the status of Midcontinent Mallards, we can set general frameworks that, afford opportunity on other species while providing them with, you know, protection to ensure their long term viability. You know, there's a couple species we have extra concern over, pintails and scoff and camisback. But in general, the Midcontinent Mallard provides a good representative of of the status of ducks in the Mid Continent region.

Pat Devers: 32:36

But as Minh was saying, going back to the earliest days of Atlantic flyaway, there's never been that consensus that one single species provides that same role, and that's because we are harvesting a variety of different species up and down the flyway kinda and their importance in different parts of the flyway going from the Northeast to the Mid Atlantic to the Southeast changes, and and not one species represents that that same or that entire gradient. I mean, I think in early days, people said, well, maybe it should be the black duck that we use, but, you know, obviously, there was concerns there. It didn't really cover the whole entire flyaway, and we didn't have as much information. We weren't really competent in status. So that that wasn't a good a good alternative for setting regulations either.

Pat Devers: 33:24

And but we're also stuck with you need to have certain amount of data, and, clearly, we had more data on on Mallards and black ducks than we done in other species. So in some ways, it seemed to work in the Mid Continent region region, so why not use the same approach in the Northeast? And as Minh says, that achieved some of our goals. We want to not have the Atlantic flyaway hunters exposed to, changes in regulations due to prairie conditions, dry conditions when they're getting their birds from, Eastern US that that doesn't have that wet dry cycle. So they didn't wanna be penalized when their birds are doing well because things might have been dry or poor in the Mid Continent region.

Pat Devers: 34:04

It does still provide an objective way to set the general framework. But even with those two things being very successful, we still had this long running issue of what stocks actually represent the harvest up and down the flyaway. So, yeah, just point out kinda the slight difference between eastern mallards can play for Atlantic Flyaway versus what they can play for the Midcontinent region.

Mike Brasher: 34:27

At this point of the conversation, we've you know, if we're thinking about it sort of chronologically, we're we are working towards a discussion about multi stock management in the Atlantic Flyway and and how it operates. At this point in the conversation, we have Eastern Mallard in place, but and it's rocking along, everything's going well, the first few years of it. Somewhere along the way, to kind of do a little foreshadowing here, of course, not not too revealing because people that are familiar with this issue know that we're no longer using Eastern Mallard or Eastern Mallard as the basis of something changed along the way, and that changes that that triggered a a redirection of the adaptive harvest management process or the basis for it in the Atlantic Flyway, and, of course, that that change, that thing that happened is gonna be some continued well, some declines in the Eastern Mallard population. We'll pick up our next episode with that particular part of the conversation. We're gonna talk a little about the Mallard decline.

Mike Brasher: 35:31

We're not gonna get into a lot of the details of the causes for it because some of that's still being investigated, But I think it's important to to at least talk about that, and then we'll transition to the or we'll get into the discussion about multi stock management, how it came about, what it is, and what it means for current adaptive harvest management and harvest regulations in the Atlantic flyways. So, Minh, with that, we'll wrap this one up. Thank you for joining us here today.

Min Wong: 35:56

You're very welcome. My pleasure.

Mike Brasher: 35:57

And, Pat, same to you. Thanks for joining us.

Pat Devers: 35:59

Thanks for having us.

Mike Brasher: 36:00

Very special thanks to our guest on today's episode, doctor Minh Wong with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and doctor Pat Devers with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. We greatly appreciate their time and and spending it with us here. We always thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for the wonderful job he does on these podcasts, editing them and getting them out to you. And to you, the listener, we thank you for your time, sharing it with us, and for your support, passion, and commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.

VO: 36:27

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