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Waterfowl hunters harvest 12–14 million ducks and 3 million geese annually in the U.S. The process used to estimate annual waterfowl harvest has several components and relies on the cooperation and participation by State wildlife agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and most importantly waterfowl hunters. Drs. Kathy Fleming and Paul Padding of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service join Dr. Mike Brasher to help explain the harvest estimation process and some of the important uses of these estimates. This is episode 1 of a 3-part series.
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Listen now: www.ducks.org/DUPodcast
Send feedback: DUPodcast@ducks.org
Creators and Guests
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.
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.
Mike Brasher:Every year, typically in late summer or early autumn, the US Fish and Wildlife Service releases its annual report on waterfowl harvest estimates from the previous hunting season. Now understandably, this is an exciting report that garners a lot of, interest and attention from scientists and hunters alike. Yet, I think it's fair to say the details of how these estimates are obtained and the important role that hunters play in the process are often either taken for granted, overlooked, or otherwise just not really well understood. In the next couple of episodes here on the podcast, we're gonna be joined by two people that know this process extremely well, quite quite possibly better than anyone else that we could have brought on the show, and we're gonna have them help explain the different parts of the harvest estimation process so we could all get a better appreciation for it and understand what goes on in that process. So with that said, I am, very pleased to welcome to the show two special guests, each of whom I'm happy to call longtime friends and colleagues, doctor Kathy Fleming with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mike Brasher:Kathy is the chief of the branch of monitoring and data management, and doctor Paul Patti, a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service representative to The Atlantic Flyway. So, Kathy, welcome to the show.
Kathy Fleming:Thanks. I'm glad to be here.
Mike Brasher:And, Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Patti:Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here too.
Mike Brasher:Yeah. So for the listeners here, we're we're doing something a bit different on this episode. We're as most folks know, we're still somewhat early in the process of this this podcast, and this is the first time that we've had two people call in to the show. So just to explain what's going on, we have both Kathy and Paul on a conference call, and I am here in the studio, and we're gonna see how this works. It's a bit of a challenge compared to the the way we normally do this with just one person calling in, so so bear with us if we have a few hiccups.
Mike Brasher:We're gonna do the best we can to make this sound great, piece it all together for you. So with that with that said, we're gonna get into the harvest discussion momentarily, but we want to begin by introducing each of our guests to you, the listeners. And so, Kathy, let's start with you. Tell us a bit about your background, where you are right now in your position, and what you do there.
Kathy Fleming:Well, I have a background in wildlife biology. I have a bachelor's and master's and PhD. My PhD was studying wild turkeys, which isn't really a waterfowl, but somewhat close. I am currently the branch chief of monitoring and data management for the migratory bird program in the Fish and Wildlife Service, and I've been working with the service for about almost fifteen years now.
Mike Brasher:Okay. And, Paul, tell us tell us the same for you.
Paul Patti:Well, I'm educational background is also wildlife biology. I started with the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1991 as the Wingby coordinator in what was then the section of waterfowl harvest surveys. After about two and a half years of that, my boss got promoted and I'm not sure it was a great idea, but so did I. And I became the chief of that section and I was chief of the harvest surveys group until, let's see, 2007 when I moved over to be the Atlantic Flyway representative.
Mike Brasher:And if I understand correctly, you are I think I might have mentioned this with your introduction. You're you're currently retired, and that's a recent retirement. Correct?
Paul Patti:Yeah. I forgot to say that. Sorry about that. Yeah. So at the August 2019, I I've retired, and I'm enjoying retirement immensely.
Paul Patti:More time to hunt.
Mike Brasher:Very good. Well, I'm tempted to ask you questions about that, but I know we have a lot to discuss here. One thing I want to unpack a little for our listeners relates to how things are structured there with you. And and I know there have been some name changes to the branches. I don't exactly understand how all those go, but but briefly, Kathy, let's start with you.
Mike Brasher:You're the chief of the branch of monitoring and data management, but that was a that changed names here recently, didn't it?
Kathy Fleming:Yes. Yeah. So I and I neglected to mention that, that about two years ago in the division of migratory bird management, we reorganized a little bit and this was an effort to put a little bit more of a focus on data management, improving how we collect data, analyze it, and make it accessible for other people to use it. And so we took the existing staff from harvest surveys and also some staff that were focused on monitoring such as our waterfowl surveys and pulled them all together into this new branch. And so my branch includes all the people who used to be in harvest surveys and that was the same group that Paul used to be the chief of, plus several other people who have different job responsibilities related to monitoring within our program.
Mike Brasher:Okay. So to follow-up on that, do I understand correctly? I think you mentioned this. Just want to make sure. Your group is also responsible for overseeing the spring breeding population survey, is that right?
Kathy Fleming:Well, it's a joint effort of several branches, but I would say that the people in our branch that focus on the waterfowl survey do the part after the data have been collected by our pilots, they send it back to us here and we clean the data and archive it and analyze it and produce estimates. So it is a joint effort from both branches, but our branch takes care of much of the managing of that data.
Mike Brasher:I guess at very high level, Kathy, let's just talk about the types of waterfowl harvest. Most folks don't think only about harvest that occurs by your waterfowl hunters during the regular duck and goose season, but from your seat, when you think about the types of waterfowl harvest, what are we looking at?
Kathy Fleming:Well, there is the main source of the harvest in The United States does come from sportsmen hunting, but there's also subsistence harvest for some species that accounts for a much smaller percentage of the total harvest than sport harvest.
Mike Brasher:Yeah, and so within each of those, what do we know about the size of the waterfowl harvest as it occurs each year? What are some of the most commonly harvested species out there?
Kathy Fleming:Well, the annual duck harvest in The U. S. Is about 12,000,000, give or take. It does vary from year to year. And that's duck harvest, so you could compare that to the total migratory bird harvest because we do survey more than just waterfowl, which is about 24,000,000 birds harvested each year.
Kathy Fleming:There's about 1,000,000 birds harvested in Canada and maybe 100,000 in Mexico. And then goose harvest is about 3,000,000 in The US, probably less than about 50,000 in Mexico and also about a million in Canada.
Mike Brasher:Kathy, I wanna back up here for just a second. I thought I heard you say something about 12,000,000 harvested and then also 24,000,000. What's the distinction there?
Kathy Fleming:So, yeah, 12,000,000 ducks harvested, but that's out of a total of about 24,000,000 migratory birds harvested. So that includes all the other species of migratory birds that could be doves, woodcock, cranes, coots, snipe, salinal. We survey quite a few species, not just waterfowl. So that's just putting it into perspective.
Mike Brasher:Okay. So then by those calculations, the waterfowl harvest accounts for about half of the total migratory bird harvest in The US. So I did not realize that.
Kathy Fleming:And you had asked about the most important species. And so we do provide this in our annual report that you can get from our website. For last year, species of ducks, the highest harvested species are Mallards and then Greenwing Teal, Gadwal, Wood Ducks and Bluewing Teal.
Mike Brasher:Paul, I want to move to you now and let's talk about the importance of waterfowl harvest estimates. How are they used in the management and study of waterfowl population, whether that be harvest regulation or otherwise? So the basic way of saying this is why is harvest estimation important in the first place?
Paul Patti:Well, back when the harvest surveys were first developed in the nineteen fifties, in the fifties and sixties, there wasn't a whole lot of information on ducks and geese. We did not have a banding program at the time. We did have and I use we sort of liberally. I wasn't there at the time obviously, but they had a midwinter survey and in the fifties, the spring breeding population survey was just getting started. So those were the two pieces of data that they had and then if you with harvest a harvest survey gave estimates of harvest.
Paul Patti:So that gave kind of an indirect estimate of harvest rate. The number of birds on the midwinter survey and compared with the number of birds harvested gives you an idea of what proportion of the total ducks on the continent were being taken every year. That so that was kind of the first use of it, but that became quite a bit less important when we developed the preseason banding program in the 60s and 70s. That program provides us with direct estimates of harvest rates for a lot of key species like mallards, pintails, wood ducks and Canada geese. Nowadays, estimates are used along with band recovery data to get indirect estimates of some of the species that are difficult to survey directly.
Paul Patti:The habitats that wood ducks are in and snow geese and white fronted geese make them pretty difficult to survey directly and so you have an estimate of harvest an estimate of harvest rate, you can back calculate to the population size. It's called the Lincoln estimator and you may have talked about that with someone else in one of your other podcasts. Another good thing that these estimates are used for now is that they enable us to predict the impact of harvest when we're contemplating various regulatory changes. I want to just give an example of that because that doesn't sound very direct. But some years ago, I think about eight or ten years ago, we were considering changing the bag limit on wood ducks from two birds a day to three birds a day.
Paul Patti:The wood duck population had increased quite a bit over the previous twenty years and it seemed like we could probably sustain another bird in the bag. So with the information that we have from harvest surveys that tells us how many people shoot two birds, shoot three birds, shoot four birds of various different species, we could look at those estimates and estimate how much of an increase in the harvest of wood ducks an increase from two birds to three in the bag would be expected to result in. The analysis that we did on that predicted about a 10% increase in wood duck harvest. That was acceptable, that was sustainable, so we went ahead and made the change and it turned out after the fact that the actual harvest increase was about 8%. So very close to right on the money.
Paul Patti:So that kind of information is really helpful when you're trying to figure out, well, can we press the envelope a little more? And it also helps when we need to reduce harvest. We don't want to reduce it too much and we have good information from the harvest survey that lets us predict what the results will be of various actions.
Kathy Fleming:Mike, I know that you're familiar with this, is that our harvest estimates are also used to determine where duck stamp funding is spent. So when hunters provide us the information of the county where they harvested the bird, those counties with the highest harvest are considered to be better areas for preserving wetlands.
Mike Brasher:That's a great point to to draw out there, Kathy. That's something that I had overlooked in my development of this outline, so thanks for catching that. And that's that's a incredibly important use, of this data that I'm fairly confident folks are not, not terribly aware of.
VO:Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.
Mike Brasher:So, Paul, I wanna go back to you real quick. You began to touch on this when you talked about banding, and so I wanna and how that developed in in the sixties and seventies. And so given where we are now, we've we've rapidly expanded or greatly expanded our banding program since those days. And and so some might think, harvest estimation isn't as important as it once was for figuring out the impact of harvest regulations on the population, but that's not necessarily true, is it? Because isn't don't we still rely more heavily on the harvest estimates for some species?
Mike Brasher:It might be harder to ban than others?
Paul Patti:Yes, we do, Mike. I think the harvest estimates are most important for the species we don't ban very many of and also the ones that our population surveys don't cover all that well. Species like buffleheads, hooded mergansers and sea ducks. That might not sound all that important to a lot of lot of your hunters, know, many of us are after mallards and wood ducks, but those are species that are that are really important to keep an eye on. And I think a large decline in the harvest of one of those species would be the best indicator that we have that the species might be in trouble.
Paul Patti:There might not be any other way to figure that out.
Mike Brasher:As we go through this discussion, we're gonna hit on numerous areas where hunters play an incredibly valuable role in providing the data. And a lot of times you hear or see messages of people almost trying to game the system, if you will, by not reporting something or trying to over report something. But I think the thing that we want to emphasize is that the data that we get from from hunters is valuable in so many ways and in ways that I I think is not completely appreciated. So, hey, if you're a hunter, the safe bet is to participate at the highest level possible with the reporting of all your data and do it in in a in a straightforward manner, and and that's gonna get us the best outcome all around in terms of habitat conservation, population management, that's the safe bet. So, it's there are a lot of a lot of nuances in in how this data is used, and I'm glad we have the opportunity on this podcast to bring that that out.
Mike Brasher:Okay, Paul. We'll continue on with a bit of a historical perspective on this when the process for estimating harvest first came about. I know you weren't some of your some of your colleagues might accuse you of being around and being employed by the service back in the fifties, but I know better. But so based on your work in the in the service, what can you tell us about the initial methods that that were used and any particular failures or successes that were worth noting from back in the day?
Paul Patti:Sure. Well, the the Waterfowl Harvest Survey was started in the nineteen fifties. I think 1952 maybe was the first year it was a nationwide survey. And the first big issue in getting the survey started is how do you get the names and address as of 50 to a 100,000 duck hunters nationwide to send a survey to? Well, at the time, almost all federal duck stamps were sold at post offices and so that provided potential opportunity for a really good accounting of all federal duck stamp purchasers, in other words all waterfowl hunters which what we would call that in the survey business a sample frame or a sample universe.
Paul Patti:That's the universe of all the people that you are interested in that you want a sample from. So the Fish and Wildlife Service worked out an agreement with the US Postal Service where every year the Fish and Wildlife Service would select a sample of post offices nationwide, send them send them a bunch of name and address postcards, postage paid postcards, and the postal clerks were asked to hand out one of these postcards with every duck stamp they sold. And the postcard just had a place on it for the hunter to put their name and address and and a couple of other little pieces of information and then drop it in the mailbox. And that was where they got their sample of a 100 to back then it was a 100,000 or so hunters every year.
Mike Brasher:Make sure I heard you correctly. So this wasn't a completely random sample across all waterfowl hunters necessarily. It was a random sample of post offices that were servicing, so to speak, the hunters. Is that right?
Paul Patti:That's right. The it was a random sample at first in the first couple of years, but then it became a a stratified sample where you quickly figure out that there's a lot more duck hunters in some states than there are in others, and of course you want to have at least a reasonable estimate at the state level. So we used that information on where DUC stamps are sold to help decide which post offices would get sampled every year to hand out these cards. It was a different set of post offices every year.
Mike Brasher:Yep. And that initial sample, you'd get how many postcards back? 50,000 to a 100,000? Is that what you said?
Paul Patti:In the beginning, was in the first decade or two, it was a 100,000 and and then it started to go downhill.
Mike Brasher:So what happens once they once they send that in send in that postcard?
Paul Patti:The the people that sent in the postcard were then sent a questionnaire, a survey at the end of the hunting season asking them how many ducks and geese they shot. And the postcard that they got had an attachment on it. The name and address postcard they got at the post office had an an attachment on it that told them you're gonna get a survey at the end of the season, so please keep track of your hunting. So they got the survey and the early in the early years, the survey asked the hunters to report how many ducks and geese they shot by species and that was in the fifties. And it didn't take too long for people to figure out that a substantial number of hunters were not that great at identifying ducks.
Mike Brasher:That's funny that you say that because there was recently a and you may have even seen this, a recent publication. There's actually been two publications of this type that I know of. One was authored by my former supervisor within the Gulf Coast joint venture, Barry Wilson, that was part of his master's work where he was sort of gauging the ability of waterfowl hunters to identify different species from in hand taxidermy mounts of different species. He would actually go to the to the boat ramps or check stations and ask people to identify these birds that he had taxidermy mounts of. But then more recently, I think even well, it was 2019 where they had an another publication came out, I forget the the researcher's name, but it it quantified the ability of hunters to identify waterfowl species.
Mike Brasher:And that was one of the one of the comments that they made is the because of this is it's really important for us to have other methods rather than relying on the hunter's identification skills alone to estimate the species that are harvested because of kind of what you're starting to allude to here. So tell us what happened at that point once you realized that, hey, hunters aren't as good as at identifying these species that we would like for them to be.
Paul Patti:Yeah. And manifested itself in what what was pretty obviously overestimating mallard harvest because, you know, green heads are easy enough, but brown ducks, well, they all kinda look like hand mallards. So I think probably a lot of the brown ducks were reported as hen mallards and that was what resulted in a much larger estimate of mallard harvest than was expected. So for some hunters, it's green heads, brown ducks, and black and white ducks and it doesn't go much further than that or at least back then that was the case. So biologists saw that and started working on trying to figure out a way to identify the species and also the age and sex of ducks from their wing plumage.
Paul Patti:And that worked out pretty well and in 1959, the Fish and Wildlife Service did a test run of a new wing survey. They conducted that on Minnesota hunters. The test was for two things. One, to see if hunters would even do it with, you know, mail in duck wings and second, to see if the postal service would cooperate. Well, the test was successful on both counts so it was expanded to the entire flyway in 1960 and then throughout the Lower 48 states in 1961.
Paul Patti:Was
Paul Patti:parts collection survey. Alaska was
Paul Patti:added added to to that survey in 1966 and since then it's been conducted nationwide every year and that's where we get our species composition estimates for the annual harvest.
Mike Brasher:The idea, I could imagine some of those conversations back in the day where you're thinking, well, we're gonna ask hunters to remove the wings of the ducks they're harvesting to mail those in, we're gonna trust the postal service to actually handle these wings from dead animals, I'm sure there were a lot of unanswered questions and uncertainty whenever that thing was first imagined, but, know, lo and behold, that stuff is continuing, that process continues to this day, and I'm sure there are many of our listeners that are familiar with those envelopes, the parts collection survey, those Manila colored envelope with, I think, some kind of green checkered on them, checkering on them, so they're very identifiable envelopes. And so many folks probably participated in that. So, Paul, tell me a little about, you know, what you know of the how hunters initially reacted to the request to participate in this survey and and then how if things what have you observed with respect to hunter response, hunter reaction through the years?
Paul Patti:Well, for the mail survey part of it, the the just the questionnaire part, hunter participation was really pretty high up especially at first and for several decades after that survey started. It's only been fairly recently that participation rates have dropped, maybe the last ten or fifteen years or so. The wing survey is a lot more labor intensive. It takes a lot more effort and dedication and and and time for a hunter to participate in that properly. So for the most part, I think participation rates have been pretty good on the wing survey too, but that has declined in recent years too.
Paul Patti:I don't know, maybe that has to do with some with the general decline in the trust of the federal government, who knows?
Mike Brasher:I think at this point we want to try to wrap up a discussion of the historical perspective of this, and Paul, perhaps a good final question is for you to talk big picture about how methods for estimating harvest have changed over the years, and that'll kind of lead to a close on this episode and then set the stage for us to come back and talk about modern day harvest estimation.
Paul Patti:Sure. Well, after the wing survey, the next big change was switching the entire survey system from that previous federal duck stamp based waterfowl harvest survey that I described earlier to the harvest information program based migratory bird harvest surveys. And I guess that's what we're gonna talk about next.
Mike Brasher:Okay. And so that harvest information program, the acronym that folks will will know is HIP. So what that is, harvest information program. Paul and Kathy, I think that's gonna wrap it up on this episode. We've covered kind of big picture history of waterfowl harvest estimation in The US and and why it's important.
Mike Brasher:And of course, we have the big conversation of modern day harvest estimation and what it consists of and all the contemporary pieces of that process. So we want to come back and do that as a separate episode. So we're gonna wrap up this one here and we thank you for coming on and sharing this information with us and we'll we look forward to the next episode with you.
Kathy Fleming:Great. Thanks for having us.
Paul Patti:Okay. Thank you.
Mike Brasher:A special thanks to our guest on today's show, doctor Kathy Fleming and doctor Paul Padding for sharing their extensive knowledge and and expertise and experience with waterfowl harvest estimation in The United States. We also thank our producer, Clay Baird, for the, the work that he does in getting the podcast out to you. I also wanna take this time on behalf of our special guest to to thank any of the hunters out there that have participated in these surveys. The information you provide, the time that you take to fill out these surveys is incredibly valuable for the management of the resource, and we thank you for for that time. To all our listeners, we thank you as always for your support, passion, and commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.
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