Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
It’s early September, and duck hunting is back! But it’s also the time of year when identifying ducks can be most challenging, as most have yet to attain their signature breeding plumage. On this made-for-video episode, Chris Jennings is joined by Dr. Mike Brasher, Dr. Jerad Henson, and Katie Burke as they discuss the popular pastime of sexing and aging ducks based on wing and tail characteristics. Tune in to learn more about this educational skill and how you can apply it on your next hunt, even if you aren’t all that confident!
WATCH ON YOUTUBE
www.ducks.org/DUPodcast
WATCH ON YOUTUBE
www.ducks.org/DUPodcast
Creators & 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.
Chris Jennings: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast. I'm your host Chris Jennings. Joining me today in studio is Dr. Jared Henson, my co-host Dr. Mike Brasher, and Katie Burke. So today what we're going to talk about, and it's funny we're getting together to do this because Mike and I have done this show probably three times, maybe four? At least, yeah. We tried to. And we always try to do it when we're kicking off teal season. And right now we're in the midst of teal season throughout much of the United States. And this discussion is all about, you know, really trying to identify the pace of the migration. And so what we're talking about is being able to tell the difference between an amateur bird and adult bird. And so we've got two doctors here to explain. We've also got Katie here to kind of talk about some of her experiences. So, Mike, why don't you go ahead and just jump right into this, and we'll talk about how to identify the primaries on a blue-winged eagle.
Mike Brasher: We'll get to that in a second. I'm going to do a little bit of background. This is an interesting and unique time of year from a hunting perspective because, and I guess once you get into hunt, if you ever hunted in Canada or the prairies up in northern latitude, you kind of encounter the same thing, but for southern hunters, This is about the only time that we get to experience this phenomenon of birds, males and females, looking very similar. Most southern hunters will be familiar with, you know, you shoot a drake during January, December, even November, and you know immediately what it is. But this time of the year, if you go north to the prairies, males are going to look very similar. Some of them will look very similar to females. And so it's, and for teal that are migrating down here early, it gives southern hunters an opportunity to see that, to witness that. They shoot a teal, blue-winged teal, and you retrieve it, you can't immediately tell if it's male or female, because males and females are the same. And so what's going on there is it's related to the body molt of these ducks. Typically, all ducks here in North America will go through two body molts, and around this time of year, the males, the adults, the ones that were hatched last year, would have dropped their breeding plumage, and they're going through this, I guess it's, what is it, a pre-basic molt? Pre-alternate molt? No. Pre-basic. We won't get into the technical aspects of that.
Jerad Henson: Eclipse.
Mike Brasher: That's right. It's a lot more technical than we probably need. Eclipse plumage. I think that's a good term. And so they look like females. They don't have their breeding plumage yet. The other thing that's happening is you have a lot of young birds, newly hatched birds that are also out there. They too have not developed their bright breeding plumage. So you have really four cohorts of birds, males, females, and the adults, the hatch year, birds that were hatched this year, and after hatch year, those that were hatched last year. all out there at the same time, and they look pretty similar, especially for blue wings. So, one of the things that you can use with ducks during really any time of year is characteristics on their wings to identify the species, the sex, And the age, and… And before you get into… Oh, go ahead.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, I was just gonna say, you can't tell if they're 4, 5, 6, 7. You can tell if they're hatch year versus an after hatch year is how we would say that. Sometimes a second year, depending upon the bird, but… Yeah.
Mike Brasher: So, and that is because while they go through two molts, go through two different body plumages, they, for the most part, only molt wing feathers once a year. Now, we'll get into a discussion here a little bit later on talking about some of these feathers on the inner part of the wing that they will molt. Young birds will molt theirs out as they get into the fall. But anyway, that's why you can pick up a wing pretty much any time of the year and should be pretty easy to identify the species. and the sex, once you get to that age differentiation, it becomes a little bit more difficult.
Chris Jennings: So… And I think the importance of this, from a hunter's perspective, really, and you guys can, as we get further along, it's kind of what I alluded to, is by being able to identify, you know, age and sex, you're really able to identify your local hunting area's pace of the migration. You know, whether or not you're shooting adult birds, whether or not you're shooting juvenile You know, that's kind of the important thing, and that's because they're all migrating at a little bit different times. And you guys can get into the science of that, of why the males are bailing out first, and the females… Do you want to get into that? No, no, no. That's why we've got Dr. Dr. Dr. here. So, you know, if you guys want to get into that before you actually identify, just kind of explain the pace of that migration. I think that's what's really some of the most important things for, from the hunter's perspective.
Mike Brasher: Do you want to take that or you want me to go?
Jerad Henson: Yeah, I can jump in. You can follow up with whatever you want to. I think one of the important things to note is that with waterfowl, especially dabbling ducks, the second that that hen lays her last egg, that male is gone at that point. His job, for the most part, is generally, he's off… There's a little bit of give and take there, based on my research.
Mike Brasher: Generally, generally… Based on my research.
Jerad Henson: He will a lot of times leave at that point, he'll go do his molt, molt migration a lot of times, something like that. And so that puts the males slightly ahead of females in that molt pattern, right? And so females are sitting on those eggs, then they're raising broods, and then ultimately going to make that step when the juveniles are old enough. to then fly. And so there's a little bit of difference in migration chronology that has to do with that. I think the most pronounced place to see it, especially if you're a southern duck hunter, is green-winged teal. Oh, really? Because you will see giant wads of males the first couple weeks of the season. and earlier in mid-November, and then you won't see females generally until a few weeks later. But you'll see and you might get a bunch of 30 green wings come in and you shoot, you know, six or seven and all of them are drakes.
Mike Brasher: This time of the year in September, of course, we see it with blue wings. And Chris, you might remember a couple of years ago, I want to say it was 2021. The degree to which males, females, and young birds will be migrating at different times in the fall is also a function of sort of how good the breeding season was and how many breeding opportunities they had, how long that opportunity went. Because I think it was 2021 where pretty much as soon as… the blue-winged teal migration started, and it was really dry in 2021, so there wasn't a lot of re-nesting. And when that happens, those females finish their nesting efforts pretty early, and they can get on with their wing molt and getting ready for migration. I think it was 21, when as soon as we started hearing from people that were out teal hunting, they're like, okay, we're seeing females right along with the adults. So, that can happen also. You can get some indication of likely productivity or likely breeding opportunities. So, in a year like this, where portions of the prairies were pretty wet, especially the U.S. prairies, and some portions of the Canadian prairies, you would expect there to be pretty good productivity for some of those dabbling ducks that settled in that landscape. And I would expect there to be a pretty pronounced kind of phasing of that migration based on the birds that we're seeing come through. So, to that extent, we should be seeing the adult males be the initial vanguard south. And blue wings are a great species to demonstrate some of this with the larger issue of aging and identification of species, sex, and age using this wing plumage. Do you have a whole lot of experience doing this? I know we've played around with some of the wings before for some of our outreach, education, meeting with different groups.
Jerad Henson: I mean, just like the basics, not to this detail.
Mike Brasher: And it's more than just kind of for entertainment. If hunters have participated in the parts collection survey, they will, and I know you have, have you ever participated? I have. Okay, I have not. Interestingly enough, they will clip off the wings and then send them in and then they'll have their annual wing bee, they call them wing bees, where a lot of… You didn't shoot enough ducks. I won't argue. They'll gather together a lot of state and federal biologists and they will pull out all of these wings and they'll do the species, age, sex identification and that gives a lot of information related to harvest by different species and these different cohorts. So, by looking at the ratio of adults to juvenile birds, we can also get an understanding of productivity during a given year. And so, again, going back to 21, if you look at age ratio estimates from that year, they were about half of what they have been for the past two years. And so, there's a very clear signal in some of those years when it's really, really dry. So, are you ready to go through some of this?
Chris Jennings: I think so. This is much anticipated with video now.
Mike Brasher: The first thing I want to do, the first thing, the other little thing that we have is, okay, so if you're a teal hunter and you shoot a teal, one of the first things that you can do is try to age it as a bird that was hatched this year or a bird that was hatched in a previous year. And the easiest way to do that this time of year is to look at their tail feathers. And a lot of people have probably heard this concept or this idea of notched tail feathers. Can we get the overhead camera there? And so this is a graphic that I copied from some textbook here and it shows three different types of feathers. These two right here are indicative of birds that were hatched this year. So let's say, and the first thing that you see here is the tip of this one is looks like it has a little downy plume still attached to the end of it, and then this one has your classic notched tail feather. You may hear people talk about this, talk about that, and we'll certainly get into it. We don't have any of those actually here, so we're just having to use a diagram. And this is the type of feather with a sort of smooth, pointed tip, consistent with an adult. Now, there's a caveat, and I'm not sure if you were about to go there. The farther you get into fall and winter, the less reliable this becomes.
Jerad Henson: It holds up till, what, mid-October at the latest? Depending on the species, probably, yeah.
Mike Brasher: I mean, actually, last year… Why? Well, so last year, we actually shot some birds in December that still had notched tail feathers. Yes, yeah. So, what happens… Oh, the feathers don't hold up. These… That's right. Okay, that's… So, what happens if you're a newly hatched duckling You'll have downy plumes, not true feathers when they first hatch. They'll just be down covered. As they grow, the feather shaft continues to grow and push through that follicle. And when you look at what that does on the tail feather, so what you see remaining here would have been the original kind of downy feather. And that feather shaft continues to grow, and so it pushes that downy plume, you know, just basically, I mean, it stays at the tip, but you essentially see it come out to the end as that feather grows. Eventually, because that feather shaft is really weak right at the tip, it will break off and you'll be left with this notch at the end of the tail feather there. So that's for birds that are hatched this year, and as Jared mentioned, that's a reliable indicator up until you get to about, let's say, October and over December, depending on the year and all that, because those young birds will replace their tail feathers as they get into fall. So eventually you get to a point where even birds that were hatched this year will have tail feathers that are indicative of adult-like tail feathers. They go through another molt. Yeah, yeah. They'll also do the same thing on their tertials, which are a section of the wing feathers here. And so that's the first thing that you can look at. And you can continue to do that for any birds that you shoot through the fall. If it looks like it has, if it appears to have adult-like tail feathers, that doesn't necessarily mean it's an adult. You'd have to then look at the wing characteristics, because a lot of these wing feathers, as I mentioned, are not replaced until the following year. But the tail feathers are. If it has that notch. But if it has that notch, you can rest assured that it was a bird that was hatched this year. with the, I guess, important caveat that just make sure it's not a damaged adult tail feather. You know, you want to be able to see it in a couple of different places. And so, if you look close, you can actually, even around especially October, November, early December, you can, if you see indications of both notch tail feathers and adult tail feathers, you can kind of pull that back and get to right where it's growing out of the tissue, and you can see that feather growth actively occurring. So, a lot of neat stuff that you can get into there. So, that's the first easy way to age them. But if you don't want to do that, don't have the ability to do that, then you can look at the wings. And I have some stacks of wings here.
Chris Jennings: So, before you do this, you mentioned, you know, tertials and primaries and all of this. Can you just go through and identify what exactly you're talking about?
Mike Brasher: Not gonna go through everything comprehensively, but let's start here. What is this metal thing that you have? It's a letter opener.
Jerad Henson: It's a feather pointer.
Mike Brasher: I thought it was an ice pick. It's a letter opener. Okay, move on. Unbranded letter opener and all that kind of stuff. All right, so major feather groupings here, the flight feathers, there's these 10 outer flight feathers, the most characteristic aspects of bird wings. These are called the primaries. And here, about starting right here, coming inward, these more colorful feathers, let me see if I can do what I've got here, these more colorful feathers, Not the white ones, but the ones down here are called secondaries. There's 10 primaries, 10 secondaries. A lot of these are in groups of 10. Let me get one that's a little bit different here. Okay, so yeah, there we go. So, the bright green ones that you see there, those are the secondaries. Primaries out here, the long ones. And then we have feather groupings that are called covert, C-O-V-E-R-T-S, and they cover the base of these other feathers that we just pointed out. So, these would be the primary coverts. And then these right here, there's several different names for them. The white ones that you see here, they're called secondary coverts, greater secondary coverts, things of that nature. And then you get up into the shoulder patch of the wing and you get into sort of the middle coverts. And then the upper covert. And then the other important grouping of feathers for wing species, age, sex identification are these inner feathers right here, real close to the body. They're called the tertials. So primaries, secondaries, tertials. And there's not 10 tertials. There's just a few of those. But when looking at, I guess, For age determination, maybe it varies a little bit. I was trying to figure out if there was any single group of feathers that was most diagnostic for either species, age, or sex. The tertials are pretty diagnostic for some things, but otherwise you have to look at a variety of feather or color combinations and color patterns in different groups.
Jerad Henson: Species and dabbling ducks, the secondaries with the speculum on it. From a species identification. Yeah. Mike, one of the things I want to mention too, and it's a little beyond this, but you've got those different groups of flight feathers, the primaries and the secondaries. Those are what are called the flight feathers. And just so people know, there's those two distinctions and they're distinctly shaped because the primaries provide propulsion and secondaries provide lift. So those are the differences in the feathers and what they do. There you go.
Chris Jennings: That's cool.
Mike Brasher: And I mentioned this is for more than just entertainment purposes. There is a book. Can we get the overhead shot on this? This is a highly coveted book nowadays. Species, Age, and Sex Identification of Ducks Using Winged Plumages by Sam Carney. He was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and this was 1992. It is very difficult to find this book nowadays, but in it, it has color photographs and descriptions of all different species of ducks. It has a key to help you identify The sex and age of the different birds by each species. Most of the dabbling ducks in here are in sort of color photos. Then you get on over into the diving ducks and it's mostly just kind of black and white because they're not necessary to have those different colors really. It's just mainly different shades of black and white. And there's all sorts of different telltale signs for differentiating the species, the age, and the sex depending on which one you're looking at.
Jerad Henson: And for waterfowl, that's by far the best one. If you can find it, sometimes you can find a PDF of it floating around. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may have that on their website.
Mike Brasher: They do have it online. I want to say the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center or something like that, maybe on their website, but you could find it just by doing a search.
Jerad Henson: There's some other stuff, like Pile Guide is another one, but it includes way more species and can be a lot to try and get through.
Mike Brasher: So, we're ready to go through some simple… Alright, let's identify. So, let's assume that we've identified it as a blue wing, right? You've shot the bird, bring it back, and it looks male, female, I can't tell the difference. It doesn't have the crescent on it that time of year. So, and let's say you've looked at the notched, you looked at the tail feathers, and there's nothing very distinct there. So, the first and easiest thing to do is to try to differentiate male from female. And so, I have these two different piles of feathers here, and Wait, I'm looking at the screen and it's reversed. Just look at the wings and the screen will take care of itself. So, the one that I have right here is a male. This is a female. In fact, all of these are females. All of these are males. And the one thing that you might notice, hopefully, initially, is the difference in the green iridescence in that speculum. In all of these males, you will see that green is fairly prominent. It's kind of hard to see on some of these because these feathers are kind of overlapping one another. These specimens were were some things that some of our staff did here, and some of the birds came in in poorer condition than others, but nevertheless… Some stayed in the freezer a little too long.
Jerad Henson: Some stayed in the freezer a little bit too long. If you've ever tried to send a bird to a taxidermist, they will yell at you if you leave it in the freezer for too long.
Mike Brasher: But that's the first thing that you look for to differentiate male from female is if there's any, this iridescent green in that speculum. That's a great shot at it right there. And you get these in hand and you can… That's a pretty easy identifier. It is. And so you know you've got a male at that point. All of these females are very, very, that speculum is very, very dull. You can see a little tinge of green in it, but it's not really shimmery or shiny at all. So then the next thing we do is like, okay, we've got a male. Let's differentiate the hatch year birds from after hatch year birds. And the easiest, the first thing you want to look at there is the white, the amount of white in these secondary coverts. Juvenile birds are going to have two or more dark spots on some of these white feathers. Can we see that? It's not highly prominent, but there are a few feathers here that do have some white spots on it. There's some there, some here. And in contrast, You can look at this one here and those secondary coverts are entirely white. There's no black spotting on those secondary coverts and so that would be the indication of an adult. The other thing that you look at to differentiate adult from or after hatch year from hatch year would be the condition of these tertials. The after hatch year birds are going to have just sort of better-looking tertials. Their feathers in general are gonna be more well-developed, because you gotta think about the young birds are growing every part of their body, and they're trying to put nutrients into all of their tissue, their muscle, all of their different feathers, and so a lot of times you will see the juvenile, the hatchier birds have feathers that are very weak and frail and kind of thin. They'll show a lot of feather wear. And they show feather wear easily, but this is a great example of sort of adult-like tertials, despite it being a bird that we think is a juvenile because of these black dots here, but the tertials are clearly of the adult type, very full in their shape and appearance. And, yeah, so this is one that I would probably say it's a juvenile bird, but it has already replaced those tertials. We don't know when these were harvested. That's another good indication that could be like a December bird or something of that nature.
Jerad Henson: I think you've got a pretty good example of a juvenile bird with some juvenile tertials there, too, to show.
Mike Brasher: And so you see some of the dark spotting on the secondary coverts there, but the other thing that really stands out, and it's a great contrast here, is the condition of those tertials. See that, Katie?
Jerad Henson: Yeah.
Mike Brasher: So this one here is a juvenile bird. You can see that green iridescent and a lot more white in those greater secondary, in those secondary coverts than anything we'll see in the females as well, but a big difference in those tertials. What else on the males? Is that clear enough there?
Chris Jennings: I think that's clear. So basically just to kind of line that out, if it has the small black spots or even bluish spots on that white area, that would indicate that it is a hatch year bird.
Mike Brasher: You might find an adult bird that has a spot on a feather or two, but typically, those secondary coverts on afterhatch year birds, adults, are going to be solid white. And if you look at, and we make this point to one another kind of often, it's a fun little sort of almost trivia type thing. If you get a good photo of blue-winged teal, a flock of blue-winged teal, banking, and the sun is hitting those wings, you can identify the age and sex of pretty much every one of those birds just based on those feather characteristics.
Jerad Henson: And another follow-up too, I mean, if you get one of those, it's that kind of got the more adult-like tertials, but those white spots or the secondary coverts have some black spots in them. Flip the bird over and look at tail feathers. Yeah. Right, especially this time of year, the tail feathers will be another good telltale sign. So take more than one, there's more than one way to ID this, and so use as many of those reference points as you can.
Mike Brasher: Okay, we'll move on to females. And again, we've identified them as female because they lack any of that green iridescence, bright iridescence in the secondaries, in the speculum. And so then we go to look at one of two things. We're again going to look at the feather groupings, the coverts, and we're also going to look at the tertials. And it gets a little trickier with the females and this is pretty much, it sort of runs the, there's sort of a gradient of sort of the degree of difficulty of doing this age and sex identification really for any species. Because the adult males are typically in best condition, brightest coloration, most definitive color patterns, and then immature females are at the other end of that gradient. Weakest kind of feathers. dullest coloration, more frayed feathers, that type of stuff. It's when you get to the immature males or hatchier males and the adult females that it can sometimes be a little tricky. But the females in blue wings are pretty easy. This is a good example, I think, here of… Let me pick a good one. This actually may have been from the same… These two may have been from the same bird. It probably looks like it. So, the one thing that you'll… I hope you'll try to point out here is… Can we see? Get the overhead shot. So, Katie, can you hold that one? Yeah, hold that one. Let's see if we can get these. One of the things that you see that's a little bit different here is in this bird, there's a bit more prominent white in those secondary coverts, and there's no real… shape, definitive shape, to that white. There's no pattern necessarily developing. As opposed to this one, we do see a little bit of white, but the one thing that begins to stand out is that white is in the shape of a V, and I don't know how well we can see that. on the screen there. It's very subtle, but it's fairly consistent across multiple feathers here. You begin to see that white take the form of a V, and so that would be an indication of an after hatch year or an adult female. And we have several others, and you can kind of see there are some differences in the tertials as well. If this is a female, the tertials are not as bright and black as they are in the males when you're dealing with a female. There's typically, for the afterhatch year, The cream-colored edging on the tertials tends to be a little broader. The condition of the tertials seems to be a little better than in the juveniles. These feathers are a little bit shorter and you can actually, even when I run my finger underneath it, they're actually thin and I can sort of see, it's almost translucent through there as opposed to some of the adult-like tertials. So, would you agree with that? And once you handle these things for a while, sometimes you can actually create some juvenile, like some matchier tertials out of them.
Jerad Henson: I think one of the cool things to look at too, if you look at that first tertial right there, the one on top, look how much feather wear is on the end of that one. Yeah. I mean, you can really see some feather wear. And when you look at other species of ducks, that's an indicator itself on age.
Mike Brasher: Yeah. And so we have some others here.
Jerad Henson: Mallards, sometimes that can be a great way to look at age on them.
Mike Brasher: So Katie, what would you say on that?
Jerad Henson: I don't know. I'm gonna get it wrong. There's a quiz. We'll do our quiz. There's a tag on it with the answer.
Chris Jennings: She's trying not to cheat. She's trying to be a good student. No, I'm trying not to cheat.
Jerad Henson: And I'm not the best at this. I mean, you get people, when you go to these wingbees,
Mike Brasher: You'll have people that specialize on a single species, and they'll get really, really good at this. And so, there's some uncertainty even whenever we're looking at these and trying to identify this, but yeah.
Jerad Henson: That's a lot of individual variation. So, it's…
Mike Brasher: It's a very useful piece of information for management. It's very entertaining if you're in the blind, once you develop this skill. I think as we go into the fall season, we'll try to do a few more of these. Some species are more difficult than others. Yeah, we'll see what we can do, and hopefully, if nothing else, we will allow people to begin to understand some of the things that they're seeing and what they might be able to figure out based on looking at these wing characteristics, based on notched tail feathers, whether they're present or whether they're not.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, and those folks that like to keep a waterfowl journal or something like that, that's a great way to be able to, or if you use the DU app.
Chris Jennings: There you go. You know another cool thing to do about this, and when you are trying to identify these in the blind with some of your hunting partners, and as long as you have the wing in hand and you're looking at it and you're going through and you're just like, you know, this is a female, definitely a juvenile bird. And as long as you're confident in it, No one's going to argue with you, right? Just go with it. Unless you've got two PhD water biologists sitting next to you, they're not going to argue with you.
Mike Brasher: So just go ahead and use the information that we're providing and just be confident with it. Just be careful if you put it out on social media and you're too confident. You don't want to be too confident. What else? We always ask Scott Stevens this time of year, you know, what's he seeing? Is he seeing males or females or how many young birds? And so that's how he's easily able to get that information. Presence of notched tail feathers certainly in September, easy indication of a hatch year bird. But then also the wing characteristics, pretty easy to differentiate males from females as well on these.
Chris Jennings: Cool.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, I think this is great information. Do you teal hunt much? No, because it's a hunt in Mississippi and the mosquitoes are so bad.
Chris Jennings: They're not great in Louisiana.
Mike Brasher: You go teal hunting and start shooting mosquitoes? Yeah, basically. Maybe you'll get a chance to this year or next year sometime. I mean, I can. They're there most years, but yeah. It's a debate on if you want to sit with the mosquitoes.
Jerad Henson: Yeah. Take a thermosol. Cottonmouths.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, you got to hang out with the cottonmouths too.
Chris Jennings: I've done that before as well. I think that's all.
Mike Brasher: I actually brought notes in here, Chris. You know, we tried this, as you said before, and failed. And there's a lot to even go through whenever you get video.
Chris Jennings: Yeah, and I think one exciting thing about doing this now and when we're recording this, it is September 6th. And we are, especially here in the Mid-South, we are right on the precipice of a massive cold front shift in weather. It's going to hit up north, you know. pretty hard. It's going to get cold. So, you know, lots of blue wings are going to be on the move. You know, Minnesota season's already closed, but some other, especially upper Midwest.
Mike Brasher: Minnesota's teal season's already closed.
Chris Jennings: It is, yeah.
Mike Brasher: So, they have one of those early seasons. They have the early ones. Okay. And that's still fairly new for them.
Chris Jennings: It is. They did a three-year trial, I believe, and don't hold me necessarily to this, but they extended it by one year. Okay. And so, you know, their season is closed. It sounded like it was really positive. Okay. You know, they had a pretty decent water up there, which, you know, they're shooting some locally grown ducks, especially in western Minnesota, so… Sounds like you have them.
Mike Brasher: Was that in the most recent migration alert?
Chris Jennings: It is. It hasn't even been posted yet. I'm pulling out super secret information here.
Mike Brasher: But it'll be out by the time this airs.
Chris Jennings: Oh, absolutely. It'll be out today. So, yeah.
Mike Brasher: But, you know, the rest of the states… So, it's really… So, we're the ones that have the access to the secret, privileged information. We're privy to the knowledge. It won't be a secret when people hear this. That's right. That's right.
Chris Jennings: But no, I mean, the rest of the country, or not the rest of the country, but states that do participate will be opening up this weekend or even next weekend. Some states are waiting a little bit longer, but it should be perfect timing with the cold fronts and we should have hunters pretty excited for this season. Everybody's going to be antsy around the office. Yeah, that's right. People get antsy around here. If anyone's got water in the Mid-South, let me know. We don't have water. Because it is dry as a bone right now.
Mike Brasher: We just turned the pump on early. Not for teal season, though. No, for duck season.
Jerad Henson: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Because last year went so bad. So we're trying, or even earlier this year.
Chris Jennings: Well, everyone's fingers crossed for a little bit of moisture out there. Yes. We're going to need it. Yeah. Cool. Well, you know, I think this has been, you know, an awesome, very informative podcast, especially for those hunters out there participating in teal season. Do you guys have anything else to add to that or? You good? All right.
Mike Brasher: I would thank you, Chris Jennings, for being part of this. We were able to do it.
Chris Jennings: Yep.
Mike Brasher: Can I close the book on the aging and sexing of blue wings and wing characteristics?
Chris Jennings: Cool. It's a good conversation. It's a good conversation to have in the blind. So definitely listen to it, re-listen to it, and learn this information, learn the science, as Mike always says, and take that out and really kind of show it off to the people you hunt with. I'd like to thank my co-hosts, all of you, for joining me today. It's been great, very informative. I'd like to thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for putting the show together and getting it out to you. And I'd like to thank you, the listener, for joining us on DU Podcast and supporting whales conservation. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.