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Join Dr. Scott Stephens, Dr. Mike Brasher, and ultra special guest Dr. Brian Davis for storytelling of days gone by and a report on hunting and habitat conditions from one end of the Mississippi Flyway to the other. Warm weather has kept wetlands open and birds around in the Canadian prairies, and when coupled with light hunting pressure, hunting success has been good. Conditions for early white-front hunting in Arkansas have also been dry, but with young birds around, Dr. Davis reports of good hunting success. The conversation then turns to changes in rice production, how this has affected food resources for wintering waterfowl, and what other changes may lie ahead in the future.
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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.
Mike Brasher: Everybody, welcome back. I am your host on this episode, Dr. Mike Brasher. This is a bonus migration update episode for you. And we have two people that are going to be joining us here. One of them you are all very, very familiar with, and it is none other than… Dr. Scott Stevens, joining us from his home office in South Dakota. Scott was up in Manitoba last week, and he's going to be giving us an update on that. And this episode is doubly special because in studio here with me is a great friend of both mine and Scott's, and he does not have any walk-up music. He doesn't need any walk-up music. He only needs his name, and that's Dr. Brian Davis. Brian, I'm glad you could be here with us. We'll tell the story on why you're even here right now, but great to have you in studio with us. Thank you very much. Who wants to go first telling the story? Scott, you want to go first or Brian? Telling stories on one another.
Scott Stephens: Okay, I'll go first. So my story would be Brian and I and some other students used to hunt down at Lake George Wildlife Management Area.
Mike Brasher: He didn't hesitate at all.
Scott Stephens: Nope, I'm ready. And this is back in the early 90s. And I think the limits in the early days when we hunted there were you could shoot two mallards and one other duck. Now, key part is one other duck. You couldn't shoot three mallards, but would Brian shoot the other duck early when they were flying like green-winged teal? No. He wanted to shoot mallards first and wait to shoot the other duck until later. But the problem was they weren't flying later. So that was always the challenge. I'll shoot those buzzard ducks later.
Mike Brasher: What's the logic behind that? What's the logic behind waiting?
Scott Stephens: There is no logic.
Brian David: That's a pretty soft story. I thought he was going to throw a fastball. I don't know. It was just me being myself, I guess, back in the day and being an idiot. No, I don't know. Just kind of waiting on, you know, it's like if you shoot too many times and the Mallards won't come around. So we just wait. We'll just shoot Mallards.
Mike Brasher: I know. Brian is a very particular hunter. I have my own stories. I'm not going to get into all those right now. Brian, you have any stories on Scott that you want to tell? Oh, Lord. They have to be clean now.
Brian David: Yeah, this is PG. So, you know, college kids and grad students, we all like to go to the pub and we drink a few beers and talk about how we're going to change the waterfowl world, you know. So I knew right away, I like Scott. One, he's just really nice. He's really smart. He doesn't drink, so he's a lot smarter than we are, right? But what was cool about Scott is he wanted to hang out everywhere we went. He was right there. He would be D.D. He would drive us all home, keep us out of trouble, so yeah. I would have Dr. Pepper, though. He would have Dr. Pepper. He loved Dr. Pepper, so. That was his Uber fare, his reimbursement back in the day.
Scott Stephens: Uber, Uber before there was Uber. I was a good guy to be in grad school.
Brian David: And I was always complaining about how much I had to do. And they created this, I got a thousand things list to do. And I just wanted to tell Scott, I still have that list.
Mike Brasher: It keeps getting longer and longer, I know.
Scott Stephens: We all know about that list. The follow-up that I have to share on my story is, then what would happen is after he didn't want to shoot the ducks early, then we'd each have two mallards, and me and the other guy would have a green-winged teal, and then Brian wouldn't have his other duck, and he'd be like, those docs earlier.
Mike Brasher: Every time. Yeah, we told you. Every time, right? Every time.
Brian David: Hey, I just wanted a little more. Oh man. I was more of the purist. I just had Mallards.
Mike Brasher: Well, so if you can't tell, the three of us know one another really well. Brian, you and Scott actually go back even farther than I do with the two of you. Y'all were both grad students at Mississippi State working alongside one another. I was an undergrad at Mississippi State when the two of you were grad students, and of course, the three of us have stayed in touch and worked together on a number of projects and studies and reports, and you name it, we've done it. Brian, you actually used to work for Ducks Unlimited. What were the years on that?
Brian David: 2001 to 2008 in Arkansas. And then for nine months in South Louisiana, 2009. Then I came back to Mississippi State.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, and so that's where you are now, and that's why you're here. So tell folks a little bit about yourself in that role.
Brian David: Native Missourian, worked for Missouri Department of Conservation, worked for California Waterfowl Association, went to graduate school at Mississippi State. And then in 2001, worked for DU and Little Rock. And 2009, they asked me if I would want to go to the low country of South Carolina or coastal Louisiana. I'm like, shoot, both are great, but went to Coastal Louisiana, and then this waterfowl position at State opened later on in 2009. So, I only stayed nine months in Coastal Louisiana.
Mike Brasher: But what a great… It seems like it was longer than that.
Brian David: No, I moved there January 1st of 2009 and came back like… You're just super productive while you were there. Yeah. No, it's a fascinating place to work. So, yeah.
Scott Stephens: Either that or it felt like dog years when you… Dinosaur years.
Mike Brasher: And so you're here today with a wetlands ecology class?
Brian David: Yeah, so I teach a wetlands ecology and management class and a waterfowl class. The wetlands is every even fall, so 2024, and it's a mix of graduates and undergraduate students. So I try to bring Trying to bring them up here, because you talk about Ducks Unlimited, but when they come in here and they see it, it's like, holy smokes, this is amazing. So brought them up last fall. I think this is the first time we've been back-to-back years, but I'd love to bring them every fall if we can. So get a different crop. Some of the ones that were in waterfowl are here. Two of my students are here again today that were here last year, but most of them, they've never seen anything like this.
Mike Brasher: Your class just finished receiving a little presentation from Dr. Jared Henson and Dr. Ellen Herbert on some of the work that we do, and they're out touring the building right now, and so I grabbed you and we're in here doing a little quick episode because we did want to, well, number one, it's just great to have a group of friends together to talk about some of this stuff. So Scott was up in Manitoba. last week and we had this lined out for him to give us a quick update on what he saw what the conditions were like but you were actually at the other end of the flyway last week or this past weekend uh shooting uh speckle bellies with our other good friend dr scott manly and so you're going to give us an update on kind of the conditions that you guys that y'all encountered there um Things have definitely changed from a moisture standpoint over there in Arkansas, and we'll get you to talk a little bit about that. Scott, I want to start with you. I guess frame it up for us. When did you go there? Where did you go? And just what did, what our condition, were conditions like up there for y'all?
Scott Stephens: Yeah, so I drove up last Thursday.
Mike Brasher: I guess, what is today? Just do a timestamp. This is a Thursday, November 7th? November 7th, yeah.
Scott Stephens: So I drove up a week ago today. What does that make it? Like the 29th? The 31st? Halloween?
Mike Brasher: Something like that. We're good at duck ecology, not very good at calendar math.
Scott Stephens: Not so good at pulling up the calendar. So I drove up last Thursday. That's kind of the timeframe that worked in my work schedule. I got back from another engagement on Wednesday, had the truck loaded, jumped in the truck, drove up Thursday. Looking at the weather, it didn't look like it was going to freeze up before I got there. That turned out to be true. They had had They had had some below freezing lows. Yeah. And my friend up there, you know, everything's in Celsius. So it's like, they were going to be minus seven one night before I got there. Um, which it's like, Ooh, is the water going to get hard? But it didn't. So I got up there. Temps were in the fifties for highs down in the thirties or upper twenties for lows. And there were still plenty of ducks. It's still rather dry, I would say, but more permanent water is holding birds. And maybe the thing that struck me most was there was no one else out on the landscape where I was hunting. So birds were relatively undisturbed. I think that's pretty common this time of the year. Especially, you know, for things like guides and outfitters, they're hesitant to book people in that late because you never know if things are going to be frozen up. And so pressure is pretty light that time of the year. I guess that's relevant for folks down south because it's like until the weather gets cold, there's not much reason for birds to move. But there were good numbers of birds. We had to kind of figure them out. We had an okay hunt the first day on Friday morning, and then things got better. We got in a cornfield. Birds were feeding in and shot limits of birds. And then the next day we ended up in what was a night roost. The other unique thing up there in Canada is in the evening you can shoot until a half hour after sunset. You can see the fire come out of the end of your gun barrel. It is dang near dark at a half hour after sunset.
Mike Brasher: I've done that before and feel almost guilty. You feel like you're an outlaw, don't you? Oh yeah. You're conditioned to think that this is not right. I should not be out here right now. Especially when you see the fire come out of the end of the barrel.
Scott Stephens: Yeah, but the ducks were swarming into this wetland then. So we finished up on a good note. And yeah, I don't think, since I left, conditions have changed much. They have not frozen up. There is still very little pressure up there. So yeah, it's going to take some weather to move mallards, I would say.
Mike Brasher: Scott, I was talking to you, I guess we were chatting email or Teams or whatever it was, and I said something about, yeah, we might want to bring one of our meteorologist friends on to talk about the impending Arctic blast. And you replied and said, when is this Arctic blast supposed to arrive? And so I'm like, well, let me double check this thing. Because I had looked last night, and I think 10 or 12 days out, it had, yeah, lows in the teams and the single digits up around Regina and highs in the in the teens or something of that nature. And it was a pretty dramatic drop, but I looked this morning and it's moderated quite a bit. So it's still below freezing in the evenings, but above freezing or just above it, uh, as highs throughout the rest of the day for the next two weeks. And that's not a good recipe for moving ducks out of that country.
Scott Stephens: Yeah. And my, my rule of thumb would be, it'll take, it'll take highs below zero, you know, below freezing, below 32. to, you know, in a couple days of that, to really lock up all the water and send the birds on their way. So, yeah, we've got, when you sent that note, I looked at my 10-day forecast for, like, Brandon, Manitoba, and I was like, I don't see an Arctic blast in the forecast there, so.
Mike Brasher: No, it changed overnight. So good numbers of birds. Did you see any birds that surprised you? I spoke with somebody and it might have been you telling me they were still shooting blue wings at some far northern latitude. Maybe it was the folks that went to North Dakota. Maybe shot a few blue wings.
Scott Stephens: Wasn't me. I haven't seen blue wings in a while. There were big piles of snow geese. There were Canada geese. And for ducks, there were what I expect this time of the year. It was mostly mallards. There were a few Pintails, like when we hunted the cornfield, there was a flock coming in and I picked out a nice drake pintail and shot it. And there were a few wigeon around too that were mixed in that I did make note of, but mostly mallards and kind of what you think of as late season birds.
Mike Brasher: And wetland conditions, pretty dry there. Pretty dry still.
Scott Stephens: Yeah. And I guess the other thing that I've made note of is soil moisture is still very low. It is dusty, like following my friend around. It's like, yeah, I'm hanging back because I don't want to eat dust for miles and miles. So we will need probably rain before freeze up to improve that soil moisture and then a bunch of snow to change conditions up there before next spring. So I would say the stage is not set for a big runoff next year, even if we get a bunch of snow because the soil moisture is non-existent right now.
Mike Brasher: All of that rain that we had in Canada, even, I guess it continued in through June, earlier this summer, it dried out substantially, dramatically after that. And so we kind of did a reset, I guess you'd say, and we're now back to a reset, not in the good way, back to super dry conditions up there. Back to dry conditions. That's right. That's the report from me. All right. Well, we may come back to you. We're going to take a break right now, and whenever we come back, we're going to get a report from Brian out of Arkansas, what he saw, both in terms of geese and moisture conditions and maybe any kind of ducks that you would have seen over there. So stay with us. We'll be right back as Dr. Stevens serenades us with his white front calls as we go to break. Stay with us. All right, welcome back, everybody. We are here with Dr. Scott Stevens, joining remotely from South Dakota. And over here to my right is good friend, Dr. Brian Davis from Mississippi State University, who was over in Arkansas chasing speckled bellies during the early season. Tell us who you were with, what you saw, what were your impressions, and did you shoot any birds? I know you shot some birds.
Brian David: Yeah, so let me lie about all of it. Yeah, do it. No, so many of you know our good friend and colleague, Dr. Scott Manley. He's been a good friend of ours for a long time, and we've got a place over there along the White River. Yeah, we're fortunate to be able to hunt some farms around there, I'll just say, in the greater Grand Prairie area.
Scott Stephens: You aren't going to give us a pin or anything, Davis?
Brian David: No, no pin. Okay, come on, man. But, no, you know, what's fascinating about white fronts, there's so many things about them, but they just so defy you know, the larger bird migration, you know. I don't know if you've ever talked about the Bergman's rule on here before, but that's basically… It will surprise you to learn that we have not. The larger… The larger the animal, typically, the further north they can stay, right? So that's what's really fascinating about white fronts is they, you know, they're almost like a blue-winged teal in a way. They come in early fall. There were tens of thousands already in Arkansas probably by mid-October. And so in terms of physiology and thermal regulation, body temperature, there's really no reason at all that they need to migrate, but they do. So it's really, really fascinating, and we're lucky to have that early white-fronted goose season. Lots and lots of birds. We did do well. Of course, you always have to figure out how to hunt them. Didn't have the pit dressed up yet, and we ended up flooding one field just to provide some water, and man, it's just so dry. Now, I don't know what's happened in the last couple of days. I knew a lot of rain went through kind of central Missouri and the Ozarks. I don't know how much that hit the Arkansas Delta, but when I was there, kind of like Scott said, really, really dry. You know, a lot of dusty roads. Yeah, this is… You're hunting a rice field? Yes. Harvested rice field. They harvest them and they treat them differently. Some of them, they go over it and they kind of harrow it where it's almost dust. One of the fields that we're in, fortunately, that farmer still farms dirty, if you will. He's got the crooked levees, a lot of stubble, so it looked a lot more natural. Now, that field was primarily dry. We had a little bit of water in the bottom end of it. Yeah, lots of birds on both farms. And where we did have the water, of course, we saw lots of teal. We had several bunches of 25 to 100 greenwing teal swooping around. And some pintails, really cool. Probably a couple 300 pintail that were kind of milling around. And even though they're not being hunted, I mean, they would just be pintails, you know, just drift way up there and they'd kind of come down and move over this field and disappear and come back. And so it was fun to watch all that. Of course, we couldn't shoot ducks, but… So, it's almost like where there's a little oasis of water, the birds just completely congregate, especially at night, because they're going to roost in the water, of course.
Mike Brasher: So… Whenever you put water on for specks this time of year, what are you targeting at? How much are you trying to put out there? And yeah, what's your goal there?
Brian David: So usually just, sometimes we'll just kind of wet the mud, almost like give them a reason to get in there and be able to like sift through the stubble, through the mud and things like that. Maybe up to a couple of inches of water.
Mike Brasher: And they're going for the rice seed that's left after harvest. Yep. Yep. Primarily. Anything else that you think they're getting out of there this time of year? Probably not the greens haven't started growing yet?
Brian David: No, it's really early in the year, they seem to love seeds, right? Yeah. that bird, unlike a snow goose, where they pull the rhizomes out of the ground, they'll just kind of go and sift along and pull grain up, and green stuff later on, but the seeds. When you look at some of the diet studies, I mean, it's more than just the grains, but there's typically a lot of grass seed, weed seeds, things like that. And whether they're really targeting those is probably more just inadvertent, picking them up. But yeah, the rice is the… I need to give a plug for rice. I mean, you guys in your rice stewardship program is… I tell my kids in class, I'm like, if there's one agricultural crop that really benefits waterfowl and water birds and shorebirds, it's rice. Rice is basically an aquatic grass. Man, it's so important, so important, you know. And I don't know what the trends are over there, but it seems like fewer people winter flood anymore. You know, they're doing a lot of fall, kind of, we joke and call a fall hip, and they get out there and work the fields. They're so dry. So there's a lot of fields, you know, where there's not a lot of tall stubble. There's a few. And then every now and then you see a ratoon field, that's where a second crop will grow. But unlike South Louisiana where ratoon rice fields are pretty common, in Arkansas we're too far north and just a few people will have a ratoon field. But you'll see some where the stubble's coming back. And some of them leave that, but a lot of them get out there and work that. So there's a lot of fields without much cover.
Mike Brasher: I know there's one guy, one friend of Ducks Unlimited, case in short, Bill Byer, Hunter Club. He was trying, he's a rice farmer and does some outfitting over there as well, and he was trying to pull off a ratoon crop this year. I have not kept up with the, you know, I guess, how that turned out for him. I know he was making pretty good progress there most of the fall, but I need to kind of check in on his social media feed to see what he ended up getting out of that.
Scott Stephens: So, when does the first harvest happen if you're going to get a second crop?
Brian David: Well, in South Louisiana, for example, there it's like August, you know, maybe late July, August, July.
Mike Brasher: And in Arkansas, I mean… I could go back and look, but I want to say it was August whenever Mid to late August when he was trying to harvest.
Brian David: And people like George Dunclan, they joked, they're like, man, we're all done by Labor Day. Everything's cut. So there's so much time between that harvest. Now, Scott did show me a field. Two years ago over there, east of the Rice Research Center, somewhere north up in that part of the world, and it was a ratoon field, and it's just one field, but that thing was slapped full of all kind of stuff. I mean, there were ducks and geese.
Mike Brasher: Like birds? Okay.
Brian David: Oh, man. Ducks and geese, just all kinds. It was packed. So obviously, he hadn't been hunting it, but I think he was going to, but it was a ratoon field, and it was… It's just one. But it's like, wow.
Mike Brasher: Well, as we get, yeah, as things get warmer and warmer, growing season gets longer and longer. Those frost days get pushed back later and later.
Brian David: And when Manley and Stafford did all their rice work, you know, 20, 25 years ago now, we're like, oh man, this is horrible. And it is. But DigiGenetics may get to the point where we can start doing it so early that we can come up with a ratoon crop.
Mike Brasher: I don't know if that'll happen, but… And the reason that's… Scott, I know you got a question, but just the reason that's important is because if we get to the point where we can have a ratoon crop here in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, then that harvest is going to occur so much closer to the date when waterfowl start arriving here because it's going to be later in the year. And one of the problems that we've had with that earlier maturing varieties and the harvest occurring in August or something, there's so much time available for those residual seeds to germinate or otherwise be eaten by other rodents and whatever else and they're gone. A lot of that seed biomass is gone by the time ducks get here. So, that's why that ratoon crop would be so important from a duck standpoint, also really important from a, hopefully, from a rice producer standpoint to get some additional revenue off that land.
Brian David: Steve McLaughlin Right, yeah. No, no, those are good things working in tandem. And, you know, South Louisiana, we kind of joke, it's almost because they have the ratoon, it's almost like the MAV, Mississippi, Louisville, Arkansas, Mississippi, like 40, 50 years ago, when they're cutting in October and maybe November or whatever, it was a lot later. So the first harvest in South Louisiana is really early, but by the time they grow the ratoon and harvest that, it's almost like our historical first harvest in the MAV. So there's a bunch of rice on the ground after the second harvest. If they didn't ratoon down there, I mean, there'd be nothing. So for the listeners, some of the work that's been done on sampling these rice fields, it's, again, it's, you think about it, man, it's like 20, 25 years now. Yeah. So that's what I was going to reflect on. So what's going on right now? You know, is it worse? Is it the same? I mean, we don't really know, but thinking about that.
Mike Brasher: Almost 30 years since we were out in those rice fields with Scott Manley. Scott?
Scott Stephens: Yeah, I was going to say, I was reflecting on, you know, I remember one year during that timeframe when we were out there hunting and a white front was like not heard of, right? Like there were not specks in the Delta at that time, like in the early nineties. And, you know, there was a spot we hunted and one was around and we shot it and that was a big deal. We were telling everybody, we shot a white front goose, you know, it's like, really?
Brian David: No way. And now they're like crazy, so. Oh, my thought was, anyway, for the listeners, you know, when you… That's what happens when you get old. That's right. No, I just… Yeah, I get on here and I was just… Stuff starts cycling. It's like, oh, God. Anyway, no, so we're always concerned about food, you know, and you landowners out there that may listen to this. You're always like, when should I flood? How much food is enough? All those kinds of things. And in these agricultural fields, again, this is 25, 30 years ago, the amount of food, the waste grain that after you harvest your field and you have a harvested field and you can legally hunt that. Basically, after that harvest, all the way until early December, there's about 70 pounds of waste rice left per acre. And what we know from ducks in agricultural fields is they really don't like to hang around when food gets down to about 50 pounds per acre. So, that's always been concerning for us because, you know, and especially if you've got a lot of flooded rice fields but not much food per field, you know, you can cause birds to move around and fly around and burn energy and things like that. So, who knows where that is now? I mean, Scott and I were talking about that. We're like, good God, what is it now? You know, 25. I mean, we almost need to re-replicate these studies. You know, it's like, man, I'm done doing soil cores, but it's like, you know, time flies. Now he sounds like a researcher.
Mike Brasher: More research is needed. That's right. I think that soil core sampler is still around there somewhere, right?
Scott Stephens: That's what Brasier and I spent some time doing. Mud mustaches at the end. Mud mustaches, yeah.
Brian David: No, so honestly, who knows where the food is? But we think about the decline in waste rice, yet all these birds have shifted from Texas and Louisiana and are now in Arkansas and Missouri, and we know they eat seeds. So that tells me You know, we're not that food depauperate. Otherwise, or is this just the next best place they can go? But but it tells me there's food out.
Mike Brasher: I mean there is food out there The other part of that converse. Yeah, the other part of that conversation though Is that you are seeing white fronts show up in other move into other states as well, illinois, indiana Yep, um into the southern great plains and is that because of the disturbance that they're now feeling in in places like arkansas and mississippi or is it because of because of a decline in food abundance that we're sort of talking about. Chances are, it's a little bit of both.
Brian David: Well, I was going to say, in the waterfowl world, it's usually not one answer, but about seven. So, seven to twenty variables.
Scott Stephens: And I always say, the good thing about them is they have wings. They're not going to starve to death anywhere. They are going to move and find resources.
Mike Brasher: They're tracking the changes in the landscape, and sometimes they end up going to places where we are not. It frustrates some of us, and other people were pretty excited about that. Folks that are now hunting speckled bellies in Illinois, Indiana, they appreciate the movements, that's for sure. Y'all had good success in Arkansas. How long does the season, that early season, go?
Brian David: Is it over now? This year, in the past, I think it was like 14 days and three birds, but I think partly because of the pressure. This year was nine, so it opened on a Saturday, closed on the following Sunday. It was nine days and two birds. Are you going back over this weekend?
Mike Brasher: It's closed now. Oh, it's closed.
Brian David: So now when I think it's this that's the best time to go.
Scott Stephens: There's a little pressure Saturday before thanksgiving.
Brian David: I think yeah, it reopened.
Scott Stephens: So both ducks and specs will open again So I thought you were gonna say you had a million things to do He does i'm down to 999 000. So i'm good Scott and once one of those things is still write a novel and get rich
Mike Brasher: And you go to the post office to get some stamps, there's another one.
Brian David: He's relentless.
Mike Brasher: Bear with us here, folks. Let's see, Scott, what's the next trip on your list? Where are you going? Chasing birds next.
Scott Stephens: It will probably, I don't have solid plans, but it will probably be here in South Dakota because as things lock up up north, we should stack up with birds here.
Mike Brasher: Stack up, lock up north and then they'll stack up in South Dakota. We need it to lock up in Canada, in North Dakota, and in South Dakota for us down here.
Scott Stephens: We'll send them down to you in like January, but we're going to hold on to them until then.
Mike Brasher: That's what I'm afraid of. Oh, that's what I was going to ask you, Brian. Of the birds that you guys shot, anything notable about the adults, juveniles? Obviously juveniles are more susceptible, just inherently they're the ones you're more likely to harvest. But did you notice observationally a good proportion of young birds this year?
Brian David: Yeah, you always do early, but last year was really striking. It's like, man, you hardly saw a dark belly. I mean, obviously there's adults flying with the young, but it just seemed like a huge abundance of young birds last year. This year, Lots of young birds, but it seemed like a lot more, you know, we almost shot probably half and half adult looking birds versus juveniles. Last year was like 80%, 75% juveniles, it seemed like, you know.
Mike Brasher: The fact that you saw a lot of young birds last year and good number of young birds this year. That checks out with some of the other data that we've been hearing come out of Canada and out of the Arctic. We just saw this week the report on those fall surveys that Canadian Wildlife Service conducts and indices of young in those fall flocks was up again, so that was a good thing. So we are I guess we're probably ready to wrap this one up. I appreciate you guys being on. You're gonna let him off the hook this quick? This is a bonus episode, so we typically don't have these run too long. This will go out probably tomorrow. I think we're gonna see our producer shaking his head over there. So we'll get this out as a bonus to all the podcast listeners. A lot of folks are gonna be out there hunting already, so that's a good thing. Any final parting words, Scott, for the listeners or for our good friend over here?
Scott Stephens: Well, Davis knows this, but we always say, life is short, go hunt, right?
Mike Brasher: We should hunt. Brian, thank you for being here. Thanks for taking time out of your schedule here. Thanks to your students who are outside looking at us in through the little window over there for giving you up for about 30 minutes to join us. And yeah, so thank you guys. We'll catch up with you sometime later. Thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for the great job he does on sometimes sort of impromptu requests to have somebody come on and record one of these things, and he was agreeable to do that today, and as he always does, a fantastic job in doing so. And to you, the listener, we thank you again for joining us, for sharing your time with us, and most importantly, for supporting Ducks Unlimited and wetlands and waterfowl conservation.